What would Keith Richards do_ - Jessica Pallington West [16]
All good things must end, including the utopian 1960s, and when that happens, who are you going to blame? Keith and his fellow Stones seemed a good choice.
The government turned the screws. Their taxes were hiked; they were surveyed, busted. The queen was pointing toward the door. They packed their suitcases and moved to France. Cut off from home and roots, the band retreated into a dark mansion on the Riviera, which, in a double kick to the head, turned out to be a former Gestapo hideaway.
But back to your problem: You’re exiled. What do you do? What did Keith do? There’s really only one choice. Screw ’em. And tell yourself: I’ll show them.
But you have to actually act on this conviction.
A method to get there: “Change the backdrop.” It’s a standard Keithism. Every time there’s trouble, he moves and sets up a new background mural. He put it to use in 1967 after a major arrest by going to Morocco, and again, after prison, by going to Rome. He did it after the 1977 arrest. He did it in the early 1970s with France.
Get a new background. Move. It doesn’t have to be anything as exotic as the Riviera. You can choose Pittsburgh if you like. Change not just the larger visuals but the little things you surround yourself with as well. Look for new images, new sounds. And from there, develop your own new images and sounds. In the Stones’ case, it was the album Exile on Main Street. In your case, it can be your New Shopping List. Or a new relationship. A new look. A new candy bar you never tried before, now eaten every day. A new five-line poem that you wrote.
As Keith says, “We carry our past around like a ball and chain,” but we’re free at any time “to retire from military service” and start anew.
There’s a lot of world out there. Exile leads to transformation. And from transformation we can reinvent ourselves and become free. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll get a hit record out of it.
VI. SEPARATION, REUNITING,
FORGIVENESS, CONTINUING ON
Family. Friends. They come into our lives, they wander about, they leave, they come back. We see them, we don’t see them. Sometimes things end without a clear reason.
What happens when you haven’t seen a certain person for a long time, then there are some bad feelings, and you feel nervous about meeting up with them again?
WHAT WOULD KEITH DO?
For all the bad-boy imagery, Keith is known for maintaining long-term relationships, as well as for being gracious to those whom he meets for the first time and those who reemerge from the past. For Keith, so much from the past needs to be sequestered as water under the bridge. You have to look beyond a lot to keep moving forward, because in the end that’s what’s important: moving forward. The past happened. The past will always be there. The future we can do a little bit more with.
We’ve all done things we’re sorry about. And while everyone knows that You Don’t Cross Keith Richards, a typically Keith quality is also to forgive the past’s misdeeds and keep going.
As long as they are within certain limits.
Just don’t bilk him out of several billion dollars or call him an arthritic monkey. (Are you listening, Andrew Loog Oldham and Elton John?)
One Keith example of putting the past behind came by way of Marshall Chess.
After serving as the head of Rolling Stones Records, Chess found himself distanced from the band for eighteen years by “misunderstanding” and, well, “circumstances.” When he finally turned up at a Stones concert years later, he was nervous about the reunion. He asked for five minutes to set things straight. Keith’s response: “What the fuck are you talking about, Marshall? You were there. And now you’re here."
Another example of this philosophy involved more complicated past histories: Nellcote, Keith’s house in the Riviera, was formerly a Nazi headquarters. When a recording engineer was freaked out by the sight of swastikas in the house, and its potential bad spirit and dark past, Keith’s response was, “But it’s all right. We’re here now. Fuck those people."
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