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Is Keith Richards the real article?


Vincent Vega

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Guest Len B'stard

Keith Richards is Keith Richards and that is a guy that, for his particular niche, is an exceptional guitar player. Sloppy yes, not a technical wizard, yes but a great songwriter and rhythm guitarist extrodinaire. As far as the imagery surrounding him, or any celebrity, yes, it is just an image, a method by which to sell a particular product to people that aren't interested in the inherent substance of the product at hand or for whom the product alone is not enough. Put simply, immature people.

But no, he's not superman, he does sleep upside down and drink people blood at night, he isn't a pirate, he isn't bulletproof or un-killable or in possession of any superpowers or anything, just a guitar player. And the same goes for any celebrity with an 'image', which is all of them, they are all just people.

Edited by sugaraylen
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Guest Len B'stard

I think he's just a guy who found something he was good at.

Did you read his book or listen to the audiobook?

We're all "images" aren't we?

Quoted for being spot on, as usual ;)

Edited by sugaraylen
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Guest Len B'stard

So wait...Ginger Baker and Liam Gallagher are the real deal, but Keith Richards is just an image??

pppfffttt...

They're all just images, behind which are sometimes talented musicians and sometimes not :shrugs: Sometimes those images are of their own design, sometimes not but all in all, to my understand they're just people, people who are often more interesting in and of themselved than the images used to flog em to us.

But, to entertain the question since we're here, Johnny Thunders was the real deal :) Realness in accordance to the whole imagery thing would put the likes of Johnny way ahead of Keith, not least because the end game for Johnny was never a big house on conneticut and the padding of an expansive pension fund.

Which begs the question that if the end game of this whole rock n roll thing is being found curled up under a coffee table, blue-skinned with a needle in the toilet in New Orleans is it really worth it?

The fact it the real deal is far to grim for

Your regular folk to tolerate.

Whats funny about that is Johnny grew up wanting to be Keith...or the image of him at least.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaYPCho3AaU

Ever see that doc Zint? :) It's really cool (if a little grim), you should check it out if you haven't (not to derail or anything).

And yeah, while we're about it i'd put Ginge ahead of Keith too, Ginge was a proper working class boy from proper London, as in Lewisham not Richmond, he was fakin' nothing, never satisfied, always looking for newer cooler crazier sounds, he would actually give you a smack instead of play acting the hardman, he done the women, the drugs, the drink and was an totally totally inimitable musician and a true wandering nomadic mentally unsound person, he's a lot closer to the image than Keith Richards and it shows. Ginge never gave a fuck. Keith might've had his holidays in Morrocco back in the day with young Michael, thrown on a few scarves and played at being bohemian for a few years there but Ginge is still at it.

And he was a top drawer fuckin' musician the likes of which has never been known in a band like The Stones. Don't get me wrong, there's some sick fuckin' players in The Stones that have come and gone over the years...but never a Ginge. Ginge looked the gypsy pirate back when Andrew Oldham had Keith and them up in Bond Street with the measuring tape getting kitted out in suits trying to get them to look like The Beatles.

Edited by sugaraylen
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I think anyone playing in front of a crowd for a living is going to develop a thick skin. Ginger and Jack were feuding before Cream, in what was probably one of the best live bands at that time...

This is the kind of thing that depresses me. Wish he had pulled it together, it wasn't like he was a teenage dad. Hopefully GNR's cover and others put the kids through college.

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Guest Len B'stard

I got new for ya Dalshie, the kids ain't doing to well, his boy Vito is in Rikers on drug charges...how fuckin' sad is that eh? Seriously fuckin' tragic, his kids too, his own fuckin' kids went down that road.

The mental thing about it is, towards the end when he was touring in The Oddballs with Stevie Klasson i think and Stevie was like, yeah, i wanna try heroin and Johnny literally lost his fuckin' mind, yelling at him like you fuckin' idiot, what the fuck do you wanna try that dirty shit for, you think i like being this way etc etc, was it even Stevie Klasson, i can't even remember the names no more, i'm getting fuckin' old, the 19 yr old kid that played guitar with him, i think he was Swedish.

Johnnys whole tale makes me incredibly sad when i think about it all. I think it's why his like...sentimental songs were so poigniant, precisely because he was like...this chauvenist fuckin' Italian American meathead so...it took a lot for him to get to the kinds of places he needed to go to write songs like It's Not Enough and Memory and Hurt Me (which Richard Hell wrote part of) and I Only Wrote This Song For You, just makes it all sound all the more...touching. You could tell a struggle had taken place.

Curled up under a fuckin' coffee table in NO having just been robbed, with a needle in the fuckin' toilet, the greatest fuckin' rock n roller there ever was, thats not the way it should've happened..

Y'know there was two people that Johnny met in NO that went up to his room with him, the receptionist heard a ruckus, these two people left the fuckin' hotel and Johnnys found dead and robbed after and the cops didn't investigate shit...

That guy was realer than a billion Keith Richardses..

Edited by sugaraylen
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Who knows how he really died, esp. if he had leukemia and might have gone there to spend his last days. He may have planned it all out, and didn't have it in him to end his life, esp. if he still considered himself an Italian Catholic from New York, but I could see him not wanting to be surrounded by family watching him wither.

It makes for a good film biopic. Wonder who would play him....

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Guest Len B'stard

They say he was pretty far gone with lukemia, or at least Jerry Nolan said so but...nah man, something happened there, way too fuckin' suss...Dee Dee Ramone said in his book that he met some bastards there lookin' to rip him off for his methadone although how that scatty bastard knew is anyones guess, the junkie grapevine? :shrugs: Just fuckin' sad, all of it..

I'd hate for them to make a movie bout him, it'd just be a load of bullshit like 99% of these rocker biopics.

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Guest Len B'stard

And then go on every publication going "no i didn't say that!" "oh yes i did" "oh no i didn't" just makes you sound like a sad old man thats full of shit. I think Keith Richards is a thoroughly ridiculous person. A really small man thats about 5 feet off the ground that thinks he's some kind of Don Gangster, he's like the personification of little man syndrome. I mean stickin' butterfly knives in the table and that, really Keith, well scary. Funny how the only account existing of him ever getting smacked was by Chuck Berry and he didn't do fuckin' shit in return, for all his chat in his autobiography about getting peoples legs broken and that :rolleyes: The real tough guys (like Berry) don't jump up and down and give it the big 'i am', it's only the try hards that wanna impress.

'i did heroin because i wanted to keep one foot in the gutter', what a load of fuckin' bollocks :lol:

That said, i love the bloke as a musician, i think he makes great music but thats not what the thread appears to be about, it's about image and the image quite frankly is just laughable. It literally is one of those point at and laugh things.

Edited by sugaraylen
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