Then one of my daughters said, “Oh, Daddy, he’s got five legs,” and I said, “Six including the trunk.” His cock was on the ground, eleven foot long. Humbled, I was humbled. I mean, this gun was loaded. In fact, on the way back, Richard said, look at the tracks there, and there were these huge elephant tracks and a line down the middle which was its cock trailing on the ground. We saw some cheetahs. How do we know they’re around? Because there’s an antelope in the goddamn tree, dangling. A cheetah has dragged it and stashed it up there. Next the water buffaloes, three thousand of them in a marsh. These things are amazing. One of them decides to have a shit, and before it hits the ground, another has come up behind and caught it and eaten it. They’re drinking their own pee. And then, to cap it all, let alone the flies, suddenly in front of us is a female giving birth, and all of the bulls are having a bash at the placenta! What more can we stand! We get out of there, and on the way back, the stupid driver stops beside this puddle, pulls out a stick and goes, hey, look at this! And he pokes this puddle. And I’m just sort of hanging around the back, I’ve got my hand dangling over the edge, and I feel this hot breath, and I hear this snap, and the jaws of this croc must have missed me by a goddamn inch. I almost killed the guy. Crocodile breath. You don’t want to feel it.
We did bump into some hippos, which I loved. But in one day, how many of God’s creatures am I going to bump into before I get some sleep? I can’t really say it was fabulous. It’s a retrospective pleasure. What riled me up was the way the whites were treating Bernard and Lisa. It just soured me for the whole visit.
Maybe I should have read the signs of Mick putting on civic chains when he ushered in the millennium by opening the Mick Jagger Centre at his old school Dartford Grammar. I had heard rumors, which turned out to be unfounded, that a Keith Richards wing had been opened, without my permission, at Dartford Tech. I was preparing to go by helicopter and daub EXPELLED on the roof. It wasn’t too long after Mick’s ribbon cutting that he called me to say, I’ve got to tell you this now: Tony Blair is insisting that I accept a knighthood. You can turn down anything you like, pal, was my reply. I left it at that. It was incomprehensible for Mick to do it; he’d blown his credibility. I rang Charlie. What’s all this shit about a knighthood? He said, you know he’s always wanted one. I said, no, I didn’t know. It never occurred to me. Had I misread my friend? The Mick that I grew up with, here’s a guy who’d say shove all your little honors up your arse. Thank you very much, but no thanks. It’s a demeaning thing to do. It’s called the honors list, but we’ve been honored enough. The public has honored us. You’re going to accept an honor from a system that tried to put you in jail for nothing? I mean, if you can forgive them for that… Mick’s class consciousness had become more and more evident as we went along, but I never knew he’d fallen for this shit. It may have been another attack of LVS.
Instead of the queen, there was a muddle about the dates and Mick got Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, to tap him on the shoulders, which I think makes him a cur instead of a sir. At least, unlike some others newly knighted, he doesn’t insist on being called Sir Mick. But we do chuckle about it behind his back. As for me, I won’t be Lord Richards, I’ll be fucking King Richard IV, with that IV pronounced eye-vee. It would be appropriate. Keep it coming, keep it coming. I’d have my own button to pump it.
Despite that, or maybe because of its relaxing effect on Mick, the following year, 2004, was the best year I’d spent with him in God knows how long. He’d become a lot looser, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just growing up and realizing this is really what you’ve got. I think a lot of it was to do with what happened with Charlie. I’d gone to Mick’s house in France in 2004 to start writing together for a new record—the first in eight years—which would become A Bigger Bang. Mick and I were sitting together the first or second day I got there, with acoustic guitars, just trying to start some songs. And Mick said, oh dear, Charlie’s got cancer. There was a pregnant pause, like, what do we do? It was as big a shock to me as any, because he was saying, do we put this on hold and wait for Charlie and see what happens? And I thought for a minute and said, no, let’s start. We’re starting to write songs, so we don’t need Charlie right now. And Charlie would be very pissed if we stopped just because he was incapacitated for the moment. It wouldn’t be good for Charlie and, shit, we’ve got some songs to write. Let’s write a few, send Charlie the tapes so he can have a listen to where we’re at. That’s the way we did it.
