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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.

Next thing I know he's on the tour and we're traveling down to Bristol, me and my friend the writer James Fox in the back, my minder Svi Horowitz and Bert forward. Svi says to Bert, would you like a drink, Mr. Richards? And Bert goes, I think I'll have a light ale, thank you, Svi. And I wind down the partition and say, what? On the Sabbath, Dad? and I fall back laughing at the irony of all this. And then in Martinique he's got Brooke Shields on his knee. I couldn't get a word in edgeways. They were all over my dad, three or four top starlets. Where's Dad? Where do you think? He's down the bar surrounded by the latest batch of beauties. He had some energy. I remember him playing dominoes with five or six of us right through the night, and everybody else was down under the table, and he was knocking back neat rum at the same time. He'd never get drunk. Always steady. He was kind of like me, and that's the problem. You can drink more because it doesn't really do much. It's just something you do, like waking up or breathing.

A nita meanwhile, a fugitive from the press for a while after the boy shot himself on the premises, had holed up in the Alray Hotel in New York on 68th Street, with Marlon. Larry Sessler, Freddie's son, was there to look after them. Marlon's life revolved not around schooling, at least not of the conventional kind, but around Anita's new friends, the post-punk world centered on the Mudd Club, which was the anti-Studio 54 on White Street in New York. The world of Brian Eno, the Dead Boys and Max's Kansas City was Anita's hangout. Nothing, of course, had changed with Anita, and she probably remembers it as the worst of times for her, or counts herself lucky to be alive. It was very dangerous in New York at that time, not just from AIDS. Shooting up in Lower East Side hotels is no joke. Nor is the fourth floor of the Chelsea Hotel, specializing in angel dust and heroin.

To try and provide some stability, I took over Mick Taylor's rented house in Sands Point, Long Island, for them--the first of a series of mad movie-like mansions on Long Island that they lived in during this period. I would come to visit when I could, to see Marlon. I came out for Anita's birthday in 1980 and found Roy "Skipper" Martin, one of a bunch of people Anita would bring out from the Mudd Club. Roy had a nightly spot there doing some extreme kind of stand-up comedy. Roy had cooked this huge meal: roast lamb, Yorkshire pudding and all that stuff--and then apple crumble and custard. I asked him, is this real custard? And he said yes, and I said, no, it's not, you got it out of a tin. And he said, I fucking made it, it came out of a packet, Bird's vanilla, that you make with milk. So we had a set-to. I remember I threw a glass at him across the table.

I usually make an instant connection with my long-term, solid friends; I can spot them straightaway--some sense that we're going to trust each other. It's a binding contract. Roy is one of them, from that first night. Once I've made a connection, to me it's the biggest sin to let a friend down. Because that means you don't understand the whole meaning of friendship, comradeship, which is the most important thing. You'll hear more of Roy because as well as being a good friend of mine, he's still taking care of biz at my house in Connecticut. He's been on a family retainer, for want of a better term, ever since about a year after that meeting.

I'd be nowhere without my mates: Bill Bolton, my distant muscle on the road, built like a brick shithouse; Tony Russell, my minder for the past many years; Pierre de Beauport, guitar tech and musical adviser. The only trouble with true friends like that is we keep jumping in front of each other to save each other. Me, no, me, I'll take the hit. True friends. Hardest thing to find, but you never look for them--they find you; you just grow into each other. I can go nowhere without knowing I have some solid backup. Jim Callaghan in the past, and Joe Seabrook, who croaked a couple of years before I wrote this, were just that. Bill Bolton's married to Joe's sister, so it's all in the family. Cats that I've been through thick and thin with are very important to me.

For some reason all my close friends have been jailbirds at one time or another. I hadn't taken this in until I saw them on a list together with their thumbnail CVs. What does that tell us? Nothing, because each circumstance is so different. Bobby Keys is the only one who's been to jail several times, for, as he says, crimes he didn't even know he committed. We all stick together, me and my dastardly crew. We just want to do what we want to do without being bothered by all of that other crap. We love "The Adventures of Keith Richards." It'll come to a sticky end, I've no doubt. It's like a Just William,^* really. Roy, for example, ran away to sea at fifteen years old, from Stepney in the East End of London, which tells you a lot. He went into gold smuggling in the early '60s. A free spirit, Roy. He used to buy the gold in Switzerland and put it in special jackets and around his knickers, forty kilos of it, and fly it to the Far East, Hong Kong, Bangkok. Heavy gold bars made by Johnson Matthey,.999. One day when Roy got out of the taxi after flying for twenty-five hours, he couldn't get up because of the weight. He was on his knees at the taxi door, and the hotel doormen had to rush out and help him in. Roy was banged up, for other reasons, in the famous Arthur Road prison in Bombay, as it appears in the book Shantaram. No charge, no trial. Defence of India Regulations. And he escaped. He wanted to be an actor, and he was an actor in fringe theater for a while, which is probably why he was doing stand-up in the Mudd Club. Roy is one of the funniest guys I know, and occasionally he went out of control with manic energy, and it is manic energy. Nobody else going to do it? I'll show you. Once, in the Mayflower Hotel, there were loads of people after a show and suddenly I hear this knock at the window, this is about sixteen stories up, and there's Roy clinging to the sill, knocking on the window, going, "Help, help." There's police cars going by and people below calling, "Hey, up there. Someone's got a jumper." That's not funny, Roy. Get your ass in. Underneath him there was a very narrow brick ledge. He just had his toes on it. There are guys who should not be alive.

