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T he four of us had flown to Fiji and were staying on a private island. We'd gone for a picnic on a beach. Ronnie and I went for a swim while Josephine and Patti were organizing lunch. There was a hammock, and I think Ronnie had the hammock--he got in quick--and we were just drying off after a swim. And there was this tree. Forget any palm tree. This was some gnarled low tree that was basically a horizontal branch.

It was obvious that people had sat there before, because the bark was worn away. And it was about, I guess, seven feet up. So I'm just sitting there on the branch, waiting for lunch and drying off. And they said, "Lunch is ready." There was another branch in front of me, and I thought, I'll just grab hold of that and drop gently to the ground. But I forgot that my hands were still wet and there was sand and everything on them, and as I grabbed this branch, the grip didn't take. And so I landed hard on my heels, and my head went back and hit the trunk of the tree. Hard. And that was it. It didn't bother me at the time. "Are you all right, darling?" "Yeah, fine." "Whoa, don't do that again."

Two days later, I was still feeling fine, and we went out in this boat. The water was like a mirror until we got out into the sea a little, and these huge Pacific swells started coming in. Josephine was at the front and she said, oh, look at this. So I went up to the bow, and a swell came in and I fell back down, just onto the seat, and suddenly something went. A blinding headache came on. We've got to turn round now, I said. Still, I thought that was that. But this headache got worse and worse. I never have headaches, and if I do, it's an aspirin and it's gone. I'm not a headache man. I always feel sorry for people like Charlie who have migraines. I can't imagine what they're like, but this was probably pretty close.

I found out later I was lucky that that second jolt happened. Because the first one had cracked my skull and that could have gone on for months and months before being discovered, or before killing me. It could have kept on bleeding under the skull. But the second blow made it obvious. That night I took a couple of aspirin for the headache, which is the wrong thing to do because aspirin thins the blood--the things you learn when you're killing yourself. And apparently in my sleep I had two seizures. I don't remember them. I thought I had a bad choking cough and woke up to Patti saying, "Are you all right, darling?" "Yes, I'm fine." And then I had another one, and that's when I saw Patti running around the room, "Oh, my God," making calls. By now she was in a panic, but a controlled one; she still operated. Fortunately the same thing had happened to the island's owner a few months before, and he recognized the symptoms, and before I knew it I was on this plane to Fiji, the main island. In Fiji they checked me out and said, he's got to go to New Zealand. The worst flight I've ever had in my life was the flight from Fiji to Auckland. They strapped me in, in basically a straitjacket on a stretcher, and put me on this plane. I couldn't move and it was a four-hour flight. I mean, forget the head, I can't move. And I'm, "Shit, can't you give me something?" "Well, we could have before we took off." "Why didn't you?" I was cursing like a motherfucker. "Give me painkillers, for Christ's sake!" "We can't do it in the air." Four hours of this claptrap. Finally they got me to the hospital in New Zealand, where Andrew Law, neurosurgeon, was waiting for me. Luckily he was a fan of mine! Andrew didn't tell me until later that when he was growing up he had my picture at the foot of his bed. After that I was in his hands and I don't really remember much about that night. They put me on the morphine. And I woke up after that, feeling all right.

I was there for maybe ten days, very nice hospital, very nice nurses. I had this lovely night nurse from Zambia, she was great. For about a week, Dr. Law gave me tests every day. And I said, well, what happens now? And he said, you're stabilized. You can fly to your doctor in New York or London or wherever. There was just the presumption that I'd want the pick of the world's medical attention. I don't want to fly, Andrew! By now I'd gotten to know him pretty well. "I ain't flying." "Yeah, but you've got to have the operation." I said, "I'll tell you what. You're going to do it. And you're going to do it now." He said, "Are you sure about that?" I said, "Absolutely." I wanted to suck the words back into my mouth. Did I really say that? I'm inviting someone to cut my head open. But yes, I knew it was the right thing to do. I knew he was one of the best; we'd had him well checked out. I didn't want to go to somebody I didn't know.

