Rolling Stones Keith Richards, never exactly good looking, but now YIKES!

Long article in the Wall Street Journal, as the Stones have a new album and contemplate another tour. –

Keith Richards doesn’t seek out old Rolling Stones records—unless he draws a blank trying to remember one of his many iconic riffs. “I’m saying, ‘How the hell did that song go? I better bone up.’ ”

But eluding the music of rock royalty is no easy task. Richards has four adult children, and they’ll “play my stuff,” he acknowledges. “Sometimes I hear it on the radio, and it comes out of nowhere.” 

In these moments, the guitarist is poleaxed like the rest of us. “It hits me,” he says with a devilish grin. “Oh man, that’s good.”

Splayed in an armchair in a Midtown Manhattan hotel with views of a fog-shrouded Rockefeller Center, Richards still radiates roguish, live-wire energy at 82. He fidgets with a pair of eyeglasses and points a knobby index finger to underscore a point, jiggles his leg restlessly and, at one point, mimes playing guitar. 

Wizened and creased, with a hoop the size of a quarter dangling in his left ear, he relies on gestures—shrugs, grimaces, guffaws—to flesh out responses that lean terse. He’s discussing the latest Rolling Stones album, “Foreign Tongues,” due July 10, which has brought the band together in New York. Mick Jagger is nearby, ambling through the hotel hallway.

Here he is decades and decades and decades ago with Mick Jagger.