Keith Richards is a revered veteran of the music industry, and quite possibly one of
the last true rock stars still walking the Earth.
The guitar maestro of the Rolling Stones has been living his hardest, most Keith Richards
life since the 1960s.
Here's the untold truth of Keith Richards.
Keith Richards has been around for such a long time that it can be hard to imagine him
as an innocent child.
Yet he was...and according to The Guardian, young Richards had surprisingly goody-two-shoes
hobbies.
The rock legend used to be a boy scout.
According to the Daily Beast, his boy scout past as head of a Beaver Patrol taught him
valuable lessons about teamwork and leadership.
However, it looks like he already had a rock star streak during his time with them, seeing
as he was eventually discharged for getting into a fight with another young scout.
[Laughter]
According to DW, Richards was also in choir.
Believe it or not, his career as a choirboy was actually quite impressive: He sang soprano
and performed at Westminster Abbey for Queen Elizabeth the second.
Although, he later swore allegiance to another royal icon.
"Keith calls Mick 'Her Majesty.'"
Richards' time in a choir seems to have left its mark on him.
The Telegraph reports that the guitarist and a number of his Jamaican Rastafari friends
have a group they call Jamaica's Wingless Angels.
The group has been active since the 1970s and uses old choral hymns, chanting, and drumming
to create sparse, repetitive songs.
While there is a thread that connects their music to Richards' early choir days, this
group of singers is much, much more fun to hang out with.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards form one of the most famous partnerships in rock history,
but the Glimmer Twins have always had their ups and downs.
According to The Washington Post, their first great public rift concerned Jagger's solo
debut in 1985, and his subsequent refusal to tour the Stones' 1986 album, Dirty Work.
This plunged the band into years of conflict that Richards described as World War III.
Although Jagger and Richards managed to patch things up and bring the show back on track
in 1989, public barbs, and tactical apologies, eventually started flying again.
In his 2010 memoir, Life, Richards admitted that he hasn't visited Jagger's dressing room
in decades because he doesn't enjoy hanging out with his old friend anymore.
The guitarist wrote that in the 1980s, Jagger started to become an unbearable presence and
had a larger-than-life ego.
Although Jagger was upset by some of the revelations in his bandmate's memoir, Richards told Rolling
Stone magazine,
"I was going to tell the story.
As I told Mick, ‘You should have seen what I left out.'”
Let's just hope Jagger isn't featured in Richard's next book.
"The next one is a murder mystery."
Actor and model Anita Pallenberg is an influential figure in the Rolling Stones' history.
According to The Guardian, she visited the band backstage in 1965 and started a relationship
with the band's other guitarist, Brian Jones.
The relationship soon turned violent, and Pallenberg left Jones for Richards.
The two lived together in London, where they had three children.
The Guardian also reported that Pallenberg's influence in the band went far beyond being
their guitar slinger's significant other.
She performed backing vocals on "Sympathy for the Devil," and Richards was convinced
that she had an affair with Mick Jagger when the two shot a movie together.
This allegedly inspired the guitarist to write one of the Rolling Stones' most famous and
brutal songs, "Gimme Shelter."
Through the years, Richards and Pallenberg struggled with substance abuse issues, drifted
apart, and finally separated in 1980.
Vanity Fair says around this same time Richards met Patti Hansen at the legendary Studio 54.
Hansen was the perfect match for Richards and their relationship was a much more stable
one: Their marriage has lasted for almost four decades.
In April 1971, Keith Richards rented a luxurious property called Villa Nellcote at the French
Riviera to record their Exile on Main Street album.
Villa Nellcote had a pretty bad history, as it had been the Nazi headquarters during their
occupation of France.
There were still swastikas painted in the basement when Richards rolled in and turned
the place into a curious mix of a backstage and a partially wrecked hotel room.
Along with Villa Nelcote's Nazi history and the continuous stream of drug dealers, hangers-on,
and famous visitors, the heat, dripping walls, and bad air circulation on the basement level
all contributed to the building's weird vibe.
According to the Star, this was reflected on the finished double album's swampy sounds.
Today, Exile on Main Street is one of the band's most acclaimed and enduring works.
However, Villa Nellcote is unlikely to become a popular pilgrimage for fans, despite its
importance in the group's history.
On top of it being a remote location that's quite hard to reach, the villa's current owner
makes it clear that fans who want to visit the property will not be welcomed.
"Get off my lawn."
Keith Richards has a long-standing friendship with singer-songwriter Tom Waits.
According to Rolling Stone, this goes back to Waits' 1985 album, Rain Dogs. Richards
has contributed guitar parts and vocals for several Waits' songs, and in 2013, the two
recorded a growling version of the sea shanty "Shenandoah."
They're so close that Waits once wrote a tongue-in-cheek poem called "Keith Richards" to honor the
guitarist.
It compares Richards to a praying mantis because, as Waits strangely says, "He only has one
ear and it is located between his legs."
"What?"
According to Ultimate Classic Rock, Waits reveres Richards but describes the dynamic
between the two as one that needs an adult in the room.
The musicians once got together to cowrite some songs for Waits' Bad As Me album, but
the process proved to be less than fruitful.
Richards would suddenly call out "Scribe."
When Waits wondered what was going on, Richards said it again, now pointing a finger at him.
At that point, Waits realized that Richards was looking for someone to write down the
music they had been improvising into existence for an hour...and that someone was Tom Waits.
"Look, I'm gonna have to rethink this."
Keith Richards may be a rock legend whose music is loved by millions, but his own taste
in music holds a few surprises.
