What would Keith Richards do_ - Jessica Pallington West [12]
Ask yourself: What would Keith do?
Never mind the other gurus and their instructional videos and manifestos. Never mind the people who expound on kindergarten lessons, or the one who whispers that she has a secret, or the guy with all those bowls of chicken soup. Here’s a better path out of the woods.
A guy who has cheated death as often as Keith has, and come through it stronger than ever, has something to say about getting by with the allure and aesthetic of “The World’s Most Elegantly Wasted Human”—an aesthetic that not too many gurus can claim, by the way.
What follows is an investigation into a series of fairly common problems (or their associates) and an inquiry into how to solve them—by asking and answering the question, What would Keith do?
Trouble comes in two basic forms: from the outside and from the inside. From other people, and from yourself.
Who do you have to run from? Who do you have to look at square-on? What do you have to learn to laugh at? How much do you have to silence that Mick? How much louder do you have to make that inner drummer? How much more do you have to listen to who you are? Which situation or person do you need to finally accept?
Trouble can be dealt with by way of the Twenty-six Ten Commandments. But there’s another way to look at it, in Keith terms, that makes it less intimidating: Look at all the different types of trouble as if they’re songs on an album.
You have the hit single, the one that you replay and replay and replay but still can’t figure out the words to. You have the long, drawn-out number, which puts you to sleep and makes you nuts, and yet you still don’t turn it off when it comes on. There’s the song you can’t get out of your head. You have the filler, which still somehow haunts you. And there’s the big dramatic epic that is supposed to be the ending to it all but doesn’t quite end, ever. But songs can be reworked, fixed.
They can be fine-tuned, played until they’re right. In the end, what was a headache becomes a work of art.
But first you have to meet the headache, trouble, head-on.
And Keith will look it right in the eye. He’ll then decide whether to continue the staring contest until trouble cowers in the corner, or whether he should hit the damn thing over the head with a guitar.
But by whichever means, he will defeat it. He’s willed himself to. He’s been through too much not to.
THE MANY SONGS
OF TROUBLE
Trouble with Other People:
I. STAYING STRONG: SELF-PRESERVATION AND JUST SAYING NO
“Just say no.” Easier said than done. Too many of us have a hard time on this one. Saying no to people. Or places. Or things.
And then there are those little troll-like nags who come around with the whiny voice and insist. We keep caving, keep saying yes, and kick ourselves afterward.
The troll-like nags are getting you to do any number of things: drive them across town, do their Xeroxing, coerce you into buying stuff you have no need for or impersonating a dead spouse down at the public, assistance office.
How can we be strong enough to say no?
WHAT WOULD KEITH DO?
The down-and-out experience of drug addiction and dealing with the dealers may have lasted a bit longer than Keith would have liked, but he did get some lessons in etiquette out of it, as well as some ideas on inverse salesmanship.
Keith claims he learned how to be a gentleman from drug dealers. And his children say that they learned their manners from his postdrug gentlemanliness.
He also learned how and what not to be by watching how they were. It’s like learning how not to make a bad movie from watching a bad movie: how not to be a jerk from observing a jerk.
The bad stuff teaches you the don’t-do-its of life.
One other thing a drug dealer can teach you: the head rush that can be attained by saying no.
If only Nancy Reagan had had a summit with Keith—she would have been so much more effective.
When giving up drugs, Keith took the experience of dealers trying to sell to him and turned it inside out: “I just watched their faces when they