Life (46 page)

In order to deal with Gram’s death, I said, I can’t stay in Innsbruck tonight. I’m going to rent a car, and we’re going to Munich and we’re going on an impossible task. We’re going to look for one woman. Because I knew about her, I’d seen her once or twice, and she fascinated me. I know this is pointless, but we’re going to go into Munich to look for her. Let’s go tonight. Let’s just forget about it and go do something else. I hate all that crying shit, and moping. There’s nothing you can do about it. The fucker’s dead and all you do is get mad at him for dying. So you take your mind off it. I’m going to look for one of the most beautiful women in the world. I’ll never find her, but that’s what we’ll go for. A focus. A target. And Bobby and I rented a BMW, this was one in the morning, and took off.

The target was Uschi Obermaier. If there was one thing that could soothe my soul, it was her. She was beautiful. She was quite famous in Germany as a model who had graduated into an icon of the student protest movement that was traumatizing relations between the generations in Germany and threatening to tear the country apart. She was the poster girl of the left; her picture was everywhere. She was a mad rock-and-roll fan, which is how she’d found her way to Mick at first and how I’d met her, very briefly, once. Mick had invited her to come to Stuttgart and she was looking for him in the hotel. She ran into me instead and I took her to Mick’s door. But I’d seen her picture on posters and in magazines, and there was something about her that got to me. Uschi’s boyfriend, a guy called Rainer Langhans, had been one of the founders of Commune 1, a public live-in designed to wage war against the nuclear family and the authoritarian state. She’d been co-opted into Commune 1 when she took up with Rainer, but Uschi’s other title, of which she was proud, was the Bavarian Barbarian. She had never taken the ideology seriously, openly drinking banned Pepsi-Cola and smoking menthol cigarettes and upsetting other Commune dictates. She was photographed naked by
Stern
magazine rolling joints; she was certainly wholehearted in her desire to outrage the German bourgeoisie. But when the commune world hardened up into two camps—terror groups like Baader-Meinhof on one hand and the Greens on the other—Uschi retired from the fray, at least retired from Rainer, and went back to Munich. Her road is littered with guys who tried to tame her. They tried to tame something that’s untamable. She’s the best bad girl I know.

Anyway, that night we checked into the Bayerischer Hof, where everybody’s got a Rembrandt over his bed, a real one. Bob said, right, what are we going to do now, Keith? I said, Bob, now we’re going down to Schwabing and hit the strip, the club circuit. Let’s do what Gram would have done if we’d croaked. I said, we’ve got to look for Uschi Obermaier in this city. I’ve got to have a target. No particular reason—it was the only thing I knew in Munich to aim at. I didn’t even know if she was in town. So we buffed ourselves up a bit and started to hit the clubs. And things were rocking, but it wasn’t what we were looking for. And by about the fifth or sixth club, there’s some damn good records being played, so I went up and talked to the DJ, who I happened to know, George the Greek. And on top of that he happened to know the Obermaier.

But even if I find her, what am I going to do? I’m in no condition to put the make on her, and there’s not much time anyway. So… OK, well, we’ve actually found someone who knows her, this is already a miracle, but I’m lost for a plan. George says, I know her address, but she’s with her old man. I said, George, let’s go round there. And we parked opposite the flat, and I said, George, will you go up and say that KR’s looking for her? I was determined to make the full circle with GP dying. And George goes up and knocks on her door, and out she struts, just to the window, and goes, who are you? Why? I don’t know why, a friend of mine’s just died, and I’m pretty fucked up. I just want to say hello. You were the target, and we found you. We’ll leave it at that. Then she came down and gave me a kiss and went back upstairs. But hey, we actually pulled it off! Mission accomplished.

The second time I tried to get in touch with Uschi, I got Freddie Sessler to track her down on the phone. He called her agency. And the agent said, “I’m not allowed to give those numbers out,” and there’s Freddie greasing the line and Freddie could grease like nobody. Freddie was versed in many languages. Uschi and I didn’t speak each other’s language. When I got her number and she answered she said, “Hi, Mick.” I said, “No, it’s Keith.” She was living in Hamburg at the time and I sent a car round to drive her to Rotterdam. She basically had to do a runner from her old man. They had a fight; she got in the car and came to Rotterdam. She ripped my earring out that night in the bed. We were in this Japanese-style hotel in Rotterdam—next morning I realize my ear is stuck with my own blood to the pillow. As a result of which I have a permanent malformation of the right earlobe.

