The cover shot says everything you need to know about the
Keith Richards attitude. The bird he’s flipping says, “Fuck off.” The smile
says, “Don’t take it so seriously, baby.” This is the Keith we encounter time
and again in Keith Richards on Keith
Richards: Interviews and Encounters, largely because Sean Egan chose so
many pieces from the eighties onward when Keith was in full I-know-I’m-a-living-legend mode. The editor, who also put together the
excellent recent anthology The Mammoth Book of The Rolling Stones, had his reasons for skewing so post-golden
years. In the sixties, Keith was actually third in line behind Mick Jagger and
Brian Jones in the Stones hierarchy, so there were fewer interviews with him.
Because Rock journalism had not matured yet, the interviews of that period
tended to be lightweight anyway.
So The Rolling Stones’ most creatively fertile decade is
represented by a mere nine pages. That includes a ghostwritten piece from 1964
dropping the first hints of Keith’s anti-establishment stance, an interesting
piece from the same year about his early experiences with songwriting, and an
amusing Better Homes and Gardens-style puff about Redlands from 1966 that does as good a job of highlighting his
Gothic decadence/wasted clown image as any of the proper interviews (stolen
truncheon hanging from the ceiling, burnt sausage in the frying pan, Dennis
Wheatley book on the crapper floor, bedroom missing half its floor to provide a
view into the kitchen).
After Brian’s death, Keith’s artistic influence over the
Stones’ music became better known, and the rebel persona he earned with his 1967 drug arrest solidified his infamy. From the seventies we get one
massive, uncut, 80 page interview with Rolling
Stone and a zonked one conducted in 1976 first published online twenty
years later. If you’ve read The Mammoth
Book, you’ve already read these.
That leaves the period when the Stones’ greatest relevance
was in the past as the most thoroughly represented. This is also when Keith
Richards had his act down completely: sneering disdain swaddled in
down-to-earth amiability. He has certain stock responses he likes to repeat:
Spanish Tony’s book Up and Down with The
Rolling Stones constantly lapses into “fairy tales,” Brian Jones was ruined by his pop
star complex, law enforcement is a bigger problem than drugs, guitarists should
spend more time playing acoustic, Mick Jagger’s solo career is dog shit. That
there is truth and insight in much of what he says makes the repetition less
irritating, but it remains frustrating that the selection isn’t better
balanced. It’s definitely a problem when Dirty
Work, the Stones’ one irredeemable stinker, gets more ink than almost any other LP. That Keith spends a lot of time defending that dreck, even saying
that his band shuns technology at a time their music was caked in synths and
processors, suggests he isn’t always the most self-aware guy in the world.
Yet there are still things to learn in
Keith Richards on Keith Richards: his take on The Who, his cagey handling
of Chuck Berry while making the Hail!
Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll documentary, his surprising affinity for guitarists
Johnny Marr and Glenn Tilbrook when he generally seems skeptical of every
musician born after Chuck. Egan’s choice of pieces that veer from the expected
format are interesting too: the aforementioned
Redlands article, an excerpt from Gil Markle’s online memoir about recording
Keith performing oldies and standards in 1981, an unpublished Ira Robbins
interview from 1988, a Dutch one from 1989 printed in English for the first
time, a 2010 interview devoted to Exile on Main St., and perhaps most intriguing of all, an ice-and-fire parallel interview
with Mick and Keith from 2002 in which many of the guitarist’s criticisms of
his singer become subtly apparent. And for those who have not read The Mammoth Book, that 1971 Rolling Stone interview is required reading.
