Keith Richards is a revered veteran of the
music industry, and quite possibly one of the last true rock stars still walking the
Earth. The guitar maestro of the Rolling Stones has
been living his hardest, most Keith Richards life since the 1960s. Here's the untold truth of Keith Richards. Keith Richards has been around for such a
long time that it can be hard to imagine him as an innocent child. Yet he was...and according to The Guardian,
young Richards had surprisingly goody-two-shoes hobbies. The rock legend used to be a boy scout. According to the Daily Beast, his boy scout
past as head of a Beaver Patrol taught him valuable lessons about teamwork and leadership. However, it looks like he already had a rock
star streak during his time with them, seeing as he was eventually discharged for getting
into a fight with another young scout. [Laughter] According to DW, Richards was also in choir. Believe it or not, his career as a choirboy
was actually quite impressive: He sang soprano and performed at Westminster Abbey for Queen
Elizabeth the second. Although, he later swore allegiance to another
royal icon. "Keith calls Mick 'Her Majesty.'" Richards' time in a choir seems to have left
its mark on him. The Telegraph reports that the guitarist and
a number of his Jamaican Rastafari friends have a group they call Jamaica's Wingless
Angels. The group has been active since the 1970s
and uses old choral hymns, chanting, and drumming to create sparse, repetitive songs. While there is a thread that connects their
music to Richards' early choir days, this group of singers is much, much more fun to
hang out with. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards form one of
the most famous partnerships in rock history, but the Glimmer Twins have always had their
ups and downs. According to The Washington Post, their first
great public rift concerned Jagger's solo debut in 1985, and his subsequent refusal
to tour the Stones' 1986 album, Dirty Work. This plunged the band into years of conflict
that Richards described as World War III. Although Jagger and Richards managed to patch
things up and bring the show back on track in 1989, public barbs, and tactical apologies,
eventually started flying again. In his 2010 memoir, Life, Richards admitted
that he hasn't visited Jagger's dressing room in decades because he doesn't enjoy hanging
out with his old friend anymore. The guitarist wrote that in the 1980s, Jagger
started to become an unbearable presence and had a larger-than-life ego. Although Jagger was upset by some of the revelations
in his bandmate's memoir, Richards told Rolling Stone magazine, "I was going to tell the story. As I told Mick, ‘You should have seen what
I left out.'” Let's just hope Jagger isn't featured in Richard's
next book. "The next one is a murder mystery." Actor and model Anita Pallenberg is an influential
figure in the Rolling Stones' history. According to The Guardian, she visited the
band backstage in 1965 and started a relationship with the band's other guitarist, Brian Jones. The relationship soon turned violent, and
Pallenberg left Jones for Richards. The two lived together in London, where they
had three children. The Guardian also reported that Pallenberg's
influence in the band went far beyond being their guitar slinger's significant other. She performed backing vocals on "Sympathy
for the Devil," and Richards was convinced that she had an affair with Mick Jagger when
the two shot a movie together. This allegedly inspired the guitarist to write
one of the Rolling Stones' most famous and brutal songs, "Gimme Shelter." Through the years, Richards and Pallenberg
struggled with substance abuse issues, drifted apart, and finally separated in 1980. Vanity Fair says around this same time Richards
met Patti Hansen at the legendary Studio 54. Hansen was the perfect match for Richards
and their relationship was a much more stable one: Their marriage has lasted for almost
four decades. In April 1971, Keith Richards rented a luxurious
property called Villa Nellcote at the French Riviera to record their Exile on Main Street
album. Villa Nellcote had a pretty bad history, as
it had been the Nazi headquarters during their occupation of France. There were still swastikas painted in the
basement when Richards rolled in and turned the place into a curious mix of a backstage
and a partially wrecked hotel room. Along with Villa Nelcote's Nazi history and
the continuous stream of drug dealers, hangers-on, and famous visitors, the heat, dripping walls,
and bad air circulation on the basement level all contributed to the building's weird vibe. According to the Star, this was reflected
on the finished double album's swampy sounds. Today, Exile on Main Street is one of the
band's most acclaimed and enduring works. However, Villa Nellcote is unlikely to become
a popular pilgrimage for fans, despite its importance in the group's history. On top of it being a remote location that's
quite hard to reach, the villa's current owner makes it clear that fans who want to visit
the property will not be welcomed. "Get off my lawn." Keith Richards has a long-standing friendship
with singer-songwriter Tom Waits. According to Rolling Stone, this goes back
to Waits' 1985 album, Rain Dogs. Richards has contributed guitar parts and vocals for
several Waits' songs, and in 2013, the two recorded a growling version of the sea shanty
"Shenandoah." They're so close that Waits once wrote a tongue-in-cheek
poem called "Keith Richards" to honor the guitarist. It compares Richards to a praying mantis because,
as Waits strangely says, "He only has one ear and it is located between his legs." "What?" According to Ultimate Classic Rock, Waits
reveres Richards but describes the dynamic between the two as one that needs an adult
in the room. The musicians once got together to cowrite
some songs for Waits' Bad As Me album, but the process proved to be less than fruitful. Richards would suddenly call out "Scribe." When Waits wondered what was going on, Richards
said it again, now pointing a finger at him. At that point, Waits realized that Richards
was looking for someone to write down the music they had been improvising into existence
for an hour...and that someone was Tom Waits. "Look, I'm gonna have to rethink this." Keith Richards may be a rock legend whose
music is loved by millions, but his own taste in music holds a few surprises. According to Billboard, Richards likes both
Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga. He also respects singer Tony Bennett enough
to say that if he likes Gaga, that means she must be great. BBC says that Richards is a fan of old music
such as blues, gospel, jazz, and reggae but isn't above lavishing praise on individual,
even modern artists. Florence and The Machine, James Bay, and reggae
legend Gregory Isaacs have all received positive mentions from Richards. He also seems to like Ed Sheeran. Richards has seen Sheeran play live more than
once and enjoys his one-man-band style…though he does appear to think that the younger artist's
name is "Ed Sheenan." "Ed Sheenan, I really like. The little one man band." On the other hand, Richards doesn't particularly
seem to enjoy artists who are closer to his own genre. He has been known to dismiss Led Zeppelin
as "a little hollow," though he does respect Jimmy Page. He's described the Grateful Dead as "boring
shit," and harder acts like Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne's Black Sabbath as "great jokes." We're sure Ozzy would like to have a few words
with Keith about that comment… [incoherent mumbling] Keith Richards is famous for his extravagant
style that features loud jackets, scarves, and accessories. According to The Telegraph, his style is actually
incredibly simple and not even entirely his own: He just raids the wardrobes of the women
in his household. The man whose style inspired the costume of
Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies has worn women's
clothes for decades. In 2016, he said the majority of his clothes
are actually just borrowed from his daughters and his wife, Patti Hansen. Richards insists that however outlandish his
clothes might seem, they're just things he likes to wear, not deliberate costumes. His daughter Alexandra has backed up this
claim, saying Richards just has the ability to wear anything, including his wife's pajama
pants, and make it look great. Jagger, on the other hand, can make almost
anything look great. Keith Richards has been through so much that
it's generally regarded as a miracle that he's lived such a long and distinguished life. "It's not just about living forever, Jackie. The trick is living with yourself forever." Richards has been dodging the grim reaper
since he was born. Ultimate Classic Rock says the guitarist's
tribulations started during the London bombings in 1944, when a Nazi V-1 bomb hit the infant
Richards' cot. Fortunately, baby Keith and his mother had
already evacuated the area. In 1965, his microphone gave him an electric
shock during a performance, burning the strings of his guitar and knocking him unconscious. In 1971, Richards fell asleep while smoking
in bed. The cigarette lit the bed on fire and almost
burned him to a crisp. In 1973, another fire burned down Richards'
Redlands estate, though he insisted that a wire-chewing rodent was to blame rather than
a passed-out rock star. At some point in the 1970s, he had the worst
drug experience of his life when someone laced his drugs with poisonous strychnine. Later in life, his incidents have become more
mundane but no less dangerous. In 1998, Richards slipped and fell while reaching
for a book in his library, and broke several ribs when heavy books fell on him. In 2006, he had an unfortunate experience
with a palm tree while foraging for coconuts in Fiji. Richards cracked his skull so badly
that he needed brain surgery. Despite all of his brushes with death, and
the damage he's done to his body, Richards actually looks pretty decent for his age. "Keith Richards looked 70 when he was 40. And now that he's 70, he looks 69. He's regenerating." It's probably no surprise that the Rolling
Stones have visited one of the most notorious temples of debauchery: the Playboy Mansion. What may come as a surprise is that Keith
Richards once nearly set it on fire. According to The New Zealand Herald, Richards
says when they were visiting the mansion, he and the band's saxophone player, Bobby
Keys, stole their tour doctor's bag and, more importantly, the multitude of drugs it contained. They locked themselves in one of the Playboy
Mansion's bathrooms, and started sampling everything. Suddenly, they heard a fire alarm. People were running down the corridor, so
they left the scene, at which point, it burst into flames. They had accidentally started a fire. Richards tells another version of the story
in his memoir: As he and Keys were busy dealing with the array of drugs, they suddenly noticed
that the room was getting quite smoky. The drapes of the bathroom were already smoldering
and everything was just about to go off big-time, when they heard banging on the door. A bunch of waiters and men in black suits
stormed in, carrying buckets of water. The two musicians sat on the floor with their
pupils constricted to pinpoints, annoyed at the way their private celebration had been
interrupted. "I'm lucky to be here, man. It's amazing." Let's just get it out of the way here: Keith
Richards really likes to tell the story about him snorting his father's ashes. He has told NME that he couldn't resist mixing
some of the ashes with his cocaine, and that his father wouldn't have cared. The version he told GQ paints the incident
as a semi-accidental one in which he intended to spread the ashes to fertilize an oak tree,
but when he pulled the top off the box that contained his father's mortal remains, some
of the ashes landed on the table. After that, he just had, quote, "A line of
dad" because it felt right. "I wouldn't eat him, you know, but I snorted
him." Even before the snorting incident made them
truly inseparable, the father and son were close. According to the Irish Mirror, Richards and
his father, Herbert, spent 20 years without contact, until the guitarist finally reached
out in the early 1980s. Their reunion was successful, and over the
next two decades, Richards introduced his father to the lifestyle of a Rolling Stone. In turn, he discovered that his father could
drink them all under the table. At the time of Herbert's death, the two got
along so well that Richards felt comfortable with, as he says, ingesting his ancestor. Now, he wants to make it a family tradition. When he dies, Richards said that he wants
his family to do the same with his ashes. [Laughter] "I love this s---. I love this s---." Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Grunge videos about your favorite
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