Life (55 page)

As to Patti’s three brothers, the toughest challenge was Big Al Jr., and he really, at the time, did not like me
at all
. He wanted to fight; he wanted an OK Corral. So one day at his house in LA I said, let’s cut the crap, Al, let’s go outside, let’s take it on, let’s do it now. You’re six-foot-what, and I’m five-foot-this. You’ll probably kill me, but you’ll never walk the same again because I’m fast. Before you kill me I’ll sever you and your sister. Your sister will hate you forever. He threw in the towel. I knew that was the kicker. The rest about the macho bullshit didn’t mean anything. That was his way of testing me.

Greg took a little longer. He’s a nice guy, he’s got eight kids, he’s working hard for a living and keeps having babies. This is a religious family that I’m married into; they go to church, they form prayer circles. We have different ideas on religion. I’ve never found heaven, for example, a particularly interesting place to go. In fact, I take the view that God, in his infinite wisdom, didn’t bother to spring for two joints—heaven and hell. They’re the same place, but heaven is when you get everything you want and you meet Mummy and Daddy and your best friends and you all have a hug and a kiss and play your harps. Hell is the same place—no fire and brimstone—but they just all pass by and don’t see you. There’s nothing, no recognition. You’re waving, “It’s me, your father,” but you’re invisible. You’re on a cloud, you’ve got your harp, but you can’t play with nobody because they don’t see you.
That’s
hell.

Rodney, the third brother, was a naval chaplain at the time I met Patti, so I took him on on theology. Who actually wrote this book, Rodney? Is it the word of God or is it the edited version? Has it been tampered with? And of course he’s got no answer to that, and we still love to joust about these things. It’s very important to him. He likes the challenge. He’ll come back with another thing the next week, “Well, the Lord says…” “Oh, he does, does he?” I had to fight my way into Patti’s family, but once you’re in, they’d die for you.

I
t was good
that I had such a distraction of the heart at that time because there was a bitter current beginning to flow between me and Mick. Its onset seemed quite sudden, and it was shocking to me. It dated from the time I finally kicked heroin. I wrote a song called “All About You,” which was on
Emotional Rescue
in 1980 and on which I sang one of my then-rare vocals. It’s usually taken by the lyric watchers to be a song of parting from Anita. It seems like an angry boy-girl song, a bitter love song, a throwing in of the towel:

If the show must go on

Let it go on without you

So sick and tired

Of hanging around with jerks like you.

There’s never one thing a song’s about, but in this case if it was about anything, it was probably more about Mick. There were certain barbs aimed that way. It was at that time when I was deeply hurt. I realized that Mick had quite enjoyed one side of my being a junkie—the one that kept me from interfering in day-to-day business. Now here I was, off the stuff. I came back with the attitude of, OK, thanks a lot. I’ll relieve you of the weight. Thank you for carrying the burden for several years while I was out there. I’ll make recompense in time. I’d never fucked up; I’d given him some great songs to sing. The only person it fucked up was me. “Got out of there, Mick, by the skin of my teeth,” and he’d got out of a few things by the skin of his teeth too. I think I expected this burst of gratitude: sort of, thank God, mate.

But what I got was, I’m running this shit. It was that rebuff. I would ask, what’s happening here, what are we doing with this? And I’d get
no reply
. And I realized that Mick had got all of the strings in his hands and he didn’t want to let go of a single one. Had I really read this right? I didn’t know power and control were that important to Mick. I always thought we’d worked on what was good for all of us. Idealistic, stupid bastard, right? Mick had fallen in love with power while I was being… artistic. But all we had was ourselves. What’s the point of struggling between us? Look how thin the ranks are. There’s Mick, me and Charlie, there’s Bill.

The phrase from that period that rings in my ears all these years later is “Oh, shut up, Keith.” He used it a lot, many times, in meetings, anywhere. Even before I’d conveyed the idea, it was “Oh, shut up, Keith. Don’t be stupid.” He didn’t even know he was doing it—it was so fucking rude. I’ve known him so long he can get away with murder like that. At the same time, you think about it; it hurts.

