Keith Richards

“Nineteen sixty-eight was a funny year,” Richards reflected. “It had a hole in it somewhere.” On May 11, the day before the Stones debuted “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” at the New Musical Express concert, it was announced that Mick was going to act as a jaded rock star in a film called Performance to be directed by their friend Donald Cammell and the ace British cameraman Nicolas Roeg, who had shot Lawrence of Arabia. It had been planned that Marianne would star opposite him, but when she became pregnant she dropped out. Consequently, it came about that Anita would star opposite Jagger. This development clearly put Richards in a difficult position. At first he maintained a cool attitude. But then Decca refused to release Beggars Banquet that summer with the cover Anita, Keith, and Mick had chosen, a toilet wall covered with graffiti such as “God rolls his own,” the Stones refused to change it, and Keith was left with no record to promote.

GLYN JOHNS (who worked for Decca Records): “I believe Sir Edward took legal advice and discovered that if Decca had put out the sleeve they would probably be sued for obscenity. From that level on there was a big lack of communication and Allen Klein was in the middle. Klein is a strange man. I think his greatest secret is not telling artists exactly what is going on but letting his artists think they know exactly what is going on, and not telling the people he is dealing with what is going on but letting them feel that they also know. I don’t think Decca ever felt that they knew what was going on. Sir Edward was always saying to me, ‘I’m not sure what’s going on,’ and I think one of the great things he wanted me to do was to have direct communication with Jagger on a very informal basis, just so that we could make sure that we knew that everything that we were saying and we were agreeing to was getting back to the Stones.”

Despite Johns’s attempt to mediate, the release of the album that was to reestablish the Rolling Stones as the premier rock band of their age was delayed for six months, until December 1968. Consequently, Keith had to spend from August through October cut off from Jagger and Pallenberg and at loose ends. He had not wanted Anita to take the part. To complicate matters, Anita claimed she too became pregnant, but since she had already signed the contract she felt forced to have an abortion and went on with the film.

“Whatever you do, don’t try to play yourself,” Marianne urged Mick. “You’re much too together, too straight, too strong. You simply can’t play yourself. That would be a disaster. The character must be a combination of Brian and Keith. Mix up and combine Brian with all his torturedness, all his paranoia and his coked-up movements, and Keith with his torturedness but his cool, and put them together to make this character. You’ve got to imagine you’re poor freaked-out, deluded, androgynous, druggie Brian, but you also need a bit of Keith’s tough, self-destructive, beautiful lawlessness.”

Taking the advice of Faithfull, Jagger cleverly prepared for his role by creating a composite character based on Jones and Richards. Marianne, who was worried that she might miscarry (or perhaps wanting to skip the September 12 premiere of The Girl on a Motorcycle, in which she appeared totally nude), went on holiday with her mother, leaving this amalgam of the men Anita loved on the loose.

Donald Cammell quickly saw that Keith was deeply uneasy about Anita’s role as Mick’s lover, which was as mischievous and alluring as her role with the Stones. Their costar, James Fox, who would be changed irrevocably by his involvement with Jagger, was appalled to discover Mick and Anita fucking in the dressing room three days into the shoot. “Anita was having the time of her life,” Cammell said. “She’d go home to Keith, who’d be terribly jealous when he heard she’d been in bed with Mick.” Tony Sanchez, who had become Keith’s paid companion, saw his boss sinking into a depression reminiscent of Jones’s collapse. Keith must have recognized that he could not emotionally afford to have the kind of falling-out with Mick that he had endured with Brian, because he chose a see-no-evil strategy.

IAN STEWART: “Keith refused to go into the Lowndes Square house [where much of the movie was filmed] and often parked outside and sent messages in to Anita. As for Anita and Mick, I always felt there was no love lost there; they always seemed to be a bit wary of each other, but when the big sex scene of the movie was filmed, instead of simulating sex they really got into each other, and although what wound up in the picture was a lot of vague, tumbling bodies in the sheets, nothing explicit, there was a lot of very explicit footage of Mick and Anita really screwing, steamy, lusty stuff, that was edited into a separate X-rated short feature that was shown all around and actually copped an award at some X-rated film festival in Amsterdam.

