Crossfire Hurricane (2012)

Keith Richards: Self

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Quotes 

• Keith Richards, Himself : To me, the real interest in playing guitar is to play guitar with another guy. Two guitars together, if you get it right, it can become like an orchestra. And, Mick Taylor, is a virtuoso.

• Keith Richards, Himself : Of course, you have to talk about Andrew Oldham, who'd been working for Brian Epstein, with the Beatles. He went around London and he heard we were kicking up a storm in some clubs. He took a look around and he said, "Hey, there can't be just one band in England."

  Mick Jagger, Himself : Andrew wanted to make the Rolling Stones the anti-Beatles. So, you got heroes, you got an anti-hero. Like in a movie, you got good guys and bad guys. Andrew decided that the Rolling Stones were the bad guys. It wasn't just an accident. He thought the Rolling Stones would suit that image. It helps to have people that go along with it or would fit the bill. It's good to have an actor to play the part.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : You see, you're thrust into the limelight in a youth oriented thing. It's not about growing up. It's about *not* growing up, in a way. Then, it's about bad behavior. Then, you're about bad behavior. So, then, you start behaving badly.

  Keith Richards, Himself : It's a weirdly situation. I mean, if you - If you did something wrong, even better. And the Beatles got the white hat.

  [laughs] 

  Keith Richards, Himself : What's left? The black hat.

• Keith Richards, Himself : I mean, in a way, the Rolling Stones overtake you. And it's almost like you're sort of levitating. You don't even want to touch the strings cause they're doing it themselves. And, any way, they'd be too hot.

• Keith Richards, Himself : You've been thrown into this. I mean, you started being a blues player and then suddenly this fame thing comes in. And everybody has to handle that in their own way. Charlie hates it. Charlie's perfect world would to be in the Rolling Stones but except nobody gives a shit who you are.

  [laughs] 

• Keith Richards, Himself : It was a realization in Canada that I was actually jeopardizing the band. And if they were going to put me away, it was bye-bye. That's why I stopped. That's it. The experiment is now - we are pulling the plug on this once and for all. It was an end of chapter there and a turn of page.

• Keith Richards, Himself : [final lines]  You just don't fuck with the Stones, you know. This is a simple rule, where it don't pay.

  [laughs] 

  Mick Jagger, Himself : You had this kind of fuck the world, you can do anything, attitude. For a moment, that was definitely there. I mean, you felt you're riding in a wave and all. Well, you can't be young forever.

• Keith Richards, Himself : I'm amazed by it, myself. It's -

  [laughs] 

  Keith Richards, Himself : It's almost a fairy story, you know.

• Keith Richards, Himself : I think between Mick, Brian and me, we had a feeling that the idea to put a band together that was a little less show business was exactly at the right time. The show biz angle was just boring to us.

• Keith Richards, Himself : It started, man, on the first tour. Half way through it, things started to get crazy.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : In those days, we only played covers. The first album was all covers. I remember having this discussion, well, what are we going to do. We can't make a second album of covers. We already knew we'd come to the wall there.

  Keith Richards, Himself : Andrew Oldham said if we wanted to keep going, you've got to, really, we need new material. Well, this was something I couldn't have conceived of.

• Keith Richards, Himself : Suddenly, you know, just playing guitar and playing blues, suddenly, it wasn't enough, you know. Now I wanted to *invent* things for me to play.

• Keith Richards, Himself : We went on to write a whole lot of crap. And we didn't dare for months and months and months to write a song for the Stones, you know. Oh, God, that's a whole other trip.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : It felt like an explosive mount. People felt this sensation that something was going that had never happened before - that they'd been waiting to happen.

  Keith Richards, Himself : And that was at that same time in London that all kinds of shit was hitting the fan and, of course, we joined in.

• Keith Richards, Himself : [Reflecting on the impact of his first arrest for illegal drug use in 1967]  It cemented our relationships with our generation, with the public. And it sort of gave us a badge of honor, in a way, you know. To me, it just made me like, okay now, now you know who I am. Basically, givin' me a license. You know, it was Jesse James time. I mean, the cops turned me into a criminal. You know, that's when I started to carry a shooter in America.