After the '81 tour I persuaded Roy to look after Marlon and Anita full-time. One of his briefs was to see whether he could get Marlon to go to school. Bert joined them after the 1982 European tour. What a menage a trois that was. Bert, Marlon and Roy, living in the Gatsby mansions with Anita coming and going. Bert always thought Anita was nuts. And yes, she was pretty far out; she just carried on, out of her brain all this time. It was like some crew stranded on half pay in a series of huge, deserted mansions. Harold Pinter meets Scott Fitzgerald. Roy was a sailor anyway. Bert and Marlon weren't, but they were all adrift, let's put it that way, in this foreign country, though Marlon was so used to foreign countries he didn't really care which one he was in. Roy lived with Bert from 1982 until he died. I put them there while I was on the road. I only ever visited there off and on, pop in and say hi. So I should have Marlon describe what gothic adventures came to pass in those lost years on the shores of Long Island. Marlon: The worst part was growing up in New York, because in the late '70s it was a scary place. I didn't go back to school for all of 1980. We lived in the Alray Hotel, in the middle of Manhattan, which wasn't too bad. It was like Eloise at the Plaza. We went to movies. Anita used to take me round to see Andy Warhol, William Burroughs. I think he lived in the men's showers at the Chelsea Hotel. It was all tiled, and there were washing lines with used condoms on them, hanging across the room. Very strange man. From there we moved to the Mick Taylor-vacated house on Sands Point, Long Island, for about six months. The first filmed version of The Great Gatsby was shot there, in which Sands Point is East Egg, with many acres of lawns and a huge beachfront and a saltwater pool, all decaying. We used to hear '20s jazz music coming from the gazebo, dinner parties and clinking glasses and laughter that dissipated as you walked towards it. There were certainly mob connections in this house. I found family snaps in the attic of Sinatra and Dean Martin, all the Rat Pack, hanging out there in the '50s. This was where Roy first turned up, before he came to live with us for good, this crazy Englishman who Anita brought from the Mudd Club, where his act was to drink a whole bottle of cognac on stage while telling jokes and blabbering on and reciting a poem by Shel Silverstein called "The Perfect High," about a boy called Gimmesome Roy, and slowly peeling off his clothes. All for two hundred dollars and a bottle of cognac. Anita brought him home to the big house, and we put him up in the attic at first, but he completely wrecked the room in a drunken rant. He was terrifying. We had to kick him out of the house, essentially. He would drink a bottle of cognac in the morning and sing, so we just shifted him into the doghouse, which was like a shed. He had an affinity for the Labrador at the time and he would spend the hours singing away with the dog. It was a mild spring, so it wasn't too bad. Anita collected other fringe acts too. The writer and beat poet Mason Hoffenberg often used to live there with us. This little bearded Jewish gnome who would sit naked out in the garden and sort of spew down at people who drove by. He was going through his naturist stage, which was a bit terrifying for Long Island. We called him the garden gnome. He stayed for quite a while that summer. Roy became a permanent fixture in late '81, having been on tour with Keith, a kind of official minder to us when we moved to Old Westbury, another huge mansion where we lived from 1981 until 1985. It was an enormous place with only the four of us living there and semi-derelict, absolutely no furniture and no heating but with a beautiful ballroom I used to roller-skate around, its walls hand painted on canvas in the 1920s but now peeling. In fact, by the end of our stay the whole edifice, with its two main staircases and two wings, looked like Miss Havisham's. The only furniture was a big white Bosendorfer piano that Roy used to play on and do his Liberace routine. And I had my drum kit at the other end of the ballroom, so we sort of jammed. We had a good sound system and all Keith's records, so we'd put a record on and mess about and then Roy would open a tin for dinner. What tin do you want tonight, Spam or...? So I became a vegetarian after that. No, I don't want any more Spam, Roy, thanks a lot. Anita was going through a very self-destructive period at this time. She was in a dark place. If she went to New York she would drink a lot when she got back to calm whatever she had taken and go into violent alcoholic rages. Despite this, interesting people were coming all the time via Anita--Basquiat, Robert Fraser came down, and Anita's punk friends, like the fellows from the Dead Boys and some of the guys from the New York Dolls. It was quite crazy. I don't think Anita got any credit for the fact that she did contribute to the punk movement. A lot of them, at least New York ones, would come and spend weekends at our house. She'd come back from the Mudd Club and CBGBs with a car full of pink-haired nutters. Nice people generally, just nerdy Jewish kids, really. Every now and again Roy would go up to the office in New York with receipts and come back with big envelopes full of hundred-dollar bills, and that would be the money for the month. It was hilarious. So when I got my allowance, what did I do with this brand-new crisp hundred-dollar bill? I just wanted to go and buy some comic books, and I was waving this thing around. They got quite used to us in Long Island. Roy would go ninety miles an hour everywhere, screaming. And he drove huge Lincoln Continentals, those big pimpmobiles we used to rent. Roy would write them off once every two months and we'd get another one. He used to have his two days off, where he'd say, right, I'm going away for two days, don't bother me. And