Someone had a nice riff recently about how it might go down when my old mucker Keith Richards finally meets the Grim Reaper.
The man with no tan – that’s Mr D, not Keef, though confusion is understandable – is sitting at home, sharpening his scythe by the fireplace and adjusting his cowl, when the door is knocked off its hinges and The Human Riff crashes in, bottle of JD in hand, and croaks: “Ok, mate, your time has come.”
Keith reportedly chuckled at that one and remarked that his biggest concern was not about having to explain himself to God but, rather, to what he variously called “God’s bitch” and “Mrs God”.
She’d be waiting for him at the gates, Keith imagined, hair up in curlers, rolling pin in hand, wondering what the hell had kept him out so late. It’s kinda nice to know that Keef fears someone, even if it’s not so much ’er indoors, as ’er upstairs.
In the meantime, he appears to be very much alive, or at least as alive as someone can be who bears all the signs of having been already exhumed from an unmarked grave on a moonless night deep in the heart of a Transylvanian forest.
Never mind puzzlers like: is there a God? (There isn’t.) Or what’s the meaning of life? (Who cares? Just live it.) Or even, when will the Dublin Port Tunnel be finished? (No answer possible.) The big philosophical question of this or any other age is: how come Keith Richards still walks – well, okay then, staggers – the earth?
Here is a man who now has more lines on his face than he has had up his nose – and that’s a lorra, lorra lines, folks – whose hair makes him look like a hedge dragged though a man backwards and who has generally lived such a life of drink, drug and tobacco-fuelled excess that he probably should have expired not once but nine times.
And yet, here he is again, Marlboro hanging out of the corner of his mouth, guitar slung low, back out on the road with the Strolling Bones for the umpteenth time, their combined age profile now pushing the 250 mark. And that’s just Charlie Watts. (Cue drum roll and Jagger drawling: “Chawlie’s good tonoight, inne?”)
Posthumous Thoughts
The great Charles has been poorly recently and is hopefully taking good care of himself. Jagger, what with his Pilates and washboard stomach, always has, and even Ronnie has apparently cleaned up his act. So that leaves Keith to do it his way, which is not a whole lot different to the way he’s being doing it for about 40 years straight – except none of them were. Again, we must ask: how the hell has he gotten away with it? And why don’t we read about the Keith Richards guide to a long and happy life in The Lancet?
To paraphrase the great Bill Hicks: you can only imagine the posthumous thoughts of someone like Jim Fixx, the man who invented jogging and who, unhappily, dropped dead of a heart attack while out pounding the beat one day.
So, in his afterlife reflection, there’d be Jim, grimly recalling the daily dawn slog and how, every so often, he’d meet a black limousine coming in the opposite direction. Barely glimpsed inside would be Keith, a bottle and two babes on the go, just getting back to his hotel after a night on the tiles. And Jim thinks to himself: “I’m dead, Keef’s alive. Shit.”
Of course, every time you write a column praising the great man’s supernatural staying power, there’s a little part of you worrying that, just as the old mag is hitting the newsstands, word will break that Keef has only gone and croaked. Kinda like that infamous NME review of a low-rent Elvis collection back in ’77 which hit the streets one day after poor old El died, as they say, while at stool.
Consequently, while every newspaper in the known world was boasting dramatic headlines and black-bordered obituaries on the death of The King, the NME’s contribution to this universe of mourning was a five-par, derisive review which appeared under the heading ‘The Great Cheeseburger Waddles On’.
But no, Keef would hardly go and ruin his buddy Sam’s day with an untimely demise. Fact, at the rate things are going, the Human Riff could still be at it when he’s about 90, taking his whiskey on a drip, being wheeled in a bath chair onto the stage, and desperately trying not to confuse his guitar lead and his catheter.
From Glimmer Twins to Zimmer Twins, from Cork Rock to Crock Rock, from VIP to OAP – those Stones just keep on rolling. And whatever about the other ones, it’s beginning to look now like Keef will never stop. I mean, never.
Slightly Woozy
You can picture the funeral scene: the bouquets, the painted ladies weeping, the solemn tributes of the rock aristocracy, among them a cryogenically frozen Pete Townshend, a stooped and bearded Paul Weller and Pete Doherty still looking like a twat. Suddenly, the silence is interrupted by a tapping sound. It’s coming from the coffin. It grows louder. And louder. And then, with a great crash and a splintering of wood, a gnarled, bejewelled hand – on one bony finger, a familiar death’s-head ring – appears, followed by its owner, an even woozier than usual Keith Richards. He clears his throat, fires up a smoke and says two words: “Let’s rock.” And why not? After all, it wouldn’t be the first time he was out of his box.