Even in broad daylight, he manages to look fairly frightening. His skin is corpse-white, as if, in his battles with heroin, all the blood truly had been pumped out of him. His eyes, under the draggled pompadour, are smudges of leering black. His mouth is a grimace, held in suspense like the grin of a skull. He is half-naked in his bare-chested jerkin and cracked jeans tucked into ankle boots, a mangy white silk scarf wound many times around his neck. His gait is unsteady and sidelong, as if he were just arisen from his vampire’s casket. And yet, for all the gypsy squalor and reek of suicidal decadence, there is something about Keith Richards strangely and resiliently alive. He seems, within his own ghastly parameters, a happy, even healthy, man.

Staggering across the Stones’ backstage enclosure, he bites the cap from a beer bottle. He lurches up against a member of Bill Wyman’s party, throws his dead-white arms around someone else, and says, “Why is everyone making such a fuss about a bunch of middle-aged madmen on tour?” The vampire speaks in the boozy, affectionate tones of some old-time actor-manager.

The Rolling Stones in 1984 are still essentially what they were in 1964—a “two-guitar band” whose mesmeric instrumental effects never came from any tricksy, egocentric soloist. It is no accident that the most volatile, insecure— even dangerous—role among them has always been that of lead guitarist. It killed Brian Jones; it could have killed Mick Taylor, had Taylor not wisely opted for escape. Ronnie Wood survives in the perilous niche due to temperament rather than original talent. For Woody can accept that whatever he plays is no more than a descant. The sound of the Stones is the sound of chords. It is the chords—which only Keith Richards can shape and strike with such evil elegance—that plunge the song into the brain before Mick Jagger has uttered a word.

A few months ago, Bill Wyman, the quietest and most levelheaded of the Rolling Stones, sat at lunch with his Swedish girlfriend, Astrid Lundstrom, talking about Keith with a fondness and respect he has seldom evinced during their twenty years together onstage.

“I really admire him for what he’s done,” Wyman said. “Ten years on heroin and he gets off it.”

“You can do it if there’s something more important,” Astrid added.

“That’s right. You’ve got to be in love.”

Love, for the last authentic rock ’n’ roll outlaw, came in the shape of Patti Hansen, a fashion model and actress who was only nine years old when “Satisfaction” was the number-one American single, and whom Keith married last December in Mexico. For Patti, the attraction is only partly that of getting into bed with a living—or, as it has sometimes seemed, semi-living— legend. Keith Richards, throughout all these years, has seldom been recognized as one of the funniest, most articulate and scathingly honest people in rock. And Patti is in tune with him, right down to the love of eccentric wordplay, which for Keith could hitherto be exercised only on unresponsive drug pushers and bodyguards. “He’s a good egg, isn’t he?” she will whisper to interviewers while Keith’s back is turned. Indeed, after spending his time swimming and horseback riding with Patti in Mexico, cleansed of heroin and with newly capped teeth, “the human riff” has come to look almost human.

The new Mrs. Richards comes, not to a settled home, but to a diverse and difficult household. Where Keith goes, so does his fourteen-year-old son, Marlon, a hulking youth weaned on the self-indulgent madness of Stones tours. There is also the background presence of Anita Pallenberg, Marlon’s mother and Keith’s companion through the lurid heroin odyssey, whom he may have left but would never abandon. And then there is Mick Jagger. No woman has yet come between Keith and Mick, whose union is as indestructible as it is implausible. Mick, who has sometimes resembled Keith’s teasing lover, sometimes his nagging wife, is as inseparable from Keith Richards as the fret board under his fingers.

Guitars, and coveting them, are among Keith’s earliest memories. His mother’s father, Theodore Augustus Dupree, led a small semiprofessional dance band in the 1930s and himself played several instruments, including saxophone, violin, and guitar. Keith remembers with what excitement he would approach his grandfather’s guitar and draw his hands with a soft thrum across its untuned strings.

