WITH SPECIAL GUEST STAR KEITH RICHARDS

Keith Richards strides through the door wearing a grin and gripping bottles of Rebel Yell in his right hand and a pack of Marlboros with a camouflage-colored lighter in his left.

“What we do here is force alcohol down your throat,” he says through the same toothy grin, “so both of us will be on equal footing.”

Seconds into the interview, and the man many say is the Rolling Stones is already playing the much-celebrated part of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest survivor. This is, after all, the man who’s appeared on more than a few lists of rock stars expected to die young. He’s always been a heavy drinker, a no-charge endorsement for Jack Daniel’s sour mash, with which he’s been frequently photographed. His drug use—including a crippling heroin addiction that was busted up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—has been chronicled through a series of arrests and his own candid remarks. In the fast lane of rock ’n’ roll, Richards seemed to be headed in the direction of one of the Stones’ betterknown song titles—“Shattered.”

But there have been changes in recent years. A calming marriage to Patti Hansen. A one-year-old daughter named Theodora. Another baby with Hansen on the way. Closer relations with Marlon and Andrea, the children from his common-law marriage to Anita Pallenberg.

Tanned and trim, Richards denies the mellow tag some have placed on him at 42. But it’s clear he’s aging more gracefully than most would have expected, even if he still chain-smokes and keeps his tumbler filled with bourbon and ginger ale.

And he’s still making great music, as the Stones’ latest album, Dirty Work, proves. With its aggressive guitar lines and rough ’n’ tumble lyrics, it’s clear this is an album Richards dominated, and when he talks about it, he dotes as if bragging about a child.

The interview took place in the Manhattan office of Rolling Stones’ record, in a conference room that features a plastic, jaws-like shark on the wall and a bottle of Jack Daniels on the coffee cart. It was shortly after Dirty Work came out, and a week after Mick Jagger told the New York Times that the Stones definitely wouldn’t tour in 1986 and that he and Richards weren’t getting along.

So let’s not mince words. According to the New York Times, you and Mick are currently trying to find a time and place for your duel.

{Laughs) People have sort of gone on about Mick and I feuding and yelling at each other, but really, it’s just part of the same thing. There’s a certain amount of friction that you need to work to get things done.

And if things don’t coincide, it’s not the end of the world. After

"I consider it a privilege to still be here."

all, we used to play together when we were so small we could run our heads through the Grecian tables. Mick and I have been playing together since we were four years old. It goes back a long way. After all, if you can’t shout at your friends...

It’s all for the same cause, you know. And its always gone on, at least now at the moment it’s become public knowledge. Who knows—maybe Mick and I made the whole thing up, you know? What’s the real story on a tour, then?

I can conceive of myself as being selfish about it because I love playing with these guys. One of the main reasons I wanted to get the band on the road is that

I just love to play with the guys, especially live. Also, I know enough about the business aspects to know it would be an astute move to go out and play live. But there’s no way you can force people to do what they don’t want to. Mick doesn’t want to go on the road, so we won’t. In another situation, I might not want to do another video, so we won’t. This is not majority rule here; everyone has to want to do something. You can dangle a million dollars in front of them and they’ll say, “It might come in handy, but...” We’ve been around long enough to deal with that. That doesn’t mean we can’t go out at a later date.

If you do go out, could you live with another round of people claiming this is the last one?

I don’t know. It was also said about the ’78 tour, the ’75 tour, and so on. The last tour is almost as famous a phrase as the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band. I don’t know where that came from, either.

If the Stones don’t tour—and it seems you won’t, now—would you consider going out on your own?

Woody and I have done that with the Barbarians. If somebody called me up and said, “I’m putting this group together and we’re going out to play,” and I felt like playing with them, I’d do it. It’s enjoyable for me to sometimes be a sideman instead of going out as a Rolling Stone. So long as it wasn’t my gig, so I’m just the hired hand. That could happen anytime.

You’ve also got a lot of material lying around on tapes. Now that Mick’s gone the solo route, any idea if you’ll put your own out?

I like to fiddle around with different styles. There’s a lot of good country there as well. I don’t do it just for myself; if I could put it all together and feel like it clicked, there may be an album there somewhere. But a lot of stuff I’m interested in doing I can do best with the Stones. If there’s a song I like, I make a tape of it for the other lads and push it on them.

“The Harlem Shuffle,” I’d been trying to get Mick to do that for years. I’d slip it into the odd cassette player that was around, hoping he would bounce back to it. But it never clicked, never clicked, never clicked. Then at one rehearsal, I was playing it over the speakers and the rest of the band started learning it. Mick came in a bit later, when we’d really got it down, and went straight to the microphone and boom, we had it down in two takes.