Mick’s château is very nice, the Loire about three miles away, with beautiful vineyards above it, with caves beneath it that were made to store the wine at forty-five degrees, year in year out. A real Captain Haddock château, very Hergé. We were tight together, got some good stuff working. There was less of the moodiness. When you’ve got a sense of really wanting to work together, rather than, OK, how do we pin this, it’s totally different. I mean, shit, if you work with a guy for forty-odd years, it’s not all going to be plain sailing, is it? You’ve got to go through the bullshit; it’s like a marriage.
My retreat away from Jamaica became Parrot Cay, a place in the Turks and Caicos Islands, north of the Dominican Republic. It’s got nothing on Jamaica, but Jamaica had become unpopular with my family because of a number of scares and incidents. The peace of Parrot Cay, by contrast, is never disturbed—least of all by parrots. There’s never been a parrot anywhere near Parrot Cay, and the name was obviously changed from Pirate Cay by the nervous investors of yesteryear. Here my children and my grandchildren come and go, and I spend long periods. I listen to US radio stations that specialize in genre music—’50s rock will be on twenty-four hours a day until I feel it’s time for the bluegrass channel, which is pretty damn good, or your pick of hip-hop, retro rock, alternative. I draw the line at arena rock. It reminds me too much of what I do.
I wrote in my notebook:
After being here a month or so a strange cycle becomes apparent. For a week squadrons of dragonflies do a show worthy of Farnborough, then—vanish. Within a few days, however, flocks of small orange butterflies begin to pollinate the flowers. There seems to be some scheme. I live here with several species. Two dogs, one cat, Roy (Martin) and Kyoko, his Japanese lady (or in reverse, Kyoko with Roy her East End diamond). Then Ika, the beautiful (but untouchable) butler(ess). Bless her! Balinese! Mr. Timothy, a sweet black local man who does the garden and from whom I purchase his wife’s basketry and palmweaving. Oh, then innumerable geckos (all sizes) and probably a rat or two. Toaster, the cat, works for a living. He does big moths! Then there are the Javanese and Balinese barmen (wicked). Local sailors add local color. But manana I go back to the fridge. I have to pack once again. Wish me luck.
This was written at the beginning of January 2006, after a break in the Bigger Bang tour for Christmas. I was packing to go back on the road, to play first the Super Bowl in February and then one of the biggest rock-and-roll concerts ever staged, in Rio, to more than a million people, two weeks later. A busy start to the year. Exactly a year earlier, while I was walking along the beach, climbing rocks, along the shore came Paul McCartney, just before he played the Super Bowl that year. It was certainly the strangest place for us to meet after all the years, but certainly the best, because we both had time to talk, maybe for the first time since those earliest days when they were flogging songs before we were writing them. He just turned up, said he’d found out where I lived from my neighbor Bruce Willis. He said, “Oh, I just came down. I hope it’s OK. Sorry I didn’t ring.” And since I don’t answer the phone anyway, it was the only way he could do it. I sensed with Paul that he really was looking for some time off. That beach is long, and of course these things come in hindsight: there was something wrong there already. His breakup with Heather Mills, who was with him on that trip, was not long coming.
