This is a long excerpt from an old interview with Keith but it's interesting.
You used hard drugs for a long time. What are the good things that came out of it-for your music, if not for your health?
I can't really say if any good things come out of it for your music or anything else. Usually drug taking in music starts off on a very, very mundane level, just keeping going to make the next gig. It starts with popping a few white crosses just to be able to stand up after driving 500 miles across the desert. And once you've accepted that-it's the old bomber command mentality: "Put 'em in the goddamn B-29s with the Lancasters and send 'em over Germany and pop 'em a few amphetamines to keep 'em alert until they get back." It's the truck driver mentality: "Do you want me to crash this sucker or do you want me to stay awake?" And once you've got past that, the next question is an escalation. Drugs are fairly innocuous. But people think they can take them without knowing anything about them, without learning what it is they do to you. If you can make a conscious decision to take some kind of crap you better damn well know what it is it's doing to you. What to take to counteract it, what's safe about it, what isn't. I've had too many good buddies go down the tube, that's the terrible thing to me. Whether I'm still here or not is fairly irrelevant compared to the number of guys I've seen go down the tube because they just didn't know what it was they were taking. They were great guys. They weren't drug-crazed loonies. They just overdid it one night or somebody slipped 'em something.
And the most boring thing about it is the people that you have to hang around with in order to get stuff. It's such a waste of time to wait five hours for the man to come with sweating people going, "Oh man, Oh man!" It's a very narrow existence and I don't think you get much out of it for your music. 'Cause while you were sitting there waiting for five hours for the man you could've written five songs. I never took any of this shit in the belief that this was gonna make my music any better. I started taking stuff in order to be able to get to the gig and actually be in a conscious state to play and do the job that I was getting paid to do. This is when most musicians get into it. Those long hauls for a few bucks with a show at the end of a few hundred miles in the back of a cramped van. That's when you take that shit. "Yeah, man, I'm gonna fall asleep onstage if I don't take something right now."
I don't think you can say that drugs ever inspired or made anybody a better musician or a better writer because in a very short time I don't care what drug you're talkin' about-you're taking it just 'cause you need it. I mean the heavy stuff. If somebody's doing a bit of reefer, so what? But I've only found it interesting when listening to music, not for performing.
The perception people have is that some of the great music on Exile on Main Street and Sticky Fingers owed its creation to your drug use.
I don't think the drugs were an important factor in any of that. I may just as well have done "Brown Sugar" or "Honky Tonk Women" or "Tumbling Dice" straight. First off, I would straighten out to go on the road 'cause the last thing you want to do is be strung out on the road lookin' for the man. I'd always straighten up for tours. It's only the periods with nothing to do that got me into dope. It was more of an adrenaline imbalance. Three or four months on the road- everything's happening, and then it's the last gig, everybody disappears and suddenly you're sitting at home and your body's still waiting for the next show. It's a very hard readjustment. You have to be an athlete out there, the show must go on, etc. That's fine, you take it, but when it all stops suddenly, your body don't know there ain't a show the next night. That was always what put me back on. Something just to calm me down so that I could just sit at home with the kids and the old lady, or my buddies. It was really to do with not working. Now, that's just personal, I can't talk for anybody else, but that was the reason I found it almost impossible to do without it and kept going back for such a long time-that stop and start. It was the easiest way I could find to calm down and relax after a tour or four months in the studio. The body is saying, "Where's the adrenaline? Where am I gonna go? Leaping out in the street?"
