BURROUGHS: It’s a long story. It’s a bad story. But I haven’t shot anyone right lately. I assure you of that, Mick. I been on my good behavior.
BOCKRIS: Do you need a gun?
JAGGER: Oh yeah. On the road.
BURROUGHS: I always try to keep a gun around the place in case something really awful happens. It gives you a feeling you got something that you can rely on.
JAGGER: Especially in this society.
BURROUGHS: I guess it’s pretty much impossible in England.
JAGGER: It’s all right in the country, but you can’t carry small arms around.
BURROUGHS: This fucking jerk mayor that we got now, he wants to pass some law about mandatory sentences for possession of firearms.
WARHOL: Well, more cops were killed …
BURROUGHS: Well, so what! You think that the guys that killed a cop are gonna be deterred by an extra year they might possibly get for possession of a firearm? Holy God what kind of thinking is this? The only person that’s gonna suffer from this is the citizen who has a gun.
BOCKRIS: What else do you have written in your notes, Bill?
BURROUGHS: We talked about cultural revolution.
BOCKRIS: We decided that there wasn’t a cultural revolution.
JAGGER: Between you and me.
BURROUGHS: What do you mean there isn’t a cultural revolution? There was a great cultural revolution that gained many of its objectives, and now there’s no necessity …
BOCKRIS: So now we’re just hanging around waiting for the next thing?
JAGGER: You tell us, Victor.
WARHOL: There’s not going to be any wars.
BOCKRIS: Do you think there’ll be a war?
JAGGER: There’ll be all kinds of them.
[At this point Mick got up to make another phonecall. I hastily whispered to Bill that the interview hadn’t proceeded according to plan: couldn’t he think up some more questions. “I asked him everything I had written down here,” Bill replied, adding dryly, “I don’t think there’s anything more to be extracted.” Mick came back in from the other room and announced that he had to leave. Handshakes and farewells were perfunctory. After Mick, Jerry, and Liz left, Andy, Bill, Marcia and I stood around in a dazed group.]
BOCKRIS: I find with these things that if I feel it was good afterwards it was always terrible, and if I feel it was really terrible it was usually good. So it’s probably very good!
WARHOL: You were really terrible.
BOCKRIS: It was terrible. Nothing …
WARHOL: Happened.
BURROUGHS: Well, I really didn’t expect anything to happen. The following week, Bill and I figured out what had happened. I had been trying to get Keith Richards to visit Burroughs, and Keith had been keen to comply. But Keith had only just gotten off the 1977 heroin trafficking charge in Toronto that could have effectively, once and for all, destroyed The Rolling Stones. Consequently, we concluded, Jagger did not want Burroughs’ name associated with Keith Richards’ or, for that matter, the Stones’, and that he had come to The Bunker for the sole purpose of nixing the possibility of Burroughs writing anything for the Stones’ twentieth anniversary, to turn Burroughs off the whole project – and had succeeded.
It was perhaps a testament to the power of William Burroughs’ name in 1980 that Mick Jagger himself had felt it necessary to make sure that Burroughs’ name would not publicly be associated with his band. Big Bad Bill still stood for the outlaw-pirate myth Keith Richards alone embodied in the Stones.
When I showed William the transcript of the tape he chuckled vigorously, “It’s great, man, it’s great. And I’ve got the perfect title, because it’s just like when the captain of the ship has a cocktail party and he has to invite all the notable people aboard, but nobody can find any common ground for conversation. We’ll call it ‘The Captain’s Cocktail Party’.”
This interview, conducted in 1977, very much in the shadows of the Toronto bust, was one of Richards’ first great interviews. He had shied away from the press in the 1960s, but starting in the early ’70s he has given a series of interviews which collected together today would, I believe, remain the most articulate, poetic series of interviews with a rock star ever given.