“He was a great character, my grandfather Gus. He’d got a job as janitor at Highgate School, where Yehudi Menuhin’s son was a pupil. My grandfather, in the end, got to know Yehudi; they’d even have a bit of a scrape together on their violins. What a fantastic hustler!”

Keith Richards was born—as was Mick Jagger—in Dartford, Kent, a featureless outer London suburb. At the time, Joe and Eva Jagger lived just around the comer from Bert and Doris Richards. Seven-year-old Mick met six-year-old Keith at Wentworth County Primary School in 1950. “I asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up,” Mick remembers. “He said he wanted to be a cowboy, like Roy Rogers, and play a guitar. I wasn’t that impressed by Roy Rogers, but the bit about the guitar did interest me.”

Soon after Keith met Mick, the Richardses moved away. The two would not see each other again for almost ten years, by which time Mick had merged into the middle-class swarm at Dartford’s illustrious Grammar School, and Keith—aided and abetted by his indulgent mother, who had bought him his first guitar—had lapsed into the life of a street-corner teddy boy.

At age sixteen, Keith was expelled from Dartford Technical School for habitual truancy. A sympathetic teacher recommended him for what seemed the last educational hope: a course in graphic design at the art college in nearby Sidcup, where he was introduced to authentic blues music. A group of students—including a plumber’s son called Dick Taylor—would meet in an empty room next to the principal’s office and play songs by Little Walter and Big Bill Broonzy. It was from one of the members of this impromptu band that Keith acquired his first electric guitar, swapping a pile of records for it in a hasty transaction in the college lavatory.

So far as Dick Taylor was concerned, Keith Richards was just an incorrigible and hilarious distraction from the business of studying art. “When I think of Keith at college, I think of dustbins burning. We used to get these baths of silk-screen wash, throw them over the dustbins, and then throw on a match. The dustbins used to explode with a great woomph.”

One morning in 1961, on his railway journey from Dartford to Sidcup, Keith happened to get into the same commuter carriage as Mick Jagger, who was en route to his classes at the London School of Economics. This meeting might have been as casual as the few previous ones had been were it not that Mick had under his arm a pile of import blues albums he had got by mail order from America. Keith noticed the sacred names of Chuck Berry and Little Walter and, with some incredulity, asked the striped-scarfed LSE student if he liked that kind of music, too.

Chatting further, they discovered they had a common friend in Dick Taylor, who had already mentioned to Keith that he was rehearsing with Mick’s embryonic group, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. By the time their train reached Sidcup, it was arranged that Keith Richards would come along to rehearsals at Dick’s house.

When Mick Jagger hung around with Keith Richards, he would drop his middle-class accent and manners; he would, instead, talk broad cockney and affect Keith’s chaotic nonchalance and street-tough recklessness. Keith on occasion would become thoughtful, self-effacing, even shy. Dick Taylor noticed what was to become a regular interchange of identities. “One day, Mick would become Keith. On another day, Keith could go all like Mick. You never knew which way round it would be. But from then on, Mick and Keith were together. Whoever else came into the band or left, there’d always be Mick and Keith.”

During the transformation of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys into the Rolling Stones, and their rise from hard-up rhythm-and-blues purists to Britain’s most lawless longhaired pop stars, Keith played only a minimal part. After Mick Jagger, the driving force of the group was Brian Jones, with his gold dome of hair, his musical virtuosity, his outrageous clothes. Bill Wyman—even Charlie Watts—looked more menacing than the twenty-one-year-old Keith, pimply and shy and wearing his good-natured, rather dizzy grin as he plucked at his Hofner cutaway.

The power axis shifted dramatically in 1964 when the Stones’ teenage manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, at whose behest Keith had dropped the s from his surname, locked Mick and him in the kitchen of their shared London flat and threatened to keep them there until they had written a song. After several false starts, they produced “As Tears Go By” for Oldham’s other protegée, Marianne Faithfull. It was the start of Mick and Keith’s unstoppable alliance as “the Glimmer Twins,’’ and of Brian Jones’s growing alienation and despair.

