COOKING WITH KEITH

Been reading Keith Richards Book, Life. Not done yet, but I was astonished at the glaring absence of any mention of his gastronomic talents and innovations. So I called his publisher, who agreed to share with me (in exchange for my promise of promoting the book on my heavily trafficked blog) some pages that were edited out of the book. . So here’s what they sent me…in “Keef’s” own words.

“Don’t remember if it was in Monte Carlo after the smashup in the Mercedes when I let the donkey drive while I was busy trying to scoop up all the coke that fell out of the glove box or maybe it was just after I ate a bit too many of those blue pills that I nicked from the Sicilian Olive Oil heir who ended up in the Amazon somewhere trying to be some modern day Kurtz from Heart of Darkness…but that’s a different story, cause what I do remember is that for like maybe a few months (though it could have been a few years, it was a weird period) I got hooked on cooking.

And when I got my mojo workin in that fuckin huge ancient kitchen in that French castle we rented from that guy who was selling guns to the Khmer Rouge, I was like Julia Child’s evil twin layin down a reign of terror on the orthodox church of gastronomic hypocricy. I mean, the shit I was cooking up during that wild period (during which I think I maybe slept a total of 45 minutes total the whole time) was out of the realm of anything you could or will ever find in any restaurant on the planet, I don’t even know if the shit was even legal to serve.

But that’s how I was doin the music too, just divin in and divin down as deep as I can go, and when I think I gotta come up for air, that’s when I dive down even deeper cause if you’re worrying about shit like ‘how’m I gonna breathe?’ or some straight world fear like that then you ain’t gonna find out nothing you already didn’t know and so why the fuck even put yourself in that position in the first place?

So I made it my mission to take over the kitchen duties for the mongrel horde of like a hundred fuckin people livin in that madhouse of a mansion, and I did it like Robert Johnson would do it…I went to that crossroads and followed that devil and didn’t look back. First thing I did was totally re-rig this huge stove. Now I know that fancy chefs who’ve been to fancy chef schools and shit like to have these big friggin stoves with all these burners goin at the same time cookin up all these different things at different temperatures and that’s ok, I can see that way of doin things—but that wasn’t my way. What I had in mind was something more pure without all that stuff that gets in the way when you’ve been brainwashed with all that formal training.

So I tore that stove up. I pulled out all those tubes and burners and set it up to be one big burner with just one knob. I was going for the heart of what that stove could do…I was gonna put all that power into one pot. It was like my guitar…when I realized I had these six strings all tuned to different notes that didn’t go together and made you have to think till you got your brains all knotted up trying to intellectualize this thing that is really just about what’s in your soul..that’s when I said “fuck this shit—that’s not what music is!” and that’s what happened with the cooking thing too.

See, I never went for that thinkin where just because you ate meat a certain way all your life, or you used certain parts of them and not other parts…like, it’s all just dumb goin along with what everyone else is doin and not thinkin it through for yourself. So now I’m startin to have a vision for this new way to cook and first thing I do is I take all those low E strings that I took off all my guitars when I went to the five string open G tuning and I looped them all together till I had this long strong wire that I could use to tie all those burners together and produce one monster burner with one fuckin nasty flame that would cook everything together in one big soulful stew.

I must have gone four straight days and nights riggin that thing till it suddenly occurs to me that I had to come up with a new riff for this song we owed the record company—so I leave the stove and go back down to the basement studio and start workin on the riff when I hear this fuckin thunder and the whole goddamn house starts shaking and shifting like some earthquake hit us, which is what I thought until it then occurs to me that maybe I left the stove gas goin cause I was pretty much out of it by this time and basically just running on the fumes of four days of pure heroin (and some coke for keeping awake) and a couple of handfuls every few hours of Tuinals and these strange purple pills I got from the Contessa’s chauffer. I later found out that he got them from this Russian Count she was jerkin around with who had them shipped to France from Burma where he knew the royal family that at that time was dealing to anyone who could pay them in cash cause that’s how they paid their military who were always threatening a coup and getting ready to hook up with the Pakistani warlords who kept a stash of heroin the size of the Matterhorn locked up in an underground bunker in a country I'm not at liberty to reveal . But I knew about the bunker cause the Count let us once use it as a studio to record this one track when I was looking for a different kind of echo effect than the one Phil Spector had already done to death on all those Ronettes and Shirelles tunes.

