26 Sep 2015

Keith Richards: “The Rock’n’Roll is Important. The Sex and Drugs is just Something that Happened to me Along the Way”

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KeithRichardsCigarette

The Vancouver Sun responds to the arrival of Keith Richards: Under the Influence, a Netflix documentary by asking: How did Keith Richards become everybody’s favorite Rolling Stone?

Watching the old buccaneer in action, you have to wonder how he became so universally loved. He has been hailed as the Human Riff and anointed the world’s most elegantly wasted human being, the bad-boy pin-up for junkie chic with the heavily wrinkled face. Surely Richards should be nobody’s idea of a role model: self-indulgent, irresponsible, a star squandering his gifts on drugs and alcohol? Mick Jagger’s former partner, Jerry Hall, warned their children of the dangers of drugs by asking them if they wanted to grow up to look like Uncle Keith.

So how did such a reprobate survive five decades on the edge to become everybody’s favourite Rolling Stone?

Back when it all began, it was Jagger who was the epitome of sexy, rebellious cool. Richards was his scruffy sideman with a swaggering line in guitar riffs. Aficionados loved him but the dreamy Brian Jones was hailed as the band’s genius (not least by Jones himself). As the 60s ended, though, there was a shift in the Stones hierarchy. Richards was getting his look together: cigarette permanently attached to lower lip, jagged hair cascading around his head like an electrified mop, ragged gypsy clothing accessorized by skulls, rings and bandanas.

Dark-eyed and lean, Richards, even with his piratical flamboyance, took on a very masculine presence next to Jagger’s camp theatricality. It corresponded with his growing maturity as a musician. Richards took the reins for the Stones’ greatest run of work, from Beggars Banquet in 1968 to Goats Head Soup in 1973, reshaping blues for the modern age. But at the same time, he was developing habits that have made him the personification of all the most extravagant myths of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

Read the whole thing.

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2 Feedbacks on "Keith Richards: “The Rock’n’Roll is Important. The Sex and Drugs is just Something that Happened to me Along the Way”"

GoneWithTheWind

I can’t speak for everyone of course but in my opinion those in the business take themselves and their work too seriously. I barely know the name Keith Richards and others and their music is simply something I listened to not revered. If it wasn’t them it would have been some other music or perhaps something totally different. It is more like the passing scenery from the seat of a greyhound bus than it is something meaningful.



Fred Z

“universally beloved”???

I have hated that fuck from day one.

He is both emblematic and a cause of the decline of the west. Fuck him and the repulsive unmusical train he rode in on.



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