Groovin’ High

The life and lures of Keith Richards.
A black and white photo of a shirtless Keith Richards smoking a cigarette.
“Your persona . . . is like a ball and chain,” Richards writes. “It’s impossible not to end up being a parody of what you thought you were.”Photograph by Max Vadukul

In 1973, the editors of New Musical Express put Keith Richards, the principal guitarist and the musical soul of the Rolling Stones, at the top of their annual list of “rock stars most likely to die” within the year. Even by rock standards, Richards was a heroic consumer of heroin, cocaine, mescaline, LSD, peyote, Mandrax, Tuinal, marijuana, bourbon, and other refreshments, and it seemed to all observers that he was living on borrowed time. Rock’s casualty list was already ominously long; Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin merely headlined the necrology. In 1969, Richards and his fellow-Stones had lost Brian Jones, who drowned in a pool just a few weeks after the band fired him. Richards did not so much guard his mortality as flaunt it. He memorialized his near-constant insensibility by giving open access to Robert Frank, Annie Leibovitz, and other image-makers, who captured him, backstage or in hotel rooms, half dressed and thoroughly zonked. You looked at those pictures of Richards, slumped, stoned, and stupid, and you figured it was only a matter of days before the wires would announce that he’d choked to death on his own vomit.

In fact, Richards went on and on, stumbling through concerts in a narcotic haze, sleeping through rehearsals, always on the edge of oblivion, and yet, together with Mick Jagger, producing some of the most memorable pop music of the time. Between 1968 and 1972, the Stones recorded “Beggars Banquet,” “Let It Bleed,” “Sticky Fingers,” and “Exile on Main St.,” the core of their repertoire. They went on to perform those songs as long as Sinatra performed “Love and Marriage.” The distinctiveness of the Stones was due less to Jagger’s vocals than to Richards’s capacity to ingest the blues-guitar styles of Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed and create something new. There were far better technicians than Richards, far better soloists, but his sense of rhythm and riff and taste, his signature sustained chords and open spaces, gave the band its sound. And, through it all, the Grim Reaper was denied a backstage pass. New Musical Express, having kept Keith at No. 1 on its deathwatch for ten years, finally gave up and conceded his immortality.

The Stones have not written a song of consequence in thirty years, but they have survived four decades longer than their great contemporaries the Beatles. And, even as their originality has waned, their performing unit and corporate machine has been honed to perfection. Since 1989, the Stones have earned more than two billion dollars in gross revenues, helped along by sponsorship deals with Microsoft, Anheuser-Busch, and E*Trade. Promotour, Promopub, Promotone, and Musidor, firms based in Holland, for tax reasons, handle the various ends of the Stones’ business concerns, and everything is watched over by teams of accountants, immigration lawyers, security experts, and, until very recently, an aristocratic business adviser named Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg. Even in years without tours or albums, the Stones find a way. They licensed “Start Me Up” to Microsoft when the company rolled out Windows 95, and “She’s a Rainbow” to Apple when a line of iMacs was in need of promotion. According to Fortune, the Stones are behind the merchandising of some fifty products, including underwear sold by Agent Provocateur. The Stones logo—a fat, lascivious tongue thrust through smiling, open lips––is as recognizable on the corporate landscape as the Golden Arches.

“The whole business thing is predicated a lot on the tax laws,” Keith Richards told Fortune. “It’s why we rehearse in Canada and not in the U.S. A lot of our astute moves have been basically keeping up with tax laws, where to go, where not to put it. Whether to sit on it or not. We left England because we’d be paying ninety-eight cents on the dollar. We left, and they lost out. No taxes at all. I don’t want to screw anybody out of anything, least of all the governments that I work with. We put thirty percent in holding until we sort it out.” Keith may fancy himself a symbol of ’68, but he channels the fiscal policy of Grover Norquist.