With Uschi Obermaier, especially at that time, it was lust, pure and simple. And then she grew on me and entered my heart. We’d draw pictures or use sign language. But even if we couldn’t talk to each other, I’d found a friend. As simple as that, really. And I loved her dearly. We dabbled around off and on with each other in the ’70s, and then she took off with her new love, boyfriend Dieter Bockhorn
,
to Afghanistan, and she slipped from my mind and my heart. And then I heard that she’d died, of a miscarriage somewhere in Turkey. Which was almost true, but it turned out she was smarter than that. I found out the real story many years later on a beach in Mexico, on the most important day of my life.

T
his was a
terrible period for casualties. Towards the end of that summer, Gus, my granddad, died; Michael Cooper, my deep mate, committed suicide—a fragile psyche, I’d always seen it as a potential. All the good ones die on you. And where does that leave me? The only answer is to make new friends. But then some of the live ones dropped off the active list. We wore out Jimmy Miller, who slowly succumbed to the dope and ended up carving swastikas into the mixing board while he worked on his swan song album for us,
Goats Head Soup
. Andy Johns lasted until late 1973. We were cutting “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” in Munich when he got fired for the same reason —hitting the hard stuff too hard. (He survived and worked ever after.) And then my buddy Bobby Keys—I couldn’t save him from his own rock-and-roll shipwreck around that same time.

Bobby went down in a tub of Dom Pérignon. Bobby Keys, so the story goes, is the only man who knows how many bottles of it it takes to fill a bath, because that’s what he was floating in. This was just before the second-to-last gig on the ’73 European tour, in Belgium. No sign of Bobby at the band assembly that day, and finally I was asked if I knew where my buddy was—there had been no reply from his hotel room. So I went to his room and said, Bob, we gotta go, we gotta go right now. He’s got a cigar, bathtub full of champagne and this French chick in with him. And he said, fuck off. So be it. Great image and everything like that, but you might regret it, Bob. The accountant informed Bobby afterwards that he had earned no money at all on the tour as a result of that bathtub; in fact he
owed.
And it took me ten goddamn years or more to get him back in the band, because Mick was implacable, and rightly so. And Mick can be merciless in that way. I couldn’t answer for Bobby. All I could do was help him get clean, and I did.

A
s for me,
I was now put on the death list by a cheering press, starting with the music papers. A new angle. Not interested so much in the music, early in 1973.
New Musical Express
drew up a top ten of rock stars most likely to die, and put me at number one. I’m also the Prince of Darkness, the world’s most elegantly wasted man and so on—these titles that have stuck to me were coined then and were good forever. I often felt wished to death in this period, even by well-meaning people. At first you were a novelty. But then that’s what they thought about rock and roll, even into the ’60s. And then they wished you to fuck off. And then when you didn’t fuck off, they wished you to death.

Ten years I was number one on that list! It used to make me laugh. That was the only chart on which I was number one for ten years in a row. I was kind of proud of that position. I don’t think anybody’s held that position as long as I have. I was really disappointed when I went down the charts. Finally dropping down to number nine. Oh my God, it’s over.

These necromantics were given a boost by the story that I went to Switzerland to get my blood changed—perhaps the one thing everybody seems to know about me. OK for Keith, he can just go and have his blood changed and carry on. It’s said to have been some transaction with the devil deep under the stones of Zurich, face white as parchment, a kind of vampire attack in reverse and the rosiness returns to his cheeks. But I never changed it! That story comes from the fact that when I was going to Switzerland, to the clinic to clean up, I had to land at Heathrow and change planes. And there’s the Street of Shame following me, “Hey, Keith.” I said, “Look, shut the fuck up. I’m going to have me blood changed.” Boom, that’s it. And then off to the plane. After that, it’s like it’s in the Bible or something. I just said it to fob them off. It’s been there ever since.

I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me. I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl. Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s thirty years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it. I think some of it is that there is so much pressure to be that person that you become it, maybe, to a certain point that you can bear. It’s impossible not to end up being a parody of what you thought you were.

There is something inside me that just wants to excite that thing in other people, because I know it’s there in everybody. There’s a demon in me, and there’s a demon in everybody else. I get a uniquely ridiculous response—the skulls flow in by the truckload, sent by well-wishers. People love that image. They imagined me, they made me, the folks out there created this folk hero. Bless their hearts. And I’ll do the best I can to fulfill their needs. They’re wishing me to do things that they can’t. They’ve got to do this job, they’ve got this life, they’re an insurance salesman… but at the same time, inside of them is a raging Keith Richards. When you talk of a folk hero, they’ve written the script for you and you better fulfill it. And I did my best. It’s no exaggeration that I was basically living like an outlaw. And I got into it! I knew that I was on everybody’s list. All I had to do was recant and I’d be all right. But that was something I just couldn’t do.

