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The Stones only started to make money through touring in the '80s--the tour of '81-'82 was the start of the big stadium venues and broke box office records for rock shows. Bill Graham was the promoter. He was the king of rock concerts at the time, a big backer of the counterculture, of unknown artists and good causes, as well as bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. But that last tour was a rather dodgy period--a lot of bits were going missing. The mathematics weren't adding up. To put it more simply, we needed to get control of our shows again. Rupert Loewenstein had reordered the finances so that, basically, we didn't get cheated out of eighty percent of the takings, which was nice. On a fifty-dollar ticket, up till then, we'd get three dollars. He set up sponsorship and clawed back merchandising deals. He cleaned out the scams and fiddles, or most of them. He made us viable. I loved Bill dearly, he was a wonderful guy, but his head was beginning to turn. He was getting too big for his boots, as they all do when they've been doing it for too long. Separate from Bill, his business partners were stealing money from us and openly bragging about it--one of them telling how he bought a house with it. The inside machinations are nothing to do with me. Eventually I'm going to end up on stage playing. That's why I pay other people. The whole point is that I can only do what I do if I have the space to do it in. That's why you work with people like Bill Graham or Michael Cohl or whoever. They take this weight off your shoulders, but you're going to get a good cut of it. All I've got to do is have somebody on my staff like Rupert or Jane who makes sure at the end of the day that the right shekels end up in the right pot. There was a big meeting on one of the islands when we threw in our lot with Michael Cohl, and he then did all our tours up to A Bigger Bang in 2006.

Mick does have a talent for discovering good people, but they can get discarded or left lying about. Mick finds them, Keith keeps them, is the motto in our troupe, and it's borne out by the facts. There were two people particularly that Mick had picked up for his solo stuff, and without knowing it, he actually put me in contact with some of the best--guys I wouldn't let go of again or ever. Pierre de Beauport, who came to Barbados as Mick's sole assistant when Mick and I met up again, was one. He had taken a summer job out of college to learn to make records in New York, and Mick brought him along on his solo tour. Pierre can not only mend anything from tennis rackets to fishing nets, he's a genius at guitars and amplifiers. When I came to Barbados, all I'd brought with me was one old Fender tweed amp, which was barely working and sounded terrible. Pierre of course, as a rookie working for Mick, had been warned never to cross the cold war battle lines, as if it was North and South Korea, when all it was was East and West Berlin. One day Pierre, cutting through all that, got hold of the Tweedie, stripped it, reassembled it and made it work perfectly. He got a hug from me. It wasn't very long before I knew that he's the man. Because also--and he hid it for a long time--he can play guitar like a motherfucker. He can play this shit better than I can. We fell in through our total infatuation with and obsessive love of the guitar. After that, he was backstage for me, handing me the guitars. He's the guitar curator and trainer. But we're a team music-wise too, to the point where now, if I think I've got a good song, I'll play it to Pierre before I'll play it to anybody else.

All these guitars Pierre presides over have nicknames and personalities. He knows their different sounds and properties. Most of the people who made them in '54, '55, '56 are dead and gone. If they were forty or fifty years old then, they would now be well over a hundred. But you can still read the names of the checkers, the ones who gave them the seal of approval, inside the guitars. So the guitars get their nicknames from their checkers. On "Satisfaction" I play a lot of Malcolm, a Telecaster, while on "Jumpin' Jack Flash" I play Dwight, another Telecaster. Micawber is a real all-rounder. Micawber's got a lot of highs; Malcolm's got more bottom on it. And Dwight's an in-betweener.

I take my hat off to Pierre and the rest of his backline crew. On stage, things go wrong suddenly. They have to be prepared for a guitar with a broken string to come back for a restring and have one ready that's going to sound similar and fling it over the guy's neck in ten seconds. In the old days, fuck it, if you broke your guitar, you just walked off and let everybody else carry on until you'd sorted it yourself. With all this film and video, everything is under scrutiny. Ronnie's a string breaker. Mick is actually the worst. When he plays guitar, he thrashes the thing with his pick.