The last time the Stones were out on the road, between 2005 and 2007, they took in more than half a billion dollars—the highest-grossing tour of all time. On Copacabana Beach, in Rio de Janeiro, they played to more than a million people. Few spectacles in modern life are more sublimely ridiculous than the geriatric members of the Stones playing the opening strains of “Street Fighting Man.” The arena is typically jammed with middle-aged fans, who have donned après-office relaxed-sized jeans, paid the sitter, parked the minivan in the lot, and, for a few hundred dollars a seat, shimmy along with Mick Jagger, who, having trained for the tours as if for a championship bout, prances inexhaustibly through a two-hour set, at his best evoking the spawn of James Brown and Gumby, at his worst coming off like someone’s liquored-up Aunt Gert, determined to trash her prettier sister’s wedding with a gruesome performance on the dance floor. Ever since 1975, “the tour of the giant inflatable cock,” as Richards calls it, the Stones have tried to outdo themselves with spectacle. Occasionally, they have gone too far. “There was a huge business of getting elephants onstage in Memphis,” Richards says, “until they ended up crashing through ramps and shitting all over the stage in rehearsals and were abandoned.” But, beyond the spectacle, we come to admire the unlikely persistence of the Stones, an entity nearly half a century old, chugging comically, determinedly on. The lads are approaching seventy. Pruney, dyed, and bony, they storm through a set list that is by now as venerable and unchanging as the Diabelli Variations. “You do, occasionally, just look at your feet and think, ‘This is the same old shit every night,’ ” Richards has said, and yet he goes on playing and the crowds go on paying, reluctant to give it up, the last link to glory days.

The newest artifact of the band’s endurance is Keith Richards’s chipper new autobiography, called, defiantly, “Life” (Little, Brown; $29.99). Half book, half brand extension, it’s an entertaining, rambling monologue, a slurry romp through the life of a man who knew every pleasure, denied himself nothing, and never paid the price. Maybe you can’t always get what you want. The rule doesn’t apply to Keith.

One obvious caveat: a memoir by a man whose memory is fogged by countless years of narcotic obliteration is a memoir of a particular kind. In 1978, when Richards was asked why the Stones called their new album “Some Girls,” he replied, “Because we couldn’t remember their fucking names.” Nevertheless, Little, Brown paid Richards seven million dollars to produce the book. Richards, in turn, selected a skilled ghost––James Fox, the author of “White Mischief,” a well-told history of the murder of Josslyn Hay, the twenty-second Earl of Erroll, who was one of the many dissipated expats living in Happy Valley, outside Nairobi. For Fox, writing about the drugs, sexual adventure, and exquisite boredom in Happy Valley was good preparation for “Life.”

Richards and Fox know why the reader has put down his money: the same reason that Keith staggers around the stage even today, thirty years after kicking heroin, and, grinning maniacally, tells the cheering crowd, “I’m glad to be here! I’m glad to be anywhere!” It’s the titillation of hearing from someone who has never seen the inside of a factory or an office, and has consumed what there is to consume and survived to crow about the fact. This is the man who invented the riff to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in his sleep and yet has known satisfactions beyond the imaginings of Giacomo Casanova. And so “Life” is in a hurry to enhance the Myth of Keef and give us what we want. It opens with an extended scene of the Stones touring the American South, in 1975, their cars packed with high-class narcotics––“pure Merck cocaine, the fluffy pharmaceutical blow.” But in the town of Fordyce, Arkansas, population four thousand two hundred and thirty-seven, Richards runs into trouble with the cops. An antic narrative of Stones misbehavior and Southern justice ensues. Richards, who has just bragged to us of his possession and ingestion of vast quantities of dope, feigns incomprehension in the face of a possible prison sentence. Which, as usual, he dodges.

Richards boasts of his constitution. He not only recounts his “acid-fueled road trip with John Lennon” but also makes sure to tell us that Lennon “couldn’t really keep up.” Richards recalls, “He’d try and take anything I took, but without my good training. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, couple of downers, a couple of uppers, coke and smack, and then I’m going to work. I was freewheeling. And John would inevitably end up in my john, hugging the porcelain.”

At times, the book sounds like a consequence-free version of William Burroughs’s “Junky.” In one extended passage, Richard describes his daily diet:

I would take a barbiturate to wake up, a recreational high compared to heroin, though just as dangerous in its own way. That was breakfast. A Tuinal, pin it, put a needle in it so it would come on quicker. And then take a hot cup of tea, and then consider getting up or not. And later maybe a Mandrax or quaalude. Otherwise I just had too much energy to burn. So you wake up slow, since you have the time. And when the effect wears off after about two hours, you’re feeling mellow, you’ve had a bit of breakfast and you’re ready for work.