Anita rented Robert Fraser’s flat for the course of the filming, but instead of moving out, he merely gave up his room and hung out with Keith, stoking his paranoia. When she came home after a day of shooting, the two would be waiting for her snarling, “What did you get up to today?” Treachery was an affectionate game with Robert, explained Donald Cammell, who, fearing sabotage, barred Fraser from the film set.

The same malevolent tension that gave Performance its strange appeal would be heard on the Stones’ next album, Let It Bleed, which Keith was writing alone at Robert Fraser’s flat. He submerged himself in work, playing guitar and taking drugs. He had begun to use heroin for the first time, mixing it with coke and snorting it speedball fashion. “In the autumn of 1968, that year of assassinations, riots, and undeclared war, I went to England to meet the Rolling Stones,” wrote Stanley Booth. “Keith and I spent an afternoon talking, mostly about the blues. He was heavy lidded and remote. We had, all of our generation, fallen in love with the singing cowboys in westerns; in our boyhood games we had all—including Keith—pretended to be Roy Rogers, but Keith, it seemed, wasn’t pretending.” In twenty minutes one day, inspired by his convoluted feelings, Richards slapped down on a cassette the words and music to “Gimme Shelter.”

A vital part of the film deal had been Jagger’s commitment to provide a song for the sound track, but as the film was being edited, Cammell found Jagger becoming elusive about the production of the song. Keith’s method of retaliation was to postpone working with him. “Keith just refused to get down to it,” Cammell said. “I kept asking Mick, ‘Where’s the goddamn song?’ Mick kept saying, ‘It’s OK, it’ll be ready,’ but he knew very well what Keith was doing, and why.” Finally, Cammell and Jagger wrote “Memo from Turner,” but when the Stones met to record it, Keith’s sabotage continued. “With Keith against it in the studio, it sounded just awful—stiff and lifeless,” Cammell said. “But without the song, we couldn’t end the picture. Keith knew he had the power to sabotage the whole thing.” Jagger, who was finally reduced to tears before Cammell over his embarrassment at not being able to produce the song without Richards, got a bunch of studio musicians (including Ry Cooder) together and cut the track, but without Keith it lacked the edge that characterized the Rolling Stones at their best.

The breach among Jagger, Richards, and Jones healed temporarily on September 24 when Keith and Mick attended Jones’s London drug trial. “Mr. Havers, Brian’s attorney, had just completed his summation when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards walked into the gallery,” wrote Stanley Booth. “Everyone—spectators, counsel, jury—turned to look: it was as if the outlaws Cole and Jim Younger had walked into the court where Judge Roy Bean was trying their brother Bob. Keith was dressed in a tan suede jacket, white T-shirt, and brown leather pants with, clearly, no underwear.”

“As the foreman announced ‘guilty,’ Brian, near to collapse, staggered back muttering,” recalled Wyman. “Girls in the public gallery gasped. Keith was visibly trembling.” To everyone’s relief, Jones was let off with a fine of fifty pounds. Booth watched in awe as Mick and Keith posed with him for photographers, then “drove away in a blue Bentley whose hood displayed the flag of the Confederate States of America.”

In December, Beggars Banquet, with a revised cover, was released to critical acclaim. The record broadened the Stones’ audience: the Left seized upon it as a manifesto; hard-core blues fans who had dismissed the Stones’ earlier work as derivative were won over. The Beatles were “still searching—and it showed,” said The New York Times, but the Stones “had found out where they were and were building.” Most of the credit went to the high-profile Jagger, but there were those who recognized a Richards creation when they heard it. “The Chuck Berry influence became dusted by hayseed as Keith drenched Beggars Banquet with the sound of acoustics,” wrote one critic. His guitar playing on “Sympathy for the Devil” was singled out by another as “among the finest rock solos I have heard recently. He only uses about five of the simplest rock lines around but he plays them with such finesse they seem to be oozing out of the guitar. His style is pure eroticism and he seems to linger over each note, making sure it comes out exactly like it’s supposed to.”

