[ed. I want that guitar.]
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.”
by Jon Pareles, NY Times | Read more:
Image: J. Rose/Netflix