Richards is proud of many things, including his capacity to stay up for days at a time. His all-time record, he says, was a nine-day coke-assisted session of wakefulness, at the end of which he merely tipped over, slamming his head against a stereo speaker: “It was just a curtain of blood.”

This aspect of the book, the addict’s narrative, is the latest installment in a tradition that dates back to Romanticism and Thomas de Quincey’s opium visions of crocodiles and other “unutterable monsters,” to Crabbe, Coleridge, Byron, Baudelaire—where to stop? More specifically, “Life” follows the subcategory of the musician-addict memoir: Art Pepper’s “Straight Life,” Anita O’Day’s “High Times Hard Times,” Hampton Hawes’s “Raise Up Off Me,” and Miles Davis’s fabulously profane collaboration with Quincy Troupe.

After finishing Richards’s book, I read a stack of these jazz memoirs, along with biographies of other addict geniuses, including Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker. In the wake of revisiting all the desperation, the bad dope, the prison terms, the lives cut short, I found something almost creepy about lucky Keith’s ego and blithe spirits. Richards is full of cockeyed advice for the potential junkie and voyeur: no mainlining, take only the best and purest drugs, and, please, never overdo it. (“Well, I shouldn’t say never; sometimes I was absolutely fucking comatose.”)

Richards admires the music of his predecessors and betters, but he does not feel their pain. He is almost uniquely insulated from the junkie’s predicaments by layers of money, attorneys, and privilege. Charlie Parker made “Relaxin’ at Camarillo” after emerging from a mental hospital in California of the same name. Richards made “Exile on Main St.” as a tax exile living on an estate in Villefranche-sur-Mer. During breaks from shooting up and rehearsing, Richards would ply the Mediterranean in a speedboat in search of Eurotrash: “We’d pull into Monte Carlo for lunch. Have a chat with either Onassis’s lot or Niarchos’s, who had big yachts there.”

Another staple of the rock memoir or biography is the catalogue of sexual conquests, and, on this subject, Richards is almost shy. He tells us that his colleagues Jagger and Bill Wyman bloodlessly tabulated their conquests. Keith is the passive sort. The ladies come to him. “I have never put the make on a girl in my life,” he says. And yet he describes with delight how he stole the Teutonic model and artist Anita Pallenberg from Brian Jones as they motored down to Morocco in a Bentley:

Anita and I looked at each other, and the tension was so high in the backseat, the next thing I know she’s giving me a blow job. The tension broke then. Phew. And suddenly we’re together. . . . For a week or so, it’s boinky boinky boinky, down in the Kasbah, and we’re randy as rabbits but we’re also wondering how we’re going to deal with it.

“We believe in the concept of public education.”

Eventually, Richards and Pallenberg set out to make a life together. They are quite the pair, young junkies in love, constantly dodging jail terms. They cannot, however, dodge tragedy. In 1976, while Keith is on tour, his third child with Pallenberg, an infant named Tara, dies in his crib. This is Keith’s considered expression of regret: “Never knew the son of a bitch or barely. I changed his nappy twice, I think. . . . Anita and I, to this day, have never talked about it.” This exceeds the limits of ordinary reticence.

Pallenberg’s addiction and misbehavior are too much even for Richards. It’s not so much that he’s convinced she had an affair with Jagger—her third Stone!––as that she outstripped Keith’s limits in the decadence department. “She was unstoppably self-destructive,” he writes. “She was like Hitler; she wanted to take everything down with her.” Finally, Keith finds happiness, and a far steadier existence, with an American model named Patti Hansen.

Richards is rough on many people in this book, as he has been in numerous interviews over the years. He thinks it’s part of his roguish charm. He slags the punks as talentless. He has an occasional nice word for U2, but he is dismissive of everyone from Prince (“an overrated midget”) to Elton John (“an old bitch”) and Bruce Springsteen (“If there was anything better around, he’d still be working the bars of New Jersey”). The unschooled may be surprised to read in “Life” of how hard Richards can be on Mick Jagger, whom he sometimes refers to as “Brenda” or “His Majesty.” He cannot bear Jagger’s pretensions, his “calculation,” his overattention to business affairs, his lust for establishment approval, and his occasional tendency to treat Richards and the other band members like the help. He portrays Jagger as fussy, joyless, and out for himself: “It’s almost as if Mick was aspiring to be Mick Jagger, chasing his own phantom. And getting design consultants to help him do it. . . . I used to love to hang with Mick, but I haven’t gone to his dressing room in, I don’t think, twenty years. Sometimes I miss my friend.” Richards, who lives like a squire on gated estates in rural England and Connecticut, concedes that Jagger is his “brother,” and he will always have his back, but he clearly thinks of himself as the more authentic man and musician.

