And the guitar player he looks damaged He’s been an outcast all his life.

“Jigsaw Puzzle”

A photograph of Keith Richard at his most wasted says more than anything just exactly what rock & roll is all about.

Ian Hunter, Mott the Hoople

The lady behind the amps, staring hazily at Billy Preston and his band performing oh stage, looked elegantly damaged. Half of her face was covered by huge vintage op-art shades and a cigarette holder hung limply from her mouth.

She smiled a lot and danced sporadically, surrounded by earnest-looking roadies who went about their business as usual.

Watching her, I had a momentary flashback recalling an old 1965 presscutting of a beautiful, conservativelydressed ex-model posing above a news story that ran:

Rumours have been sweeping London for the past ten days that attractive 20-year-old German model Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones . are about to marry.

At a Chelsea party, attended by many top show business and fashion names, several of Brian and Anita’s closest friends stated that the wedding was “definitely on” and that Bob Dylan was to be the best man.

Eight years later and Anita Pallenberg is still in the pack, dancing in the wings from the first chords of “Brown Sugar” onwards and travelling around in stoned splendor with her rock *n’ roll old man, Keith Richard.

Of all the Stones’ ladies she has always appeared the most ideal female counterpart to the band’s chosen lifestyle; far more so than the ever-so fragile Bianca Jagger, or the beautiful but fated melancholy and outrage that personified Marianne Faithfull.

Anita always seemed tough. She was easily Jagger’s equal when she played Pherba, part of Turner’s menage a trois, in Performance.

She had true style ■*she was beautiful and dangerous.

When the first bars of “Happy” kick out from Keith’s amplifier, she picks up Marlon, all of four-years-old with ragged blonde curls roaming down his back and the face of a baby rocker, and points to the lean shape of his father.

Keith Richard swaggers back and forth, his eyes closed, his mouth open — displaying a distressing paucity of teeth.

He is oblivious to everything, straining in front of the microphone, grinning when he hits the right notes.

The Rolling Stones revue has finally set off on its travels around the provinces of dear old England. The first night at Manchester found the Stones adhering to the peaks set on the three-day stint held at Wembley.

(The format is much the same; the band attempt an acoustic version of “Sweet Virginia” which quickly falls apart owing to faulty pick-ups, and “Silver Train” has been dropped altogether — “It sounds just a little too much like ‘All Down The Line’ when played live,” stated Mick Taylor.)

The audiehce for the first night leave satisfied, a smell of sweaty denim and plimsolls hanging over the hall after their departure.

The Stones themselves travel back by coach to the Post House, an out-of-town Holiday Inn look-alike which Taylor claims was the only place that would allow the Stones to stay under its roof for two nights.

“It still goes on,” he states. “None of the hotels in the center of Manchester want anything to do with us. Same with the taxi-ranks. I had to pretend I was one of Billy Preston’s band to get here in the first place.”

Compared to his cronies, Mick Taylor has the air of a successful worldly young executive. Dressed casually, he is both eloquent and genuinely charming, a fact that will surprise those who heard the first extremely self-conscious and awkward radio interview that Taylor was forced to take part in once he had joined the Stones. And consequently compounded their vision of the young guitarist as a timid unworthy pretender to Brian Jones’ crown.

He sips brandy and discusses the Stones’ current affairs with the same measured ease and concern for precision that stands out as dominant characteristics of his peerless guitar work on stage these days.

Meanwhile, Charlie Watts aimlessly wanders around the lobby with his family in tow while Bill Wyman sits in the restaurant, his dour face contemplating the menu.

Marlon Richard is boisterously running 'amok around the room, chasing one of Watts’ kids and it’s only when you crane your neck that you actually notice the ubiquitous Mr. Richard himsftlf rhftprfnllv slumned over a table in the corner drinking coffee alone and chain-smoking.

God knows, enough tall tales and horrendously murky image-weaving have been constructed around Richard since his transformation from the awkward punk Chuck Berry-Slim Harpostyled rocker who always seemed to lose out to beautiful Brian Jones and sensual Mick Jagger when it came to getting the action, to the bone-faced hoodlum raunch connossieur toting a powerful drug-oriented mysterioso, topped off with a hornet’s nest of black hair and a bone earring.