The second new arrival was Bernard Fowler, singer with the band ever since, along with Lisa Fischer and Blondie Chaplin, who came a few years later. Bernard too was working with Mick on his solo stuff. Bernard has since sung on my solo records and on every song I've written since he arrived on the scene. The first thing I said to Bernard when he was doing some backup vocals in the studio was "You know, I didn't want to like you." "Why not?" "You're one of his guys." Bernard cracked up, and the ice was broken. I felt I stole him, in a way, from Mick. But I wanted to get out of this embattled idea anyway, and we sing good together. So all that shit went out of the way.

I smuggled Bobby Keys back into the band in 1989 for the Steel Wheels tour, but it wasn't easy. He'd been out for ten years or so, apart from some one-night gigs. It took me that long to get him back in. And when I did, I didn't tell anyone at first. We were rehearsing for the new tour at the Nassau Coliseum. We were getting to the dress rehearsals, and I wasn't too happy with the horns, so I rang Bobby and said, get on a plane and hide yourself when you get here. So we're going to play "Brown Sugar," and Bobby was in, but Mick didn't know he was there. I just told Bobby, when we play "Brown Sugar," come in on the solo. So it was solo time, and Mick looked round at me and said, "What the fuck...?" I just said, "See what I mean?" And when it was over, Mick looked at me like, well, you can't argue with that. I mean, baby, that is rock and roll. But it took me years to grease Bobby back into the band. As I said, some of my friends can really fuck up, but so can I, and so can Mick, so can anybody. If you can't fuck up, where's your halo? My life is full of broken halos. Mick didn't speak one word to Bobby for the whole tour. But he stayed.

I added one more member to the Richards gang in the person of Steve Crotty--one of those people who just find me, who become instant friends. Steve comes from Preston, Lancashire. His dad was a butcher and a rough man, which is why Steve left home at fifteen for a life of pretty rough adventure. I met Steve in Antigua, where he ran a famous restaurant, a big hangout for musicians and yachtsmen called Pizzas in Paradise. Anyone recording at George Martin's AIR Studios in Montserrat would come back to Antigua, so Steve knew many people in the business. We used to stay at Nelson's Dockyard, which was not far from his restaurant.

I struck up immediately with Steve, recognizing a kindred spirit. A jailbird, of course. My mates go to the most distinguished jails. In Steve's case, he'd recently been released from the prison outside Sydney, Australia, in Botany Bay, where Captain Cook landed. He was there, sentenced to hard labor, for eight years, of which he did three and a half, locked up twenty-three hours a day. Part of the reason Steve survived its brutalities untouched was that it was known he had kept his mouth shut and taken the rap for two friends who got away. That's the kind of bloke he is. For such a sweet-natured man, hard though he is, Steve's taken a lot of beatings. One day Spanish sailors, cracked out of their heads, came into his bar at three a.m., and he told them he was closing. They nearly killed him. He was in a coma for some days, suffered aneurysms, lost nine teeth, couldn't see for two weeks. Why had they beat him so badly? The last bit of dialogue exchanged was Steve saying, "Come back later today and I'll buy you a drink." He turns to the bar and hears, "I fuck your mother." So Steve says, "Well, somebody did. What do you want me to do, call you Daddy?" He suffered for that.

When Steve had recovered, I asked him to come and look after my place in Jamaica, where he is today as sheriff of the Caribbean conference. While this book was being written, a guy came armed with a pistol to rob my house there. Steve floored him with an electric guitar. The guy's elbow hit the floor and his gun went off. The bullet went in an inch from Steve's willy, missed all the major arteries and went out. What you call a clean shot. The guy that broke in was shot dead by the police.

There was one time the blade was called for while we were rehearsing in Montserrat. We were recording a song called "Mixed Emotions." One of our engineers was there and witnessed it, and he had better tell it. I don't include it just to brag about how accurate I am with a throwing knife (although it's lucky I made my mark on this occasion), but to show the kind of thing that triggers the red mist--in this case someone coming into the studio who didn't play an instrument, who knew fuck all about what I was doing and tried to tell me how to improve the track. Yap, yap, yap. As this eyewitness remembered: Some bigwig figure in the music business, invited by Mick, came to Montserrat to discuss some contract to do with touring. He obviously fancied himself for his producing abilities, because we're standing in the studio area, playing back "Mixed Emotions," which was going to be the first single. And Keith is standing there with his guitar on and Mick's standing there and we're listening to it. The song finishes, and the guy says, Keith, great song, man, but I tell you, I think if you arranged it a little bit differently it would be so much better. So Keith went to his doctor's bag and pulled out a knife and threw it, and it landed right between the bloke's legs, boinggg. It was really like William Tell; it was great. Keith says, listen, sonny, I was writing songs before you were a glint on your father's dick. Don't you tell me how to write songs. And he walked out. And then Mick had to smooth it over, but it was fantastic. I'll never forget.