The outstanding year’s work climaxed with the filming, on December 11-12, of the ill-fated “Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus” television special, which featured the Who, Eric Clapton, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Marianne Faithfull as well as the Stones, but was never released. Asked to dress as he envisioned himself, Keith wore a black patch over one eye, a top hat accentuated his wolfish profile, and smoke from a cheroot encircled his pockmarked features. Meanwhile, “Street Fighting Man” was released in Europe, went to number one in Germany, and was also a big hit in Denmark, Holland, Sweden, France, Switzerland, Hungary, Poland, and Turkey.

ANITA PALLENBERG: “Mick wanted to do another movie with me and for us to be a couple, and other people made offers for us to make films together, but I just didn’t want it. Mick just wanted to walk around and show me off like he did with all his women, and I felt Keith needed a more human kind of attention and care and love.”

Keith and Anita booked passage on a ship leaving Lisbon for Rio de Janeiro on December 18, Richards’s twenty-fifth birthday. Anita had just learned that she was pregnant again and they were taking the safest possible route. Deciding to put the past behind him, Mick joined them with Marianne. “We’ve become very interested in magic and we’re very serious about this trip,” Keith joked to the press. “We’re hoping to see this magician who practices both white and black magic. He has a long and very difficult name which we cannot pronounce. We call him ‘Banana’ for short.”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “Marianne left after a while because she couldn’t stand the Brazilian climate and felt sick, so it was Mick, Keith, and me staying on this ranch in the middle of nowhere. It was quite a creative time. That’s where they wrote ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ and ‘Let It Bleed.’ Mick wanted me to split with him after we had done Performance. I definitely remember that I didn’t want to have anything to do with Mick Jagger. I did not want to be his girlfriend. I never did. But Mick and me still had this kind of secret, or thought we did, so for me it was exciting because I thought I was in the middle of this high drama. And Keith was willing to go along with it. He could have just said, ‘No, I don’t want to know. You do whatever you want to and that’s it.’ But Keith was willing to go along with it. Me and Mick would jokingly talk about all those things and it was like, you can’t always get what you want. It seems to me that everything was very repetitious in those days. The way Mick and Keith write is they don’t actually put the words down. They make a tune and they go ‘Aah, ah, ah,’ and the words come out afterwards. And I think it was a creative process because of this repetition. Every day that phrase would come up.”

While Anita was playing with Mick, Keith was writing “Honky Tonk Women,” connecting to his roots as a cowboy guitar player in Dartford. On one occasion, finding themselves in the remote town of Urubamba in Peru, which lacked even a small hotel, they played for the local farmers in the hope of earning a meal. Keith reached all the way back to his fake “Malagueña.” “We got them all going and got beds for the night, food and everything,” he said. “I have to thank my grandfather for that—he taught me to pick up the essentials of any kind of music.”

As soon as they returned from South America, Keith and Anita went down to Dartford to visit Doris. Being a traditional British mum, Doris had always found it hard to appreciate Anita’s continental style. When Anita proudly displayed her stomach, joking that her baby had been to Brazil, Mrs. Richards thought, this was no way to tell your mother-inlaw you were pregnant! And what had happened to her wonderful Keith? He looked like Jesus Christ, floating around the house in a long white robe as if his feet were three inches above the ground. Doris had no idea that Keith had started his long, deadly relationship with what people who took heroin referred to, ironically, as Jones.

Eric Clapton, who also became a heroin addict, thought that musicians were particularly vulnerable to heroin because they live “on a very intense plane of emotional necessity, and heroin is probably the strongest painkiller you can get.” Reflecting on his relationship with the white powder, Richards explained that becoming addicted had been a slow seduction. He had taken heroin for two months, stopped for a month, and had no worse withdrawal symptoms than a bad flu. But when the arranger Jack Nitzsche, who had played a significant role in the early recording sessions, flew into London to join them for Let It Bleed, Keith and Anita seemed like different people. Richards offered Nitzsche some heroin, telling him, “For every junkie there’s a shining example like myself!”