Remember when Kenneth Anger called him “the devil’s right-hand man?” Or the grandiose tales of decay and debauchery that followed the Stones, and particularly Richard, on the 1972 American tour, which were borne out in part by a constant stream of photographs that appeared throughout the media displaying Keith splayed out on a sofa unconscious, eye-make-up running and a look of total collapse on his wasted features, while Princess Lee Radziwill was there in the corner eyeing Mick Jagger’s crotch.

God knows the Media has accused Keith Richard in their usual snide way of anything from heavy involvement in black magic to cranking up heroin.

No one quite knew which member of the Stones would take over as the most publicly persecuted of the band, blit Richard has certainly taken the lion’s share this time around to the extent that many have almost seemed to will their own perverse death-wish fantasies on him.

We all need someone we can bleed on, but Keith Richard is no way a wasted victim of his own image, nor is he some incoherent zombie biding his time.

If anything, the splendidly grotesque photo of him adorning the back-sleeve of Goafs Head Soup, looking like a death’s head on fire, is a parody of the Keith Richard gonzo image.

“Pretty grotesque innit! I think most people use the word ‘charred’ to describe that photo.”

Richard sniggers hazily and stares down at the table focusing on nothing in particular. He’s swaggered over to Mick Taylor’s table and now talks in a stoned drawl which never seems to lapse into the realms of incoherence though it sometimes teeters on the edge.

No clumsy pauses occur during the conversation either: in his own excessively ‘laid-back’ zone of activity, Richard is an animated conversationalist.

“Y’see, I don’t really give a damn what they — what the Media or whatever you call ’em — write about me.

“Y’know, I’d just like to see all those cock suckers spending an hour on stage doing what I do, and see how they stand up to it. I just presume they have nothing better to do, or that they’re hard up for a story, or whatever.

“It still goes on and I just go along with the ‘Bad publicity is better than no publicity’ idea. I mean, if they wrote about me as the .sweet, gentle loving family man, it would probably do me more damage! And be equally untrue.

“They don’t know anything anyway They’ll just blow anything up out of all proportions like that ‘Ron Wood to replace Keith Richard’ story which started off as a mildly funny drunken joke we thought up at Tramps one night, and which Fleet Street got hold of and blew up.

“Same with the busts. Everyone thinks I’ve been busted hundreds of times when in fact this now is only the second time I’ve ever been brought up before a court. I mean Mick (J)’s been busted more than I have, but because you’re a celebrity or whatever, everyone gets to hear about it.

“I’m iust not interested in mixing with most of the press or setting things straight, because, really, the last consideration is always the truth. It’s all stereotyped shit, and they’re all hacks.

“It’s the same with jobsworths who are just the lowest as far as I’m concerned. I mean, the guy on Sunday, who was causing that disturbance, was just looking for a chance to get into some violence. He must have been frustrated or something.

“Anyway after the show, he had all his commissionaire chums standing on some scaffolding going like this [he pulls a particularly ludicrous grimace]. So Mick and I threw some coke bottles at ’em.”

Richard drags a hand through his black, matted locks and lights up another cigarette:

“I suppose I should add that the press have also helped me. I mean, the Sunday Times helped us obviously over that bust, but another time, a few years ago when I was on tour the Home Office were getting very stoppy about Anita being in the country and were all ready to throw her out. So we went to the Daily Mirror or one of those papers, and afterwards the Home Office dropped it like a hot brick. So they can help too.”

A plate of pancakes was ordered, and Keith starting digging into them lethargically with his fork. How did he and Taylor feel about the reputation the Stones had picked up, particularly on the last Stateside tour, as being the latest international playboy-jetset elite chic thrill?

_ “Personally I just don’t want to know about ’em. I mean, how they get in there and why they’re there in the first place, I don’t really know.”

Taylor broke in: ‘They seem to like indulging in the popular extravagances of the time, especially Americans who are very publicity-conscious anyway. Now we leave it to Pete Rudge, and as you must know, the organization is incredibly tight.”

Richard came back into the conversation: “It’s a difficult thing to handle anyway, because it starts with things like — ‘Oh, Truman Capote is going to come along and write something on the Stones’ — and he comes along and brings along Princess Lee Radziwill and some other socialites from New York and you’re surrounded by those people. And it just takes One bored, aging little queen like Truman Capote to trigger it off.

“I mean, all those jetsetters must be bored or something. They seem to be on this massive ego trip anyway, which I just don’t want to know about.

