What would Keith Richards do_ - Jessica Pallington West [29]
But Keith Richards wasn’t always this image we’ve come to know. It took a while to get there, just as the process of being a guru does. In The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, the metamorphosis of Keith is outlined thus: “Over time shifting from an amiable-looking mod with the street-cred cool of a bewildered rabbit, through the long heroin-happy years as Britain’s licensed bad boy, to the extraordinary figure he cuts today as everybody’s favorite cadaver. What’s remarkable is how long his dark, hip makeover took him."
If only we could all remain an innocuous garden mammal. But things tend to change when the shit hits the fan. If you put a Barbie doll in a blender by mistake, when you take it out, if it’s not completely shattered, it’s going to look a little different.
The visual symbol that is Keith Richards—the one that is as recognizable as a box of Cheerios or a drawing of Charlie Brown— came about in installments, with each part pegged down after a period of significant trouble.
If fashion and style are an outcome of “something happened,” then Keith as Cheerios box came about, in part, as a response to guilt, death, badgering, humiliation, and a little problem with policemen.
The Cheerios-level Keith got its first installment in 1967, the year some have called the period of the Great Keith Richards Makeover.
Keith was at a crossroads. One direction spelled defeat, the other spelled resistance, escape, and freedom. He decided he was going to get tough and take route B. Then he added the necessary armor and travelware. The journey, in prophet terms, was the first several miles of a walk through fire. And it was from this point on that a tougher Keith emerged. All accounts of Keith, post-makeover, attest to a guy who wasn’t so shy anymore, who wasn’t afraid to yell back, who started sharpening that now razor-fine wit. The prophet within started talking. Before that, he was just a rabbit in training. Then the rabbit went punk, and a philosopher was born.
Following the drug bust and the prison stint in 1967, the backdrops were briefly changed, first to Tangier, then Rome. It was in Tangier that he picked up the shemagh (the traditional Middle Eastern scarf used to shield soldiers from overexposure, sandstorms, and overbearing sun) that has morphed over the years into longer and longer versions with more and more skulls. It was also in 1967 that the hair got a little more dangerous, the protective darkness around the eyes more pronounced, and the sense of “Don’t fuck with me” and “I don’t give a fuck” grew more pervasive.
In Rome, Keith added a surprising new layer: woman’s wear. When a guy wants to toughen up, you wouldn’t assume that adding women’s clothes and makeup would do it—but the woman he was taking it from was Anita Pallenberg, a gal who probably could have singlehandedly taken on half the NFL.
Keith also added on more bits from the Max Miller wardrobe: conflicting prints, polka dots, mad stripes. Near-vaudeville outfits. But if you’re going to arm yourself against the beast, you might as well use humor. And if you have to dress like a music-hall comedian like Max Miller, or like Groucho Marx, or Laurel, or Hardy, or Buster Keaton, or Woody Allen, well, that’s one way to survive.
Two years later, following the death of Brian Jones (who mistakenly did mess with Anita), Keith added the Peruvian shark’s-tooth earring, another warding-off-the-demon talisman.
Jump ahead about ten years, and the war got uglier. The prophet in flames needed more protection. It was 1979, the next do-or-die period, and the most profound aspect of the Keith look came in: adornment on the finger and the wrist, a message about freedom, mortality, and equality forged in heavy metal.
First, there is the skull ring—given to him in ’79 on his thirty-sixth birthday. During this time there were rifts with evil twin Mick and with Anita (capped off when a teenage boy shot himself while in bed with her). The band was unraveling. (Guess whose fault that was?) There were the aftershocks