Mais Où Sont Les Keith Richards D'antan?

[mallorys_camera]

Didn't make it to the garden yesterday (and likely won't today either, since temps are not forecast to rise to 60°). Instead, I devoted the morning to making money, went for an abbreviated tromp, and then settled down in a lawn chair on the back forty to chaperon the chickens and read Bob Spitz's The Rolling Stones: A Biography.

I do love me some celebrity dish, except I can't really relate to many current celebrities—their faces are indistinguishable, their names unmemorable, their ostensibly flagrant behavior mere bouts of exaggerated narcissism. Mais où sont les Keith Richards d'antan?

I saw the Stones in concert a couple of times in my late teens and early twenties. In fact, I went to the infamous Altamont Concert—although that wouldn't count as "seeing the Stones," I suppose, since I was at least a mile from the concert stage and very high on LSD. At that distance, we couldn't know anything that was happening near the stage, though the vibes wafting our way were bad enough to make us decide to pack up & leave long before sundown when the Stones were scheduled to perform. I was so high, my pals had to force-feed me a quarter of a jug of Red Mountain to get me into the car. Red Mountain, the vilest of the vile! I remember thinking at the time that it tasted like every human effluvia combined, like blood and sweat and tears and sperm and gastric spit-up all mixed up into one alcoholic beverage.

But mostly, I wasn't into the Stones' music as much as I was into their bad behavior. This was back when the beauty standards of the 1950s still weren't being challenged very much. The dolly girls of Swinging London with their bangs and long, straight, center-parted hair still had faces defined by the Golden Ratio, and Paul McCartney & George Harrison were the handsome Beatles. Meanwhile, I was struggling in the modeling industry because while I photographed well, my skin was too dark and my features too exotic for anything but lingerie catalogs and the middle of the runway.

And yet, here was Jagger, with his exaggerated simian features, the biggest Lothario of them all! And there was Keith Richards, doing lots and lots of heroin! Proving that it was perfectly possible to live a productive life doing heroin if only you had the money to pay for it! (I did not, which is why I gave it up before I developed the habit.)

Spitz describes the excesses of the 60s and 70s at exhaustive length, but crams the last 40 years of the band's career into only a handful of chapters.

You have to hand it to Jagger! He is completely unfazed by those feelings of personal responsibility that so often bedevil the rest of us. Does he care that the Stones turned Altamont into a shit show? He does not! Brian Jones drowns in a pool one month after Jagger kicks him out of the band? So what! His official girlfriend, L'Wren Scott, hangs herself after he takes up with a ballet dancer 25 years younger? Well, that's really sad, but not sad enough to stop him from parading said ballet dancer on a hotel balcony a couple of days after Scott's death.

No, Mick Jagger only cares about two things: making money and physical fitness. Maybe not in that order.

I am thinking I should have been more like Mick Jagger!