At the time I was cutting “All About You,” I took Earl McGrath, who was nominally running Rolling Stones Records, to look at the wonderful view of New York from the roof of Electric Lady Studios. I said, if you don’t do something about this, you see that pavement down there? It’s yours. I virtually picked him up. I said, you’re supposed to be the go-between with Mick. What’s going on? You can’t control this. Earl’s a lovely bloke, and I realized he wasn’t cut out to do some of this stuff between Mick and me on a bad night. But I wanted to let him know how I was feeling about this. I couldn’t bring Mick up there and throw him off, and I had to do something.

I was losing Ronnie too, but temporarily and for other reasons. More to the point, Ronnie was getting lost. He was freebasing. He and Jo were living up in Mandeville Canyon, around 1980, and he had a little gang, a clique that did it with him. Crack cocaine, this stuff’s worse than smack. I never did it. Never, never. I didn’t like the smell of it. And I didn’t like what it did to people. Once in Ronnie’s house, he and Josephine and everybody else around him were freebasing. And when you’re doing that, that’s it, that’s all there is in the world. There were all these fawning people around Ronnie, stupid blokes in straw Stetsons with feathers. I went into his john, and he was in there with loads of hangers-on and snide little dealers, and they’re all on the phone in the john, trying to get more of whatever crap it is they’re freebasing. There’s somebody else flaming up in the bath. I walked in, sat down and took a crap. Hey, Ron! Not a word. It was like I wasn’t there. Well, that’s it, he’s gone. Now I know what I’ve got to do; I’ve got to treat the man differently from now on. I said to Ronnie, what are you doing this for? Oh, you wouldn’t understand. Oh, really? I heard that phrase from potheads many years ago. And then I think, OK, well, I’ll understand or not, but I’ll make up my own mind.

Everybody had wanted Ronnie off the US tour in ’81—he was just getting too out of it—but I said, no, I’ll guarantee him. That meant I personally guaranteed to insure the tour and promised that Ronnie would not be misbehaving. Anything to get the Stones on the road. I figured I could handle him. And then in Frisco, the middle of October 1981, we’re on the tour, the J. Geils Band along with us, and we’re at the Fairmont Hotel, which looks a bit like Buckingham Palace, with an east wing and a west wing. I was in one wing and Ronnie was in the other. And I heard there was a big freebase party going on in Ronnie’s room. He was being irresponsible to the max. He had promised me he wouldn’t be doing that shit on the road. The red curtain came down. So I went downstairs, marched through the central lobby of the Fairmont. Patti was saying, don’t go mad, don’t do it. By then she’d torn my shirt off. I said, fuck it, he’s putting me and the band’s life on the line. If anything went wrong it was going to cost me a few mil and blow everything. I got there, he opened the door and I just socked him. You cunt,
boom.
So he fell backwards over the couch and the rest of my punch carried me over on top of him, the couch fell over and we both nearly fell out the window. We scared ourselves to death. The couch was going over and both of us were looking at the window, thinking, we could be going through here! After that I don’t really remember much. I’d made my point.

Ronnie’s been in and out of rehab many times since then. I put a sign on Ronnie’s dressing room on tour not long ago that read, “Rehab is for quitters.” You could take it any way you want. To mean keep going to these joints that actually do nothing for you, all you’re doing is paying a lot of money and you walk out and do the same thing. They have rehabs for gamblers, which is the one Ronnie went to. Ronnie’s idea of rehab was mainly a strategy to get away from the pressure. In recent times, he’s found a smooth little rehab place—he tells me these stories, this is straight out of the horse’s mouth. I’ve got this great one in Ireland. Oh yeah, what do they do there? It’s great, nothing. I walked in and said, well, what’s the regime? “Mr. Wood, there isn’t one.” The only rule is, there’s no phone calls and no visitors. This is perfect! You mean I don’t have to do anything? No. In fact, they let him go down the pub for three hours every night. And he’s in there with people that are in for gambling, people that are actually hiding, like he is, just to get the day-to-day living off their back.

Once when he’d come back from rehab, I said, “He’s OK now. I’ve known him stoned out of his brain and I’ve known him straight and sober. Quite honestly it makes little difference. But there’s a bit more focus on him now.” I stand by that, basically. That was the weird thing about it, when you come down to it. All this shit and money he’d spent on this crap and on getting off of it, and no bloody difference. He’d just look you in the eye a little more maybe. In other words, it’s not about the shit, it’s something else. “You wouldn’t know, man.”