So now I realize that this wasn’t an earthquake and must be the stove, but the fuckin kitchen in that place was like a half a mile from the basement, so I figure if I don’t smell smoke or the fuckin ceiling doesn’t come down on my head, then no fuckin way I’m hauling my skinny ass all the way back up there just to see what the deal is. Turns out, it was the stove, but it wasn’t really my fault. See, at that time we had a whole bunch of Norweigen Au Pairs in the house to look after the babies and the kids and this one chick, she goes to the kitchen to like warm up a baby bottle or something and doesn’t know that I did a re-rig on the stove, so she turns the knob and kaboom. She lost her whole left hand, almost up to her elbow, and her other hand was mostly gone too except for her thumb, which I never figured out how that happened. And the irony is that the only reason she was in the house is cause I hired her after meeting her at this club in Italy where under the table in the VIP section she gave me the best fuckin hand job I ever had. Probably was her last one too…and I kinda felt sorry for her after that. But I paid all the medical bills and I told Allen Klein he should get her something to make up for it, so he got her a brand new hot red Ferrari that cost like over a hundred thousand US, but I always wondered if she ever drove it, considering she didn’t have no more hands and shit.

Anyway, after I rigged the stove I really got busy in that kitchen. I had a couple of guys who worked for us unloading the sucrose bags at the pier that we needed to mix with the pure heroin…and those bags weighed a ton cause the mix is 97% sucrose to 3% heroin, and we we’re going through like a few bags a week by then…anyway, I got those guys to go looking for stuff for me to cook and I told em I didn’t want no supermarket shit or stuff from some butcher shop—I wanted the real deal, live shit that ain’t dead and rotten by the time you stick in the pot.

So they come back with like six or seven fuckin hogs and these huge goats and this other animal that looked like a cross between a Llama and Bob Dylan. It made a sound like Dylan too…this nasal honk. Mick said that sound kept him up all night and gave him nightmares for days till he figured out that that was the sound he was looking for and that’s why he sounds the way he does on most of the Exile on Main Street album.

So now I got hogs and goats and unspecified four legged creatures running all round the place and I gotta figure out how to get them in the stew. That’s when I was glad I had taken all those guns with me when we moved from Spain to France. I had five or six handguns that I used when I was bored in hotels on the road in the States…and I think there’s still this Chicago hotel that has a rug with at least three holes in it that I put there one night when we were partying with the folks from Mayor Daley’s office—who pretty much let us do anything we wanted for a small donation to the reelection campaign. So now that I got the guns and all the hardware set-up, the rest of the recipe just kinda took care of itself. Tossed all those animals into an empty Oil Drum that we got from this guy who was a bit of a pansy, but had a shitload of money from some oil-rig deal that he had with the Turkish government and he also had his own tanker that he kept anchored off-shore beyond the territorial limits, which is why we let him hang around with us because we could go out to that tanker and do whatever the fuck we wanted and no one could touch us, which in those days was something rare considering that we were being hounded day and night by every fucker with a badge who thought he’d get himself famous by bein the guy who nailed the Rolling Stones.

So all this animal meat goes in the pot, and I mean all of it. Heads, tails, feet, fur, nothing wasted, nothing left behind…this wasn’t no watered down shit like you get at some Paris Bistro, this was raw primitive take it to the fuckin limit and don’t look back till your intestines tell you that God made you just like he made every other living thing on this earth and you are a part of it and it’s all a part of you. To this day I can remember thinking when I ate that stew that there really was a God…and that God had given me a chance to see what he was about. And what he was about was all right there in that stew. I think that’s also how we came up with the title Goats head Soup.