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| moy |
Keith Richards: a very wily eccentric
By RAY CONNOLLY - More by this author » Last updated at 15:31pm on 8th April 2007
They don't make rock stars like Keith Richards any more. They can't. Because Keith Richards, or Keef, as he's popularly known, isn't just a oneoff, he's a self-creation.
For the 40-odd years he's played guitar with the Rolling Stones, he's balanced the public image of a drug-wasted eccentric who is forever on the brink of his own destruction, with one of the smartest brains in rock music. He knows exactly what to say to draw attention to himself.
This week, however, it seems, he went too far when his "confession" to a reporter from a music paper that he had mixed his dead father's ashes with cocaine and snorted them up his nose, raced around the world. "Went down pretty well," he added for good measure, never one to undersell a good story.
However, as those of us who have followed the careers of the Rolling Stones immediately suspected, the story just wasn't true. And under pressure, perhaps from other members of the group, Richards put out a statement last night describing how the meaning of his interview had been "lost in translation", and that his father's ashes were now "helping to grow oak trees".
That's some difference in translation since both parties at the interview were presumably speaking English, but the truth would seem to be that he was just having a joke about his own legend, something he does all the time.
"It's great to be here," he croaks to the crowds at Rolling Stones' concerts these days, to affectionate applause, before adding: "It's great to be anywhere, actually." And he laughs with the audience - laughing at his own legend.
Of course, many readers would have believed the story. After all, there have been more than a few jaw-dropping Keith Richards yarns over the years.
There was, for instance, the "vampire-Keef" gothic story, when word got out that he'd gone into a Swiss clinic and had every drop of his drug-laced blood replaced with that of a non-drug taker so that he could pass a medical examination to get a visa for entry to the U.S.
And the "rubber-sole-survivor Keef" tale of how a short circuit caused his guitar to erupt in a blue flame and knocked him unconscious for seven minutes. His rubber-soled shoes were supposed to have saved his life.
Looking back through the headlined history of the Rolling Stones, from the time in 1964 when they were all prosecuted for urinating against a wall, to Richards' heroin addiction and drug busts of the Sixties and Seventies, to the present day, we find two figures emerging above the other members of the band.
There's Mick Jagger, the super-fit, girl-chasing, lead-singing brains of the band - the rod-of-iron behind the Stones.
And then there's his song-writing partner, Keef, the affable gipsy of the band, the laid-back one with the bandana and what, these days, look like curlers in his hair.
In the beginning it was Jagger who was noticed most - when the Rolling Stones were on stage it was difficult not to notice him. But, little by little, it was around Richards that the purer rock cult has developed.
He is by no means the best guitarist in rock. He might have created some of the best-known riffs in the world, like that for Satisfaction, but as a musician he isn't in Eric Clapton's league.
Nor does he claim to be. He just likes to play riffs and rhythm, he says, to be part of the band, not the star. But his self-deprecating personal style, and his, well, individual clothes sense has a charismatic quality.
It was from Richards that Johnny Depp took the look of pirate Jack Sparrow in the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies, though Richards says he knew nothing about it until Depp told him.
Now Richards is to play Johnny Depp's father in the next episode of the series.
It makes sense. Even before Depp spotted it, Keef has looked like a pirate for years when on stage with the group.
In the Stones, Jagger has always been the leader. He's articulate, businesslike and witty, but he can also sometimes seem strangely distant and autocratic, and in many ways is actually rather conservative.
In non-conformist Richards, however, a template of bad behaviour for every rock star to follow was created long ago, as scrape followed scrape. And there have been many.
It was at his house in Sussex that the infamous drug-bust occurred in 1967 when Marianne Faithfull was said to have been wearing nothing but a bearskin rug. Although she was Jagger's girlfriend, she would later confess to having really fancied the "Byronic" Richards.
Then there was the time Richards and his then girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, fell asleep and woke to find the house burning down around them. It wasn't a good idea to smoke in bed under a thatched roof, the fire brigade said.
It wasn't a good idea, either, to be caught with heroin by the Canadian police, for which he could have been jailed for upwards of seven years. Instead, he got off with a promise to play a benefit concert for the blind, after which he eventually gave up that particular drug, if not others.
As the Stones' moved towards middle age, younger stars tried to capture the shock-horror headlines which so successfully sell concert tickets and records.
Ozzy Osbourne bit off a bat's head on stage, Sid Vicious carved "Gimme a fix" into his own chest with a razor, and David Bowie was said to have had a swimming pool exorcised in the belief that Satan was living in it.
But somehow, like today's unruly stars such as Pete Doherty or Robbie Williams, they all seemed to be trying too hard, never appearing much more than pale shadows of the one true rock original.
And that is Keith Richards. Keith the nine-year-old choirboy, who sang Handel's Messiah in Westminster Abbey at the Coronation; Keith the son, whose father, Bert, was a war hero; Keith the husband, who lives quietly in Connecticut with his second wife, Patti; and Keith the student of history, who fell off a ladder in his library while reaching for a copy of Gitta Sereny's biography of Hitler's architect, Albert Speer.
For some fans, it was probably hard to say which came as the bigger shock: the fact that he had a library in his house, or the kind of book he had in it.
Those less taken in by the public image knew better. Richards, at 63, might look as though his four decades devoted to hedonism have taken their toll, and the report that he had to have brain surgery after falling out of a palm tree in Fiji last year did make some wonder what kind of man still climbs trees in his 60s.
But do they know that it was Richards who picked Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts off the floor and gave him a long and successful lecture on the evils of heroin when, against all expectations, Charlie became a junkie for a short time?
And did they see the Chuck Berry TV documentary in which Berry was being difficult about being filmed, where Richards, in effect, told the much older star, his one-time idol, to pull himself together, stop messing around and just get on with it. It was like watching a school teacher talk to a churlish teenager. And it worked.
That wasn't the off-his-head Keith Richards of popular myth talking. That was the professional musician who just wanted to get the job done.
Some readers may have been shocked by the ashes-snorting headline. It's understandable, even though he was joking.
But many will, I think, have smiled fondly at the mischief the old rocker is still making, been grateful for all those years when we've got up and danced to Brown Sugar at parties, and been glad that despite his many faults, Keith Richards has never wavered from being a truly odd English eccentric. |
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| Mel Belli |
Not very insightful. |
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| Barney Fife |
Yeah, ol' Keith really pussed out cutting the ashes with coke!
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| Lord Homosex |
Robbie Willimas unruly rockstar? |
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| pdog |
When I was 13 I took alot of ludes... or was it when I as 14? Anyway, quaaludes got me fucked up... They just don't make a drug like than anymore... My whole face would be numb...
[Edited by pdog] |
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| glencar |
Bert Richards was a war hero? I never knew! More info please! TIA! |
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| Lord Homosex |
quote:
pdog wrote:
When I was 13 I took alot of ludes... or was it when I as 14? Anyway, quaaludes got me fucked up... They just don't make a drug like than anymore... My whole face would be numb...
[Edited by pdog]
I ended up mostly with bootleg Quaaludes. (They called them Mandrax) They made them with lots of Valium because unlike with real Q's where you'd be sober the enxt morning, these left you just a fucked up when you woke up. A sure sign of trusty blue V's. I got to where I preferrd bootleg Q's.
Why don't they make this great drug anymore? That stuff was pretty innocent compared to Crack and Xanax. |
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