Keith often commented that his friends’ approach to drugs had followed in De Quincey’s footsteps. They saw their bodies as laboratories and were trying to find out if they could improve themselves or understand the world in a more sophisticated way. At first, they were, he insisted, more intent on experiencing ideas, emotions, and a new physical reality than getting wasted.

To begin with, Keith took to the world of junk and junkies as enthusiastically as he took to the world of music. Indeed, for a man who had been wrapped up in closed societies since his teens this was a step up, for there is no more closed and intensely connected a society than that of junkies. It was a world where nobody arrived on time except by accident. Keith adopted its habits as completely as he had adopted the guitar style of Chuck Berry, becoming in time as archetypal a junkie as he was a guitar player. Since it distanced him from other people, making him, at first, less vulnerable, it suited his character, releasing some of his very best work. Heroin undoubtedly played a vital role in Richards’s great cycle from Beggars Banquet to Exile on Main St. “In a certain stage of the addictive process you can take dope and you can screw for nine hours straight, you can drink everyone on earth under the table and show no effects of it, you can play guitar better than you ever did, your internal creative vision is profound, and you can have this drive for days and days,” said a fellow musician and heroin addict. “Within the opening riff to ‘Gimme Shelter’ I hear that incredible vista that dope can open up and allow you to get to.”

The trouble began when Richards started nodding out at the wheel. Anita would nudge him reprovingly—“Keith!”—and he would snap out of it. One of many car crashes occurred in May 1969. Anita had recently persuaded Keith that his Bentley Touring Continental was not car enough for a man of his caliber and talked him into purchasing a nineteen-foot-long Nazi staff car rumored to have been owned by Göring. Keith had it restored to its original splendor at a cost of several thousand pounds. He had smashed it up the first time he took it for a spin and returned it to the garage for further repair. Unfortunately, the reconstruction was to be short-lived. Soon after, driving around a bend at top speed just a few miles from Redlands, Keith crashed the Mercedes into the curb and ricocheted across the road, rolling down an embankment, and bringing a speedy end to the fantastic remodeled car. When Keith had gotten rid of all his drugs and gone through the requisite police routine, he discovered that Anita, six months pregnant, had fractured her collarbone. Undaunted by this near brush with disaster, he got rid of the Mercedes but continued driving his Bentley with the same careless abandon.

The dual influences of Anita and heroin were heavily seasoned by the people Richards surrounded himself with. Kenneth Anger, who lived with them at Redlands for a couple of months in 1969, was a typical example. Richards often slept on the couch in the living room at Redlands and would occasionally wake to see Anger pottering around the lawn between the house and the moat, building a shrine while entwining himself in psychedelic scarves. But Keith never fell under Kenneth’s spells or took them seriously. He never saw Anger as anything other than a seeker, like Michael Cooper or Robert Fraser or himself, all chasing their own demons.

KENNETH ANGER: “The active magical element in the Stones’ music is its strong sexual connotations. It’s basically music to fuck to. I was going to film a version of Lucifer Rising with the Stones. All the roles were to be carefully cast, with Mick being Lucifer and Keith as Beelzebub. Beelzebub is like a henchman for Lucifer.... The occult unit within the Stones was Keith and Anita.” However, Richards claims that neither he nor Anita was heavily involved with the occult. For him it was a handy image tool; for her it was just another way in which she could mess around with people’s heads.

In March Richards and Jagger made a brief visit to Italy, where they stayed in a friend’s lofty old house in Positano and wrote “Monkey Man” and “Midnight Rambler.” From May through July 1969 they recorded Let It Bleed at Olympic Studios in London. Jimmy Miller was once again on the board. Miller was impressed by Keith’s contribution. It became clear to him now that Keith’s stamina gave him the strength to maintain the sustained drive that pulled together the music. As far as he was concerned, it was on this record that Keith “took over the musical leadership of the Stones and did brilliantly.”

