PULLING TEETH WITH KEITH RICHARD

It’s a balmy monoxide breeze that blows off the Thames across from Cheyne Walk. There’s a yellow truck slewed up on the pavement across from Keefs front door with two guys in overalls making marathon work of stripping bits of wire with pliers.

Somewhere between there and here — Atlantic’s omni-carpeted West End smoked-glass labyrinths — the man is, you, might say, in transit. This, if one is to lend credence to the popularised Richard persona, being no mean feat. Your confidant, having arrived early, is dropping cubefc in anticipation. The Big K’s newest exploit, as relayed to him in" the cab coming over, having been the drawing of a knife during a recent altercation.

Skip lightly, then.

Still feel the cops breathing on you. Keith?

“Oh ho — do I baby — I see these phony workmen outside my front door every day; I’m movin’ very shortly.

“Mick an’ I feel it — but it doesn’t bother us particularly. I mean, after every raid one just improves one’s security systems, ya know?” A lackadaisical smirk and a quick glance right at Spanish Tony, a tall chisel-faced Aramis king with immaculate grey sprayed hair, expensively-cut denims, shades and a Hawaii Five-0 whiff of neat and silent ruthlessness.

' Yeah, but how about the latest one, the gun bust?

“Aw that saga ended in Marlborough Street Magistrates Court with a very sensible magistrate who saw the way the wind was blowin’ from our friends at Scotland Yard and — uh — was reasonable enough to understan’ that — er — because I had to plead guilty because from everything found in my ’ouse, technically I was guilty...”

It happened last year. The cops blew in on Keith and Pallenberg and a friend and this gun and this whole pantechnicon of medicine cabinet marvels.

“There were like — uh — fifteen charges and with every one I had to say ‘guilty’ — but then I came out with my mitigation which was fantastic because it really showed the cops up for what they were. They even tried to string in this old Belgian shotgun that was built in — ah — 1899 or somethin’. Obviously one of those fowlin’ pieces a father’d give ’is son when he was 12 or 11 or somethin’. And the police tried their damnedest to tell this ’ere magistrate that this weapon was a sawn-off shotgun. From that moment the magistrate saw what was ’appenin’. That I’d walked into my ’ouse which I’d rented to a lot of people who’d been very clumsy and not cleaned up after themselves.”

The person to his left nods sagely; this young guy with long black hair that looks as if it’s been boot-polished, and a pair of Peter Fonda mail-order shades partially obscuring a mouldering Mother’s Pride complexion. Richard later claims he arrived on his doorstep to present him with tapes of his group, Cyanide. So here he is hitting into the Jack Daniels like a recently-qualified Southern barfly.

“Actually,” says Richard, in his personable nasal tones, “it was a very nice gun, the new model revolver with a hammer guard. It’d been sent to me by a bodyguard on our ’72 tour of America, who felt that I should never be without one — ‘you’re never alone with a Smith and Wesson.’ ”

Ostensibly, we are here to discuss Tony Scaduto’s scandalous Mick Jagger: Everybody’s Lucifer book. The real questions we’d like to pose to Keith, however, are (a) How many times a year does he have his blood changed? (b) What is the composition of the cocktail menu of congestants that supposedly necessitates this? (c) What in hell happened to his teeth? (viz the Charcoal Smile), (d) The validity of some of the more outrageous fracases he’s supposed to have been involved in. And (e) Why each part of his body appears to function from some several unconnected information centres — thus, for example, giving him the lope of a clumsily handled marionette.

Over to Scaduto, though, even though he probably doesn’t deserve it. There are certain allegations in the book —both direct and indirect — that Keith might want to respond to if for no other reason than that a whole bunch of people’re gonna read it, and like most things in print, believe it.

“It appears to me,” Keef says languidly, “that Anthony [Anthony???] got 'Marianne very, very Out Of It for a few days and wrote down everything she cared to memorise and — uh — embellish. ‘Embellished Memories’ I’d call it.

“I haven’t read it, but sure I’d love to hear ’em — at least it’d save me reading the crap...

“The only period he (Scaduto) touches on with any kind of sensitivity is when there was this period of two months in ’62 where Mick was doing quite a few gigs with Blues Incorporated to the exclusion of rehearsals with the embryonic Rolling Stones. Brian particularly was feeling that Mick was just after as much bread as he could — uh, two pound ten a week — and because he (Brian) was a stickler for rehearsals he felt that to a certain extent Mick was deserting us — which was, to any rational person, rather silly because the Stones weren’t working at all.”

.. .There was no kind of class barrier between the three of you; I mean, Brian and Mick both came from middle-class homes and you were working class. Scaduto, to an extent seems to play on this;..

“No. That’s.. .that’s beautiful. Anthony’s surpassed ’imself there — I didn’t think ’e’d get down to that one. Mick and I had known each other since we were five years old. We lived in the same street. It wasn’t until five or six years later that people realised 'that those things didn’t matter. In those days it >vas more of an inverted snobbery ; it could be held against you. One was proud to come from the lowest part of town — and play the guitar too; the richer grammar-school people were considered to be pansies, twerps...”

And the suggestion that Brian was a purist and that his disenchantment stemmed from the band moving away from the original Stuff?

“Brian was never a purist. He used to like to pretend he was, when it was convenient. Which was great, it was a great trick he had. In actual fact Brian used to play alto sax with a Cheltenham rock and roll band called The Ramrods who used to do all Duane Eddy stuff — that was his claim to fame...