T
he dope, and the cops
on our back, had gotten to a low point. This is going down the tube. But I never felt that
I
was. I thought, I can handle this. This is the way things are going, this is the way things are thrown at me, all I have to do is get through. I might have all this shit hitting me from this direction, but I know there’s a lot of people out there going, go, Keith. In a way it’s an election without a ballot. Who wins? The authorities or the public? And there’s me in the middle, or the Stones in the middle. At the time, I suppose sometimes I did wonder, is it just fun for everybody? Oh, Keith busted again. Woken up in the fucking early morning with your kids around and you’ve only been asleep for two hours, if that. I don’t mind a polite arrest. It was their manners. They barge in like a SWAT team. It really pissed me off. And you can’t do anything about it at the particular time; you’ve just got to swallow it. You know you’re being stitched up. “Mr. Richards says you shoved him up against the gate and said assume the position and kicked him in the ankles?” “Oh, no, no, no, wouldn’t have done that. Mr. Richards is exaggerating.”

Nonresident in the UK meant, in those days, that we could spend three months or so each year at home. In my case at Redlands and my house in Cheyne Walk, in London. In 1973, that address was under twenty-four-hour surveillance. It wasn’t just me. They had their eyes on Mick too, and busted him a couple of times. Most of that summer I couldn’t go to Redlands. It burned in July when we were there with the children. A mouse ate through the electrical wiring—stripped away the insulation. It was Marlon, aged four, who discovered it, screaming, “Fire, fire.”

It was mostly because of Marlon—Angela was too young to notice it—that I had started to feel a little more serious about the endless cop harassment. He would say, “Dad, why you looking out the window?” and I’d say, “I’m looking for the unmarked car,” and he’d go, “Why, Dad?” and I thought, oh fuck. I can play this game solo, but it’s starting to affect my kids. “Why are you frightened of the policemen, Daddy?” “I ain’t frightened of them. I’m just keeping an eye out for them.” But every day it would be an automatic thing to see whether they were parked across the street. Basically you were at war. All I had to do was stop taking the stuff. But I thought, first let’s win the war, then we’ll decide. Which was probably a really stupid attitude, but that’s the way it was. I wasn’t gonna bow to these motherfuckers.

They busted us soon after we got back from Jamaica in June 1973, when Marshall Chess was staying with us. They found cannabis, heroin, Mandrax and an unauthorized gun. This was perhaps the most famous bust because I faced many, many charges. There were burnt spoons with residue, needles, shooters, marijuana. Twenty-five charges.

I also had a brilliant lawyer in the person of Richard Du Cann. He was formidable looking, lean, austere. He had famously defended the publisher of D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
from prosecution by the government for obscenity. He was, soon after my case—in spite of it, perhaps—made chairman of the Bar. He told me, there’s nothing we can do about this evidence; you just have to plead guilty and I’m going to plead mitigation. “Guilty, Your Honor, guilty.” You get a bit hoarse after fifteen. And the judge is getting bored with this, because now he’s waiting for Du Cann’s speech. But the police had added at the last moment a twenty-sixth charge, a sawn-off shotgun, which was an automatic year in jail. And I suddenly said, “Not guilty, Your Honor.” And the wig went, “What?” The judge was ready for lunch; I was already done for. He said, “Why do you say not guilty to this charge?” And I said, “Because if it was sawn-off, Your Honor, why is there a sight on the end of the barrel?” It was an antique miniature, a kid’s shotgun that was made for bird hunting by some nobleman in France in the 1880s. Lovely inlay work and everything like that, but it was not sawn-off. And the judge looked at the cops, and I could see the cops’ faces drain as they realized they’d gone over the top. They’d tried one too many. It was a beautiful moment for me. You can’t get gleeful because you know you’ve just hit them right in the balls. The judge looks at them with a glare that says, “We had him. You idiots.” Then Du Cann goes into this amazing Shakespearean speech about artists and let’s face it, the gentleman here is being persecuted. This hardly seems to be necessary. A mere minstrel, etc. And the judge agreed, apparently, because he turned around and said £10 a charge, £250 in all. I’ll never forget the judge’s contempt for the police. He wanted to show them up with this light sentence because it was obvious they were trying to stitch me up. And so to lunch, Du Cann and I.