Some readers may delight in Richards’s sly have-it-all-ways self-regard, but for me the most winning sections of the book are the tales of his becoming, the way his close adolescent friendship with Jagger and their mutual love for their blues heroes rapidly led to the formation of the Greatest Rock-and-Roll Band in the World. It’s a thrice-sung story, but Richards and Fox put the song over well.

Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were children of postwar London and schoolmates at the Wentworth Primary School, in Dartford. Keith was an only child of working-class parents. His father, Bert, was a foreman at a General Electric plant. Raised on jazz, blues, and the emerging sounds of American pop music, Richards sang in the school choir. After his voice changed, he lost interest in school and started hanging around Dimashio’s ice-cream parlor, listening to the jukebox. “It was the one little bit of Americana in Dartford,” he writes. “Life was black-and-white; the Technicolor was just around the corner, but it wasn’t there yet in 1959.” At night, he tuned in to Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, and his hero, Elvis Presley, on Radio Luxembourg. These were the years of “the Awakening,” Britain’s enthusiastic reception of American music. A budding musician, Richards became interested in sidemen: Elvis’s guitar player, Scotty Moore; Fats Domino’s arranger and trumpet player, Dave Bartholomew. At Sidcup Art College, a feeder school to a job at J. Walter Thompson, Richards spent all his time goofing off and listening to blues records. Then, in 1961, at the Dartford train station, he ran into Jagger, who, he discovered, was a blues fanatic and a record collector. Jagger had all the latest disks from Chess: Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon. The two boys listened to the records over and over again.

Jagger and Richards started a band and called it, at first, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. By the spring of 1962, they had hooked up with another blues nut and guitar player, Brian Jones. The following January, they were joined by a drummer with a taste for jazz, Charlie Watts, and a bass player, Bill Wyman, whose main qualification was the ownership of a Vox amplifier. These were the Rolling Stones.

As the band took shape, Richards learned to copy B. B. King’s single-note simplicity and T-Bone Walker’s double-string solos––a technique that saved the band money, because it could “eliminate the need for a horn section.” Richards and Jagger had a simple ambition: all they wanted was to be “the best blues band in London and show the fuckers what’s what.” Monkish in their devotion, they lived in cheap apartments and practiced through the night. “Anybody that strayed from the nest to get laid, or try to get laid, was a traitor,” Richards recalls.

The band played clubs around London called the Flamingo, the Ealing, the Crawdaddy, the Marquee, and the Red Lion, and, in the fluid days of 1963—as the Beatles, a relatively veteran band, were in their ascendancy—the Stones released their first single, a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On.” The record shot onto the charts, and within a week the Stones were stars. That was all it took. “Suddenly they’re dressing us up in dogtooth-check fucking suits and we’re rushed along on the tide,” Richards says, but the boys soon got rid of the pseudo-Beatles look. They did fine on their own terms. First as an opening act for Little Richard and Bo Diddley (from whom they learned countless lessons of pacing and showmanship) and then as headliners, they caused riots wherever they went.

“In England, for eighteen months, I’d say, we never finished a show,” Richards recalls. Their short set featured covers of “Not Fade Away,” “I’m a King Bee,” and “Around and Around,” and yet the screaming was so intense that some nights the band just played “Popeye the Sailor Man” to see if anyone would notice. The boys threw bottle caps and coins; the girls were prepared to rip the Stones apart, so deep was their erotic frenzy. Even now Richards seems scared:

The power of the teenage females of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, when they’re in a gang, has never left me. They nearly killed me. I was never more in fear for my life than I was from teenage girls. The ones that choked me, tore me to shreds, if you got caught in a frenzied crowd of them––it’s hard to express how frightening they could be. You’d rather be in a trench fighting the enemy than be faced with this unstoppable, killer wave of lust and desire, or whatever it is––it’s unknown even to them.