The great Steel Wheels tour was all set to go when I got a visit from Rupert Loewenstein--not from Mick, who should have come himself--to say that Mick would not do the tour if Jane Rose was on it. Jane Rose was, and still is, as I write, my manager, last heard of in these pages heroically sticking by me during my last cleanup in the days after the Toronto bust in 1977, and all through the months, years, of the court cases in Canada that followed. She is an unseen presence on the page in much of the narrative since then. We were in the summer of 1989, ten years after those events, and Jane had certainly become a thorn in Mick's side--though he put the thorn there himself. Jane had worked jointly for Mick and me for what now seems like an impossibly long time, from that Toronto period up to 1983, though for a while her working for me was unofficial--she was delegated by Mick to stick by me and help me out. In 1983, Mick decided he wanted to get rid of her and dismissed her from the Rolling Stones. He didn't tell me. And when I found out, I wouldn't have it. Not me, pal. I'm not going to throw off Jane Rose. I believed in her; she stayed with me in Toronto, she went through all this stuff with me and also she'd been acting as my manager. I rehired her that same day.

Jane immediately became a force to be reckoned with. When Mick had refused to tour in 1986, Jane started setting up projects for me--first an ABC television special with Jerry Lee Lewis, then Jumpin' Jack Flash with Aretha Franklin, then a record deal with Virgin, which had newly arrived in the United States, to make the Winos record. It was me and Jane, and Jane was driven. So now Mick wanted to insist that she couldn't come on the tour. It was the same old problem--someone getting too close to me, making it difficult to control me, and now someone who kept thwarting Mick's plans for controlling the whole shebang. Jane is tenacious; she's my bulldog. She just will not let go. And she usually wins it. In this case she was fighting simply to have me consulted on important stuff, which Mick was always avoiding. So she flew directly in the face of Mick's desire to command. Worse for her in this situation, and she's had a doubly hard task because of it, she's a chick.

But Jane did some major things for me, from the Winos deal to my appearance in Pirates of the Caribbean, which she pulled off by sheer tenacity. After she'd done the deal with Virgin for me, Rupert asked her if she thought the Stones might switch to the label, and in 1991 we signed an enormous deal with them. Jane can be annoying at times, bless her heart. And she's inflicted bruises--often people bump into her expecting her to give way and find a rock in their path. I have a tiger in disguise here, and a devoted one. When Mick gave his ultimatum to ban her back in 1989, he had been incensed by my slipping Bobby Keys back into the lineup, defying his ban on Bobby, used as he was to running everything. Maybe this was his way of getting back at me. But my response to his ultimatum was predictable: if you won't tour with Jane Rose, no tour. So the tour went ahead with Jane on it, and in some ways I don't think Mick got over it. But he chose his ground badly.

There are comic sides to all this--one of which was Mick's pathological inability to consult me before executing his Great Ideas. Mick always thought he needed more and more props and effects. Piling on the gimmicks. The inflatable cock was great. But because a couple of things worked, every tour we started, I'd have to send acts home. I think you're better off without any props. Or the minimum. Many times I cut down the props projects on these tours. He wanted stilt walkers. Luckily, at dress rehearsals it was raining, and all the stilt walkers fell over. I had to fire thirty-five dancers who were going to appear for about thirty seconds on "Honky Tonk Women." Sight unseen, I sent them all home. Sorry, girls, go hoof it somewhere else. That was a hundred thousand dollars down the sink. Mick had got used to the fait accompli in the '70s, believing I wouldn't notice his decisions. I almost always did, even then, especially when it came to music. My weary faxes would go like this: Mick, how is it that the Stones tracks are being mixed and about to be issued without a by your leave? I find this odd to say the least. Terrible mixes anyway. If you don't know that by now... this is thrown at me as a fait accompli. How could you be so clumsy? Who chose the tracks? Who chose the mixing? Why do you imagine that it is your decision? Will you never realize that you cannot piss around with me?

