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Rock of ages
Keith Richards
Will Hodgkinson
Friday September 5, 2003
The Guardian
'If only that Mozart had a good drummer... ': Keith Richards turns his attention to classical music. Photo: Pete Millson
The most charmingly ragged man in music is having woman trouble. "They always ask you what to wear, don't they?" says Keith Richards, who has promised to take his wife, Patti Hansen, out for dinner. He's aware that he has to allow time for her outfit changes, and that his input will be expected, but there's still time for one more vodka and orange.
"Whatever you say makes no difference. Now I get it from the old lady and our daughters, so there's never any peace."
If there was ever a person happiest to be left alone with his guitar and something to make the music sound good, it's Richards. By spending his life in the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world, he has managed to avoid the complications of normality in favour of steeping himself in the music and myth of the bluesmen who first opened his heart, and coming up with the best riffs of all time every now and then.
"Music is the only thing that interests me apart from reading," he says in his famously guttural murmur, which is frequently interspersed with low chuckles. "It does something beautiful that can't be expressed in words, which is why we do it."
Richards' tastes haven't changed much since 1961, when he bumped into Mick Jagger on a train (rather than the legendary station) in Kent and demanded to know where Jagger got the Chuck Berry records he had under his arm.
During Richards' postwar childhood, R&B and rock'n'roll were hard to find. "You were lucky if you heard it on Radio Luxembourg - I remember when they played Long Tall Sally and Heartbreak Hotel, and I can still remember the ad for the Irish sweepstakes that followed. I was 12, 13 and I was supposed to be in bed and not listening to the radio. Electrifying night for me."
Rock and R&B led to a discovery of the blues they came from. "England in the 40s was drab and austere. It was black and white, sepia at best, and suddenly everything went Technicolor. Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry were a lightning bolt to kids of my generation, and they led you to other things- Chuck Berry was cutting at Chess and so was Muddy Waters, so you go through the roster of Chess, Sun records, Red Bird... Then I looked at the names of the musicians on Chuck Berry records and the ones for Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters... same cats. So you want to be one."
It wasn't possible for the Rolling Stones to hit the 1963 charts with a cover of Muddy Waters' Mannish Boy, so a compromise was found. "You're 18 years old and you're trying to copy these hip Chicago bluesmen - what a joke! Then you get a chance to go into a recording studio and you have to make a pop record. Then it's Top of the Pops. And you think: 'Oh no. That means we've got to do this miming bullshit and wear these stupid black and white checked jackets.' But at the same time, 3,000 screaming chicks and �50 a week meant that we swallowed our idealistic, snobbish blues pride and said: 'OK, we're a rhythm & blues band. And we couldn't get laid last week.'" At the beginning of the line is Robert Johnson, the country-blues legend whose song Stop Breaking Down is covered on 1972's Exile on Main Street, the most "Keith" of all the Stones albums, and the one that captures the purest essence of what the band is about.
"Robert Johnson's the apex of blues songwriting, guitar-playing and singing," says Richards. "What a package that guy was- no wonder he didn't live long. He was up to some tricks, too. I've got his death certificate at home, and there are two different versions of it: one is by poisoning and one is death unknown, both signed by different people. It's one of the great myths, like who killed Kennedy."
Gram Parsons was one of the musicians who stayed at Richards's dilapidated former Nazi headquarters in the south of France during the recording of Exile on Main Street, and tried - and failed, as so many others have - to match up to the guitarist's superhuman constitution.
Parsons, a pioneer of country-rock and one of the most soulful country singers ever, died a year after the album was released. "I don't have any regrets about myself, but I do regret not having him around, because of the loss of potential and because he was a good mate," says Richards. "Gram was an immensely charming guy - just ask the chicks. I met him in 1970 when he was with the Byrds. We hooked up at [London nightclub] Blazes, and on the spur he decided to leave the band and stay in London, so I had to put him up. We would get stoned, sit around with two guitars or a piano, and be the happiest kids in the sandbox. The strangest thing about him is that here we are talking about him, but he's been dead 30 years and he never had a hit record. Gram lives again."
A quick trawl through Richards' current reads - Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis biographies, a book on herbal remedies from Amsterdam and "some secret documents" concerning the Falklands war - leads to a reflection on his itinerant life.
Richards has been staying at Redlands, the house in Sussex that he has owned since the 60s, for the first time in two years, and he has just discovered his Motown collection, given up for lost. The rest of his records are scattered across houses and continents. "
In the last 20 years, the most I've spent in one place is three months. It's hello and goodbye, like being a whaling captain, and I don't get much time to check out much new music. I do reassess things occasionally, though. Like when I was younger, I detested classical music, but now I've realised there's quite lot going on there. If only that Mozart had a good drummer..."
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