Keith Richards on ‘Crosseyed Heart’: It’s Solo Rock ’n’ Roll, but He Likes It (2015)
From The New York Times August 2015
Sometime around 2011, Keith Richards was ready to retire from his life in rock ’n’ roll. Approaching half a century with the Rolling Stones, he had done it all. “I know what luck is. I’ve had a lot,” he reflected in an interview this month.
He’s the archetypal rock guitarist: the genius wastrel, the unimpeachable riff-maker, the architect of a band sound emulated worldwide, the survivor of every excess. Onstage, he is at once a flamboyant figure and a private one, locked in a one-on-one dance with his guitar, working new variations into every song. “I never play the same thing twice,” he said. “I can’t remember what I played before anyway.”
With the Stones in “hibernation” after a tour that ended in 2007, Mr. Richards took two and a half years “immersed in my life twice” to write (with James Fox) a best-selling memoir, “Life,” that re-examined his many sessions, tours, trysts, addictions, mishaps, arrests and accomplishments. After “Life” was published in 2010, he was enjoying being a family man and a grandfather. Retirement was a real possibility.
“I thought, that’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” said Steve Jordan, Mr. Richards’s longtime co-producer and drummer on his solo projects. “He felt comfortable with where he was and what he had done and what he had achieved. But knowing Keith, to not have him pick up an instrument and play, it was weird. When you’re a musician, you don’t retire. You play up until you can’t breathe.”
Mr. Jordan nudged Mr. Richards in a different direction: back into the recording studio to make his first solo album in 23 years, “Crosseyed Heart” (Republic), to be released Sept. 18. “I realized I hadn’t been in the studio since 2004 with the Stones,” Mr. Richards said. “I thought: ‘This is a bit strange. Something in my life is missing.’ ”
It’s a straightforwardly old-fashioned, rootsy album that could have appeared 20 years ago. The instruments are hand-played, the vocals are scratchy growls, and the songs revisit Mr. Richards’s favorite idioms — blues, country, reggae, Stonesy rock — for some scrappy storytelling. The album was recorded on analog tape. “I love to see those little wheels go around,” Mr. Richards said.
Eased onto a couch at his manager’s downtown Manhattan office, surrounded by merchandise from this year’s Rolling Stones tour and memorabilia dating back decades, Mr. Richards, 71, alternated between a Marlboro and a drink. He was wearing an ensemble only he could pull off: a striped seersucker jacket over a black T-shirt decorated with a Captain America shield, black corduroy jeans and silvery-patterned running shoes. A woven headband in Rastafarian red, gold and green held back his luxuriantly unkempt gray hair. A silver skull ring was, as usual, on his right hand as a reminder, he has said, that “beauty’s only skin deep.”
In a conversation punctuated by his wheezy, conspiratorial growl of a laugh, he was a man at ease with himself as a rock elder. “It’s all a matter of perspective and which end of the telescope you’re looking at,” he said.
“Nobody wants to croak, but nobody wants to get old,” he said. “When the Stones started, we were 18, 19, 20, and the idea of being 30 was absolutely horrendous. Forget about it! And then suddenly you’re 40, and oh, they’re in it for the long haul. So you need to readjust, and of course kids happen and grandchildren, and then you start to see the pattern unfolding. If you make it, it’s fantastic.”
Mr. Richards has outlived many of his longtime musical collaborators, most recently the Stones’ saxophonist Bobby Keys, who made one of his last studio appearances on Mr. Richards’s album. Born the same day as Mr. Richards, he died in December. “You get used to losing good friends,” Mr. Richards said. “They keep croaking on me.”
His enduring attachment is to music, and to his guitar. “I get into a very warm relationship with the guitar. I sleep with it at times,” he said. “There would be no ‘Satisfaction’ if I hadn’t been sleeping with the guitar in the bed that night. Apparently I woke up in the middle of the night and hit a button on this new thing at the time, a cassette machine. But I did this all either in a dream or in my sleep and wrote ‘Satisfaction.’ Without the guitar being right next to me I wouldn’t have done it. Not that I sleep with it every night — the old lady would complain.” (He has been married to Patti Hansen since 1983.)