During a 1965 North American tour, while stopping over at a small motel, Keith played Mick a guitar riff that he thought might be the basis of a makeweight track for the Stones’ next album. “I’d woken up in the middle of the night, thought of the riff, and put it straight down on a cassette. In the morning, I still thought it sounded pretty good. I played it to Mick and said, ‘The words that go with this are “I can’t get no satisfaction.’’ ’ That was just a working title. It could just as well have been ‘Auntie Millie’s Caught Her Left Tit in the Mangle.’ I thought of it as just a little riff, an album filler. I never thought it was anything like commercial enough to be a single.”

Even after Jagger had gone away and added words, Keith could not be persuaded that he’d hit on an inspirational new Stones A side. “I think Keith felt it was too basic...just a silly kind of a riff,” Jagger says. “And he was afraid it would sound like folk-rock. Doing ‘Satisfaction’ was the only real time we ever had a disagreement.”

At RCA’s Hollywood studio, Keith worked on his “silly little riff” some more, feeding it through a Gibson fuzz box, which lacquered each note. The result struck everyone—save Keith-— as the best thing the Stones had ever done in a studio. And the single appeared in America three full months before its British release. Within two weeks, it had jumped sixty places on the Billboard chart, from sixty-fourth to fourth. On July 10, 1965, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” became the Stones’ first American number-one song. What took “Satisfaction” into the bloodstream, on both sides of the Atlantic, was the guitar phrase, pulsing through the lyrics with a malign persistence, like migraine rendered into sound. With five guttural bass notes—to this day, the best-known intro in pop—Keith Richards had found his voice at last.

“‘He's a good egg, isn't he?' she will whisper to interviewers while Keith's back is turned."

In the fifteenth century, the Pallenbergs had been a wealthy Swedish clan whose most notable member was painted by Holbein. Anita’s great-great-grandfather, a German Swiss, emigrated to Italy, where he became a renowned painter. Her grandfather and father were painters also, based in Rome but with family and social contacts in Germany, Spain, and France. Anita, as a result, grew up fluent in four languages and accustomed to the company of artists, writers, and musicians.

At age twenty-one, she went to New York with her boyfriend, an Italian photographer. She had meant to continue studying art, and spent some time in Jasper Johns’s studio, observing him and washing his paintbrushes. She also helped fashion photographers by standing in for models.

Anita was in Munich in 1965 on the night of a Stones concert and, on an impulse, persuaded a Swedish photographer to smuggle her backstage. “That’s how I met Brian Jones. He was the only one of the Stones who really bothered to talk to me.”

In February 1967, Mick and Keith found themselves under attack by the establishment whose sensibilities they had so long carelessly flouted. Acting on a deeply suspect tip-off by a Sunday scandal sheet, nineteen police officers raided Keith’s Sussex cottage, Redlands, interrupting a relatively innocent weekend party attended by, among others, Mick Jagger and his girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull. Mick was charged with illegal possession of four almost harmless pep pills (which actually were Marianne’s). Keith was charged with allowing his property to be used for cannabis smoking. The two Stones and a friend, the art dealer Robert Fraser, together paid $12,000 in an attempt to buy off the police. Though the money was accepted, the case went ahead just the same.

To stay as far from further trouble as possible until the court hearing, there was a general exodus to their favorite holiday resort, Morocco. Keith traveled overland with Brian Jones (who was also facing a drug charge), a Stones driver named Tom Keylock, and Anita Pallenberg, who was Jones’s girlfriend at the time.

On the way through France, Brian developed pneumonia and made the fatal suggestion that Keith and Anita continue the journey without him. When Brian eventually reached Morocco, he could tell that they’d had a fling together on the remainder of the journey. Keith had intended it to be only a fling; what changed his mind was Brian’s brutal ill-treatment of Anita and attempts to involve her in degrading sex orgies with local whores. One day, while Brian was out recording ethnic music in the Marrakech town square, Keith and Anita took the Bentley and Tom Keylock and decamped together.