It wasn't Mick any more than the rest of us who conceived these megatours: Steel Wheels, Voodoo Lounge, Bridges to Babylon, Forty Licks, A Bigger Bang--these great traveling shows that kept us on the road for many months at a time from 1989 to 2006. It was basically public demand that expanded them to this size. People say, why do you keep doing this? How much money do you need? Well, everyone likes making money, but we just wanted to do shows. And we're working in an unknown medium. You felt drawn to it like a moth to a flame because it was there and they wanted it. And what can you say? That must be right. You've asked for it; you got it. I prefer theaters, but where are you going to put everybody? We never realized just what the scale of this thing would become. How did it get so big when we're not doing anything much different than what we did in 1963 in the Crawdaddy Club? Our usual set list is two-thirds standard Stones numbers, the classics. The only thing that's different is the audiences have grown and the show's gotten longer. All any top act would do was twenty minutes when we started. The Everly Brothers did maybe half an hour. When you're talking about a tour, you're talking cold-blooded arithmetic: it's how many bums on seats, how much does it cost to put the show on--it's an equation. You could say that Michael Cohl was the one who expanded things to this scale, but he did it by judging the demand--after eight years without a tour--and taking a risk. We hadn't known for sure whether the demand was still that high, though it was clear Cohl had got it right when tickets went on sale that first day in Philadelphia and could have sold out three times.

Touring was the only way to survive. Record royalties barely paid overheads; you couldn't tour behind a record like the old days. Megatours were, in the end, the bread and butter of keeping this machinery running. We couldn't have done it on a smaller scale and been sure to do more than break even. The Stones were a rarity in this market in that the show that filled the stadium was still based on the music--nothing else. You're not going to see dance routines or get a tape playing. You'll just hear the Stones, and see them.

There were aspects of these tours that would have been unthinkable in the '70s. There were shocked murmurings that we'd become a corporate enterprise and an advertising medium through all the sponsorship deals. But this too was part of the bread and butter, the equation. How do you finance a tour? And as long as it's a fair deal to the audience and to yourselves, that's the way they figure it out. There were the corporate "meet and greet" sessions--where people come in and shake our hands and get their pictures taken--that were part of our contract. In actual fact, it's fun. They're just loads of pissed people lined up going, "Hey, how you doing, baby?" "Oh, I love you." "Hey, brother." It's pressing the flesh. These people work for these companies that sponsor us. It's also part of the buildup. Oh, we're actually starting to do the work. Finished the snooker game, meet-and-greet time. And in a way, it's reassuring. It means it's two hours before we go on. So you know where you are. Everybody likes a bit of a routine, especially when you're in a new city every day.

Our biggest problem with the huge stadiums and sets, the open-air venues, was the sound. How do you convert a stadium into a club? A perfect rock-and-roll theater would be a really large garage, made of brick, with a bar at the end. There is no such thing as a rock-and-roll venue; there's not one in the world that's made to play this kind of music as an ideal form. You work and wedge yourself into spots that are made to do other things. What we love is a controlled environment. There are some theaters like the Astoria, really good ballrooms like Roseland in New York, the Paradiso in Amsterdam. There's a good Chicago joint called the Checkerboard. There's an optimum size and space. But when you're playing outdoors on those big stages, you never quite know what's in store for you.

There's another guy that joins the band on outdoor stages--God. Either he's benign or he can come at you with wind from the wrong direction and the sound is swept out of the park, and somebody is getting the best Stones sound in the world, but they're two miles away and they don't want it. Luckily, I have the magic stick. Before the shows start, we come and do a sound check and I traditionally have one of my rods in my hand and make some cabalistic signs in the sky and on the floor of the stage. OK, the weather's gonna be cool. It's a fetish, but if I come to an open-air gig without a stick, they think I'm ill. The weather usually comes around by showtime.

