Christopher Sandford of The Spectator tells his readers how Keith Richards survived a couple of onstage near-electrocutions, mountainous legal and medical bills, and a permanent place on the US Customs watchlist. He writes:
Most of us have at one time played the you-couldn’t-make-it-up game. What were the odds back in, say, 1973, that millions of us would casually engage in Jetsons-style video chats, conduct business at the swipe of a thumb, or consider the prospect of a space-tourism flight courtesy of Virgin Galactic? Or for that matter, rue the fact that the all-conquering Oakland Athletics might fall so low as to become the worst team in baseball last season, with a dismal 50-112 record? Perhaps the biggest shock to someone contemplating the future in 1973 might have been the knowledge that Keith Richards, the guitarist and primary creative force of the Rolling Stones, would still be alive and well at the time of his eightieth birthday on December 18, 2023.
Wrecked. Sick. Zombielike. Undead. Suicidally wasted. A rock and roll Baudelaire. That’s how some of the press described Richards at around the time of the Stones’ great Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street albums of the early 1970s. And those were just the more benign of Keith’s critics, who at least admired him for his obvious songwriting ability. In 1973 the editors of Britain’s New Musical Express put Richards at the top of their list of “rock stars most likely to die” within a year. Even by prevailing industry standards, it has to be said that Keith was just a touch out-there, as he later confirmed when coming to describe his daily breakfast routine of the era:
“I’d take a barbiturate to wake up… 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 then a Mandrax or a Quaalude… 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.” […]
It may be that what we’re really celebrating this week isn’t so much Richards’s checkered past as the spirit of human endurance that’s seen him become a much-loved, wispy-haired grandfather whose pirate’s grin and engagingly slurred laugh are testament to a life well lived.
When the Rolling Stones got started back at the time of the JFK administration, Keith thought the band might last at most eighteen months. Now he can look back on a sixty-plus year career that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon, with both a new Stones album and a US tour coming up in the spring. Along with the great and sometimes thrillingly under-rehearsed concerts, the whole thing has cost him at least six court appearances, a miserable night in jail, frenzied assaults by fans, cracked ribs, blackened eyes, a couple of onstage near-electrocutions, mountainous legal and medical bills and a permanent place on the US Customs watchlist. And it’s been worth it.
Read more here.