Paul started to turn up every day, when his kid was sleeping. I’d never known Paul that well. John and I knew each other quite well, and George and Ringo, but Paul and I had nev
er spent much time together. We were really pleased to see each other. We fell straight in, talking about the past, talking about songwriting. We talked about such strangely simple things as the difference between the Beatles and the Stones and that the Beatles were a vocal band because they could all sing the lead vocal, and we were more of a musicians’ band—we only had one front man. He told me that because he was left-handed, he and John could play the guitars like mirrors opposite each other, watching each other’s hands. So we started playing like that. We even started composing a song together, a McCartney/Richards number whose lyrics were pinned on the wall for many weeks. I dared him to play “Please Please Me” at the Super Bowl, but he said they needed weeks of warning. I remembered his hilarious takeoff of Roy Orbison singing it, so we started singing that. We got into discussions about inflatable dog kennels designed like the dogs inside them—spotted ones for Dalmatians and so on. Then we went off on one about a special project we were going to develop, sun-dried celebrity turds, purified with rainwater—get celebrities to donate them, coat them with shellac and get a major artist to decorate them. Elton would do it; he’s a great guy. George Michael, he’ll go for it. What about Madonna? So we just had a good laugh. We had a good time together.
Now, a year later, we headed, two weeks after playing the Super Bowl, to Copacabana Beach for the free concert paid for by the Brazilian government. They built a bridge over the Copacabana Road that went right down to the stage on the beach from our hotel, just for us to get there. When I looked at the video of that show, I realized I was concentrating like a motherfucker. I mean, grim! What had to be right was the sound, pal; didn’t matter about the rest. I’d turned into a bit of a nursemaid, just making sure everything was going right. And understandably so, because we were playing to a million people, and half of them were in another bay round the corner, so I was wondering if it was projecting that far, or if it ended up in a muddle somewhere in the middle. We could only see a quarter of the audience. They had screens set up for two miles. That might have been the triumphant exit, apart from a couple of shows in Japan, to a long career slinging the hash. Because soon after that I fell off my branch.
The four of us had flown to Fiji and were staying on a private island. We’d gone for a picnic on a beach. Ronnie and I went for a swim while Josephine and Patti were organizing lunch. There was a hammock, and I think Ronnie had the hammock—he got in quick—and we were just drying off after a swim. And there was this tree. Forget any palm tree. This was some gnarled low tree that was basically a horizontal branch.
It was obvious that people had sat there before, because the bark was worn away. And it was about, I guess, seven feet up. So I’m just sitting there on the branch, waiting for lunch and drying off. And they said, “Lunch is ready.” There was another branch in front of me, and I thought, I’ll just grab hold of that and drop gently to the ground. But I forgot that my hands were still wet and there was sand and everything on them, and as I grabbed this branch, the grip didn’t take. And so I landed hard on my heels, and my head went back and hit the trunk of the tree. Hard. And that was it. It didn’t bother me at the time. “Are you all right, darling?” “Yeah, fine.” “Whoa, don’t do that again.”
Two days later, I was still feeling fine, and we went out in this boat. The water was like a mirror until we got out into the sea a little, and these huge Pacific swells started coming in. Josephine was at the front and she said, oh, look at this. So I went up to the bow, and a swell came in and I fell back down, just onto the seat, and suddenly something went. A blinding headache came on. We’ve got to turn round now, I said. Still, I thought that was that. But this headache got worse and worse. I never have headaches, and if I do, it’s an aspirin and it’s gone. I’m not a headache man. I always feel sorry for people like Charlie who have migraines. I can’t imagine what they’re like, but this was probably pretty close.
I found out later I was lucky that that second jolt happened. Because the first one had cracked my skull and that could have gone on for months and months before being discovered, or before killing me. It could have kept on bleeding under the skull. But the second blow made it obvious. That night I took a couple of aspirin for the headache, which is the wrong thing to do because aspirin thins the blood—the things you learn when you’re killing yourself. And apparently in my sleep I had two seizures. I don’t remember them. I thought I had a bad choking cough and woke up to Patti saying, “Are you all right, darling?” “Yes, I’m fine.” And then I had another one, and that’s when I saw Patti running around the room, “Oh, my God,” making calls. By now she was in a panic, but a controlled one; she still operated. Fortunately the same thing had happened to the island’s owner a few months before, and he recognized the symptoms, and before I knew it I was on this plane to Fiji, the main island. In Fiji they checked me out and said, he’s got to go to New Zealand. The worst flight I’ve ever had in my life was the flight from Fiji to Auckland. They strapped me in, in basically a straitjacket on a stretcher, and put me on this plane. I couldn’t move and it was a four-hour flight. I mean, forget the head, I can’t move. And I’m, “Shit, can’t you give me something?” “Well, we could have before we took off.” “Why didn’t you?” I was cursing like a motherfucker. “Give me painkillers, for Christ’s sake!” “We can’t do it in the air.” Four hours of this claptrap. Finally they got me to the hospital in New Zealand, where Andrew Law, neurosurgeon, was waiting for me. Luckily he was a fan of mine! Andrew didn’t tell me until later that when he was growing up he had my picture at the foot of his bed. After that I was in his hands and I don’t really remember much about that night. They put me on the morphine. And I woke up after that, feeling all right.