Some of our best gigs have been in the worst conditions that you'd want to play in. In Bangalore, our first gig in India, their monsoon actually came down in the middle of the opening song and pissed down throughout the show. You couldn't see the fret board for rain splashing and squirting all over the place. Monsoon in Bangalore, that's what we still call it, it was a famous show. But it was a great show. Sleet, snow, rain or anything, the audience always stays there. If you stay there with them, under the worst conditions in the world, they'll stay there and rock and forget about the weather. The worst ones are when there's a cold snap. That's really hard to work, when the fingers are freezing. There are very few of them--we try and avoid them--and Pierre will have guys backstage to give us little heat bags to put on for a few minutes until the next song starts, just trying to keep our fingers from freezing.

There's a scar I have from burning my finger to the bone while playing the very first number one night. It was my fault. I told everybody, stand back, there's a big pyro to start with, and then I forgot. I went out there, the fireworks were going off, and a lump of white phosphorus settled on my finger. And it's steaming and burning. And I know I can't touch it--if I touch it, I'm going to spread it. I'm playing "Start Me Up" and I've just got to let my finger burn through to the bone. I'm watching my white bone for the next two hours.

I remember a show in Italy where I really knew that I was losing it. It was in Milan, in the '70s, and I could barely stand; I couldn't breathe. The air was totally dead, it was hot and I started to feel myself going. Mick was just about holding himself up. Charlie always has some shade, but I was out in the pollution of Milan, the heat and the chemicals there in the brutal sun. There have been a couple of shows like that. Sometimes I've woken up with a temperature of one hundred and three, but I'm going to go on. I can handle it; I'll probably sweat it out on stage. And most times I do. I've had terrible fevers going on and I'm totally cured at the end of the show, just because of the nature of the job. Sometimes I should have canceled the show and stayed in bed. But if I think I can totter up there, I will. And with a bit of sweating, I'll pull through. There are occasions when I've actually been sick on stage. How many times I've turned round behind the amplifiers and chucked up, you wouldn't believe! Mick pukes behind the stage. Ronnie pukes behind the stage too. Sometimes it's the conditions: not enough air, too much heat. Throwing up is not such a big deal. It's in order to make you better. "Where's Mick gone?" "He's chucking up backstage." "Well, me next!"

When you play these big stadiums, you're hoping that when you first hit it, it fills the room and doesn't come out like a bat whisper. Something that you played yesterday in a little rehearsal room sounded fantastic, and you take it out on the big stage and it sounds like three mice caught in a trap. In the Bigger Bang tour we had Dave Natale, the best live-sound man I've ever worked with. But even with skill like that, in a big stadium you can never test the sound until it's filled up with bodies, so you never know what it will be like on the first night. And when Mick gets away from the band, walking down some ramp, you can never trust that what he's hearing out there is the same as what we're hearing. It might be off just a fraction of a second, but the beat's gone. And now he's singing the song Japanese-style unless we put a brake on it for a second. And that is a real art. You need cats that are so together they know how to turn the whole beat around so that he'll end up on the right place. The band has changed from off beat to on beat and back twice in order to do that, but the audience wouldn't know it. I'll wait for Charlie to look at Mick to readjust to his body talk, not to the sound, because that's echoing and you can't trust it. Charlie will just do a little stutter and watch where Mick's gonna come down, and bang and I'm in.

You feel this need to run down these ramps, and it's not doing anything for the music, because you can't play very well on the run. And then you get there and you've got to run back. And you think, why am I doing this? What we've learned is that it doesn't matter how big the stadium is, if you focus the band all around one spot, you can pretend it's small. With the TV screens now, the audience can see four or five guys really tight together. That's a far more powerful image than us dispersed all over the place, running around. The more we do it, the more we realize it's the screen they're watching. I'm like a matchstick; I'm only five-foot-ten and I can't get any bigger any way you look at it.