he'd just go off on a drinking binge and he'd come back with bruises or all cut up. On one spectacular outing Roy got into some argument in a bar in Long Island. He left the bar, came back ten minutes later and drove the car right through the bar windows, crashed three cars outside and a bunch of motorcycles. He then got out of the car, walked back into the bar he'd just wrecked to make a telephone call. Next day he was arrested and put in jail and we bailed him out. But Bert was very patient with all that. Oh, Roy in trouble again? Luckily for Roy, it was a town with a private police force, so every time Roy would get into a car crash they'd just sort of drop him off at home. Bert used to go down in the evening to a Hells Angels bar by the train station in Westbury. And he'd sit there with all these Hells Angels, these guys with the caps and the leather, for hours and hours and hours. He'd sit there with Roy, and Roy would entertain everyone, yodeling and screaming. Bert, on the other hand, lived a life of strict routine. He used to get up and have a swim, fix his own breakfast. He had these very set meals, now cooked by Roy. He always had a glass of Harveys Bristol Cream at seven bells. Because Wheel of Fortune came on at seven thirty. He always watched Wheel of Fortune. He had a thing for Vanna White, used to cheer her on, yell at people who were rude to her. And then at eight o'clock he'd have dinner and then watch TV till midnight, drinking Bass and dark Navy rum. Thank God the houses were large enough that sometimes I could just disappear and I didn't have to see people. One person could have a wing to himself, and basically I wouldn't know what the hell they were doing for weeks on end. People say, oh, remember when Jean-Michel Basquiat visited for a week? No! Maybe I was in the east wing then. We used to change bedrooms every few months, just to make it interesting. I wouldn't see Roy for two weeks. I didn't know where his bedroom was. The landlord never did any maintenance on the place, so it was just getting worse and worse and worse. Once my bedroom became too decrepit, I would move into another one--luckily there were about fifteen of them--until eventually I moved all the way to the attic. It was the last place left! A huge attic space, the size of a cathedral up there, and I had my bed and a TV and my desk, and I would just lock the door and not let anyone else up there. By then we said, we can't stay here anymore; it's falling down. Or we've destroyed it. So that's why we moved to the final mansion at Mill Neck, on the edge of Oyster Bay. Around '83, Anita moved back to England because of visa problems and stayed there, coming over only for the occasional visit. So she wasn't there for this last gigantic house with twelve or thirteen bedrooms, so incredibly cold in the winter. We had a fireplace in one living room. Roy's room was heated, Bert's room was heated, and we would all sort of meet up sometimes in the kitchen. If you walked in the hallway, you had to put an overcoat on. This house had an elevator up to the rooms we lived in. One day the elevator broke down and we didn't go out for two weeks. Then we discovered that the front door had been left open and the whole ground floor had frozen into an ice ballroom, icicles hanging from the chandeliers. It was like Narnia. It was like Gormenghast. I came upon the African frogs we had as pets frozen solid in their tank, many years pre Damien Hirst. Around this time I asked Keith if I could have guitar lessons. "No son of mine is going to be a guitar player," he said. "Certainly not. I want you to grow up to be a lawyer or accountant." He was joking, of course, but very dry, and I was quite traumatized. The amazing thing is that I went to school, Portledge, a posh local school in Locust Valley, driven by Roy. But intermittently, let's put it that way. My attendance record wasn't very good. I didn't really mind all this self-sufficiency. I was kind of happy to not have everyone around, really, because it was exhausting with Anita and Keith. I just wanted to go to school as best I could and get things done and have some sort of normal life, and I felt I could do that much better by myself. Or at least with Roy. Eventually I got kicked out of the Locust Valley school for not showing up, not doing my homework, and I just gave up on school, really. Keith was getting advice from one of his relations saying that I was a complete delinquent and I should go to military academy. There was even a move to convince Keith to send me off to West Point. I wouldn't have minded, actually. But Keith said, well, what do you want to do? He said, do you want to just give up school altogether, and I said, well, no, I want to get my education; I want to go to England because I can't do it in America. So I came over to England in 1988 and moved in across the street from Anita on Tite Street in Chelsea and got a flat. And lest it be forgotten, I got four A levels.

For Marlon himself, and for me, it was the defining point. It was his decision to go back to England. He said to me, all I'm going to get is Long Island bullshit. And that's when I took my hat off to Marlon. He could take his choice, he could be the Long Island brat, but thank God he's smarter than that and got out of there and managed to cope. Maybe Bert was one of the first solid anchors. Maybe he became the steadying force. The proof is in the pudding. I'm sure things could have been done far better, but we were on the run. And Marlon had a unique upbringing. Far from normal. Hence, probably, why he's bringing up his own kids in a very secure way, hands on all the time. Because he never got that. By now Marlon understands; it was the times, and the circumstances, that made it tough on him. It was very difficult to be one of the Rolling Stones and take care of your kids at the same time.

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