The Wisdom of Keith Richards at 82

Solving the mystery of the guitarist’s longevity may be our best hope of aging gracefully

By Rich Cohen

Dec. 11, 2025

In America, the average man can expect to live 75.8 years. Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts had gone five years past that and was still playing for audiences shortly before he died in 2021. Stones founder Brian Jones died young in his swimming pool, but several of the band’s other iconic members, from Ronnie Wood, 78, to Bill Wyman, 89, have won the battle with the actuarial tables. Mick Jagger, the demonic frontman, was barely slowed by the replacement of his aortic valve in 2019. An octogenarian, Mick can still be seen dancing on the ashes of Western Civilization.


Keith Richards performing in 2024. ‘Looking at a picture of young Keith, gaptoothed and geeky, beside old Keith, as gnarled as Yoda, is a lesson in the nature of time.’© Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

And yet, for some reason, it is the band’s rhythm guitarist who personifies immortality. As the bumper sticker has it, “Think of the world we’ll be leaving Keith Richards.” How this riff-drunk ragamuffin, who turns 82 on Dec. 18, not only survived but stayed relevant is a mystery, a puzzle wrapped inside a guitar string. Solving it may be the best hope the rest of us have of aging gracefully.

I date my life with Keith to the spring of 1982, when, in the finale of the Central School talent show in Glencoe, Ill., I played the part of the guitarist in the Stones cover band that brought down the house with “Jumpin Jack Flash.” The experience taught me not only about rock ’n’ roll and the lure of stardom but about the vicissitudes of the powers that be—aka the man, Vice Principal Armor—who handed me a three-day suspension for the trip I made into the seats during the solo, for the cigarette I lit, and for how I tossed it into the crowd, the orange tip shedding sparks as it turned over and over.

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It was while preparing for the show that I first really learned about Keith: about his legendary 1961 meeting with Jagger at the train station in Dartford, the English town where they both grew up; about their mutual love for the Chicago Blues (Jagger was carrying a stack of albums from Chess Records); about the Stones’ apprenticeship in the basement clubs and bars around London; about the first rush of fame and how Keith shut himself off from it behind a wall made heroin. It was living through the chaos and tragedies of the 1960s and 70s—the river of opioids, the demise of Janis, Jimi, Jim and the rest—that gave him that vampiric aura. As the roadie puts it in “Wayne’s World 2,” “Keith cannot be killed by conventional weapons.”


Richards, far right, is shown with The Rolling Stones in 1963. He met Mick Jagger, far left, at the train station in Dartford, the English town where they both grew up, just two years earlier.© Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images

Looking at a picture of young Keith, gaptoothed and geeky, beside old Keith, as gnarled as Yoda, is a lesson in the nature of time, in what the years can do. It’s the damage that makes him seem immortal, not just what he lived through but how he survived. It’s what Hemingway called “grace under pressure,” the ability to maintain a steady inner atmosphere even when the whip comes down. In his memoir “Life,” Keith describes writing “Angie” in a Swiss sanitarium after narrowly surviving yet another overdose. It’s Keith—squeezing his life like a press, turning a brush with death into maybe the most beautiful ballad in rock ’n’ roll—that gives us hope.

Keith says he doesn’t know where the songs come from. “Great songs write themselves,” he explains in “Life.” “You’re just being led by the nose, or the ears. The skill is not to interfere with it too much.” But I think I do know. It’s the confrontation between a sensibility and the abyss, not just touching the edge but coming away with a song, that makes a person seem everlasting.


The author with Richards in 1994, during the Voodoo Lounge tour.© Rich Cohen

To me, the lesson is simple: If you keep going long enough, if you keep playing, if you stay in the game, if you get up just one more time than you’ve been knocked down, people will ascribe to you a quality that is indistinguishable from wisdom.