What would Keith Richards do_ - Jessica Pallington West [22]
With this, make use of the Keith concept of weaving, where you work two guitars together as one. With weaving, you don’t try too hard to take control, and you work in a give-and-take with the other players.
So much of life is like going up on a stage, and with so many gigs, you just never know what’s going to happen. Wing it. If you see winging it as being like the blues, it becomes an artful activity. Or, put in a more base way:
“When it’s time to go on, it’s time to go on, and when you get up there you either croak, puke, fall over, or not."
XV. ALWAYS KEEP GOING
Completely overwhelmed? Feel like you can’t take another step forward? Want to give up? Not sure you can keep going? The end of the road?
WHAT WOULD KEITH DO?
“Keep breathing."
This was the answer Keith gave Mojo magazine in 2007 when he was asked what life’s biggest lesson had been. A bit of a surprise for someone who could have spouted a long and complicated lesson about how to get away from sirens and prison bars, using gymnastics worthy of an episode of The Monkees. No. Just:
Keep breathing.
CHAPTER THREE
KEITH AND NIETZSCHE
OR: THE PHILOSOPHY
OF KEITH AS VIEWED
IN RELATION TO THE
GREAT PHILOSOPHERS
“The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."
—Bertrand Russell
“All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher."
—Ambrose Bierce
Who would have guessed that a heroin-addled guitar player from the projects would end up as a twenty-first-century philosopher and urban street guru?
But this brings up the question: What exactly makes and creates a philosopher? Or a prophet? Or a guru?
There are two reigning camps on the philosopher scene: You’ve got the suave side and the disheveled side. There’s the princely aristocratic thinker with the fancy-schmancy university degree and the walking cane. Then there’s the other guy—the one who got into the palace through the back door by picking the lock. It’s the prince and the pauper. Goofus and Gallant. Guess which one Keith is?
In the first camp are the guys whose lives are devoted to the quiet cloister of the ivory tower. The other kind walks through the fire, then emerges on the other side with blisters on his feet and fingers, the smoke still hissing out his ears … and yet he’s done it—he’s become someone wiser and kinder and enlightened, someone who now connects and speaks to the people. Once out of the fire, there is now beauty and a message to be found in the blisters, scars, and smoke. It’s here where we find the prophets of the Bible and the long lineup of saints, with their bad behavior spun as if by Rapunzel into a halo of gold. Oh, those prophets … with their jaunts across the desert, their long stretches of lost sleep and heart-to-heart talks with burning bushes, their battles with demons in sandstorms, their secret conversations with God while eating stale crusts of bread delivered by pigeons, their hallucinations of strange music. And then onward to ducking when stones are flung, getting tossed into a cage or a prison, laughed at and poked with sticks, put before a court of judges. This is the road Keith Richards walks.
And yet there are some Keith connections to both sides of the philosopher aisle, both old school and prophet school. Throughout philosophy, all those who have illuminated the pressing human questions of “What do I do?” have also served another function: to illuminate the sayings of Keith Richards.
And then Keith illuminates them back.
By looking at the wisdom of the great philosophers—both the Goofus and the Gallant schools—you come closer to the final goal: bonding with the Keith Way of Life, seeing it clearly, and achieving a full rendition of the Tao of Keith in daily living.
It’s the Keithaholic’s job to