Is that the way it works with most of the covers the band does?

Oh yeah. “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg,” Mick wanted to do that for quite a while before we did it. There’s loads of songs you’d love to play. We don’t plan covers. We play them when the band first gets together and is all rusty. We go through the Otis Redding songbook, and suddenly you get a new feel for a song, so it sticks to you.

The Stones as a band started off playing other people’s music, so we have an innate feel for picking out songs and putting our own stamp on them. The first couple of albums were all other people’s stuff. Now we can break into that as a change of pace, just pop off on something. No one walks in saying, “I want to do this cover or that cover.”

So how did you get started doing your own songwriting?

It was put to Mick and me fairly succinctly by Andrew Oldham after the first or second album: “You gotta start writing, boys.” We said, “You’re crazy. That’s like asking us to shoe a horse. It’s another job.” Andrew, of course, said with a nod and a wink that it would bring in a lot of profit. So he shoved us into the kitchen of an apartment Mick and I shared, and after hours of toil we came out with “As Tears Go By.” Andrew had at the time alighted on Marianne Faithfull, so he was all moony over the song. And it was a hit, so that gave us the encouragement, with the first song we’d written being a hit. Your first giant hit, of course, was “Satisfaction. ” I understand you didn’t really like it when you came up with it.

1 “people have gondon about Mick ayf l feuding aim yelfit other... maybe Mick and I made the whole ffi/lff upM

It's not that I didn’t like it. I just didn’t think it was anything above the ordinary. Being on the road 360 days a year made it hard to get a perspective on things; I didn’t have time to think about it.

I woke up in the middle of the night with “Satisfaction” on the brain. Through the haze of sleep, I put two minutes of da-da, da-da-da da-da-da on tape. I listened to the tape the next morning and it was two minutes of “Satisfaction” and 40 minutes of me snoring.

Once we cut it, Mick and the rest of the guys said, “This is a single.” Not many get by me, but that one did. It was the big breaker for the Stones internationally, after all. Everyone was like, aaaaah—kind of like going to the bathroom after holding it for a week. It was, “At last, we cracked a biggie!”

When the Stones and Beatles started, rock ’n’ roll was suposed to be the nine-day wonder or some sort of shortlived trend. But I’ve always had the feeling that you knew it would stick around.

It wasn’t so clear to me at the time. I started to believe when the Beatles and ourselves started to treat every track of an album as singles. The Beatles and ourselves had gotten so pissed-off buying albums that had three singles and a bunch of toss-offs. We wanted to make every song a single, a Mazarati or something like that. Eventually, that turned the music thing from 45s to albums, and it increased the longevity and the importance of the music.

Throughout your career—and particularly in recent years—you’ve had a chance to play with your idols, like Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. What’s that like?

It’s a charge for me. When people like Jerry Lee call and say, “Can you play this gig with me,” it’s awful hard for me to turn them down. I spent my teenage days listening to those guys. It’s an honor and pleasure, too; I dreamed about playing with guys like that. I learn a lot of things as well; when you stand by Jerry Lee’s piano and he gets off on you, it’s better than getting money. I like kicking people in the ass a little.

Yeah, but if you kick Berry in the ass he may poke you in the eye again. [Berry once gave Richards a black eye by accident].

He’s got a long reach. I sent him a note that said, “Thanks for the golden hit” (laughs). I can hit him too, y’know, but it’s hard to give a black man a black eye. Just having contact with and the approval of these people must be a charge as well. Was there ever any concern they would actually resent you?

Even in retrospect it’s surprised me; one would have expected resentment or something: “Eh, who are these young white kids from England, copping our riffs and making all this money?” Then again, no one’s going to turn down royalties from a Rolling Stones song. When they realized we can hold our own with them, they developed a mutual respect. For us, that’s one of the best compliments we could get. Muddy Waters encouraged us rather than fighting us.

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Dirty Work is the first time in a while you and Mick have actually shared songwriting credits with someone else. I think Ronnie has, what, four co-writing credits on the album?

Ronnie and I worked together for a year before we started recording. Mick was working on his solo album, and Ronnie and I had seen to ourselves since we did the last tour. The idea was to avoid laying fallow until we got word from the high court to go back to work. So we sat around and played, and out of all that playing came several songs. We recorded 35 tracks, so there was a lot in the can as well. So compared to other records, where he was playing the new boy sideman, Ronnie’s contribution was very major.

How do you two write?

You don’t sit down and say, “It’s songwriting time.” You just play, and if you come across something you say, “Hold on there,” and then run it back. Otherwise, you’ll just sit around and play Everly Brothers tunes all afternoon.

