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| Tuesday, 01 April 2008 21:41 |
An Open Letter to Keith Richards: From The Offices of The Cad Like so many others, Mr. Richards, we at The Cad consider you a god of sorts. Perhaps not, we admit, a near-omnipotent major deity like Zeus or Odin or even Elvis, but a sort of demi-god (Odin, for example, would have taken care of that whole Altamont mess with a quick grumpy thunderbolt or two, while Loki, that troublemaker, would probably have not done much more than you did. But we digress.) We’re not complaining, mind you, of this recent Louis Vuitton advertisment built around you, as so many others have. We commend you on your stylish travel gear, and commend you as well on giving your fee to charity since, as you stated publicly, you already can’t find any fresh ways to spend all that filthy money that keeps accumulating around you. That’s what comparatively clean livng will do for a fella, eh? And besides, beyond all that, you’re Keith Richards — who are we or anybody else to tell you what to do? That said, we have a few ideas as to what you should do. Or, more accurately, what you should stop doing. Immediately. Post-haste. Tout de suite. Keiith, Mr. Richards, sir, old buddy, friend and boon companion and reverse role model of our youth and our dissipated middle-years and our looming dotage, please, please, please stop wearing that damn headband and find yourself a new barber. We, your pals at The Cad, can help. We’ll pay. No problem, dude. It’s on us. Got you covered. But we do have to insist you to go to a tonsorial parlor of our selection, rather than one that you pick.  Because we’re not exactly sure what happened, Keith. Although we do have suspicions. From fairly early days, you had a fine grasp on how to make your basic post-Beatle-cut look sort of lived-in .(And how to hide ears that had been 90-degree side-mounted back at the factory.) You entirely avoided the high-maintenance bouffant foppery that your bandmate Brian Jones sported. (How long was it going to take him to re-assemble his ultra-pouffy look after his fateful and deadly dip in the pool, we wonder, and we somberly reflect that these were the years before blow-dryers.) And by the latter part of the 1960s, when all around you lost their grasp of hair length and many another thing, you managed to maintain not merely a semblence of sanity — hair-wise, anyway — but also a sense of innovation. You formulated what is basically known worldwide as the Keith Richards shag.And this is where we at The Cad, who consider ourselves avid amateur achaeologists of Great Haircuts Through The Ages, salute you, if with some concern. Certainly we know how horribly your haircutting innovation has been abused; there is in fact an argument that The Mullet is directly descended (descended being exactly the right term, if we use it in the dystopian, de-evolutionary sense) from your own hair-fashion efforts. But holding you responsible would be wrong and unfair and unsportsmanlike conduct. It would be like holding Hank Williams responsible for Billy Ray Cyrus, or Yul Brynner for Britney Spears.  Clearly, somewhere along the line, the plot was lost, the blueprint was wrinkled, the map was folded away wrong and then held upside-down and sideways. Perhaps a timeline would guide us in our pursuit of understanding. Maybe it was when you went off to that Swiss detox clinic and had your blood exchanged for that of several healthy non-heroin-geezing young maidens, maybe that was when your hair-compass lost its ability to point True North. We’ve all had our befuddled moments in life, and we here at The Cad have made many a haircutting misstep, though we like to think that long before they grew out, we’d moved on, wiser and better for the experience.Which is what’s been so troubling for so long, Keith, about the ongoing assembly of mistakes you wear on your head. It’s the headband, Keith, and the haircut too. And Keith? When you put that haircut together with that headband, a shudder moves laterally across much of Western Civ. Because, Keith, and this is the kind of thing that only a true friend will tell you, and you’ve got to trust that we’ve got your best interest at heart: with that haircut and that headband, you look like your aged Mum, hoovering the rugs around the flat of a Saturday morning, her hair up in rollers.. And frankly, no amount of skull rings and wisdom-tooth-extraction earrings can offset the effect. But a good haircut, Keith, can work wonders on a man’s self-esteem. (Do you think Charlie Watts would be willing to share his own recommendation? He’s made a set of remarkable hair-adaptations, working perhaps at cross-purposes to other bandmembers haircuts, or perhaps really just establishing contrasting bebop harmonics, dropping hairstyling bombs, as it were, against the more 4/4 time of his rock&roller bandmates. And dressing, nearly always, as Miles Davis or Art Blakey would have in the late 1940s.  This recent incident, noted worldwide, of you falling from a prominent palm tree and landing on, well, your coconut . . . we admit that we perversely took a bit of hope and cheer from it. Mayhap, we speculated, it will produce unexpected results. Maybe Keith will awake from his coma, yank off his bandages (much in the manner of The Invisible Man), seize a handy nearby hand-mirror, and shriek in horror at the damage the decades have done to his hairdo. Maybe he’ll see the light.
But our hopes were dashed by the Vuitton luggage ad. There you were in your mother’s house-cleaning kerchief and that scraggy so-called haircut of yours. You know, we’ve often wondered if the problem lies in barber-client communication. The brutal truth, Keith, is there are indeed times when you mumble a bit, and your words can be a tad slurred in moments. Maybe you’re wandering into random barbershops and, well . . . what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.  So, Keith,take up our sincere offer, and let us take you in hand. We’ll pay for a couple of cuts, if necessary: first, an interim adjustment cut, meant to sort of reorganize matters and give you a growing-out grace period, and another, once things have progressed, that restores you to the swanky, cocksure, rooster-resembling days of yore, yet succeeds in being perfectly contemporary, no mere nostalgia trip. (And yet is manageable within your busy rockstar lifestyle too.) All we ask is that you ring us up next time and we’ll set an emergency appointment. Oh, and we’ll need to drop by and burn each and every one of those headbands. Or flush ‘em down the loo. Because we know the temptation to backslide is going to be tough. Don’t worry, Keith. We’re there for you.The Cad |