According to Billboard, Richards likes both Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga.
He also respects singer Tony Bennett enough to say that if he likes Gaga, that means she
must be great.
BBC says that Richards is a fan of old music such as blues, gospel, jazz, and reggae but
isn't above lavishing praise on individual, even modern artists.
Florence and The Machine, James Bay, and reggae legend Gregory Isaacs have all received positive
mentions from Richards.
He also seems to like Ed Sheeran.
Richards has seen Sheeran play live more than once and enjoys his one-man-band style…though
he does appear to think that the younger artist's name is "Ed Sheenan."
"Ed Sheenan, I really like.
The little one man band."
On the other hand, Richards doesn't particularly seem to enjoy artists who are closer to his
own genre.
He has been known to dismiss Led Zeppelin as "a little hollow," though he does respect
Jimmy Page.
He's described the Grateful Dead as "boring shit," and harder acts like Metallica and
Ozzy Osbourne's Black Sabbath as "great jokes."
We're sure Ozzy would like to have a few words with Keith about that comment…
[incoherent mumbling]
Keith Richards is famous for his extravagant style that features loud jackets, scarves,
and accessories.
According to The Telegraph, his style is actually incredibly simple and not even entirely his
own: He just raids the wardrobes of the women in his household.
The man whose style inspired the costume of Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow in the
Pirates of the Caribbean movies has worn women's clothes for decades.
In 2016, he said the majority of his clothes are actually just borrowed from his daughters
and his wife, Patti Hansen.
Richards insists that however outlandish his clothes might seem, they're just things he
likes to wear, not deliberate costumes.
His daughter Alexandra has backed up this claim, saying Richards just has the ability
to wear anything, including his wife's pajama pants, and make it look great.
Jagger, on the other hand, can make almost anything look great.
Keith Richards has been through so much that it's generally regarded as a miracle that
he's lived such a long and distinguished life.
"It's not just about living forever, Jackie.
The trick is living with yourself forever."
Richards has been dodging the grim reaper since he was born.
Ultimate Classic Rock says the guitarist's tribulations started during the London bombings
in 1944, when a Nazi V-1 bomb hit the infant Richards' cot.
Fortunately, baby Keith and his mother had already evacuated the area.
In 1965, his microphone gave him an electric shock during a performance, burning the strings
of his guitar and knocking him unconscious.
In 1971, Richards fell asleep while smoking in bed.
The cigarette lit the bed on fire and almost burned him to a crisp.
In 1973, another fire burned down Richards' Redlands estate, though he insisted that a
wire-chewing rodent was to blame rather than a passed-out rock star.
At some point in the 1970s, he had the worst drug experience of his life when someone laced
his drugs with poisonous strychnine.
Later in life, his incidents have become more mundane but no less dangerous.
In 1998, Richards slipped and fell while reaching for a book in his library, and broke several
ribs when heavy books fell on him.
In 2006, he had an unfortunate experience with a palm tree while foraging for coconuts
in Fiji. Richards cracked his skull so badly that he needed brain surgery.
Despite all of his brushes with death, and the damage he's done to his body, Richards
actually looks pretty decent for his age.
"Keith Richards looked 70 when he was 40.
And now that he's 70, he looks 69.
He's regenerating."
It's probably no surprise that the Rolling Stones have visited one of the most notorious
temples of debauchery: the Playboy Mansion.
What may come as a surprise is that Keith Richards once nearly set it on fire.
According to The New Zealand Herald, Richards says when they were visiting the mansion,
he and the band's saxophone player, Bobby Keys, stole their tour doctor's bag and, more
importantly, the multitude of drugs it contained.
They locked themselves in one of the Playboy Mansion's bathrooms, and started sampling
everything.
Suddenly, they heard a fire alarm.
People were running down the corridor, so they left the scene, at which point, it burst
into flames.
They had accidentally started a fire.
Richards tells another version of the story in his memoir: As he and Keys were busy dealing
with the array of drugs, they suddenly noticed that the room was getting quite smoky.
The drapes of the bathroom were already smoldering and everything was just about to go off big-time,
when they heard banging on the door.
A bunch of waiters and men in black suits stormed in, carrying buckets of water.
The two musicians sat on the floor with their pupils constricted to pinpoints, annoyed at
the way their private celebration had been interrupted.
"I'm lucky to be here, man.
It's amazing."
Let's just get it out of the way here: Keith Richards really likes to tell the story about
him snorting his father's ashes.
He has told NME that he couldn't resist mixing some of the ashes with his cocaine, and that
his father wouldn't have cared.
The version he told GQ paints the incident as a semi-accidental one in which he intended
to spread the ashes to fertilize an oak tree, but when he pulled the top off the box that
contained his father's mortal remains, some of the ashes landed on the table.
After that, he just had, quote, "A line of dad" because it felt right.
"I wouldn't eat him, you know, but I snorted him."
Even before the snorting incident made them truly inseparable, the father and son were
close.
According to the Irish Mirror, Richards and his father, Herbert, spent 20 years without
contact, until the guitarist finally reached out in the early 1980s.
Their reunion was successful, and over the next two decades, Richards introduced his
father to the lifestyle of a Rolling Stone.
In turn, he discovered that his father could drink them all under the table.
At the time of Herbert's death, the two got along so well that Richards felt comfortable
with, as he says, ingesting his ancestor.
Now, he wants to make it a family tradition.
When he dies, Richards said that he wants his family to do the same with his ashes.
[Laughter]
"I love this s---.
I love this s---."
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