So Dr. Law came back in a few hours with his anesthetist Nigel, a Scotsman. And I thought my really smart move was to say, Nigel, I'm really hard to put out. Nobody's been able to put me out yet. He said, watch this. And within ten seconds, I'm bye-bye gone. And two and a half hours later, I woke up feeling great. And I said, well, when are you going to start? Law said, it's all done, mate. He had opened up the skull, sucked out all the blood clots and then put the bone back on like a little hat with six titanium pins to connect the hat back to its skull. I was fine except that when I came out of it, I found myself attached to all these tubes. I've got one down the end of my dick, one coming out of here, one coming out of there. I said, what the fuck is all this shit? What's that for? Law says, that's the morphine drip. OK, we'll keep that one. I wasn't complaining. And actually, I've never had a headache since. Andrew Law did a wonderful job.

I was in there for about another week. And they brought me a little extra morphine. They were really nice, very cool. In the end they want you to be comfortable; that's what I found. I seldom asked for the drugs, but when I did, it was, OK, here you go. The guy I was next to had a very similar injury. He'd done his on a motorcycle without a helmet, and he was moaning and groaning. And the nurses stayed with him for hours, talking him down. Very calm voices. Meanwhile, I was pretty much healed and I was going, I know the feeling, pal.

And then a month in a wee Victorian boardinghouse in Auckland, and all my family came out, bless their hearts. And I had messages from Jerry Lee Lewis, from Willie Nelson too. Jerry Lee sent me a signed 45 of "Great Balls of Fire," first pressing. Goes on the wall. Bill Clinton sent me a note, get well soon, my dear friend. The opening line of my letter from Tony Blair was "Dear Keith, you've always been one of my heroes..." England's in the hands of somebody who I'm a hero of? It's frightening. I even got one from the mayor of Toronto. It gave me an interesting preview of my obituaries, the general flavor of what's to come. Jay Leno said, why can't we make planes like we make Keith? And Robin Williams said, you can bruise him, you can't break him. I got a few good lines out of knocking myself on the head, added to all the other knocks.

What was amazing to me was what the press dreamed up. Because it's Fiji, it must be a palm tree I fell out of, and I had to be forty feet off the ground, going for a coconut. And then Jet Skis came into the story, which are things I really dislike intensely because they're noisy and stupid and disruptive to the reefs.

Here's how Dr. Law remembers it all. Dr. Andrew Law: I got a call Thursday, April 30, three a.m. They rang me from Fiji, where I do work for a private hospital, saying they had someone with an intracranial hemorrhage, and it was quite a prominent person, could I cope with that? And they said it's Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones. I remember having his poster on my wall when I was at university, so I was always a Rolling Stones fan and a Keith Richards fan. All I knew was that he was conscious, that the scan showed an acute cerebral hematoma, and his history with regards to the fall from the tree and the episode in the boat. So I knew he would need to be under neurosurgery care, but at that stage I didn't know whether he would need surgery. That means you've got pressure from one side of the brain pushing the midline across to the other side. That first night I got lots of phone calls from neurosurgeons around the world, from New York and LA, people who wanted to be involved. "Oh, just wanted to check. I've spoken to such and such a person, and you've got to be sure you do this and that and this and that." And the next morning I said, look, Keith, I can't cope with this. I'm being woken in the middle of the night by people trying to tell me how to do a job that I do every day. And he said, you talk to me first and you can tell everyone else to get fucked. Those were the actual words. And that took all the weight off me. It was easy then, because we could make the decisions together, and that's exactly what we did. Each day we talked about how he was. And I made it very clear what the signs would be for when we'd have to operate. In some people with acute subdurals, the blood clot will dissolve over about ten days and you can remove it through little holes rather than a big window. And that was what we were trying to do, because he was well. We were trying to manage him conservatively or with the simplest operation. But the scan showed a decent-sized blood clot, with some shift in the midline of his brain on that first scan. I didn't do anything, I just waited, and then Saturday night, after he'd been here a week, I went for dinner with him and he was just not looking good. The next morning he rang me, saying, I've got a headache. I said, we'll arrange a scan on Monday. And by Monday morning he was much worse, very headachy, starting to slur his words, starting to have some weakness. And the repeat scan showed that the clot had got bigger again, and there was quite significantly more midline shift. So it was an easy decision, and he wouldn't have survived if he hadn't had it removed. He was really quite sick by the time he went to theater. I think we operated about six or seven o'clock that night, 8 May. And it was quite a big clot, about a centimeter and a half thick at least, maybe two. Like thick jelly. And we removed it. There was an artery that was bleeding. I just corked that artery, washed it up and put it back together. And then he woke up straight afterwards and said, "God, that's better!" He quickly had relief of pressure and felt much better after surgery, immediately, on the operating table. In Milan, the first concert he did after the surgery, he was nervous and I was nervous. Language was what worried me most, both receptive and expressive language. Some people say the right temporal lobe plays more on musical ability, but it's the dominant hemisphere of your brain, the eloquent part of your brain. The left side in a right-handed person. We were all worried. He might not remember how to do it, he could have a fit on stage. We were all very tense that night, everyone. Keith didn't let on, but he came off the stage euphoric because he'd proved he could do it.