When you go on the road on these grueling tours you become a machine; your whole routine is geared to the gig. From the moment you wake up, you're preparing for the show; your whole mind's on it all day, even if you think you know what you're going to do. Afterwards you have a few hours free if you want, if you're not knackered. Once I start a tour it takes me two or three shows to find my line, to get to the groove I'm in, then I can work it forever. Mick and I have different ways of approaching it. Mick has a lot more physically to do than I do, except that I am carrying five or six pounds of guitar. So it's a different concentration of energy. He does lot of training. All I do to train and preserve energy is keep breathing. The grind is the traveling, the hotel food, whatever. It's a hard drill sometimes. But once I hit the stage, all of that miraculously goes away. The grind is never the stage performance. I can play the same song again and again, year after year. When "Jumpin' Jack Flash" comes up again it's never a repetition, always a variation. Always. I would never play a song again once I thought it was dead. We couldn't just churn it out. The real release is getting on stage. Once we're up there doing it, it's sheer fun and joy. Some long-distance stamina, of course, is needed. And the only way I can sustain the impetus over the long tours we do is by feeding off the energy that we get back from an audience. That's my fuel. All I've got is this burning energy, especially when I've got a guitar in my hands. I get an incredible raging glee when they get out of their seats. Yeah, come on, let it go. Give me some energy and I'll give you back double. It's almost like some enormous dynamo or generator. It's indescribable. I start to rely on it; I use their energy to keep myself going. If the place was empty, I wouldn't be able to do it. Mick does about ten miles, I do about five miles with a guitar around my neck, every show. We couldn't do that without their energy, we just wouldn't even dream of it. And they make us want to give our best. We'll go for things that we don't have to. It happens every night we go on. One minute we're just hanging with the guys and oh, what's the first song? and oh, let's have another joint, and suddenly we're up there. It's not that it's a surprise, because that's the whole reason to be there. But my whole physical being goes up a couple of notches. "Ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones." I've heard that for forty-odd years, but the minute I'm out there and hit that first note, whatever it is, it's like I was driving a Datsun and suddenly it's a Ferrari. At that first chord I play, I can hear the way Charlie's going to hit into it and the way Darryl's going to play into that. It's like sitting on top of a rocket.

F our years went by between Steel Wheels and Voodoo Lounge, which kicked off in 1994. It gave me and everyone else time for other music, for solo records and guest spots, tribute albums and idol worship of various kinds. Eventually I played with almost all the survivors among my childhood heroes, like James Burton, the Everlys, the Crickets, Merle Haggard, John Lee Hooker and George Jones, with whom I recorded "Say It's Not You." The award I was proudest of was when Mick and I were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1993, because it was signed by Sammy Cahn on his deathbed. It took me years to appreciate just how great was the art of Tin Pan Alley writing--I used to dismiss it or it went straight through me. But when I became a songwriter I could appreciate the construction and the skill of those guys. I held Hoagy Carmichael in the same high esteem, and I will never forget him calling me six months before he died.

Patti and I were in Barbados, hiding away for a couple of weeks, and one evening the housekeeper comes in, "Mr. Keith! There's Mr. Michael on the phone." So immediately I think it's Mick. Then she said, I think it was Carmichael. I said, Carmichael? I don't know any Carmichael. And then this sort of frisson went through me. I said, ask him his first name. And she comes back and says Hoagy. And I'm looking at Patti. It's like being summoned by the gods. Such a weird feeling. Hoagy Carmichael's calling me? Somebody's putting me on. So I get to the phone and there it is, it's Hoagy Carmichael. He'd heard a version I'd done of the song "The Nearness of You," which I'd given to our lawyer Peter Parcher. Peter liked my record and the piano playing and he'd sent it to Hoagy. My treatment of it is barrelhouse; it really flips the song on its back, deliberately so. I can't play piano well and I was improvising to say the least, just sort of making do. And here's Carmichael on the phone, and he says, "Hey, man, when I heard that version, shit, that's the way I was hearing it when I was writing it." I had always thought Carmichael was so right-wing, I doubted whether he'd ever approve of me or of me doing his song. So I couldn't believe it when he rang and said he liked the way I'd done it. And to hear this from... Whoa! I've died and gone to heaven, right? In one sweet slice. He said, "You in Barbados? You oughtta go to the bar and get some corn 'n' oil." That is a drink made of dark blackstrap rum and falernum, the sweet syrup made of sugarcane. I drank nothing else for two weeks--corn 'n' oil.

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