A new documentary, “Keith Richards: Under the Influence,” was directed by Morgan Neville (the Oscar-winning “20 Feet From Stardom”) and will be shown via Netflix beginning Sept. 18. It includes recording sessions for “Crosseyed Heart,” glimpses of the Rolling Stones’ past and Mr. Richards’s return visits to cities like Chicago and Nashville. The “influence” of the documentary’s title is musical, not pharmaceutical, as Mr. Richards recalls all the idioms he has absorbed, among them flamenco and jazz. In the documentary, Mr. Richards also observes: “I ain’t a pop star no more, y’know? And I don’t want to be.”
Pop fame, he now insists, was never his goal. “I only did it by accident. All I wanted to do was play. And then given the time that we were working in, ’63, ’64, you realized you can’t just sit around and make records. You have to become famous,” he said. “To tell the truth, I didn’t mind it once it was going. I mean, I’m 19 and all these chicks are screaming at me,” more amorous, he added, than they had been six months earlier. “But at the same time you’ve done the crossroads bit without knowing it” — that is, in blues lore, selling one’s soul to the Devil.
“At times, it can be a bit annoying, but who are you to get annoyed because people like you?” he said with a chuckle. “Live with it, pal.”
Mr. Richards’s solo career started amid strife in the Rolling Stones, a period in the late 1980s that he has called the band’s “World War III.” Mick Jagger, his partner in songwriting and producing, had chosen to make solo albums with younger, au courant collaborators. Mr. Richards decided to dig into his own, bluesier music, anchored by Mr. Jordan on drums, with whom he had backed Chuck Berry in the tense 1987 documentary “Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll.”
For Mr. Richards’s first solo album, “Talk Is Cheap,” in 1988, they assembled a band of seasoned studio musicians, including Waddy Wachtel on guitar and Ivan Neville on keyboards, who would go on to tour with Mr. Richards as the X-Pensive Winos and make a second album, “Main Offender,” in 1992. “Talk Is Cheap” featured “You Don’t Move Me,” a direct taunt at Mr. Jagger’s solo efforts: “You lost the feeling/Not so appealing.”
Things are more diplomatic now. The Stones endure, with concerts planned in South America early next year. “Healthy competition is O.K.,” Mr. Richards said. “Mick and I’s relationship is, we’ve known each other longer than anybody else. We’ve known each other since we were 4 or 5 years old. There’s been a lot of gaps in between, but at the same time, you’ve known somebody from the playground. We twist and turn. I mean, yeah, now and again we have beefs because we’re like brothers in that respect, and what brothers don’t have beefs now and again?”
But after years of inactivity, the Rolling Stones stirred only once Mr. Richards was recording again. The making of “Crosseyed Heart” was interrupted by a handful of Rolling Stones concerts marking the band’s 50th anniversary in 2012. And before Mr. Richards could allot time to promote “Crosseyed Heart,” the Stones geared up for this year’s American tour.
“The record’s been finished for about a year, but then the Stones go back into work. Oh, right,” Mr. Richards said. “We’ve been holding it back and finding the right space to put it out. But the Stones won’t be working again until next year. So I do have this space to do something on my own without anybody getting their feathers ruffled.”
“Crosseyed Heart,” Mr. Richards said, is the first album he has made without a deadline. Mr. Jordan described the sessions as “very civilized,” just one or two afternoons a week. “Which is very different from the other albums,” Mr. Jordan added, “when we would start at midnight and end at 8 a.m.”
The album gathered momentum after a tentative start. “He felt rusty,” Mr. Jordan recalled. “But his facility started coming back to him, and then the fire started to return, and the energy got ramped up, and then all of a sudden we were making a record.”
Mr. Wachtel and Mr. Neville returned for some tracks, though much of the album comes down to Mr. Jordan’s beat and Mr. Richards on guitars, bass and piano. On his own, he matches the loose-but-tight mesh of rhythm and lead guitar that he gets with Ronnie Wood in the Rolling Stones. “He’s a counterpuncher,” Mr. Jordan said. “If you have a driving beat, he can just jab; you throw a punch, he comes right back.”
The earthy momentum of the music carries lyrics full of contentious romance, hard knocks and betrayals, in songs with titles like “Trouble,” “Amnesia,” “Substantial Damage” and “Suspicion.” More than one lyric, as in “Nothing on Me” and “Robbed Blind,” worries about encounters with the police. “My life is getting busted and getting out of it,” Mr. Richards said. “Writing the book brought back certain things. So much has happened and sometimes you just forget about it. Especially getting busted is not something you want to dwell on. But then you think about it, and you think, maybe there’s a song in there.”