Another musician who worked on the album, Al Kooper, who played on Dylan’s first electric albums, remembered the effect of Richards and Jagger’s entrance the night they recorded “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”: “Mick and Keith came exploding in the door. Mick was wearing a gorilla coat, and Keith had on this sort of Tyrolean hat with a real long feather in it. It was gonna be party time, and they were the party from the moment they arrived. Everyone sat around on the floor with either an acoustic guitar or a percussion instrument, and Mick and Keith played the song they wanted to record until everyone had the chord changes and the rhythm accents. There was a conga player there who could play congas and roll huge hash joints without missing a lick. It was decided I would play piano on the basic track and overdub organ later.

“I got into this groove I had heard on an Etta James record of ‘I Got You Babe’ that really fit their song well. Keith picked up on it right away and played a nice guitar part that meshed right with it. When the proper take was gotten, Keith overdubbed an electric part and I overdubbed the organ.”

RICHARDS: “We fooled around with ‘Honky Tonk Women,’ trying to make it sound funkier, and hit on the sound we had on the single. We all thought, ‘Wow, this has got to be a hit single.’ And it was and it did fantastically well, probably because it’s the sort of song which transcends all tastes.”

“ ‘Honky Tonk Women’ was a dazzling showcase for the rhythmic expertise of both Keith Richards and Charlie Watts,” wrote Roy Carr. “Like all truly great stylists, Richards and Watts have realized that it’s not what you play, it’s what you don’t play that heightens the effect.”

In June, Richards and Jagger finally ousted Jones from the band, easing him out with a golden handshake of one hundred thousand pounds a year for the rest of his life, and the promise of continued friendship. Keith, Mick, and Charlie drove down to Brian’s house in silence. Brian knew why they had come, and they sat down in the kitchen to confront the issue. Keith did most of the talking, explaining that they wanted to tour America in the near future. Brian agreed that he just didn’t have the physical stamina to go through all those one-nighters. Keith said they understood, but they needed to make a move and they already had Mick Taylor waiting in the wings.

RICHARDS: “Brian was a very infuriating guy. Firing him was hard for Mick and me, but he could hardly play, hardly stand up, hardly breathe. That was one of the things we’d gone on to Brian about; he’d drink and take barbiturates on top of his respiratory problems; you’d see him choking in a corner many times, pumping his inhaler into his mouth. We’d come to the point where we could not bring the guy around, and the only way was to say, ‘Sorry, old cock, you’re out.’ ”

The following week they invited a young jazz-blues guitarist, Mick Taylor, to join the band. Taylor, who had made a name for himself in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, said of the Stones’ decision, “I just assume I was the best guitarist available at the time.” As a way of introducing Taylor to their fans while publicizing their new single, “Honky Tonk Women,” they decided to give a free concert in London’s Hyde Park on July 5. Just past midnight on July 3, while the band was recording Stevie Wonder’s “I Don’t Know Why,” Brian Jones, twenty-seven, drowned in the swimming pool of his country house.

RICHARDS: “We were at a session that night and someone called us up at midnight and said: ‘Brian’s dead.’ Well, what the fuck’s going on? I don’t know, man, I just don’t know what happened to Brian that night. If anybody was going to kill Brian, it was going to be me. There was no one there that’d want to murder him. Someone just didn’t take care of him.”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “The reason he died when he did was that there was no one around who knew what to do when he was starting to overdose and suffering from his asthmatic condition at the same time. He had been in that condition many times before, but there had always been people around to turn him on his side and take care of him.”

Had he wanted to deal one final, devastating blow to the two people he loved and hated most, Jones could not have done anything more effective than dying when he did, two weeks after he was fired and two days before the Stones were to play to the biggest audience of their careers. Keith would spend the next ten years, as he put it, becoming Brian and trying to kill himself with heroin. In her attempt to assuage the pain and guilt incurred by Brian’s death, Anita would follow Keith down the path of self-destruction with even more harrowing results.

