What would Keith Richards do_ - Jessica Pallington West [63]
WHAT HE’D HAVE BEEN IF HE HADN’T JOINED THE STONES: “A layabout. But a very high-class one."
*REGARDING THE CHEESE:
Ron Wood first brought it up in 1974, saying that Keith runs screaming from rooms when he comes into contact with cheese. Keith has gone on record since then, saying it’s the one thing he’ll never put in his body.
THE
KEITH
TIMELINE:
A CHRONOLOGY OF
TROUBLE
PRE-KEITH KEITH.
Keith’s family origins are in Europe’s religiously violent past. His mother’s father’s side is from Wales, originally descended from the Huguenots—Protestants who fled Catholic France in Elizabethan times due to violent religious suppression—and settled near Canterbury. On his father’s side, the roots go back to Wales as well, then onward to East London in the 1800s, where they ended up as factory laborers. His mother, Doris Dupree Richards, got pregnant with Keith to avoid factory work during World War II. His father, Bert, wasn’t so lucky, and spent several years in a light-bulb factory, leaving before dawn and returning after dark, setting the stage for a miserable household. According to Rolling Stone magazine, the only time Bert left England up until Keith’s childhood was to go to France for the war: “And that was to get his leg blown up."
DECEMBER 18, 1943.
Keith Richards is born on a Saturday night at Livingstone Hospital in Dartford, Kent, England (which had been a stop on the pilgrims’ road to Canterbury). He’s born at the same hospital where Mike Jagger was delivered five months earlier to more upwardly mobile parents, as opposed to the downwardly mobile Richardses. December 18 is an auspicious birth date for someone who would develop a strong interest in both America and black culture. It’s the day that the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, as well as the day the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, was ratified.
CHILDHOOD.
By his own accounts, he grew up “in a wasteland,” with bombings, war rationings, and school hazings. He is a little runt of a mama’s boy, chubby, with a chronic cold and a runny nose. But he has a dream—to be Roy Rogers: “He could shoot, play the guitar, and ride a great horse. What more do you want?” Little Keith “Ricky” Richards dresses up as Rogers, with cowboy hat and holsters, but is well-known as a crybaby. A lonely only child in a working-class family, he soon finds an outlet in music, as influenced by his bandleader grandfather, Gus Dupree, who keeps a guitar lying about when Keith comes to visit (as soon as he leaves it goes back in the case). He meets Mike Jagger at around age four. (The number sometimes changes according to who is telling the story, and when.) Together they attend Wentworth County Primary School. While Mike is a good student and outgoing, Keith is neither. Still, a teacher comments that Keith is “a straightforward type of person. He laughs when he is happy, cries when he is sad. There is no problem in trying to find out what is going on inside his mind. He’s open, frank.” But despite her kind words, it’s not easy. He cries all morning and needs to be forced to school. It’s the beginning of a long, bad relationship: School and Keith go together like oil and water.
1951 or 1953 (accounts vary) – Along with the two other biggest hoods in school, Spike and Terry, he becomes a choir boy. It was a good way to get out of science class.
They are three bad boys with the sweetest voices and tight jeans under their surplices. Their highlight comes in singing for the queen at Westminster Abbey, 1953 (although skeptics wonder if Keith made that up). “All my gigs have gone right downhill since."
1954 (accounts vary) – Joins the Boy Scouts as part of the “Beaver Patrol” but quits six months later, not liking being told what to do.
1955 – A move to the wrong side of the tracks.
The Richardses move to Spielman Road—government housing for the working class, i.e., the projects. It is, by his account, “Soul-destroying. A disgusting