Keith Richards: Playboy Interview

"If you want to learn an instrument, sleep with it near your head," bluesman Mississippi John Hurt used to say. That is what Keith Richards was doing the night in 1965 when he dreamed and awoke to record (and fell back to sleep to forget) what would become the best-known riff in rock and roll and the immortal words, "I can't get no...satisfaction."

Imagine waking to discover you'd written a song. Imagine that song becoming the anthem of your generation. Imagine living from your teenage years onward in a pressure cooker of adulation and condemnation. Imagine making millions of dollars, taking unimaginable amounts of drugs and having friends drop dead by your side. Imagine Altamont, arrest and jail in Britain, your marriage in the tabloids, the celebrated rumbles with your Stonemate Mick Jagger, more touring and adulation, the breakup of "the greatest rock-and-roll band in the world," licking your drug problems, starting over solo in your 40s, and then returning to the studio and the road again with the Stones. A series of narrow escapes, the life of Keith Richards.

One afternoon in 1944, when Richards was about a year old, he left with his mother on a shopping errand in Dartford, the London suburb where he was born, and went home to a house demolished by German bombs. It seems a proper introduction to international society for someone whose life would be characterized by, among other elements of war, loud noises. As a slightly older Dartford citizen tooling around on his tricycle, Richards became aware of another young man about town, Michael Jagger. But it was not until they were both about 17 that Richards, an art student by default, and Jagger, a scholarship student at the London School of Economics, had their fateful meeting at the Dartford train station. Richards, a guitar apprentice, and Jagger, who was trying to wrap his suburban English accent around Afro-American blues, began rehearsing with some like-minded schoolmates, in time venturing to London, where they met other emerging members of the music scene.

Over the next year or so, Richards, Jagger, Charlie Watts, Ian Stewart, Brian Jones and a bass player named Bill Perks became the Rolling Stones. Stewart, a boogie pianist from Scotland who died in December 1985, remembered that early on, the Stones had rented a club in the London borough of Ealing on two successive Tuesday nights and "We got not a soul; not one person would come to Ealing to see the Rolling Stones." Undaunted, they carried on, found club dates and a manager-producer (Andrew Loog Oldham), signed a contract with Decca Records, toured England, had a small hit with an old Chuck Berry song and a bigger hit with a song they were given by two writers from a new group called the Beatles.

By this time, Stewart was no longer an official band member, having been asked to step down because he didn't fit Oldham's concept of the lean, mean Rolling Stones. Oldham also insisted that Richards and Jagger learn to write songs and locked them in a room from which they emerged with "As Tears Go By," a hit for Oldham's new artist Marianne Faithfull. Although the Stones eventually recorded the song, months passed before they began to write true Stones tracks. Their next single was Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away," with its Bo Diddley rhythms.

On their first tour of the United States, the band played to perhaps 150 people in a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, arena designed to hold thousands. They played on the network-TV show of a highly amused Dean Martin, following an elephant act.

A few months later, Richards and Jagger wrote "The Last Time," their first song released by the Stones as the A side of a single record. To some music fans, it was imitative of a public-domain Gospel tune. "A good composer does not imitate, "Stravinsky said. "He steals." The Stones' next release was "Satisfaction." By the end of 1965, they were installed along with Bob Dylan and the Beatles as gods in their generation's pop pantheon.

Just over a year later, Richards, Jagger and Jones were arrested in England for drug offenses. The Stones did not launch another major tour for nearly three years. By the time they returned to America in 1969, Oldham had left their management to Allen Klein, and Brian Jones was dead, drowned in his swimming pool less than a month after being asked to leave the band. That year's tour ended with a free concert at Altamont Speedway in Northern California, where Hell's Angels killed a young black man in front of the stage.

The Stones retreated to Europe under their customary cloud of bad publicity. In 1970, they fired Klein; in 1971, they became tax exiles in France; and in 1972, they again attacked America's amphitheaters, this time with an entourage including, at times, Princess Lee Radziwill and Truman Capote. On the Stones' next U.S. visit, in 1975, Keith and guitarist Ron Wood—who had replaced Brian Jones's replacement, Mick Taylor—were thrown in jail in Arkansas on weapons charges, a comic event foreshadowing Richards' unfunny arrest in Toronto in 1977 for possession of heroin.

Once that problem had been resolved (by giving public-service concerts for the blind), Richards tried to settle his private life. Separated from actress Anita Pallenberg, the mother of his son, Marlon, and daughter Angela, Richards married—on his 40th birthday, December 18, 1983—the American model Patti Hansen.

The Stones signed a new contract with CBS, leaving Atlantic Records, their label since 1970. The situation was complicated by Jagger's new-found vision of himself as a solo artist. The first Mick Jagger album, She's the Boss, was released in 1985. By the time Stones' most recent album, Dirty Work, appeared a year later, relations between Jagger and Richards had reached an all-time low. Jagger refused to tour with the Stones in support of their album, choosing instead to perform on his own with a rented band. Richards, hurt and angry, completed projects with Jerry Lee Lewis and Aretha Franklin, coordinated the music for the Chuck Berry film Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll and settled down at last to make his own solo album, Talk Is Cheap, released in late 1988. Then, earlier this year, the Stones announced that they would kick off a U.S. tour in September.

Richards, when asked whether there were any books about the Stones he particularly liked, replied, "Stanley Booth's book—The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones—"is the only one I can read and say, 'Yeah, that's how it was.'" We asked Booth, a Playboy award-winning author and companion to the Stones at intervals over the past 20 years, to talk with Richards. He reports:

"It now costs Keith about one one-hundredth what it used to for him to get through an evening. He still takes the occasional sip of bourbon, but he has backed far away from the 'frequent medications' of the 'True Adventures' era. Being with Keith these days is like it used to be hanging out with the late blues singer Furry Lewis—one maintains a mild buzz in a pleasant, jovial atmosphere. Against all odds and expectations, Keith may turn out, unlike numerous friends, to be a long-distance runner.

"We began our series of talks in Los Angeles, where Keith was taping the video for 'Take It So Hard,' the first single from Talk Is Cheap.The whole scene was strange: a different band in the dressing room, some indefinable difference in the music. The band sounded great, but the Stones sound great. During the first take on the day of the taping, it became obvious: Keith's singing was better than any I had ever associated with his musical milieu. His choirboy past had caught up with him.

"The next night, in the first session of this interview, Keith and I talked for a couple of hours in his rooms at his hotel on Sunset Strip until Patti came back from the beach with Misses Theodora and Alexandra, the baby beauties.

"Then Keith excused himself. 'I'm expected.' After a meeting at A&M studios, he came back with Jim Keltner, the born-again drummer extraordinaire for the likes of Ry Cooder and Bob Dylan. Keltner's third mention of Jesus within his first two minutes in the room brought an exhortation from Keith to 'leave that stuff at home when you come to see me.'

"'What'd I say?' Keltner asked.

"'You brought it up three times already, and it's gettin' on my tit—I mean, a guy hangin' on a cross, what a logo.' (Once, in London, Keith had silenced a Keltner sermon with the words, 'I love God. But I hate preachers.')

"Our conversation began with personalities but soon developed a somewhat philosophical tone. It ended in New York a few weeks, a few thousand miles and a few dozen cassette tapes later. Our last session, at Keith's office five stories above the Broadway theater district, ended only when Keith fell asleep, giving me—and Playboy readers—his last waking gasp. Our final tape ends with the classic snore that followed the original take of 'Satisfaction.'"