Life (69 page)

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 “Malagueña” 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 “Malagueña.” 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 “Malagueña.” 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 “Malagueña” and you’re in.