Keith and Me, Up a Tree

Is Keith still up a tree?
In my ‘yoot’ I had time to follow the exciting adventures of Keith Richards –Rock Star, but not anymore.
Some months back though, I believe I heard that Keith was up a tree, and had another of his famous adventures.
Actually, what I heard was that Keith was up a tree, in Tahiti, and came tumbling down. And all the King of Tahiti’s surgeons, and some in New Zealand as well, were trying to put Keith back together again.
They must have succeeded.
The only bigger news about Keith Richards that there could be - apart from his regular misadventures, would be his long anticipated death: and having not heard that news, I assume that he has recovered.
Weren’t the Stones at Gillette Stadium a few weeks back? I must have missed that one.
Though I am clearly slowing down, in many ways I still mark the passages of my life by the lives of Rock Stars.
I am of an age that saw the golden age of rock and roll, in its prime, in mine.
My first rock concert was a triple bill at a dinner theatre in Gaithersburg, Maryland, featuring Joe Cocker’s Grease Band, Savoy Brown, and the Small Faces (with a singer named Rod Stewart).
The ticket, I remember it well, was priced at $3.50.
But I digress.
I actually never saw the Stones until much later, when they played RFK Stadium (where the Washington Nationals play baseball today), with Stevie Wonder as their opening act.
It was 1972, and Jagger came on to the stage dressed in a colonial outfit with a three-cornered hat. It was the tour in support of their power blues’ double-album ‘Exiles on Main Street’, and so the band included a full horn section, Billy Preston on organ, a half dozen back-up singers, and more.
But, though I didn’t admit it at the time, it was a bad show, in oh so many ways: beginning with the so-called festival seating (no reserved seats), which meant a death-defying queue outside the stadium followed by a mad dash for the grass, hours in the sun waiting for the show to start and then – (probably smart considering the circumstances) the Stones in and out in less than an hour.
But it was also my first in-person look at Keith, looking then like a character from Fritz the Cat: deathly pale, bad shag haircut, frilly shirt, and the ghost of a cigarette – completely turned to ash, miraculously hanging from his smirking lip.
Deathly pale, I said, but that does a disservice to death. Death was rosy by comparison.
Keith was Nosferatu, the undead, and this was 34 years ago!
Age and the occasional functioning credit card have given me the chance to see Keith and Co. many times since, and he has looked, despite advancing years, healthier each time.
Maybe it’s me, my age, and the crap that I have gone through over the last decade or so. Whatever it is, more and more everyday I see the value of survival.
As you get older life starts feeling more and more like a simple child’s game: we’re all sitting cross-legged on the ground, holding hands, and trouble comes skipping up from behind and taps us on the shoulder.
It’s a race.
If trouble beats you round the circle it takes your place in the circle.
It’s that simple.
If you lose the game is over.
If you win, well, there’s the difference: when you are a child if you win you smile, shrug, and move on to the next thing on your schedule.
But as you get older you take a little more pleasure in each of those victories, and in compiling a winning record. And you realize that every time you beat back trouble, you shouldn’t just move on to the next thing on your schedule, you should celebrate.
That’s what Keith means to me, I think, and many others: a celebration of survival.
Everyone jokes about the life he’s lead, the way that life has carved crudely into his once smooth skin, but most also seem to realize that he has a valiant spirit.
That may be the underlying appeal of the music of my generation: that spirit, that fight, that independence. Whatever it is, no one person exemplifies that spirit more than Keith.
Sure, Mick Jagger is an ageless wonder: but there are always exceptions, always the exceptional. That’s Mick.
Keith seems more a regular bloke, blessed with an indomitable spirit.
Mick is like most of us, aware of the time slipping away and, unlike most of us, doing everything he can to forestall it.
But Keith has let life take its shots.
Shot after shot after shot, much of it self-inflicted.
To cite another rock legend - who didn’t survive, Keith’s been “driven by the wind, bitten by the snow, had his head stoved in, but he’s still on his feet and he’s still…willin.”
Keith will be up that tree, with a coconut in one hand, and a guitar in the other, until the end.
I think that’s the way we’d all like to go, up a tree singing ‘Satisfaction’.