KEITH RICHARDS - "CROSSEYED HEART"

Promo copy with barcode scratched out. The rollout for Crosseyed Heart has played like several episodes of Keith Says the Darndest Things. For those who haven’t been tuning in at home, here are the highlights from the last few weeks: Sgt. Pepper’s is a “mishmash of rubbish,” Metallica and Black Sabbath are jokes, the Grateful Dead are boring, rap is music for the tone-deaf, Donald Trump is “refreshing,” and T-Swift, well, Richards managed to speak volumes about her by declining to comment at all (“Oh, I don’t want to sound like an old man”). If this was anyone but Keith Richards, publicists would be going into DEFCON 1 damage-control mode or looking for ledges to leap from. Because it’s Richards, they shrug and say, “That’s just Keith being Keith.”

Keith has been “being Keith” for so long now that sometimes we allow ourselves to forget this is the same guitarist who fell asleep in a hotel one night while recording and woke up to find, alongside snoring, a rough version of the riff to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, a guitar part as hallowed as any in the rock ‘n’ roll pantheon. It’s easy, and admittedly entertaining, to indulge the pop culture tendency that often reduces Richards to the inspiration for Jack Sparrow or a series of Chuck Norris-type badass jokes. After all, who doesn’t laugh when Wayne’s World 2 roadie Del Preston postulates that sleeping upside down “may be the reason why Keith cannot be killed by conventional weapons”? But when the microphones finally disperse and the jokes subside, we’re left with recordings that we can’t help but take seriously. That’s where we separate the myth from the musician, and Crosseyed Heart finds Richards’ sights still focused and fixed dead ahead after all these years.