11
An Interview With Keith Richards
Keith Richards has been the Rolling Stones’ lead guitarist for the last 15 years and one of rock’s leading crusaders and criminals. His most dangerous brush with the law came in 1977 in Toronto, Canada, when he was arrested for possession of heroin with intent to sell.
I interviewed him at a rented house in Westchester County, 60 minutes outside of Manhattan.
BOCKRIS: Do you feel that it was your destiny to be a musician?
RICHARDS: Well, when I used to pose in front of the mirror at ’ome, I was hopeful. The only thing I was lacking was a bit of bread to buy an instrument. But I got the moves off first, and I got the guitar later.
BOCKRIS: Is music magic to you?
RICHARDS: In the way that magic is a word for something that is power that we don’t fully understand and can enable things to happen. I mean, nobody really understands about the effect that certain rhythms have on people, but our bodies beat. We’re only alive because the heartbeat keeps going all the time. And also certain sounds can kill. It’s a speciality of the French for some reason. The French are working with huge great speakers which blow down houses and kill laboratory technicians with one solitary blast. I mean, the trumpets of Jericho and all that.
I’ve seen people physically throw up from feedback in the studio. It’s so loud it started their stomach walls flapping. That’s the most obvious aspect of it. But on another level, if you go to Africa or Jamaica, you see people living to that rhythm. They eat, talk, walk, fuck, sleep, do everything to that rhythm. It’s magic in that it’s an unexplored area. Why, for instance – zoom in ’ere – should rock and roll music suddenly appear in the mid-Fifties, catch hold and just get bigger and bigger and show no signs of abating?
BOCKRIS: Brian Jones was the leader, then Mick became the leader, but now there’s a feeling that, musically, you’re the leader of The Rolling Stones.
RICHARDS: I guess it takes a long time … I mean, I’m basically doing the same thing now as I always have done. I run around trying to communicate with the rest of them, because Charlie’s sitting down and Bill’s over there and I’m more free, and I give them the tempo because early on I evolved a certain style of playing that is fairly basic. I know that I can give what’s needed to Charlie and Bill and Ronnie to keep the thing together.
BOCKRIS: And to Mick?
RICHARDS: I hope Mick should get the whole thing. I’m trying to keep all the separate things together so that by the time it gets to the front of the stage and out into the audience, it’s jelled together.
BOCKRIS: Is the guitar an instrument you can get further and further into?
RICHARDS: I think most guitar players feel that they’re always still learning. Nobody ever feels that they’ve reached anywhere near covering the whole thing. It’s still coming up with surprises. Although that’s not the most important thing to me.
It’s never been a function in our band to do one thing or another. We’re all doing all of it, you know. That’s what happens and that’s what interests me about it, it’s not who’s playing virtuoso. I’m interested in what people can do in terms of an overall sound and the intensity of it that can be done on that level. I mean, five people produce one thing out of five separate things going on. After all, what’s the point of dissecting everything and putting parts under a microscope and ignoring the rest?
BOCKRIS: Do you get very high off the response to your records when they’re particularly effective in some way?
RICHARDS: Yeah, sometimes, you try to, but it’s not always that immediate. You put a record out, and then you get the feeling everybody’s disappointed with it. Then two years later you bring another record out, and you suddenly realize that they’re all holding this ot
her record up and saying, “If only it was as good as this one.” And I know it’s not because we’re ahead of our time, because that’s not ever what we’re trying to do.
It’s not avant-garde, no, that’s not it. It’s just that when you’ve been around as long as we have, people have got their own fixed idea of what they want from the Stones, and it’s never anything new. Even though they do really want it, they still compare it with this big moment in the back seat of a car 15 years ago, and it was never as good as then. There’s so much nostalgia connected with it that you can’t possibly fight, so you have to sometimes let the record seep into their lives. let them have a good time with it first.
A lot of the time with records it’s the experiences that people have been through while that record’s been playing that makes it special to them. “It’s our song, darling.” That sort of shit. And the longer you’ve been around the harder it is to fight that one, ’cos you got so much other stuff which is somebody else’s song, darling. And although they’re interested and they’ll buy the new record, it doesn’t mean as much to them as the one they heard that magical night when they screwed 15 chicks.
