In honor of Keith's 78th birthday, the Children’s Museum in West Hartford, Connecticut, named a hissing Madagascar cockroach “Keith” to commemorate the Rolling Stones rocker’s special day.
Bobby Keys was built for fun. When we were making Exile on Main Street in France, we were there for several months, and I had a good ole speedboat. (Rolling Stone)
In the afternoons, before we went down the basement to record, we’d sort of zoom around, creating mayhem from Monte Carlo to Cannes.
Bobby also bought a huge motorcycle, which he used to roar around the hills and pick up a few girlfriends.
He’d always come back with a different chick on the back. He was that kind of guy.
He was the epitome of the rock & roll sax-playing man. He used to tell me about listening to Buddy Holly rehearse in his garage just down the road from his house. That’s one of the reasons he wanted to get into music. That’s pretty early rock & roll, so he was right in there at the very beginning. He was playing on the road by the time he was 15. He was a piece of history in himself, and had a deep knowledge of it.
When we brought Bobby in, we were listening to the great soul bands of the Sixties. We wanted to give the band a bigger sound and were influenced by all of the beautiful R&B records with the Memphis horns — the Otis and the Pickett bands — so adding saxes seemed quite natural to us. When I first met him, he had Jim Price with him on trumpet and they were a hot little duo themselves. I think they were with Delaney & Bonnie at the time.
When he cut “Live With Me,” his first record with us, I immediately thought of great players like Plas Johnson or Lee Allen, who played for Little Richard and Fats Domino. He had that same Southern feel on the way he played. I guess that’s not too astounding, since he does come from Texas [laughs]. He never let anybody forget he was from Texas.
Being in a guitar band, Bobby had an incredible knack of making horns melt in. He always knew the right part to play. I remember when we cut “Happy.” One afternoon, I just had this idea and the rest of the boys hadn’t turned up yet. It was just Bobby and Jimmy Miller, our producer at the time, who also plays drums. We cut the finished track in about an hour. Bobby was amazing on that, because instrumentation-wise, that started off just guitar, a baritone sax and some drums. Bobby’s baritone part just picked it up.
Robert Henry Keys (December 18, 1943 – December 2, 2014) was an American saxophonist who performed with other musicians as a member of several horn sections of the 1970s. He appears on albums by the Rolling Stones,[1] Lynyrd Skynyrd, Harry Nilsson, Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, George Harrison, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker and other prominent musicians. Keys played on hundreds of recordings and was a touring musician from 1956 until his death in 2014.
The cockroach will permanently live at the museum, which is located just 60 miles north of Richards’ home in Weston, in an enclosure and will be cared for by staff at the museum, noting that “all of his rider demands will be met.”
“It is said the only two things to survive a nuclear war would be cockroaches and Keith Richards,” the museum wrote in a press release. “Chances are the real Keith will outlive the newly named, oval-shaped invertebrate whose life span is two to five years.”
“As Ronnie and I often say to each other, let’s go onstage and get some peace and quiet,” Richards says.
There have been some changes over the years. Richards is off the hard stuff and, as the Daily Mail saw fit to print, he has ditched his bandanna and given his hair a slight brownish tint. But that doesn’t mean the onetime serial consumer heads to a Pilates class after soundcheck. He gets his exercise the way his heroes did: onstage.
“I have a beer occasionally, and that’s about it,” Richards says. “I live a normal life without being too preoccupied about my health. I find that what I do as a job actually is enough for me.”
He pauses and gives that Keef cackle, a laugh that falls somewhere between a pirate and a prep-school prankster.
“As you know, I’m different from a lot of people,” Richards says. - to read the full article click here
Keith Richards last week had a talk with Steve Jordan and Little Steven about the making of Talk is Cheap.“I’d forgotten totally about them,” Keith Richards said in a recent phone interview from his home in Connecticut. “They came up while we were sifting through the vaults,” referring to versions he recorded of Willie Dixon’s “My Babe,” Eddie Taylor’s “Big Town Playboy,” another track titled “Slim” and one more simply labeled “Blues Jam.”