  Brett Morgen, Himself : So, the outlaw was born.

  Keith Richards, Himself : Yeah. Yeah, it was fully blown. That was when we really put the black hat on. You know, before that it was just sort of off-grey.

  [laughs] 

  Mick Jagger, Himself : [historical footage - singing]  I was born in a cross-fire hurricane; And I howled at the morning driving rain; But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas; But it's all right. I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash; It's a gas, gas, gas...

• Keith Richards, Himself : Well, in a way, I kind of felt that everybody else was writin' a script for me. "You're going to do what I can't." Okay. And that is a very easy role to slip into. And there's a slot available and it was just built for me.

  [laughs] 

• Mick Jagger, Himself : Keith and I took drugs... But, Brian took too many drugs of the wrong kind and he wasn't functioning as a musician. I don't think he was that interested in contributing to the Rolling Stones anymore.

  Keith Richards, Himself : We didn't even expect him to be there. If he turned up, we'd find something for him to do. I'd ask him, "You got anything?" You know, "What do you think about this? Want to put something over this?" Or, but, eh, by then he was already in Bye-Bye Land.

• Keith Richards, Himself : We were workin', in the studio, don't you remember?

  Mick Jagger, Himself : And someone came in and said Brian's just died.

  Keith Richards, Himself : Everybody just looked at each other and go, "Finally." It was almost like it was bound to happen, one way or another.

  Mick Jagger, Himself : It was a horrible moment. And I don't know how many months later, that was, when we went down to see him.

  Brett Morgen, Himself : He died - three weeks later.

  Keith Richards, Himself : Fuck.

• Brett Morgen, Himself : [referencing Brian Jones death]  Was there a reason you didn't attend his funeral?

  Keith Richards, Himself : It was going to be too much of a circus. And, anyway, I didn't ever go to my mother's funeral or my father's. We didn't have one. We're like that in my family. You know, my dad is now an oak tree. We put his ashes where there's an enormous oak tree growing and every year he gets a little bit bigger. And my mum, she said, "Don't make no fuss over me, boy." "I promise I'll make no fuss, mum." And Hyde Park was the funeral.

• Mick Taylor, Himself : At the end of the '69 tour we went to Muscle Shoals and we cut "Wild Horses", "Brown Sugar" and "You've Got To Move" - which are great tracks. During those recording sessions or just before, somebody must have put it to somebody in the Stones organization that we went to Altamont to do a free concert. It was never planned to be part of the 1969 tour.

  Keith Richards, Himself : It was really just a throw-away. You know, there are a lot of these free shows going on and we said, "Well, you know, why don't we do one?"

• Mick Jagger, Himself : [referring to Altamont]  The Hell's Angels were the people doing the security. So, you know, I thought that's the way they do things in San Francisco. You know, it was a very hippy-dippy thing.

  Charlie Watts, Himself : Except, these were actual, proper, Hell's Angels. It was a bit like asking the Nazi Party to sort out the fun at the auditorium.

  Keith Richards, Himself : When I got a bad vibe about it, when I saw the condition of the Angels. Now, I can tell these guys are on acid and ripple wine. And already in the early afternoon, they're startin' to get antsy. These guys are out there just lookin' for trouble. Now, I went "Uh-oh. This'll get ugly tonight." And it did.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : [referring to Altamont]  We were scared. I mean it was scary. And these people were crazy and they were like standing next to you and we didn't know how to control it, stop it. It was completely out of our control. It was just a nightmare.

  Keith Richards, Himself : Everybody was fuckin' scared, man. I mean, I'm sure it was far more frightening for the people in the audience than it was for us.

  Charlie Watts, Himself : What we should have done was just closed shop and gone home. But, you couldn't. You got 300,000 people out there that had come, you know.

  Keith Richards, Himself : It's a - It's a hard line to call, you know. I mean, if we'd a walked off, I think there'd a been a riot. So, I just did the best I fuckin' could, under a bad circumstances, you know.

  Mick Jagger, Himself : It was just realizing that you were out of control. The whole thing was out of control. If you were in any kind of arena or theater, you can just leave, you know, off stage. There wasn't - you were very aware you were, sort of, surrounded; so, you were very vulnerable too - so, that was the feeling. That's why you shouldn't have been in this situation.

