who knew ? Mick spoke (wrote) in response to Keith Richards book… contrary to all presuppositions, the man seems to be able to think with remarkable coherence and think like a philosopher…
"Again, the honesty is bracing. I think Keith puts just about any of his manifold urges on a par with hunger, and I think we can agree the world would be a dangerous place if that was the norm. It explains many, many of his actions over the years. In the book he tells the story of going to meet Patti Hansen’s parents for the first time—drunk, holding an open bottle of Jack, and with one of his fucktard friends in tow. You can imagine how the evening ended. I’m sure Keith thinks it’s OK. (“Being nervous ain’t no crime.”) (“Oh, shut up, Keith,” I think.) With that perspective—and the added benefit of being rich and famous and having most of his deplorable actions do nothing but burnish his image—Keith’s way in the world has been, in a certain way and ignoring, for the moment, the people who died, a blessed one.
I certainly bless it. I stood by him and propped him up and didn’t fire his ass for many, many years. It would have ended the Stones, of course, so maybe I was being selfish. In a way, even comatose he had a marquee name; as my meal ticket, you might say, it suited me to let him doze. I took the reins until, when he finally woke up, he found that he had no place in the management. He’s angry about that, too. Yes, let’s let Keith Richards have a hand in overseeing an operation that generates $1 million a day in revenue. I don’t know what else I could have done. Later, one grows older and becomes more informed about such things, and I saw I was supposed to have held an elaborate ceremony called an “intervention.” Society could have effectively halted the upheavals of the 1960s simply by requiring all of us to “intervene” with one another. In any event, considering half our circle was on heroin and the rest were coke fiends, I think it wouldn’t have efficacious in our circumstances.
He talks about me, too, in his solo songs, less subtly: “I’m so sick and tired/ Of hanging around/ Jerks like you.” People ask me why I let him put these on the album. I think: Oh, why not? It’s a great song, and he can sing it, and he can write the book, too. He’s trying to get my attention. To connect. To have it be how it once was. At our age, I think there’s no basis for it. Keith celebrates his own unchanging character, and I have had quite enough of that.
But, still, when I think of Keith, I think sometimes of how someone different from the book comes out through these songs. Once in a great while he detaches and looks down at his corporeal self. “I think I lost my touch,” he sings on one of them; “It’s just another song and it’s slippin’ away.” Rock and roll is strange. When a song is beautiful—those spare guitars rumbling and chiming, by turns—the words mean so much more, and there, for a moment, I believe him, and feel for him.
Or I think about “How Can I Stop” which may end up being Keith’s last great song.
“How can I stop … once I start?” he murmurs, over and over again. “How can I stop once I start?”
It’s about rock ‘n’ roll, of course, and playing guitar, and his tenure, and mine, in our unusual coalition. It’s also about heroin and everything else he can’t stop ingesting. But again it’s about Keith himself, who once started never did stop—through the fame, the songs, the concerts and the women and the drugs; and the violence and senselessness, the addictions and the deaths, the ruined lives, the petty and large-scale cruelties. At the end Keith got Wayne Shorter to do a sax solo that is itself almost an out-of-body experience, perhaps the loveliest moment on one of our records. It goes on and on over the last two minutes of a very long track, and the end is almost a … an exaltation, perhaps? I am lost there. It’s something I’m not sure I ever saw evidenced in real life, and something that isn’t in his book. It’s the sound—or at least the closest thing Keith Richards will ever admit to it—of a conscience. "