Most songs come out of accidents, one wrong chord against another one and, “Wait a minute. Do that again.” It’s a matter of being aware, being an antenna. There are songs whirling around up there, so maybe you’ll be able to pull one down by being receptive. The more you play and do what you do, the more chance there is to really get something. Word has been out since you started recording that Dirty Work was a Keith album. When you listen to it, it would appear that it’s true.

Most of the hooks and ideas on Dirty Work were mine. I come up with lyrics to work as a basic hook, but if Mick’s going to sing them, well, I just tell him, “Here’s the basic idea, here’s the hook, you finish the verses.”

I’m like anyone else, I can get angry. But I’m also a musician, and there’s a song I can channel it through. “Fight” came when Mick walked out of a session one night. I didn’t want to end the session, so it was like, “I’ll bust your balls, boy.” Then, of course, I’ve got the song and Mick’s gotta sing it, so it’s like, “Here Mick, here’s something I wrote for you. Now sing it.”

Another interesting aspect of this record is that you used an outside producer after doing so many albums with you and Mick producing as the Glimmer Twins. Why for this album?

First off, Mick and I never intended to do more than two or three albums as producers. You become foggy, you know, putting on the producer’s hat, then zooming back into the arranger’s hat and then the musician’s hat. You know, you can’t cover all the bases all the time forever. But at the same time, with producers, you can go around looking, and I’ve said this before so this won’t be an original, but it’s kind of like gurus: gurus find you, you don’t find them.

It’s the same with producers. Somebody just crops up and has the time at the right time. Mick and I are well aware that we needed somebody. It was the same situation in '68 on Beggar’s Banquet, we were looking for a producer and Jimmy Miller just suddenly was there. And suddenly Steve (Lillywhite) was there.

And that was a pleasure, too, not to have to worry about what was going on in the control room, especially these days with the incredible technology and not being able to know exactly what’s going on in the control robm and what we’re going to use. It became just too much of a task and Mick and I were stretching ourselves very thin trying to cover it, particularly on Undercover and Emotional Rescue. Tattoo You was made out of the can, so that wasn’t much of a problem. It was all stuff that was already recorded.

We were well aware and have been talking to guys for two or three years, trying to find another guy to work with us. We even started Dirty Work without Steve. Steve came just at the right time. Also, I have to give a mention to Dave Jersey, the engineer, who never worked with Steve before and they became a team on their own.

It was just a very fortunate, fortuitive meeting. Everybody knew exactly what we wanted. When Steve walked in the studio that first night, I said, “You don’t want to be the meat in this sandwich, I’ll be very surprised if you’re here next week.” It’s very hard, you know, when you have guys that have been around as long as the Stones and expect to take direction from a young guy they don’t know. But Steve mastered it very good. Very heart-warming, I enjoyed working with Steve a lot.

How about all the guests on this record? A lot of phone calls or what?

It is. Even before the sessions started, we knew we had stuff that sounded very much like Bobby Womack, and I wanted to get him involved. Ronnie used to live in L.A. and was very close to Bobby, so I said, “Why don’t you call him?” That’s how Bobby came out. And at the same time, Bobby came down with the Don Covay, and it was, “Lord have mercy.” So already, we were working with two of our teenage heroes and having a great time together.

Then there was Tom Waits. I did his Rain Dogs album, so he reciprocated and came down to our sessions for backup, Jimmy Cliff walked in on his way to Tokyo when he had a few hours stopover in New York. He heard the track for “Too Tough” and I hadn’t done the vocal yet, so he said, “Let’s go out there and do it.” It was three takes and boom, and he was out the door to the airport.

Last year was a strange year, with the Live Aid thing and all. Lots of people got together with a lot of exchange-of-ideas, like, “Hey, I haven’t seen you in years. How you doing? I’d like you to do this...” Everybody was getting a chance to be together in one place with some rather interesting spinoffs. That’s how Jimmy Page got to be on this record.

Since the Canadian police busted you in ’77, you’ve kicked your more damaging drug habits and there’s been a definite rejuvenation of your creativity. Coincidence or a result of the bust?

That was when I realized it was my watershed, that this has got to stop. My reasons, if there are any, for being on the stuff had nothing to do with music. I mean it had to do with what I was describing before, huge periods of working and then suddenly stopping. I think I had an adrenalin problem, in that I would get off tour and everyone would disappear and I’d get home and my body would be going, “Where is the gig?” You know, it’s, “The sun’s going down—let’s go!”

And my answer to that was just hit the dirt for me, calm myself down. I was driving myself crazy with all that stopping and starting. That was one of the reasons why Ronnie and I both sat down and said you can’t stop, you just have to keep going. If you’re not playing for an audience, then you just play for yourselves, keep it going rather than let the rock settle and then have to spend all that time knocking off the moss. And that’s been a great help to me.©