BOCKRIS: Do you think of songs as short stories?
RICHARDS: Some of them. I mean, things like ‘Hand of Fate’ particularly, we got into a story. Others are just connections, almost stream of consciousness. One line doesn’t really connect to what’s gone before. People say they write songs, but in a way you’re more the medium. I feel like all the songs in the world are just floating around: it’s just a matter of an antenna, of whatever you pick up.
So many uncanny things have happened. A whole song just appears from nowhere in five minutes, the whole structure, and you haven’t worked at all. You’re playing and you’re bored stiff and nothing’s happening, oh dear, and you go out and ’ave a joint or something and euhuh! There it is. It’s just like somebody tuned in the radio and you’ve picked it up.
Some people equate good work with being difficult to do, but a lot of the time it’s the easiest thing. It just sort of flashes by you so quick that people virtually tell you. You didn’t even see it yourself. ‘Satisfaction’ was the biggest hit we’ve ever had, and it just came boing bang crash, and it was on tape before I felt it.
BOCKRIS: It’s obvious that everyone’s life is very much involved at this point with drugs and increasingly so, and it’s not going to get less …
RICHARDS: Oh, no way, no.
BOCKRIS: It’s something that people have to talk about, it’s something we need to know more about. Do you have any advice you could give people who read High Times about the drug situation, generally speaking, in America?
RICHARDS: I don’t think I’m in any position to give any advice, as such, but maybe just by talking about it we can make things a bit clearer. It’s interesting that they’re lightening up on the marijuana laws slowly, and it’s accelerating. I mean, since I’ve come to the States, New York is decriminalized, and once that sort of thing happens it snowballs. Already you hear talk of a commission looking into cocaine to give that a different status.
In a way I feel it’s all a bit of a game because there’s all this flimflam about decriminalization, which isn’t legalization, and eventually what it comes down to is money anyway. If they can figure out a way of taking it over and making bread out of it, it’ll be legal. The only reason methadone’s such a big deal in America is because a lot of people are making millions on it.
BOCKRIS: But why can’t they find a way at this point to make money out of grass and cocaine?
RICHARDS: Because I think they realize that even if they sell 20 filtered Acapulco golds, real grass heads will still be buying their stash from the man who comes over the border with it under the floorboards of his truck. If you want good tobacco, you don’t buy Newports or Marlboros. You go to some little tobacco stall and choose your tobacco.
BOCKRIS: Then you think because of the quality differences, marijuana is a very hard thing to merchandise?
RICHARDS: ’Oo knows? Let’s just say that I can’t see myself, or anybody that I know, preferring to buy a packet of prerolled marijuana cigarettes when I know that it’s going to be grade C.
BOCKRIS: But doesn’t it seem more and more necessary to recognize that the human being is a chemical machine?
RICHARDS: Yes. I think that what we can really say is that anybody interested in drugs and wanting to take anything ought first to find out as much as they can about what it is that they’re taking, what it is that it does to them, in order that they can compensate as much as necessary for what it is they’re introducing into their systems. Even with grass, so many people don’t take the simplest precautions.
I think that, personally, it’s purely a matter of the person concerned. I mean, it’s like a good blowjob. You know, in some states that’s still illegal. It’s just a matter of how far people are prepared to put up with so-called authorities prying into their lives. If they really don’t want to accept it, then they’ll do something about it because there’ll be no way they can enforce it.
The other way, I think, is from the government. They ought to do a lot more about educating people about drugs, rather than just trying to scare people by keeping them in the dark about everything, including possible ways of getting off really heavy drugs, because it can be done perfectly painlessly. That isn’t the main problem. As they’ll all say, disintoxication is 5 percent of the battle; 95 percent is keeping them off anything when you send them back. But ’ow do you know when all you’re doing is keeping them on methadone all the time? You don’t give them a chance that way.