I
’ve been out
in all weathers with Ronnie, and it shows. One rare occasion a year after our fight, after he’d laid down the crack pipe, required him to be in perfect order, to put no foot wrong. And he duly stepped up and he did a great job. I asked him to come with me to Redlands to be there when I met my dad again for the first time in twenty years.

I was scared to meet Bert. To me he was still the guy I’d left twenty years earlier, when I was a teenager. I had some idea over the years that he was OK from relations who had seen him, who told me that he was hanging out at his local pub. I was scared to meet him because of what I’d done in the meantime. That’s why it took me twenty years to get round to it. In my mind, I was an absolute reprobate to my father—the guns, the drugs, the busts. The shame, the degradation for him. I had humiliated him. That was my thought—that I’d really let him down. Every headline that hit the goddamn newspapers, “Richards Busted Again,” made it even more difficult for me to get in touch with my dad. I thought he was better off not seeing me.

There aren’t a lot of blokes that scare me anymore. But during my childhood, to disappoint my dad was devastating for me. I was frightened of his disapproval. I wrote earlier how the thought of it—the idea of not living up to his expectations —could still reduce me to tears, because when I was a child, his disapproval would totally isolate me, make me almost disappear. And that stuff was just frozen in time. Gary Schultz, who told me his regrets at not making amends with his dad before he died, talked me into it, although I’d always known I had to do it.

It wasn’t difficult to track him down through relations. He’d been living in the back room of a pub in Bexley for all those years, never apparently needing anything from me, or certainly never asking. So I wrote to him.

I remember I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room in Washington, DC, in December 1981, near my birthday, scarcely able to believe that I was reading his reply. We couldn’t meet until the European tour of 1982, a few months after that. And Redlands was the appointed place. In the meantime, I wrote to him.

I am really looking forward to seeing your ugly mug after all these years!! I bet you’ll still scare the shit out of me. All my love, your son Keith.

P.S. I also have a couple of your grandchildren to show you.

Soon come

K

I had brought Ronnie with me as a humorous buffer, clown, just a sidekick, a friend, because I didn’t think I could handle it by myself. I sent a car to the pub in Bexley to bring Bert to me. Gary Schultz was there at Redlands too, and he remembers me, very nervous, counting down the time—he’ll be here in two hours; he’ll be here in half an hour. And then he arrived. And out got this little old bloke. We looked at each other and he said, “Hello, son.” He was completely different. It was a shock to see him. Bandy legs, limping a bit with his war wound. It was like looking at some old rascal; he looked like a retired pirate. What twenty years can do! Silver curly locks, an amazing combo of gray sideburns with mustache. He always had one.

This was not my
dad.
I didn’t expect him to be the same as I had left him, a sturdy middle-aged chap, stocky, well built. But he was a completely different person. “Hello, son.” “Dad.” That breaks the ice, I can tell you. Bert walked away a little bit at one point, and Gary Schultz tells me that I said to him, “You never knew I was the son of Popeye, did you?” So it was “Come in, Dad.” And once he was in, couldn’t get rid of him. Still a pipe man, smoking St. Bruno flake, the same dark tobacco I remember as a kid.

The weird thing is my dad turned out to be a great piss artist. Not when I was growing up, then it was maybe one beer a night, or on the weekends if we were out socializing. Now he was one of the greatest rummies I’d ever met, I mean, Jesus Christ, Bert! There are still stools commemorated to him in several pubs, especially in Bexley. Rum was his drink. Dark Navy rum.

All he said about those headlines of mine was “You’ve been a bit of a bugger, haven’t you?” So now we could talk like grown men. And suddenly I had another friend. I had a dad again. I’d given that up; a father figure didn’t come into it anymore. It was a full circle. We became conspiratorial and friendly and we found out that we really liked each other. We started to hang and decided it was time for him to travel. I wanted him to see the world from the top. Showing off, I suppose. He devoured the whole bloody globe! He wasn’t in awe of it, he absorbed it. So then we began to have all the fun we hadn’t had the time for. World traveler Bert Richards, who’d never been in an airplane, never been anywhere except Normandy up until that point. His first flight was to Copenhagen. The only time I saw Bert scared. As the engines were revving up, I saw his knuckles whiten. He was clutching his pipe, about to break it. But he brassed it out, and once we were in the air he loosened up. The first takeoff is hairy no matter who you are. So then he started chatting up the stewardess and he was on his way.