By 1973, Keith Richards was dying. Not in the rock and roll metaphorical sense — not in the sense of self-destruction as performance or excess as artistic statement — but in the plain medical sense of a man whose body was being systematically destroyed by heroin addiction and whose circle of enablers had grown so thick around him that intervention had become essentially impossible. He had been arrested. He had overdosed. He had missed sessions and forgotten performances and produced recordings that engineers and bandmates have described, in interviews across the decades since, with the careful language of people trying to be honest without being cruel.
The Rolling Stones had continued around him — Mick Jagger managing the machinery, Charlie Watts maintaining the rhythm, Ronnie Wood arriving in 1975 to fill the gap that Richards’s availability kept creating. The band was one of the greatest in the world and its lead guitarist was intermittently present, intermittently coherent, and on multiple occasions intermittently alive.
The song that reached him when almost nothing else could was not a Rolling Stones song. It was not rock and roll. It was a reggae record — Pressure Drop by Toots and the Maytals, which Richards encountered through his friendship with various Jamaican musicians during the Goats Head Soup sessions recorded in Kingston in 1973. He has described the experience of hearing reggae at its source — live, in Kingston, played by people for whom it was not exotic but simply the local music — as the first time in years that he had been genuinely surprised by sound. Surprised in the specific way that music surprises you when you are fully present rather than partially present, when the thing being played bypasses the sophisticated critical apparatus and lands somewhere more basic.
The woman he never thanked publicly is more complicated to name — the historical record is deliberately incomplete here, partly because Richards has protected certain private relationships with an uncharacteristic discretion and partly because the people involved have not sought recognition. What is documented is that a woman in Richards’s life during the period between 1973 and 1978 — the years that culminated in the Rastafarian-influenced Some Girls album — provided a form of grounding that the Stones’ infrastructure could not. Not professional intervention. Something quieter and more durable.
Beast of Burden, written in 1978, is the song Richards has cited most often as emerging from this period of partial recovery — a song about asking someone to carry less, to require less, to simply be present without the weight of expectation. He has said in interviews that it is about exhaustion — the specific exhaustion of being someone who has been too much of something for too long. Jagger sings it. Richards wrote it. The distinction matters.
He got clean, definitively, in the late 1970s — a process assisted by a controversial blood treatment in Switzerland that the press reported on with varying degrees of accuracy. He has been largely drug-free since then, by his own account and the account of the people around him. He is, as of this writing, in his eighties and still performing, which is either a testament to his constitution, a miracle, or both.
The song that reached him when he was unreachable was someone else’s. The woman who stayed when staying was unreasonable remains unnamed. The music that followed both of them is everything that came after 1978, which is not a small thing.