After one performance in the North of England, the band stayed behind in the theatre to wait for the crowds to clear. An old janitor who had helped clean up told Richards, “Very good show. Not a dry seat in the house.”

When the Stones first came to America, in the summer of 1964, they played on bills behind Bobby Goldsboro and the Chiffons, and suffered the insults of Dean Martin, who mocked them as hairy primitives. They even shared a bill with a contortionist called the Amazing Rubber Man, who, come to think of it, may have been a formative influence on Jagger’s evolving stage antics. It was only when, that same year, Jagger and Richards––the self-proclaimed Glimmer Twins––started writing songs that they pulled into a race with the Beatles. 1965 was the year of “Satisfaction.” In a pattern that was typical of their collaboration in the following decades, Richards came up with the riff and Jagger filled out the lyrics.

In the teen-aged imagination, the virtue of being a member of the band is that you end the day in the sack with the partner, or partners, of your choice. Not so, Richards says: “You might be having a swim or screwing the old lady, but somewhere in the back of the mind, you’re thinking about this chord sequence or something related to a song. No matter what the hell’s going on.”

Never does Richards show as much pleasure as when he is describing the feeling of playing his instrument, particularly the electric guitar, which, he says, is “like holding on to an electric eel.” The come-to-Jesus moment in “Life” is purely musical, and it occurs “late in 1968 or early 1969,” after Richards has discovered one of the secrets of the blues. The six strings of the guitar are ordinarily tuned E-A-D-G-B-E. After collaborating with the great instrumentalist and arranger Ry Cooder, Richards picked up “open G” tuning, in which the guitar is tuned to a G chord: D-G-D-G-B-D. Mississippi bluesmen like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Charley Patton used this tuning; so did Don Everly on “Bye Bye Love.” Richards removed the lowest string on a Fender Telecaster tuned G-D-G-B-D and came up with the riffs to “Tumbling Dice,” “Brown Sugar,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “All Down the Line,” “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” and many others. Anyone who played in a garage band in the sixties and seventies remembers the experience of trying to play these songs and discovering that they didn’t quite have the droning, resonating sound that Keith Richards got on, say, “Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!,” the best of the Stones’ live albums. Now, of course, you can go on YouTube, punch in, say, “Brown Sugar, lesson,” and some fourteen-year-old with a video camera and guitar is there instructing you on the way to use open G and “play like Keith.” Keith himself says it best: “If you’re working the right chord, you can hear this other chord going on behind it, which actually you’re not playing. It’s there. It defies logic. And it’s just lying there saying, ‘Fuck me.’ ”

Keith Richards is sixty-six. He’s a grandfather. He’s had emergency cranial surgery, albeit for a very Keith sort of reason: he fell out of a tree in Fiji. He says that he leads a “gentleman’s life.” He reads a lot of Patrick O’Brian’s sea adventures and George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels. He has, it must be reported, also fallen off his library ladder. Where he used to have a wolfhound named Syphilis, he now has a golden Lab called Pumpkin. He and his wife pack Pumpkin onto a private jet and go to relax at their spread in Turks and Caicos. Gimme Shelter indeed. He lives like a private-equity pirate.

Age has provided Richards with a little insight into his own contradictions. He is thrilled with his life, but he is also aware of the hollow nature of his outlaw image: “I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me. I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl,” he writes. “Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s thirty years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it. I think some of it is that there is so much pressure to be that person that you become it, maybe, to a certain point that you can bear. It’s impossible not to end up being a parody of what you thought you were.”

One of the more touching moments in the book is when the very young Rolling Stones arrive at the Chess recording studios, in Chicago, a blues Mecca. A workman is painting the ceiling. The workman’s name is McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters. The Stones were headed for a life of millions, and the least they could do over time was pay tribute to their heroes. They named the band for one of Morganfield’s songs and sang his praises and the praises of all their best forebears. Richards had escaped the Reaper, but not his most essential debt, and he was true to it. “Me?” Keith once said. “I just want to be Muddy Waters. Even though I’ll never be that good or that black.” ♦