In “Illusion,” the voice of Norah Jones suddenly wafts up; it’s a troubled couple’s ballad for which Ms. Jones wrote the woman’s side of the dialogue. “It’s got a slow burn,” she said admiringly. “I wanted it to sound like an early-morning argument, or a very late-night one.” Recording it was “pretty old-school,” she recalled. “We only did three takes, and they took the first one. It’s not like it has to be perfect — it has to be real, especially with Keith.”
Mr. Richards hopes to reconvene the X-Pensive Winos for at least a handful of shows before the Rolling Stones go back on the road. He’s also impatient for the Stones to make another album. “My favorite dream is to get the Rolling Stones off of a tour and straight into the studio,” he said. “It’ll probably never happen, but I can hear the band that tight, when it’s really honed and toned and all the screws are in the right place. A lot of the earlier records we made were in between tours. We’d come straight off the road and go straight into the studio, which is why some of those records have so much bounce and hit on them — the energy.”
He added: “We’re playing South America in February and March, and I would like to get in the studio around April or May next year. It’s been too long. They need to record. I can feel something in my bones saying we have to record. And maybe this” — his solo album — “will be a little kick up the arse.”
His eyes light up and his smile broadens when he talks about performing. “People keep asking questions about, ‘How do you do it?’ I was made to do it,” he said. “Playing live, that’s the essence of what I do. As I say to Ronnie when we go onstage, ‘Right, now we can get some peace and quiet.’ There, nobody can disturb us. We’re invulnerable.”
How Ronnie Wood’s New Barbarians Saved the Stones
From vintageguitar.com
Ear-to-Ear Violence
The Rolling Stones have a history like no other rock-and-roll band, replete with the sort of peaks and valleys that spelled doom for virtually all others who first gathered in garages or introduced their music to basement bars in the 1960s. The early ’70s were particularly pivotal, as the band was on the verge of collapse thanks to drug busts, dwindling inspiration (and album sales), and the very real threat of Keith Richards serving time in jail. A turnaround, though, came in part thanks to an unsung side project – Ron Wood’s New Barbarians tour. As the Stones continue to perform live more than 54 years after their first gig, we offer a look at how Wood’s effort helped keep them rolling.
410 AD: The Barbarian hordes – led by Alaric, king of the Visigoths – sweep out of the Germanic lands and through the Holy Roman Empire, pillaging the civilized world, sacking Rome.
1979 AD: The New Barbarians – fronted by Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards – open for the Rolling Stones on April 22 in Oshawa, Ontario, before partying across the United States from Ann Arbor to San Diego, with outbreaks and riots at concerts along the way. The band then charges on to England, opening for Led Zeppelin at Knebworth Festival.
It began innocently enough. The Stones opted not to tour in 1979, leaving members with time on their side. Wood had just released his third solo album, Gimme Some Neck, and was rounding up a “pickup band” to play his songs plus some blues and rock covers on a tour. Knowing Keith Richards had nothing going, Wood signed him on for a tour of America.
From there, it all got out of hand.
Richards was still smarting from his February ’77 bust in Toronto for possession of heroin “for the purpose of trafficking.” His sentence after 18 months of legal hassles? Addiction treatment, plus play a benefit for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB).
Keen to get on the road again, Richards was on the run from the powers of the poppy seed and his éminence blonde, Anita Pallenberg; it may have been hard to fathom, but he was ready to turn over that proverbial new leaf. Wood, an unlikely poster boy for AA, paradoxically aided and abetted Richard’s recovery by providing a venue to revive himself – and issue the de facto “Get Out of Jail Free” card as the New Barbarians played the CNIB show.
“Having been in trouble with the law and everything, going out on the road was Keith’s safe place,” said Gary Schultz, one of Richards’ crew and a loyal confidant. “Keith is more himself when he’s on the road and in front of an audience than when he’s doing anything else.”
The Stones with the most insatiable appetites for gigging, jamming, and having fun then added sometime-Stone and Texan native son Bobby Keys, who added the raucous sax solo to “Brown Sugar” and played on the ’71, ’72, and ’73 tours before being thrown out as a bad influence. Despite Stones politics, Wood held no grudge.
Next was Wood’s ex-Faces mate, Ian McLagan. From his natty shoes to his Beatles-esque mop, the ex-mod was always onboard for a good time.
