When I questioned Jagger about the rift, he smiled and changed the subject. Richards interacted with the band, shouted to the bass player or drummer, while Jagger danced in the ether, in a system of his own. Onstage, in arenas where fans had come to see the spectacle of a friendship as much as they’d come to hear the music, they were in separate orbits. Photos: Classic shots of the Rolling Stones on the roadĪnd yet, never once, in the entire course of that summer, did I see the men stand together, talk or laugh together. “What can he do there that we can’t do here?” asked Richards, dropping to do five quick one-arm push-ups, the tip of his cigarette burning a kind of signature into the carpet. Before a show in South Carolina, I watched Richards, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, smirk as Jagger went through vocal scales in a nearby trailer. Over time, I began to catch glimpses of the constant tension between Jagger and Keith Richards. Read about the Stones’ debaucherous 1972 tour in an exclusive excerpt of Keith Richards’ ‘Life’ There were long nights, nasty asides, great music and, now and then, moments of transcendence. I spent the first weeks of that assignment in Toronto, where the band was piecing together a set list, picking songs. The band was promoting Voodoo Lounge, the second album it had released since “the break,” the unofficial split that came in 1987, when Mick Jagger announced his decision to skip a Stones tour and instead go on tour to support his solo album. In 1994, when I was 26 years old, I was sent, by this magazine, on the road with the Rolling Stones. This issue is available now on newstands, as well online in Rolling Stone’s digital archive. The following is an article from the Novemissue of Rolling Stone.

Life by Keith Richards