“Keith came into the office that morning and grabbed hold of me and said, ‘Are you all right?’ remembered Stones assistant Shirley Arnold.”I don’t think anyone knew what was happening, ’cause even if they had all expected Brian to die young, when it happens it’s still a shock. Then they started talking about their planned free concert in Hyde Park, and the first thing Mick said was, ‘We’ll cancel it.’ ” But Keith and Charlie insisted that they go ahead with the show, making it into a memorial concert and tribute to Jones. Later, when a reporter suggested that it was in bad taste for the Stones to hold such a huge concert before Brian had even been buried, Keith allegedly punched him in the nose and pushed him down a flight of stairs.

RICHARDS: “I wasn’t surprised about Brian. I didn’t wish him dead and there were a few guys who did, but in all honesty it was no surprise. And it was hard to shed a tear at his demise, quite honestly. It was like, ‘Wow, he’s gone, thank God.’ Cold-blooded as that sounds, he was a passenger for us. We had to cover his ass. We all revere his memory, and nobody deserves to go that young. But if anybody asked for it, he did. But you don’t leave the Stones singing, you just get carried out. Brian was already effectively dead when he died; he was already out of the band.”

After Brian died, Keith had to make a choice to become one with the living or one of the living dead. He had very little to hold on to in his life and needed to make a commitment to something. Disillusioned by Brian’s death, Anita’s infidelity, and the straight world of oppressive authority figures, Keith decided to make the major commitment to Mick. At first the outcome was extraordinarily successful, as they made their greatest records and gave their greatest performances, but some saw it as a partnership, or marriage, born out of hell and pain.

On July 5, Decca released a double-A-sided single, “Honky Tonk Women”/“You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” that would go to number one in the U.S. and U.K., and in Germany, Sweden, France, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Turkey, the Soviet Union, Poland, South Africa, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Canada, Australia, Yugoslavia, Japan, Czechoslovakia, the Philippines, Israel, Lebanon, and Bermuda. “ ‘Honky Tonk Women’ was the strongest three minutes of rock and roll released in 1969,” wrote Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone. “In spite of Mick’s screaming, joyful singing, this time the star of the show is Keith Richards. He combines the cleanest, toughest guitar lines in rock with Charlie Watts’ jingling cowbell and steady drum shots for an introduction very similar to and equally as dramatic as that of Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine.’ Keith moves off after that, really fronting Mick himself, stretching sex with a smile out of every note, running up to the choruses with the same kind of perfect excitement Mike Bloomfield displayed on ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ On the last two choruses Richards sings beautifully behind Mick, bending the words in counterpoint to Mick’s straight shouts: ‘It’s a haaaaawwwwww-aw-aw-aw-kytonk women! Bam! Gimme, gimme, gimme . . .’ It would have been a gas to hear Keith sing a chorus all by himself.”

RICHARDS: “No one really knew what was going on. It was a hassle, quite honestly. It was fantastic from the point of view of a mass gathering. You’ll never see Hyde Park like that—just people and trees. But Brian had died and we were breaking in Mick Taylor. We hadn’t played live for quite a while and the organization, the logistical end of it, was flimsy. And we played pretty bad until near the end, ’cause we hadn’t played for years. And nobody minded because they just wanted to hear us play again. It was nice they were glad to see us because we were glad to see them. Coming after Brian’s death, if was like the thing we had to do. We had that big picture of him on stage and it came out looking like a ghost in some pictures.”

The root of the problem was more musical than psychological. The band had not played live for an extended period. Mick Taylor had never played live with them. Under the circumstances, their best bet was to look to Richards to pull them together. However, when Keith arrived at the designated meeting place after being up for several days, he looked like a derelict, and when he climbed onto the stage, as one critic noted, “Every chord he played seemed resolutely drugged up to the eyeballs.”