With the frontline in place, Wood looked to the bottom-end. He asked Charlie Watts to revive his drumming role from the Neck LP, but Watts was busy with his own band and recommended Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste. Ziggy had been the propulsion for the Meters, the band that practically defined New Orleans R&B.
“I’d never actually played rock,” he recalled. “I was just an R&B-type of drummer. I loved the feel of rock and roll, so that was right up my alley, but it was a big learning curve because I had to listen in a different way. It was a little over my head, I gotta admit.”
Ziggy made the switch thanks largely to the influence of one man – his fellow on the bottom end, bassist Stanley Clarke.
When recruiting for the Barbarians, Wood’s first question to Stanley was, “Know any Chuck Berry?” It was a fair query coming from a rocker to a jazzer.
Clarke laughed, and replied, “Yeah, I know Chuck Berry songs.” In fact, Stanley had played with Chuck.
Learning curve, jazz, whatever: Wood had faith.
“I knew they would adapt naturally – and put a new slant on their approach,” he remembers.
And with that plus a seasoned crew largely made up of ex-Faces roadies, the New Barbarians were born.
Blind Date
The Barbarians debuted April 22, 1979, playing the two CNIB charity shows – opening for the Stones.
Since management was worried about Richards setting foot again on Canadian soil – returning to the scene of the crime – tour chief Richard Fernandez had the musicians stay in the U.S., fly in for the shows, then jump back on their leased Boeing 727. They set up house at the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, which served as a headquarters, rehearsal space, and base for the tour’s Midwest shows.
“Going to Canada, Keith’s visa was a concern, so we just went in and out,” Fernandez says. “I wasn’t sure what could or couldn’t happen when we got there, so we figured this would be the best way to get in, without any luggage, without anything, you know – just people. Get in and get out, spic and span.”
Or, as the official itinerary stated, “Toronto bound: Please take the time to assure that you will be clean upon arrival. Skip the soap and go right for the vacuum.”
Introduced by an obviously amped-up John Belushi, who admonished the crowd to “Go nuts!” the Barbarians roared through their set. The Stones then took over before the bands joined to play an encore of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Then they did the whole show a second time before the Barbarians hightailed it back to the Playboy Club.
From there, the band played shows across Michigan, Wisconsin, and Madison Square Garden before swinging through Texas and on to finales in California.
They opened each night with Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Rock & Roller,” Wood hitting the classic double-stops on his disc-front Zemaitis. They then rolled straight into two of Wood’s own rockers from Gimme Some Neck – “Buried Alive” and “F.U.C. Her” before playing his beautiful earlier ballad, “Mystifies Me.”
Covering Sam Cooke’s “Let’s Go Steady Again,” Richards sang while Wood played sax alongside Bobby Keys. “Variety you want? Variety you get!” Wood announced to the crowd. Richards would then take a seat at the piano for the country tearjerker “Apartment #9,” which had been Tammy Wynette’s first hit, back in ’67. Wood added pedal-steel fills.
On a cover of Freddie Scott’s R&B hit “Am I Grooving You,” most of the band retreated from stage, leaving Clarke and Ziggy to step out. Afterward, the shows were blown wide open, diving into the R&B they both loved, syncopating each other’s riffs and often surprising themselves. Stanley’s funk-inspired slaps and pops brought the crowd to frenzy each time. He was part Bootsy Collins, part Jimi Hendrix – 100,000 watts of pure Stanley Clarke.
Recharged, the full band then launched into Bob Dylan’s “Seven Days,” before Keith’s “Before They Make Me Run,” followed by a full-throttle “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
Then, they disappeared into the comforts of the 727, back to the Playboy Club.
“After the gig, there was no messing around,” Stanley remembers. “We’d go right to a limousine, to the plane, back to our hotel – and we’d be up all night, groovin’.”
Wood worked to refine the modern rock tour; home base in a luxury hotel, travel by charter jet, fine meals instead of cold cuts. It all helped reduce stress and frustration, instead lending a stately, low-key atmosphere.
“I wanted to do this in style,” Wood said.
No One Here But Us Chickens
At many Barbarians shows, the band was at moments almost drowned out by chants from the crowds, demanding “Where’s Jagger?” “Where’s Dylan?”
The first few times, Wood was bemused. Later, though, he expressed confusion, and ultimately began to respond, “Contrary to what you’ve heard, there ain’t no one here but us chickens.”