  Keith Richards, Himself : And then, some bastard gets killed, you know.

• Keith Richards, Himself : It's all a bit of a kaleidoscope.

  [laughs] 

  Keith Richards, Himself : I was definitely on another planet at the time. Everybody's got a different way of dealing. You know, I didn't for awhile.

  [laughs] 

  Keith Richards, Himself : I took to the stuff. As I say, I never had a problem with drugs. I did have a problem with cops. I'd been pushed up against the - my front door, while they're leaping out of the bushes. They were just harassing me, really. There was a definite move on. And while it became obvious, we had to make a decision, you know, okay, we're moving, you know.

  Mick Jagger, Himself : Keith always says he was chased out of England by the cops. Well, he may believe that; but, I mean, it's not actually true. But, the real reason the band left was money.

  Bill Wyman, Himself : We all thought that our taxes had been paid. We discovered in 1971 that we all owed in the region of a 100,000 pounds each.

  Mick Jagger, Himself : Income tax was so high that to earn the money to pay back the tax, we decided that we, the best way of doing that was to leave the UK.

  Bill Wyman, Himself : You know, we got shipped to France.

• Keith Richards, Himself : I think in France I felt a sort of lifting of the weights. But, I didn't realize that there are hardly any - we couldn't find a studio in the south of France. So, eventually, we stopped rummaging and I said I got an enormous basement and I love to live on the factory. You know, it saves going to the studio. Its great just to go downstairs.

• Keith Richards, Himself : It was a troglodyte existence down there. Nine, ten at night until seven or eight in the morning. The idea of playing a note before the sun went down was ludicrous - whenever you take Dracula time.

  Mick Jagger, Himself : My kind of structure is a loose structure. But, when you have no structure - it's really bad. Recording in the south of France was like that, because of all the drugs...

  Keith Richards, Himself : The junk was there to help me do the music. It gave me a space that I probably wouldn't have found otherwise.

• Brett Morgen, Himself : The band always thrives when there's...

  Keith Richards, Himself : Adversity?

  [laughs] 

  Keith Richards, Himself : I don't know, eh, probably by then, I mean, we felt very much like a, sort of, Pirate Nation to ourselves. And you dig in your heels and say, "We may go down, but, we're not going down your way, you know."

  [laughs] 

  Keith Richards, Himself : So you kind of got the bulldog comes out in ya.

• Keith Richards, Himself : You talk about Rolling Stones, you know, it was an unstoppable momentum going on. And in a way you were swept along with it. It's not as if you were particularly in control of it. Or, any of us were.

• Keith Richards, Himself : Really all you wanted to do is play music, you know. Always trying to get it better. Trying to get the band tighter. After a show, we'd be in a hotel room, knocking out songs for the next album or the next single. It was a continual day-by-day process.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : When you're working with another person, its great to bounce things off, you know. And if you're really working well together, you feed off each other's ideas and build upon each other's ideas. So, you've got someone who takes your thing and takes it to another level.

  Keith Richards, Himself : Writing songs is a great thing. It's like a jigsaw puzzle and a kaleidoscope put together; except, its all done through the ears. And on that I would say Mick and I are probably very much on the same groove.

• Keith Richards, Himself : If I wanted to hear the essence of Jagger and Richards together, I suppose it would be "Midnight Rambler." Anybody else could have written any of our other songs; but, I don't think anybody could have written "Midnight Rambler" except Mick and me. And nobody else would have thought of making an opera out of the blues.

  [laughs] 

• Keith Richards, Himself : Heroin can be a, sort of, state of suspended animation, really.

• Keith Richards, Himself : He's a great guitar player and also very sympathetic. And Ronnie was somebody I'd party with, as well. I mean, he was well versed in every manner.

  [laughs] 

• Keith Richards, Himself : Usually, it's the guy in the black hat that get's killed at the end, you know. Not this time, brother. Not this time.

• Keith Richards, Himself : In a way the Stones saved me; because, one thing that was more important than smack was the band.