I was there for maybe ten days, very nice hospital, very nice nurses. I had this lovely night nurse from Zambia, she was great. For about a week, Dr. Law gave me tests every day. And I said, well, what happens now? And he said, you’re stabilized. You can fly to your doctor in New York or London or wherever. There was just the presumption that I’d want the pick of the world’s medical attention. I don’t want to fly, Andrew! By now I’d gotten to know him pretty well. “I ain’t flying.” “Yeah, but you’ve got to have the operation.” I said, “I’ll tell you what. You’re going to do it. And you’re going to do it now.” He said, “Are you sure about that?” I said, “Absolutely.” I wanted to suck the words back into my mouth. Did I really say that? I’m inviting someone to cut my head open. But yes, I knew it was the right thing to do. I knew he was one of the best; we’d had him well checked out. I didn’t want to go to somebody I didn’t know.
So Dr. Law came back in a few hours with his anesthetist Nigel, a Scotsman. And I thought my really smart move was to say, Nigel, I’m really hard to put out. Nobody’s been able to put me out yet. He said, watch this. And within ten seconds, I’m bye-bye gone. And two and a half hours later, I woke up feeling great. And I said, well, when are you going to start? Law said, it’s all done, mate. He had opened up the skull, sucked out all the blood clots and then put the bone back on like a little hat with six titanium pins to connect the hat back to its skull. I was fine except that when I came out of it, I found myself attached to all these tubes. I’ve got one down the end of my dick, one coming out of here, one coming out of there. I said, what the fuck is all this shit? What’s that for? Law says, that’s the morphine drip. OK, we’ll keep that one. I wasn’t complaining. And actually, I’ve never had a headache since. Andrew Law did a wonderful job.
I was in there for about another week. And they brought me a little extra morphine. They were really nice, very cool. In the end they want you to be comfortable; that’s what I found. I seldom asked for the drugs, but when I did, it was, OK, here you go. The guy I was next to had a very similar injury. He’d done his on a motorcycle without a helmet, and he was moaning and groaning. And the nurses stayed with him for hours, talking him down. Very calm voices. Meanwhile, I was pretty much healed and I was going, I know the feeling, pal.
And then a month in a wee Victorian boardinghouse in Auckland, and all my family came out, bless their hearts. And I had messages from Jerry Lee Lewis, from Willie Nelson too. Jerry Lee sent me a signed 45 of “Great Balls of Fire,” first pressing. Goes on the wall. Bill Clinton sent me a note, get well soon, my dear friend. The opening line of my letter from Tony Blair was “Dear Keith, you’ve always been one of my heroes…” England’s in the hands of somebody who I’m a hero of? It’s frightening. I even got one from the mayor of Toronto. It gave me an interesting preview of my obituaries, the general flavor of what’s to come. Jay Leno said, why can’t we make planes like we make Keith? And Robin Williams said, you can bruise him, you can’t break him. I got a few good lines out of knocking myself on the head, added to all the other knocks.
What was amazing to me was what the press dreamed up. Because it’s Fiji, it must be a palm tree I fell out of, and I had to be forty feet off the ground, going for a coconut. And then Jet Skis came into the story, which are things I really dislike intensely because they’re noisy and stupid and disruptive to the reefs.
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