Turned out, though, in an effort to ensure venues were sold out, Wood’s manager and the promoters had spread rumors via the press that the Barbarians would be joined by “special guests.” Everyone from Mick Jaggar to Bob Dylan, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page, Peter Frampton, and others were promised. When the big names didn’t show, crowds responded with catcalls and, eventually, riots.
Such frenzy reached a peak in Milwaukee in April of ’79, when angered fans charged the stage at the end of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Forced back by police, the scuffle turned into a melée (as described by Billboard) as fans smashed chairs and broke windows. The police arrested 81 people.
Things turned ugly again at Madison Square Garden, where production manager Ken Graham remembers using his body to block the mixing board from flying furniture. “It was like where the villagers rioted in an old Frankenstein movie,” he said. The actual Barbarians, however, had already left the building.
Rip This Joint
Wood and Richards went together like drunk and disorderly.
“Without Mick Jagger or a hard-nosed tour manager cracking the whip, it was one long party,” remembers crewman Johnny Starbuck. “The inmates were in charge of the asylum. Technically, it was Ronnie’s band, but Keith was pretty much the leader. And when you’re following his lead… Well, you can imagine. There were no rules.”
“There was a lot of X-rated stuff going on,” added Stanley Clarke. “It was a complete rock-and-roll tour – the kind you read about in magazines. Just what you think a rock tour should be. Everything was there – bells and whistles, perks, the extras… all the ups and downs.”
Onstage, the Barbarians were a band of brothers. Away from stage, the fun only got louder – which is saying a lot, considering their stage volume. It began with Clarke’s low-end sound.
“I had an Alembic and had been using Electro-Voice cabinets,” Clarke said. “But Ronnie had four [Ampeg] SVTs for me because he liked a strong stage sound. It was just pounding – would kill a bird if it flew across the stage. It was nice to hear the sound so big.”
Wood had two Zemaitis guitars as mainstays, but also played a ’55 Strat as well as other assorted guitars. Richards primarily used his five-string ’54 Telecaster, “Micawber,” and his black ’75 Tele Custom. During the California swing, they met luthier Travis Bean, who gifted them with red and natural-finish guitars.
The guitars weren’t the showstoppers, though. Rather, stacks of amps served that purpose. Wood spray-painted the grillecloths of all the amps in red. “I want to see blood,” he told Graham.
And while no hotel rooms were trashed, that didn’t mean rooms didn’t suffer. Tour manager Fernandez remembers one incident in Wood’s suite at Manhattan’s Mayfair Hotel.
“Ronnie calls me, and he and Keith were in Ronnie’s room. He says, ‘I need more spray paint.’ They were painting one of Woody’s guitars – in the bathroom of one of a grand hotel in New York City. My only thought was, ‘Oh, no! How much is this going to cost us?’ But they were deep into it and having a great time. It just cracked me up.”
For Clarke, coming from the world of jazz, it was a little rambunctious. He’d seen a lot prior to the tour, but hadn’t seen it all.
“I was a bit of a health nut at that point, and one day Keith came onto the plane looking pretty grim,” he said. “I don’t know what was going on, but he said to me, ‘Don’t worry, this is going to clear up in a couple of days.’ When we talking a bit later, I said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna make a health shake. You want one?’ Keith started laughing, shaking his head and saying, ‘Stanley, Stanley…’”
Finale
The Barbarians’ music wasn’t rocket science, just moneymaker-shaking, unapologetic rock and roll. Some critics at the time challenged the band’s merits, mostly missing its simple brilliance while pondering what could have been if only Rod or Mick were there, too. But there was more to it; something deeper. Wood’s little pick-up band played an under-recognized role in the history of the Stones – that of deliverance.
Richards’ bust for heroin possession in ’77 had been the Stones’ nadir. In the years that followed, though, he kicked heroin, launched the band’s revival with Some Girls in ’78, and in March of ’79 met a young model named Patti Hansen, who would eventually become his wife. As part of the New Barbarians, he seemed to find true joy again in playing.
“The Barbarians, in a weird way, saved my life,” he said.
Some band members thought they were making history, others simply great music. Fernandez still gushes, decades later.
“Maybe it didn’t sell 85 million records and make a ton of money, but the vibe – seeing these cats and who they were and how they treated each other – was really special,” he said.
Fittingly, bandleader Wood offered definitive last word in his autobiography.