“All I can say is — those people will not be around a second time. There’s no way they’re going to be in our company ever again.

“But that situation was nothing new for us. I mean, back in 1964 when we were touring the States, we’d been invited to parties by all these ‘socially important’ people. Back then we’d just tell ’em where to go.”

How did Richard’s much-vaunted meeting with Bob Dylan at Jagger’s 1972 Birthday Party go?

“If was very nice actually. I hadn’t seen him since the Blonde on Blonde era. Changed a lot. Yeah, he seems to be very domesticated. Hard to say from meeting the cat at a party.”

“I think everyone expects too much from Bob Dylan,” added Mick Taylor. “You can’t keep on creating the things he was doing at that intensity.”

K.R.: “He’d have to put himself back into a very fragile position to create anything like that again. He just couldn’t do that, because if he hadn’t stopped in the first place, he would have been dead.”

Surely, though, the Stones are legendary for their sustained journey close to the edge these past ten years?

Richard continued: “Yeah, but you see Bob Dylan was by himself. With us there’s always been someone there to grip the reins when it’s necessary.”

Richard seemed slightly more comfortable discussing the Stones’ music.

“I guess I like Beggar’s Banquet the best of everything we’ve done. Let It Bleed was a good album too. I’d like to have a single album compilation of my favourite Exile On Main Street tracks, though I still feel that the amount of material we had at that point warranted a double album, even if they are always too long. I really like the new one actually. I enjoyed recording in Jamaica.”

Mick Taylor stated that the album was recorded relatively quickly: “The backing tracks were all done in Jamaica. We Started off with ‘Winter’ which was just Mick [Jagger] strumming on a guitar in the studio, and everything falling together from there.

“ ‘Angie’ and ‘Dancing With Mr. D’ were recorded in the middle of the sessions and ‘Starfucker’ was about the last. Some of the songs used were pretty old. ‘A Hundred Years Ago’ was one that Mick had written two years ago and which we hadn’t really got around to using before.”

Richard said that, despite popular opinion, he had indeed been involved in writing “Angie.”

“I had the whole chord sequence down maybe a year ago with iust the title ‘Angie’. It could have been ‘Randy’ or ‘Mangy’ or anything, y’know but Mick just picked up on the title and wrote a song around it. He added the strings — all the strings on the album are his idea.

“I don’t know who chose it as a single. I think somebody said that it would make a change and that it would get a heavy reaction on AM stations. I’m really not interested in picking singles.

‘Cornin’ Down Again’ is my song, yeah — no, ‘Starfucker’ is all Mick’s. ‘Dancing With Mr. D’ is my riff and Mick’s lyrics. I tend to work more on riffs while Mick has finished songs.

“Definite guitar parts? Well the thing is that on most tracks there are a number of guitar tracks so you can’t really distinguish who’s playing what. Mick [J] plays guitar on ‘Silver Train’ and ‘Winter’, while the other line-ups always seem to be different. Like, ‘Heartbreaker’ has Billy Preston on keyboards, Mick [J] on wah-wah, and me on bass.”

Had Richard ever considered that the Stones should do an album of personal favorite non-original tracks?

“Yeah, I could dig that idea, but more than likely we would never put a whole album out of the Stones doing other people’s stuff — just the odd track on an album every now and then.

“We’ve got a couple of old songs we’re thinking of doing up — actually we was thinkin’ of doing the old Temptations song ‘I Wish It Would Rain’ but the Faces got there first. They recorded it live at Reading for their next single or something.

“There are others but you’ve gotta keep your trap shut or someone else’ll pick up on ’em. But we really have so many songs of our own, and doing y our own songs is much more of a buzz anyway.

“I mean, back in the old 12 By 5 days — those things — we used to go down to the local record store, when we were recording in Chicago or L.A., buy up a whole bunch of soul singles, sit down by the record-player, learn ’em — things like ‘Baby We Got A Good Thing Goin’ and old Otis Redding stuff — and do ’em as quickly as possible.”

Why were the Stones not including any material predating “Jumping Jack Flash” in their current live set?

“Actually we were doing a bunch of old numbers when we were touring Australia. ‘Route 66’ we did, uh... ‘iBye Bye Johnny’ and ‘It’s All Over Now’.

“One thing about working up the old songs is that Mick [T] doesn’t know ’em and would have to learn ’em from the beginning. I mean, there are songs like ‘Have Mercy’ which I’d love to work up again.

