Reflections of a Rolling Stone

Trouble has always had a way of finding Keith Richards, said David Fricke in Rolling Stone. “I don’t think I looked for it,” he says. “That’s just the way things pan out.” There was the time he nearly burned down the Playboy Mansion in Chicago while smoking hash in the bathroom, the trips to Morocco passing whole days in opium dens, or the time he fired a gun to get a crowd of groupies out of his hotel suite, clearing the room “in a cloud of skirts and bras.” The list goes on, and he admits to having only hazy memories of most of it. “Some of my most outrageous nights I can only believe happened because of corroborating evidence,” admits Richards. “You don’t remember shooting the gun? Swinging from the chandelier? Nope, don’t remember a thing about it.”

At 66, Richards says he’s slowed down some, but vows to keep making trouble. “There is something inside me that just wants to excite that thing in other people,” he says. “People imagined me. Inside of them is this raging Keith Richards. They created this folk hero. And I’ll do the best I can to fulfill their needs.”

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