The trial of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at West Sussex Quarter Sessions in June 1967 was distinguished by the prosecution’s wholly false and irrelevant insinuation that the police raid on Redlands had interrupted a sex orgy featuring Marianne in a fur rug she had thrown on after bathing. Keith, in the witness-box, may have looked like a hung-over Beau Brummell, but he was still to prove more than equal to the patrician hauteur of the cross-examining counsel.

“Would you agree,” he was asked, “in the ordinary course of events, you would expect a young woman to be embarrassed if she had nothing on but a rug in the presence of eight men, two of whom were hangers-on and the third a Moroccan servant?”

“Not at all,” Keith replied.

“You regard that, do you, as quite normal?”

“We are not old men,” Keith retorted. “We are not worried about petty morals.”

Despite the flimsiest possible evidence that he had “knowingly permitted” cannabis smoking at Redlands, Keith was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. Mick got three months after the judge ruled that a doctor’s oral permission to possess Marianne’s pep pills could not count as a legal prescription. Though popular outcry—notably in the pro-Establishment London Times—procured their speedy release on bail pending appeal, both spent a short period of time as convicts, Mick in Brixton, Keith in the notorious Wormwood Scrubs. Keith has never forgotten his prison number (7855), the miserable square of light through his cell window, the offers he received while walking around the exercise yard from prisoners selling every kind of drug.

Just as Keith onstage had inspired a whole era of guitarists to copy his wolfish silhouette, so his private life-style had become the model for an entirely new human species. He and Anita spent most of their time at Redlands, whose half-timber exterior gave no hint of the orgiastic twilight world within. A villager who often saw Keith remembers the extraordinary blackness around his eyes, even before he took to wearing mascara, and how he always seemed to smoke cigarettes that were twice as long as normal. Lurid tales circulated about what went on behind Redlands’ imposing boundary wall—how Keith would zoom around his lake in a miniature Hovercraft or hunt water rats with a shotgun, accompanied by his giant deerhound, Syphilis.

Anita had become a power within the Stones, disquieting their otherwise seamless male chauvinism with her brazen beauty and mischievous intellect. Anita was the cause of Keith’s growing exoticism, of Brian’s unhappy dwindling, and of Mick’s newfound compulsion to write eulogies to Satan. For Anita was supposed by many near the Stones to be a witch, and even to hoard human relics for spells against those who had incurred her displeasure. According to Keith’s then drug pusher, “Spanish Tony” Sanchez, the couple dabbled in black magic to the point of receiving an unmistakable sign that their masquerade was leading them into serious danger.

In 1969 Keith bought a Queen Anne house on Cheyne Walk in the same exclusive Chelsea riverfront row as Mick Jagger’s. Anita—now pregnant with their first child, Marlon—transformed the elegant wood-paneled rooms into replicas of Moroccan hashish dens, with beaded curtains and jewel-studded beaten-metal lamps. The second-floor drawing room, where Tory ladies had once sipped tea, was now devoted to tripping—or, possibly, more esoteric rites—before an altar formed by the fireplace and two giant candlesticks. It was at Cheyne Walk that Keith and Anita rode the speedball roller coaster from hashish and cocaine to the seeming calm and levelheadedness of pure heroin. Like all before them, they had no thought of becoming addicts. “Heroin is like a slow process of seduction,”Keith says. “You try it, and you stop. You find you don’t feel any worse than after a dose of flu. You say, ‘Hey— they’ve been lying to me. I’m not hooked!’ That’s when you are hooked. Your body needs it, and you’ll do anything to get it.’’

In July 1969, Brian Jones was found dead in his swimming pool. Later that year came the Stones’ first American tour since 1966, a financial and artistic triumph until the infamous free festival at Altamont Speedway, in Livermore, California, where a spectator was knifed to death by Hell’s Angel “stewards.”

In 1970 the Stones discovered that they owed enormous sums in back income taxes. The best alternative to gritting their teeth and paying up—and wiping out all their American profits— was tax exile in France, where the Stones, unlike the Beatles, had always been ultrachic. There were, moreover, positive fiscal advantages for a pop group serving an international market to be domiciled in a country relatively free of restrictive exchange controls. And on top of everything else, there was the sunshine, the food, and the booze.