“Another reason for us not doing old songs is that Decca have stopped us releasing new live versions of material recorded on their label.

“A whole live album with Stevie Wonder on it recorded on the American tour has been scrapped because they’ve ballsed that up. They’ve got those songs for six years or something.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 72.

Keith Richard

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 33.

“I mean, if we’re recording a live show with old numbers on it, we just can’t put the thing out in the first place because recordings of those songs belong to them until 1976 whatever.

“Sure, I don’t really mind them packaging old stuff if they use a little bit of imagination, but putting out old flipsides as singles is shit.

“Decca are supposed to be making records but they might just as easily be making baked beans.

“A record to them is a piece of plastic and what’s on there doesn’t really matter.

“Decca’s attitude to their artists, to the people who work for them, is the lowest, and I’ll say that to their fuckin’ face. They have no respect for anything except the dollar and in that, they’re no better than any other company. It just happens that I know them and I think they’re the biggest bunch of shits in the world.”

So how were relations currently with Atlantic records?

“Uh, comfortable, y’know. They’ve tried to balls about a bit with this latest album.

“They’ve given us a lot of trouble over ‘Starfucker’ for all the wrong reasons — I mean, they even got down to saying that Steve McQueen would pass an injunction against the song because of the line about him. So we just sent a tape of the song to him and of course he okayed it. It was just a hustle though. Obstacles put in our way.”

Then how was Rolling Stones Records progressing and why were Kracker the first band ever to be signed?

“Everyone agreed to signing Kracker and Jimmy Miller was recording them so it seemed natural. As to why they’re the first — well there’s no hurry. We’re not interested in becoming another Apple.

“Sure there have been other bands we’ve had our eye oh — Stone the Crows were one but they’ve brqken up. Rory Gallagher is another artist I’ve thought about, just because he’s good and he seems to have had a raw deal from his record company, though I don’t really know any details.”

What about the notorious -incident when Jagger and Richard were both ordered offstage during a Chuck Berry concert by the man himself?

“Ah yes. I don’t know the real reasons because Chuck Berry is really weird.

“But the situation arose, I imagine, because I was given this huge great amplifier and he had this tiny Jewel reverb, so there was no way I could turn down and still not over-power him.

*1 was just trying to play as quiet as possible — anyway I came on with Dr. John and Mick [J] was standing at the back of the stage, and it developed into a little ego thing where the people were taking more attention of his backing band than they were of him. It’s a shame actually because the two numbers we actually played together were great, y’know.”

Had Keith ever witnessed the New York Dolls, the ultimate Rolling Stones affectionate parody band?

“Nah, I’ve never heard ’em — seen pictures of ’em though, and they look very pretty.

“Bands have always been into copying us. Really I mean, what were bands like the Pretty Things and Them with Van Morrison doing back then?

“Nah, it’s not a piss-off and it’s not particularly flattering either. I always wonder if they’re just doing it for the bread or basic considerations like that.”

Richard shrugs and orders a final vodka. Anita has disappeared from the lobby.

“Right now, I’m sticking pretty much to playing rhythm onstage. It depends on the number usually, but since Brian died I’ve had to pay more attention to rhythm guitar anyway.

“I move more now simply because back when we were playing old halls I had to stand next to Charlie’s drums in order to catch the beat, the sound was always so bad.

“I like numbers to be organized — my thing is organization, I suppose — kicking the number off, pacing it and ending it.

“Either I mess it up completely or it comes together really. Like, last night I dropped my pick twice and stepped on my leads in the last number.”

He grins, scratches his head, extends a handshake and leaves to get changed for tonight’s show. “Gotta put my make-up on ’aven’t I.”

On the coach, Charlie Watts and wife are entertaining his parents who have come down for the gig. Mick Jagger wanders in and partakes in an animated talk with a juvenile brat wearing a David Bowie hair-cut and the looks of a barely pubescent Gary Glitter — “Wanna souvenir? Want my shoes? Get away with ya. Y’ not ’avin my watch! Wan’ my cock?”

The show that night is somehow now stupendous. The crowd are up the moment the band saunter onstage. The Stones transcend all peaks previously set at their current English gigs and even perform a beautiful version of “Angie” with Jagger actually singing it in key.

A wild, wild evening indeed and, y’know, throughout the show, Keith never dropped his pick once. W>