BOCKRIS: Do you think alcohol addiction is as hard to kick as drug addiction?
RICHARDS: Yes, I think so. All these things are very individual. One drug’ll have a different effect on one person than on someone else. I can booze for weeks and months and get lushed every night, and then, because I have a change of environment or whatever, I can stop and just not miss it. I just can’t stop smoking cigarettes for the life of me. I’m as addicted to that as the biggest junkie is addicted to heroin. But then, millions of us are. That’s something else.
Booze is something that I can take or leave, but it’s a poison. I do feel there’s that double standard that we all talk about. I consider booze to be far more harmful than any other available drug, far more damaging to the body, to the mind, to the person’s attitude. The way some people change on it is amazing, and then, goddamit, every morning when you wake up you’ve got a cold turkey whether you like it or not. You know, just because it’s called the ‘hangover’… It seems to me to be the most uneconomical and inconvenient high you could possibly have, ’cos every morning you’ve got to pay for it. I mean, even a junkie doesn’t have to do that unless he decides to stop or runs out of stuff, but even if you’ve got bottles of booze in the morning, you’ve still got a hangover. And it just seems so vague putting yourself through those constant incredible changes. That’s what I think really does you with booze.
BOCKRIS: Do you pay a lot of attention to taking care of yourself physically, considering the amount of work you do?
RICHARDS: I don’t pay that much attention to it, just because I’ve never had to. I’m very lucky in that everything’s always functioned perfectly, even under the most incredible strains and amounts of chemicals. But I think a lot of it is to do with a solid consciousness of it in a regulatory system that serves me. I never take too much of anything. I don’t go out for a big rush or complete obliteration. I sometimes find that I’ve been up five days, and I’ll collapse and just fall asleep. But that’s about the only thing that I do to myself, and I only do that because I find that I’m capable of doing it.
BOCKRIS: Have you read William Burroughs’ statement in Junky: “I think I am in better health now as a result of using junk at intervals than I would have been if I had never been an addict.”?
RICHARDS: Yeah, I agree with that. Actually, I once took that apomorphine cure that Burroughs swears by. Dr. Dent wa
s dead, but his assistant, whom he trained, this lovely old dear called Smitty, who’s like mother hen, still runs the clinic. I had her down to my place for five days, and she just sort of comes in and says, “Here’s your shot, dear, there’s a good boy.” Or, “You’ve been a naughty boy, you’ve taken something, yes you have, I can tell.” But it’s a pretty medieval cure. You just vomit all the time.
BOCKRIS: What’s the new cure they’re working on in London at the moment?
RICHARDS: There’s a Dr. Paterson who’s been working on an electro-acupuncture cure that she’s developed from a colleague in Hong Kong. Her husband was a Fleet Street journalist, a real hustler, so he figured they could market it. It’s a little box about six inches by two inches with two wires coming out, one on each side. You plug one of these wires into each ear and they put out a beat that you can regulate yourself. As long as the beat is going on, you don’t feel any pain. I had Dr Paterson and her husband flown over from England, and they stayed with me during the cure. I kept this thing plugged in for 20 days. Anita and I did it together. You wake up in the morning and you feel all right. You can read a book, have a cup of tea. Things you could normally never do on first days getting off.
BOCKRIS: We live in a time where so much could be done medically to the system. With the correct medical information or supervision, we could take drugs all the time.
RICHARDS: Look at the astronauts. I mean, they’re completely chemically regulated from the minute they start that thing until they come down. I think the sooner they realize that, they’re gonna have to take notice of it and they start learning and they start teaching people more about certain things … I don’t think any drug is harmful in itself. All of them have their uses and their good sides, so it’s the abuse of them and the fact that, because of their so-called illegality, one has to get them from dubious sources, so you never know what you’re actually getting. Maybe you’re getting what you’re after, but it’s mixed with strychnine, which has happened to several people I know.
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