“I booked the tour, I was paying for it… got us a Boeing 727, took care of everybody, and wound up £200,000 in debt. But you know what? In the name of great music, I’d do it again and wouldn’t change a thing.”
Keith Richards’ Great Solo Debut, Talk Is Cheap (1988), Turns 30
From rollingstone.com March 2019
A deluxe edition of the LP reminds us what a great time he had getting back to his rock & roll roots
During the mid Eighties, the relationship between Keith Richards and Mick Jagger hit a historic low, as Jagger tested solo waters. “Mick started to become unbearable.” Richards wrote in his 2010 memoir Life. You could hear the rift: 1983’s Undercover and 1986’s Dirty Work often sounded like lackluster attempts at keeping up with the times.
So in 1988, Richards took advantage of time off in the Stones’ schedule and went into the studio with a crack band he dubbed the X-Pensive Winos, including guitarist Waddy Wachtel, keyboard player Ivan Neville and drummer-producer Steve Jordan. The result was a surprise: not just the debut solo LP by pretty much the last Sixties icon left who’d never gone solo, but an album with a loose vibrancy lacking in his primary project; “a masterpiece of underachievement,” wrote Rolling Stone Senior Editor David Fricke in his review.
Talk Is Cheap was rare among works by middle-aged rockers at the time, when many felt compelled to address the MTV era with programmed drums and albums that seemed to deny their own histories. With its raw, roomy feel and hollered backing vocals, “Take It So Hard,” the first single from Talk Is Cheap, had it both ways, rocking with garage-gang vigor while still getting MTV play. “Struggle” was taut, speedy and full of sharp-elbowed guitars. “How I Wish” was the Platonic ideal of an Eighties Rolling Stones single, minus gratuitous contemporary sonics. “You Don’t Move Me” had a classic jagged Richards riff and growled lyrics that seemed to allude to his blossoming in-house feud (“Why you think you ain’t got no friends,” he growled with strikingly authentic-seeming anger).
That bare-knuckled drive didn’t preclude texture or subtlety. Always an underrated vocalist, he delivered lyrics with two-pack-a-day gravitas, gruff aggression and flashes of fraying soulfulness. Musically, he doubled down on vintage earthiness and living history — Fifties rock & roll (“Could’ve Stood You Up”), Memphis soul (“Make No Mistake,” a track helmed by iconic Hi Records producer Willie Mitchel) and South African township jive (Michael Doucet’s beautifully dissonant fiddle on the barbed ballad “Locked Away”). For sideman, he called on Chuck Berry pianist Johnny Johnson, members of Parliament Funkadelic, longtime Stones sax man Bobby Keys and even ex-Stone Mick Taylor.
It’s perfectly fitting that an album this casual would get a 30th Anniversary reissue the year after it turned 30. The deluxe edition includes six bonus tracks that show just how much fun these guys were having at the time, like the funky throwaway “Mark on Me” (in which Richards shouts, “That bitch she put the mark on me” against a hilariously gloppy synth), the humid Neville Brothers-esque instrumental workout “Brute Force” and several blues numbers featuring rollicking piano work by Johnson.
Talk Is Cheap wasn’t meant to signify anything; that was a huge part of its charm. But in its own way it proved prophetic. The year after its release would be a boom year for Sixties-identified artists returning to their bedrock sounds after struggling to pilot the Eighties: Lou Reed with the street-level commentary of New York; Neil Young with the balance of raging noise and acoustic ache of Freedom; and Bonnie Raitt, with the subtle introspect and blues resolve of Nick of Time.
Richards recently said the experience of recording solo made him appreciate working with Jagger. The Stones were back in 1989 too, sounding undeniably Stones-like on Steel Wheels. Somewhat poetically, the album’s best song was by Richards, the slow closer “Slipping Away.” Moodily elegant and last-cigarette reflective, it’s full of middle-age self-examination, intimations of hard-living mortality and a wry sense of the Stones’ own imperiled state at the time. It was also a moving moment of detente with Jagger, who lent spirited vocals to the tune’s resiliently hard-swinging bridge. “It seems I’ve lost my touch,” the Glimmer Twins sing together. Talk Is Cheap was a reminder where they could find it.