They said you won't be able to work for six months. I said six weeks. Within six weeks I was back on stage. It was what I needed to do. I was ready to go. Either you become a hypochondriac and listen to other people, or you make up your own mind. If I felt that I couldn't make it, I'd be the first one to say so. They say, what do you know? You're not a doctor. And I say, I'm telling you I'm all right.

When Charlie Watts miraculously appeared back on the scene within a couple of months after his cancer treatment, looking more perfitz than ever, and sat down behind the drums and said, no, it really goes like this, it was like a huge sigh of relief across the room. Until I got to Milan and played that first gig, they were also holding their breath. I know that because they're all friends of mine. They're thinking, he might be all right, but can he still deliver? The audience were waving inflatable palm trees, bless their hearts. They're wonderful, my crowd. A bit of a smirk and an in-joke. I fall out of a tree, they give me one.

I was put on a drug called Dilantin, which thickens the blood, which is why I've not taken bump since, because cocaine thins the blood, aspirin too. Andrew told me about that in New Zealand. Whatever you do, no more bump, and I said OK. Actually, I've done so much bloody blow in my life, I don't miss it an inch. I think it gave me up.

By July, I was back on tour. In September, I played my debutante role as a cameo actor, playing Captain Teague in Pirates of the Caribbean 3--Johnny Depp's father, as it were--a project that started off with Depp asking me if I minded his using me as a model for his original performance. All I taught him was how to walk around a corner when you're drunk--never moving your back away from the wall. The rest was his. I never felt I had to act with Johnny. We were confident with each other, just looked each other straight in the eyes. In the first shot they gave me, two of these guys were having a conference around this huge table, all these candles, some guy says something, and I walk out of this doorway and shoot the motherfucker dead. That's my opening. "The code is the law." They made me feel very welcome. I had a great time. I got famous for being two-take Richards. And later that year Martin Scorsese shot a documentary based on two nights of the Stones at the Beacon Theatre in New York, which became the film Shine a Light. And we were rocking.

I can rest on my laurels. I've stirred up enough crap in my time and I'll live with it and see how somebody else deals with it. But then there's that word "retiring." I can't retire until I croak. There's carping about us being old men. The fact is, I've always said, if we were black and our name was Count Basie or Duke Ellington, everybody would be going, yeah yeah yeah. White rock and rollers apparently are not supposed to do this at our age. But I'm not here just to make records and money. I'm here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation: "Do you know this feeling?"

In 2007, Doris began to sink from a long illness. Bert had died in 2002, but his memory was revived a few weeks before Doris died in a big press story generated by a journalist reporting that I'd claimed to have snorted some of my father's ashes along with a line of bump. There were headlines, editorials, there were op-eds on cannibalism, there was some of the old flavor of Street of Shame indignation at the Stones. John Humphrys on prime-time radio was heard to ask, "Do you think Keith Richards has gone too far this time?" What did he mean this time? There were also articles saying this is a perfectly normal thing, it goes back to ancient times, the ingestion of your ancestor. So there were two schools of thought. Old pro that I am, I said it was taken out of context. No denying, no admitting. "The truth of the matter"--read my memo to Jane Rose when the story threatened to get out of hand--"is that after having Dad's ashes in a black box for six years, because I really couldn't bring myself to scatter him to the winds, I finally planted a sturdy English oak to spread him around. And as I took the lid off of the box, a fine spray of his ashes blew out onto the table. I couldn't just brush him off, so I wiped my finger over it and snorted the residue. Ashes to ashes, father to son. He is now growing oak trees and would love me for it."