Keith’s new home on the Riviera was Nellcôte, an enormous Roman-style villa on a hill above Villefranche-sur-Mer, ringed by a balustraded terrace commanding spectacular views of the mountains and Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. The rent was $2,400 per week, with an option to buy for $2 million if its new tenant found it agreeable. (That was in the period somewhat before local people took to lighting candles and praying that the tenant of Nellcôte would remove himself to some other part of the Alpes-Maritimes.)

The villa’s airy, elegant salons were transformed, like all of his previous habitations, into the environment Keith found most comfortable—that is to say, the semblance of a motel room recently ransacked by the police. Album sleeves, wine bottles, discarded clothes, and half-smoked joints settled as usual on the grand piano and the marble mantelpiece. Baby Marlon voyaged, diaperless, along the brocaded edges of the sofa. Nellcôte was the center of the Stones’ exile, its familiar squalor lending continuity—comfort, even—to the others’ more stilted expatriate lives. It was the meeting place for employees, business advisers, record-company people, fellow musicians, and all of the multifarious persons whom the added distance—from London or California— seldom deterred in their supplicant eagerness to “hang out” with Keith and the Stones. “In all the time we were in that place, we were never by ourselves,” Anita says. “Day after day, it was ten people for lunch... twenty-five for dinner...”

For the first few weeks, Keith seemed content to absorb himself in the Riviera pursuits of eating, drinking, sunbathing, swimming, and sailing his boat, Mandrax, with whomever he could rouse from the Nellcôte floors to act as his crew. Heroin had not killed his taste for the outdoor life: as a two-, a five-, even a ten-year junkie, he would remain physically superior to Mick at his most ostentatiously clean-living and sportif. “Mick got very into tennis while we were in France. He took it very seriously. I hadn’t bothered since the tennis-club days, when I’d go with my mum and dad in Dartford. But I could still go out on a court and beat the shit out of Jagger anytime.”

He also found time for fatherhood. Two-year-old Marlon thus far had seen little homelife outside the tumbled hotel suites where the Stones’ personal secretary, Shirley Arnold, would put him to bed. Marlon learned to walk on a Rolling Stones concert stage, and, according to Richards’s biographer, Barbara Charone, could dial room service before he could read. In Villefranche, he was finally allowed to become a child. Keith devoted the best part of every day to him, carrying him around clamped to the skinny chest that once had admitted no encumbrances but a guitar strap and dangling cocaine spoon.

By early May, Keith was starting to chafe against his new life. It was inevitable, as the months passed, that he and Anita should pull each other back to the only possible cure for their shared, surfeited boredom. A supply of cocaine, hidden in a toy piano the dealer had brought Marlon, arrived with Spanish Tony. Heroin was obtained for them by a French pusher with contacts in the Corsican underworld. Now they were shooting up rather than snorting, and buying the drug in $12,000 consignments, which rarely lasted longer than a month. This all added weight to Keith’s insistence that France was having a bad effect on the Stones and that the best cure would be to get into a studio and start work on a new album.

The Stones had been followed to France by their “Mighty Mobile,” a deluxe trailer studio equipped with every technological marvel, including closed-circuit television. In addition, Nellcôte had a basement that could be converted into extra studio space. Keith, therefore, turned his villa over to the Stones, their session musicians, and all of the extra personnel needed to build and maintain the improvised basement studio. Anita even volunteered to cook for them. The album that was provisionally entitled “Tropical Disease,” and only later renamed Exile on Main St., began late in 1971 as the biggest house party of Keith Richards’s hospitable career. “It was like a holiday camp,” says Mick Taylor, Brian Jones’s successor.

Recording in the basement of even a palatial French villa proved hideously difficult. Space was so limited that Nicky Hopkins, the pianist, had to sit in a separate cubbyhole. The power, as usual in France, flickered and faded eccentrically.