Life by Keith Richards (2011)
From amazon.com
This memoir, written with the help of writer James Fox, is an intricately detailed account of Keith Richards life, both in and out of music-but mostly in. All the stories are here-the funny, the touching, the horrendous, and the amazing. Some are well known, some weren’t even known to Richards-he only hears later, from others who were with him, what went on. And he’s put it all in this book. Included are 32 pages of b&w and color photographs (including one of the band, with Jagger driving, in a vintage red convertible, across the Brooklyn Bridge) in two groups, plus photos throughout the book itself chronicling Richards’ life. Also of interest is an early diary that Richards kept detailing the bands early gigs and impressions of the music the band played.
Richards has been known as many things-“the human riff”, as some kind of prince of a dark underworld filled with drugs, booze, and skull rings, as “Keef”, a rock ‘n’ roll pirate, as someone who should be dead (several times over) from massive drug use and other lifestyle choices, and as someone hounded by law enforcement-looking to incarcerate this bad example to all the kids. But Richards is also known as a settled (for him) family man. But somehow he’s survived it all. And now, with this autobiography, he’s letting us into his life. This book looks back at all the times-good, bad, and just plain strange.
Beginning with Richards’ boyhood in post-war England, no stone is left unturned in detailing his young life. A life which changed forever with his discovery of American blues. From that era the book details the formation of The Rolling Stones (I would like to have learned more about Brian Jones’ in relation to the formation of the group), which changed his life again-a life he continues to the present.
This book is important, interesting, and at times, harrowing, with a myriad of details surrounding Richards, his band, and anyone caught up in their universe of music, good times, misery, drugs, violence, and just plain weirdness. But the book also shows another side of Keith Richards. The pain he felt (and still feels) when his young son Tara, died while Richards was on tour. The loss of musician and friend/band hanger-on, Gram Parsons. Looking back with regret as people close to him sunk into a hellish pit of drug addiction. And Richards’ own account of his years of drug use-especially heroin and the misery he brought on himself, even while he was careful not to go to far over the edge.
Of course no memoir concerning Richards would be complete without accounts of the ups and downs, over many years, with Mick Jagger. There’s a number of fascinating asides and insights concerning their ideas of what direction the band should follow. Unfortunately, but not surprising, Jagger (and the other band members) are not heard from. That’s unfortunate because of all the valuable insight concerning Richards’ life on and off the stage, and the inner workings of one of the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll bands, that his long time band mates could bring to the story. But others who have known Richards over the course of many years were interviewed. People like Ronnie Spector, Jim Dickinson, Andrew Oldham, Bobby Keys, and a number of fellow musicians and friends, all have telling bits and pieces to add to the overall picture of just who Richards is.
The detail Richards and Fox have put into this well written memoir is almost staggering. Reading about the early days of the band is exciting and fascinating, if for no other reason the era they came up in is long since vanished. The discovery and idolization of musicians like Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed, Slim Harpo, and other blues greats, trying to emulate the hard scrabble lifestyles of American blues artists, the small scruffy clubs the band played in the beginning, living in abject poverty and squalor, the large concerts in later years, the songs, the albums, the drugs, and the many fascinating (and sometimes disgusting) characters that drift in and out of Richards’ life-it’s all here. And taken together, this is a story only Keith Richards could live (and survive) to write about in such detail.
While there have been other decent books on Richards and/or the Stones, for the straight, unvarnished truth, as he sees it and lived it, this is the book that matters. This memoir, written in a Richards-to-you conversational style, is interesting, exciting, gritty, informative, harrowing, and important. And with this book, written in his own words, we can’t get much closer to the man and his life than that.
Keith Richards Talk Is Cheap (1988)
From starling.rinet.ru
Keith Richards probably never ever even dreamt of making a solo album – until he was hard pressed to it by Jagger. He gave everything he ever had to the Rolling Stones, and he never had or, at least, always controlled his ambitions within the band. But when Mick dissolved the band (and yes, everybody knows that it was primarily Mick’s fault), what was a poor boy to do except to sing in a rock an’ roll band – his own rock an’ roll band?
So, as much as good ol’ Keith hated it, he was simply forced to assemble his own bunch of musicians, come up with some lyrics and croak out most of the vocals – himself, because, ambitionless as he was, he really didn’t want to become the next Jeff Beck. The guys he plays and jams with are mostly nameless, honest studio workers, and the ‘big star’ of the album is Keith’s co-producer Steve Jordan: he plays bass, drums and probably something else, plus he co-wrote most of the tunes with Keith.
