Today Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones turns 80.
For years it’s been impossible to venture onto social media without seeing memes about Richards’ death-cheating immortality: the often gaunt hollowed visage, the legendary drug use, urban legends about recurrent full blood transfusions. Richards’ legendary junkiedom has been decades longer in the myth-making than the reality. As best as the various histories and memoirs inform us, Richards spent about a decade addicted to heroin, from around the age of 25 to roughly 35. There were recurrent clean-ups for tours, relapses, or just decisions to start shooting heroin again. He eventually kicked the habit in stages after a notorious drug bust in Toronto in 1977, which could have sent him to prison for years. In other words, that supposedly central thing about the man actually ended going on half a century ago. Of course, there are drugs and drugs. Richards continued to drink, smoke grass, snort cocaine for years while seemingly weening himself of the vices over time. He even quit smoking at some point during the COVID pandemic.
The vast majority of that founding generation of ’60s rock music — not the origins in the 1950s with Chuck Berry and then the white version with Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins but the rebirth of it from England starting with the Beatles — was born during World War II. Lennon 1940, McCartney 1942, Jagger and Richards 1943, Roger Daltrey and Jimmy Page 1944, Pete Townsend and Eric Clapton 1945. Go right down the list from the greats to the semi-greats to the alsos. The great majority are born in those years. They’re all in their late ’70s or early ’80s. So we’re nearing the end of the line.