“Mick is an idol, but Keith is a hero—from his tattered head to his tattered boots, with all his tattered life in between"

The current chef, a Frenchman named Fat Jack, interrupted artistic flow by blowing up the kitchen. Recording was held up again when a thief walked into Nellcote through an open door and stole most of Keith’s treasured guitar collection.

There is a legend—half-corroborated by Anita Pallenberg—that Exile on Main St. was recorded with power illicitly diverted from the French national railway system. The album’s more vital energy was tapped from a physique in which the most murderous of all drugs could not dull or smother the instinct to make marvelous sound. As Keith himself puts it, “While I was a junkie, I still learned to ski, and I made Exile on Main St."

The Stones’ tax exile ended abruptly after the social-climbing 1972 U.S. tour when Keith and Anita went to Switzerland to avoid prosecution for drug use on the Côte d’Azur. Near Geneva, both underwent traumatic but inconclusive addiction cures—the “cold turkey” of John Lennon’s bleak song. “You sweat, you scream...you hallucinate,” Keith remembers. “I was convinced at one point there was a needle and some smack hidden behind the wallpaper. But in seventy-two hours, if you can get through it, you’re clean. That’s not the problem. The problem is when you go back to your social circle, who are all addicts and dealers, and someone says, ‘Go on—have a little taste.’ In a few hours you can be on the stuff again.”

The only sure antidote to heroin Keith could find was the natural high of playing onstage with the Stones. He discovered no satisfaction comparable to setting a Jack Daniel’s bottle atop his amplifier and pumping at his pale, driftwood-colored guitar.

The mutual tolerance that had kept the Stones together through so many trials and aberrations showed signs of severe strain in the late ’70s as Mick Jagger rose higher into smart society and Keith Richards sank lower, with Anita, into heroin. The more respectable Mick became, the greater seemed Keith’s determination to remain a ’60s outlaw, crashing cars, carrying guns and knives, destroying hotel rooms, and letting his teeth turn black. For the first time since the age of six, their opposite but inseparable natures were in open conflict. Keith criticized Mick for the social climbing that he saw reflected in the “theatrical shit” with which Jagger had dressed up the ’75 tour. Mick was disdainful about Keith’s inability to stop being busted for drugs, and the schoolboy pranks he indulged in with his new crony, Ron Wood, such as invading Jagger’s hotel suite and bouncing on his bed, shouting that they were “the Trampolini Twins.”

In February 1977, when the Stones met in Toronto to make several club appearances, Keith was caught by police with almost an ounce of pure heroin and arraigned on a charge of intent to traffic. With their co-leader facing possible—it then seemed, probable—life imprisonment, the only course for the Rolling Stones was rapid dispersal. The band’s future hung in the balance for several months as Keith’s lawyers struggled to get the heroin charge reduced to one of mere possession and he and Anita underwent further addiction treatment, by “neuroelectric acupuncture” in New York. The apparent success of this was what finally convinced a Canadian judge that Keith should not go to prison for life but should instead give a compulsory concert for the blind with his fellow outlaws. Keith Richards—to quote his own signature in a letter to his mother—was no longer “the fugative.”

His recent decision to restore the s to his surname was a gesture symbolic of his desire to return to normality after fifteen years of drugs and badness. He has also become reconciled with his father, whom he had not seen since he was a semi-delinquent eighteen-yea-rold. Bert Richards was living alone in the Dartford area when Keith discovered his address and began writing to him. “Eventually, I rang my dad up and said, ‘I’m sending a car for you.’ I was so nervous, I took Ronnie Wood along with me to meet him. But my dad just threw his arms round me and said, ‘Wotchere, mate.’ ”

As he lurches onstage, holding two guitars, a cigarette between his lips, desperate cries of would-be brotherhood come from afar: “He-e-e-e-y, Keith)” When he plays badly, no one plays worse; to his worshipers, all that matters is that he’s still there. Mick is an idol, but Keith is a hero. From his tattered head to his tattered boots, with all his tattered life in between, they love him.