Critics loved this album – and I can easily understand them. History has probably overrated it, but there’s no denying the fact that Talk Is Cheap was an astonishing accomplishment for Keith: nobody thought he would be able to do a record at least half that good. Now see here, it doesn’t always sound like the Stones, this one. First of all, it has no Mick Jagger on vocals. A banality, yes, but an important one. I’m not the biggest fan in the world of Keith’s vocals.
I mean, I certainly don’t have to bring up the fact that the guy can’t sing worth a dime – that goes without saying; and sometimes, his dreamy, croaky and soulful vocals can be an interesting distraction from Mick’s harsh, sly tone. But when he sings throughout a whole album, that’s damn hard to take still. Also, if you already enjoyed my Stones’ reviews, you probably already know that I’m not a fan of what I’d call ‘typical Keith-style boggy ballad’, stuff like ‘Sleep Tonight’, ‘Coming Down Again’, all that crud, which is very soulful and emotional, for sure, but lacks strong melodies completely.
Of course, Keith couldn’t miss the chance to insert a couple of such babes onto this record: ‘Locked Away’ and ‘Make No Mistake’, to be exact. The former just drags at five minute plus, and does nothing for me, although I understand perfectly that devoted Keith fans will get additional years of life out of listening to it. ‘Make No Mistake’ is a little better, maybe just because there’s something endearing in the way Keith gurgles out these ‘make no mistake… abooooout it…’ lines all the time.
But in any case, it’s not the ballads that are gonna make this album. For an ex-Rolling Stone (soon-to-be-Rolling-Stone again), the general tone on the album is remarkably soft: most of the rockers are subdued and subtle, with little distortion or ‘ass-kicking’ to get in your way. Nevertheless, Keith still plays that six-string in a way that no living man on Earth can. Listen to his pulsating, incredible licks on ‘It Means A Lot’ to know what I mean. How on Earth can he achieve that incredible rock-rock-rockin’ effect by playing just a few chords in a few places? Over the years, he’d learned that famous ‘syncopated’ style of his that could only be equalled by Pete Townshend in his prime days – but Townshend’s prime days are long over, while Keith is still in perfect form for a rhythm guitarist (not for a soloist, though). And most of the songs here display his guitar playing talents, thank you Lord – after all, the back cover of the album, with the famous fingers, the famous skull-ring and the famous guitar, should really tell you something.
Apart from ‘It Means A Lot’, there’s a great funky opener, ‘Big Enough’, that at first seems like a more self-assured, real-song-like rewrite of ‘Hot Stuff’ – but it isn’t, it’s actually a separate strong song in its own rights. ‘Take It So Hard’ is the song that rocks out the fiercest on here – with lots of prime riffage, some cool vocals and a great party atmosphere. And don’t bypass the jolly Fifties sendup on ‘I Could Have Stood You Up’ – together with some doo-wop harmonies and funny lyrics. Yeah, Keith is no great lyricsman, but he does well for a beginner. He even summons all his forces to write a venomous, How-Do-You-Sleep-ish message to Mick (‘You Don’t Move Me’), and succeeds – come to think of it, it isn’t even venomous, it just sounds like an innocent, angry, but not really thoroughly pissed off scolding of an older brother who’s always been an example but isn’t any more. ‘You made the wrong motion, drank the wrong potion’.
All in all, no Rolling Stones fan will ever be disappointed by this record. Arguably, it is considered the best offer by a solo Stones member that money can buy – and while I certainly disagree, because, shame on me, I enjoy Mick’s solo output a lot better, it is quite decent and, well, definitely better than Dirty Work, at least. It is, however, obvious that Keith really needs Mick. The Beatles’ solo careers proved that John didn’t need Paul, and Paul didn’t need John – they could get on by themselves just as well, even if with a diminished commercial and artistic success. Keith and Mick cannot successfully function without each other, not for a long time period of time, at least.
Mick needs Keith’s great riffs and his ‘primal’ sense of melody; whereas Keith certainly needs Mick’s vocals and sense of experimentalism. The latter is especially important: perhaps the greatest flaw of Talk Is Cheap is that it is horrendously formulaic. People complain about the Stones’ mythic ‘formula’ (although I hardly ever understand what they’re talking about); well, this album certainly has a ‘formula’, and it gets a bit tiring near the end, though on this particular release it never gets too tiring. Buy it still! And get Keith to autograph it to you! Hurry up – he’s still alive, miraculous as it may seem!
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Classic Rock Review 
A wonderful album that I have enjoyed since 1973