“We thought the first studio cuts were good for a first effort, but that was largely due to ,Glyn Johns (IBC Studios), who was an experienced engineer. They were linked to us via the Cheam crowd when we were doing all these little pubs,” he says.. .“rather like you’re doin’ now,” he adds. He addresses the remark to Senor Cyanide, who meanwhile has been trying to look desperately rugged whilst wiping himself out with bourbon, losing out with gauche little gestures like knocking the bottle over and spilling the* contents of the ashtray over the plate of cold cuts.

“Don’t trust nobody,” he advises, “and don’t sign nothin’.”

The kid nods.

“.. .To be fair to Brian...” Richard accepts a cigarette and pours himself another drink, “because he’s dead I can say ‘Oh Brian was a fantastic musician’ but it wasn’t true. Brian wasn’t a great musician. He did have a certain feel for certain things, but then everybody in the band has that for certain things too. And there was a nice bit of chemistry there for a while which unfortunately didn’t stay. Brian was the least capable of coping with teenybopper stardom and it made him so depressed that eventually he became a liability — and especially because of the pressure we — as a band — were under. Also Mick and I, after Andrew had got us into writing — which we’d never dreamt of doing. After the first couple got to number one it increased Brian’s antagonism towards us.”

Scaduto, at this point, shifts into fifth and puts his foot down; he suggests that Andrew, Keith and Mick formed a kind of exclusive triumvirate for working up new Stones’ material. At one point he even has Bill complaining about’it. “Brian,” he says, “felt that Jagger and Keith had been engineering his isolation from the group in an attempt to drive him out.”

“Not true,” says Richard. “Brian as far as I know never wrote a single finished song in ’is life; he wrote bits and pieces but he never presented them to us. No doubt he spent hours, weeks, working on things — but his paranoia was so great that he could never bring himself to present it to us.

“Bill wrote and we did give ’im a chance — on Satanic Majesties — which we even put out as a single, goddamn. Bill Wyman is the only cat in the Stones to have singles out under his own name ya know?

“We bent over backwards to encourage people to write. We really do not want to have to take the responsibility of coming up each time with new material — we’re really working on Mick Taylor now — because I think he could be a great writer.”

Brian was the least capable of coping with teeny hopper stardom, and it made him depressed.

Could you not have approached Brian, though — encouraged him?

“I did. Around ’66 the pressure dropped off as we stopped touring; I was living with him and Anita for two years, we became friends again. The thing that blew it was when we went down to Morocco and he was pulling this hard-man number knocking off Moroccan. whores — uh — and being absolutely disgustin’ and everything, so I said ‘C’mon baby, I’m takin’ you home’ so we left and that was the end of Brian and me as friends.. .Brian always wanted to be.. .like this whole thing of ‘Who do the chicks like most’ that started with him back in ’63.

“I’m sure that goes on with Slade and The Sweet now.”

Mr. Cyanide, meanwhile, has lost his reins completely. The tape is punctuated by the sound of glass colliding with glass and a short treatise on liquor in which C. blows a measure of cool by referring to Budweiser as “Boodwizer” during the big K’s praising of Vunderverks of Kentucky.

“Boodwjzer’s nice,” says the kid.

Yeah, but that s real Milwaukee commercial stuff,” says Richard languidly. “You actually go down to Kentucky, Louisville, and they’ve got bourbons that make Old Grandad and Jack Daniels look like Schweppes bitter lemon.. .there’s one called — ah — Rebel Yell and that’s — ah — dynamite shit.”

I bet, but — ah — well Keith what is this stuff about you and — ah —these blood changes in Switzerland?

Rod Lynton, Atlantic Press officer, inhales audibly and gesticulates that this is a faux-pas.

“What?” says Richard, grinning through that charred dental bombsite. “That’s beautiful. I love that. I’ve heard about that thing and I’d love to do it just because I’m sure that eating motorway food for 10 years has done my blood no good at all.

“The only time I’ve ever been to Switzerland is to ski.”

Motorway food? Richard on skis? Richard looks as if he’s on skis just walking down the street. I mean, c’mon...

And your involvement in the ’65 Urination Bust?

(The Stones hit the headlines having been caught one night taking a leak against a gas station wall. They thought it was closed. It wasn’t.)

“No, that was Brian and Bill. I finished mine first.. .the thing with Bill is — and this is one of the best-kept secrets in The Rolling Stones — that he has probably got one of the biggest bladders in human existence when that guy gets out of a car to take a pee you know you aren’t going to move for 15 minutes. I mean it’s not the first time it ’appened to ’im...

“fn America one night we pull up in the limo — this Cadillac limo. Bill wants a pee. Everyone’s gonna have a cup of coffee. Bill’s used to it, he’s way behind this tree or somethin’. He has a fag, reads a paper or somethin’ — and he sees this policeman coming. He’s powerless, right? And this policeman comes up with his torch blazing on this member which is still gushing away like a fireman’s hose.. .and, well, what could ’e do? All ’e can say is ‘Well, put it way and wipe it when you’ve finished.’ I think even he was horrified...

“To my knowledge, Bill has never done one in under five minutes.”

A quickie — then dart for the shrubbery.

Umm.. .Keith, how about this claim that you are about to become The Next Pigpen?

“Well.. .1 mean, I gave up drugs when the doctor told me I had six months to live...

“I mean — if you’re gonna get wasted, get wasted elegantly.

TURN TO PAGE 77.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 55

“Now the thing is,” he says, fiddling with the shattered remains of a premolar so that a small piece comes away between his fingers (he looks at it querulously), “I’m terrified of dentist^ You’ve only got to ’ave one broken tooth for everyone to think you’re a villain — but I’ll surprise you all next year. I promise you. I’m just waiting for this new technique to come out — there was a point where I could groove on it but — ah — last month another chunk fell off and since then it’s fallen outta favour wiv me.”

Courtesy of The New Musical Express