W hile D oris lay dying, the Dartford council was naming the streets in a new estate close to our old home in Spielman Road--Sympathy Street, Dandelion Row, Ruby Tuesday Drive. All that in a lifetime. The streets named for us only a few years after we were being shoved up against the wall. Maybe the council changed their minds again after Dad's ashes. I haven't checked. In the hospital, my mum was very cheeky with the doctors and everything, but getting weaker. And Angela said, we know what's happening, the girl's going, we all know that, it's just a matter of what day, really. So Angela said, take up a guitar, play to her. Good idea, I hadn't really thought about it. You get a bit confused when your mother's dying. So our last night together, I took the guitar up there and I sat on the foot of her bed, and she's lying there, and I said, "How you doing, Mother?" And she says, "This morphine's not bad." She asked me where I was staying. I said Claridge's. She said, "We are going up in the world, aren't we?" She was drifting in and out of this opiate state, and I played a few licks for her of "Malaguena" and the other stuff that she knew that I knew, that I'd played since I was a kid. She drifted off to sleep, and the next morning my assistant Sherry, who looked after my mother with love and devotion, went to see her, like she did every morning, and she said, "Did you hear Keith playing for you last night?" And Doris said, "Yeah, it was a bit out of tune." That's my mother for you. But I have to defer to Doris. She had unerring pitch and a beautiful sense of music, which she got from her parents, from Emma and Gus, who first taught me "Malaguena." It was Doris who gave me my first review. I remember her coming home from work. I was on the top of the stairs, playing "Malaguena." She went through to the kitchen, did something with pots and pans. She began to hum along with me. Suddenly she came to the foot of the stairs. "Is that you? I thought it was the radio." Two bars of "Malaguena" and you're in.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to the following for their help with Life, then and now:

Jerry Ivan Allison

Shirley Arnold

Gregorio Azar

Neville Beckford

Heather Beckwith

Georgia Bergman

Chris Blackwell

Stanley Booth

Tony Calder

Jim Callaghan

Lloyd Cameron

Gretchen Parsons Carpenter

Bill Carter

Seymour Cassel

Blondie Chaplin

Barbara Charone

Bill Chenail

Marshall Chess

Alan Clayton

David Courts

Steve Crotty

Fran Curtis

Sherry Daly

David Dalton

Pierre de Beauport

Stash Klossowski de Rola

Johnny Depp

Jim Dickinson

Deborah Dixon

Bernard Doherty

Charley Drayton

Sly Dunbar

Alan Dunn

Loni Efron

Jackie Ellis

Jane Emanuel

Ahmet Ertegun

Marianne Faithfull

Lisa Fischer

Patricia Ford

Bernard Fowler

Rob Fraboni

Christopher Gibbs

Kelley Glasgow

Robert Greenfield

Patti Hansen

Hugh Hart

Richard Heller

Barney Hoskyns

Sandra Hull

Eric Idle

Dominic Jennings

Brian Jobson

Andy Johns

Darryl Jones

Steve Jordan

Eve Simone Kakassy

James Karnbach

Vanessa Kehren

Linda Keith

Nick Kent

Bobby Keys

Chris Kimsey

Tony King

Hannah Lack

Andrew Law

Chuck Leavell

Fran Lebowitz

Richard Leher

Annie Leibovitz

Kay Levinson

Michael Lindsay-Hogg

Elsie Lindsey

Prince Rupert Loewenstein

Michael Lydon

Roy Martin

Paul McCartney

Earl McGrath

Mary Beth Medley

Lorne Michaels

Barry Mindel

Haleema Mohamed

Kari Ann Moller

Kate Moss

Marjorie Mould

Laila Nabulsi

David Navarrete

Willie Nelson

Ivan Neville

Philip Norman

Uschi Obermaier

Andrew Oldham

Anita Pallenberg

Peter Parcher

Beatrice Clarke Payton

James Phelge

Michael Pietsch

Alexandra Richards

Angela Richards

Bill Richards

Doris Richards

Marlon Richards

Theodora Richards

Lisa Robinson

Alan Rogan

Jane Rose

Peter Rudge

Tony Russell

Daniel Salemi

Kevin Schroeder

Gary Schultz

Martin Scorsese

Simon Sessler

Robbie Shakespeare

June Shelley

Ernest Smatt

Don Smith

Joyce Smyth

Ronnie Spector

Maurice Spira

Trevor Stephens

Dick Taylor

Winston Thomas

Nick Tosches

Betsy Uhrig

Ed Victor

Waddy Wachtel

Tom Waits

Joe Walsh

Don Was

Nigel Waymouth

Dennis Wells

Lil Wergilis

Locksley Whitlock

Vicki Wickham

Warrin Williamson

Peter Wolf

Stephen Yarde

Bill Zysblat

Contents

Front Cover Image

Welcome

Dedication

Photo Insert

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Acknowledgments

Photographs

About the Authors

Copyright

About the Authors

Keith Richards was born in London in 1943. A guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and cofounder of the Rolling Stones, he has also released solo albums with his band the X-Pensive Winos. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Patti Hansen.

James Fox was born in Washington, DC, in 1945 and has known Keith Richards since the early 1970s, when he was a journalist for the Sunday Times in London. His books include the international bestseller White Mischief. He lives in London with his wife and sons.

* He recorded in his Little Black Book from a memo dated 6/28/72: "For your information, the following is a list of damage that resulted from the visit of the Rolling Stones: The White rug in the Red and Blue Room bathroom was burnt and needed to be replaced; the toilet seat was also burnt and had to be replaced; two bath mats and four towels were also burnt; Red Room chair and couch are stained, possibly to the point of needing reupholstering; Red Room bedspread is badly stained. We are hoping it will come out in cleaning."

* The boys' adventure series written by Richmal Crompton.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2010 Mindless Records, LLC

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Little, Brown and Company

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First eBook Edition: October 2010

Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The author is grateful for permission to quote lyrics from the following songs: "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Written by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards. (c) 1965 Renewed, ABKCO Music, Inc. www.abkco.com. Used with permission. All rights reserved. "Get off of My Cloud." Written by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards. (c) 1965 Renewed, ABKCO Music, Inc. www.abkco.com. Used with permission. All rights reserved. "Gimme Shelter." Written by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards. (c) 1970 Renewed, ABKCO Music, Inc. www.abkco.com. Used with permission. All rights reserved. "Yesterday's Papers." Written by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards. (c) 1967 Renewed, ABKCO Music, Inc. www.abkco.com. Used with permission. All rights reserved. "Salt of the Earth." Written by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards. (c) 1969 Renewed, ABKCO Music, Inc. www.abkco.com. Used with permission. All rights reserved. "As Tears Go By." Written by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards & Andrew Oldham. (c) 1964 ABKCO Music, Inc. Renewed U.S. (c) 1992 and all publication rights for U.S.A. and Canada--ABKCO Music, Inc. / Tro-Essex Music Inc. Used by permission. International (c) secured. "Can't Be Seen." Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Published by Promopub B.V. "Torn and Frayed." Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Published by Colgems-EMI Music Inc. "Casino Boogie." Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Published by Colgems-EMI Music Inc. "Happy." Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Published by Colgems-EMI Music Inc. "Before They Make Me Run." Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Published by Colgems-EMI Music Inc. "All About You." Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Published by Colgems-EMI Music Inc. "Fight." Written by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ron Wood. Published by Promopub B.V. and Halfhis Music. "Had It with You." Written by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ron Wood. Published by Promopub B.V. and Halfhis Music. "Flip the Switch." Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Published by Promopub B.V. "You Don't Have to Mean It." Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Published by Promopub B.V. "How Can I Stop." Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Published by Promopub B.V. "Thief in the Night." Written by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Pierre de Beauport. Published by Promopub B.V. and Pubpromo Music.

ISBN: 978-0-316-12856-8

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