Keith Richards- After all, this is the man who told fellow Sagittarius Bobby Keys (also born on December 18, 1943): “We’re half man and half horse, and we got a license to shit in the streets,” which means if you’re walking behind Richards today, you better watch your step.
In fact, his longevity has been the punchline to quite a few groaners, including an oft-repeated joke about how, if a nuclear apocalypse happens, the only survivors will likely be cockroaches and Keith Richards. More recently Bill Maher joked that “Airplane black boxes should be made out of Keith Richards.”
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“I’ve no pretensions about immortality,” Richards told England’s NME in 2007. “I’m the same as everyone else – same as you, same as everybody, I’m the same old bugger, just kind of lucky. I was Number one on the Who’s Likely To Die list for 10 years, I mean I was really disappointed when I fell off the list.”
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Five years earlier, in an interview for Rolling Stone (“Will Keith Richards Bury Us All?“), Richards said:
“To me, life is a wild animal. You hope to deal with it when it leaps at you… I just hope to wake up and it’s not a disaster.”
You’ll hear how Richards was always open to exploring new influences, like his discovery of country & western music through his friendship with Gram Parsons (resulting in 1969’s Let It Bleed).
Richards also paid tribute to Chuck Berry by participating in Hail! Hail! Rock N’ Roll, a 1987 music documentary built around two 1986 concerts celebrating Berry’s 60th birthday.
Richards learned the hard way never to touch Berry’s guitar, after picking it up in the legendary rocker’s dressing room and strumming a chord: Berry returned and punched Richards in the face.
Keith Richards: Under Review finishes up with the Stones induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and some additional discussion about his appearance in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, playing the father of Johnny Depp’s popular pirate Captain Jack Sparrow (a character Depp based partially on Richards).