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Thursday, April 24, 2008
How Best to Describe Keith Richards’s Face?
A nice piece in today’s TLS by Alan Jenkins about the Stones, ostensibly a review of the new Scorcese concert film Shine a Light, but actually an opportunity to ponder not just the persistence of the group (‘What’s in it for Jagger?’ Jenkins wonders: ‘a man who qualified a few years ago for his free bus pass, who could almost certainly buy the Beacon Theater and get change from a week’s wages, but who keeps whirling and strutting and leaping, pointing and shouting and pouting through a whole longish set without once looking as if he’d rather put his feet up with a DVD and a glass of Pomerol?’) but their continuing hold on the popular imagination. Why are we all still so fascinated by this superannuated collective? Richards, in Jenkins’s words, only ‘approximates’ playing the ‘chugging Chuck Berry riffs that helped make the Stones rich and famous forty years ago’ (approximation is ‘all he seems prepared to do now’). More, the band ‘haven’t produced a body of great or even memorable songs since the burst of inspiration that gave the world Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street in quick succession from 1969 to 1972.’ Jenkins makes an exception for the ‘odd one-off such as “Start Me Up”’, which may be being too dismissive. (The first Stones album I bought was Tattoo You, and, listening to it a few weeks ago, I was struck by what a fine album it still is). But this is not to quarrel with his key point, which seems to me unarguable: it’s been many decades since the Stones released a markworthy album.
All of which is prelude to the point of this post. Journalists and commentators who write on the Stones are locked in an unofficial competition to come up with the best new way of describing Keith Richards’s extraordinary face. Q magazine recently called it ‘heroically wrinkled like a tortoise’s testicle.’ Here is Jenkins’s go:
“Keef” himself, smoking continuously and looking more and more like the love-child of W. H. Auden and Freddy Krueger, has been so close to vanishing into rock legend so often that no one could begrudge him back-from-the-dead act, his rogueish vamping and leering.
Nice, that. The Auden ref smuggles in our sneaky admiration for Richards qua poet (more than one commentator has called him ‘Byronic’), where the Krueger allusion registers the way his face has increasingly assumed an alarming, poured- and striated-latex mask-like quality. It is not so much lined as ridged, like the roof of a dog’s mouth. It is monstrous, in a fascinating way. I suppose its appeal inheres in a more thoroughgoing form of the same impulse that moved Pete Townshend to smash up expensive guitars on stage—the decades-long smashing up of a beautiful face in the service of the same aim: an offering to the presiding Rock and Roll deities of destruction and nihilism. There’s something splendid about its decay.
Comments
Years ago, when Dennis Miller had a late-night show and before he came out of the closet as a Republican, I remember he did a joke that consisted of two words and two graphics: “Keith Richards. Skeletor.”
That sums it up for me.
Stones over Beatles forever.
In an interview, Richards claimed to being scientific heroin addict who survived as long as he did by being aware of the specific risks and avoiding them to the extent possible.
A med student friend researched the intrinsic risks of long-term heroin use (without dirty needles, heroin of unknown quality and strength, mixing of drugs, or careless overdoses). As I remember, there were two: first, a non-fatal lung disease that appears after several decades; and second, increasing likelihood of overdoses because the lethal dose remains the same, while the effective dose steadily increases (tolerance).
John, Richards also has claimed that the entire time he was on heroin, he never caught a cold or the flu. He said something like, “Doctors know the cure for the common cold. They just don’t like it.”
Heroin is pretty cool. But crystal meth is the future. Where are the great crystal meth artists?
I’d say that Richards is “a fine wreck of a man,” a phrase that sounds traditional to me, though I’ve no idea where it comes from.
I personally have been wondering, in this connection, whether any film critic took advantage of the fact that Shine a Light and a movie called Leatherheads were released simultaneously. Someone must have.
The canniest part of the Jenkins observation is the reference to Auden, who to the best of anyone’s knowledge neither injected smack nor played lead guitar. But as an elderly man--I saw him recite in 1968--his face was so craggy and distinctive that the first line of my fawning college-newspaper review of the reading (I can still remember), was “Oh, the lines in that man’s face.”