She Couldn’t Open the T-Shirt Her Father Bought — KEITH RICHARDS Sat on the Steps and Did THIS D
The girl was sitting on a concrete step outside the backstage entrance with her mother’s arm around her, holding a Rolling Stones T-shirt that was still in the plastic wrap. Keith Richards almost walked past. Almost. Something about the plastic wrap, a shirt still sealed, never worn after a concert that had just ended, made Keith Richards stop.
“Is everything okay?” Keith Richards said. The girl looked at him. Her mother looked at him. What the mother said in the next 30 seconds made Keith Richards take the guitar off his shoulder and sit down on the concrete step next to them. Tell us in the comments where in the world you’re watching from and subscribe if you haven’t already.
Keith Richards sat on that step for 2 hours. Everybody else on the tour went home. The Voodoo Lounge Tour had been running for 13 months by October 1997. The show at Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey was the second-to-last date on a tour that had traveled to 58 cities across five continents and been attended by more than 6 million people.
13 months is long enough that a tour stops feeling like an event and starts feeling like a condition of existence, a permanent state of motion in which the show is the only fixed point and every hotel room, every airport, every bus ride is simply the movement between one show and the next.
Keith Richards had been in this condition for over a year. He had been in it on previous tours across previous years in various configurations and he recognized the specific quality of the final dates, the way the last few shows of a long tour carry a particular weight that the earlier shows don’t because they contain not only themselves but also the accumulated memory of everything that preceded them and also the approaching end of all of it, which was its own kind of loss.
The second-to-last show was always the one in which Keith Richards played with the specific awareness that there was exactly one more of this left and that the last was always the last without knowing it was the last while it was happening. The show had been extraordinary. The crowd had given back everything the stage sent out.
Keith Richards had walked off the stage at 11:17 p.m. with the particular physical state of someone who has just done the thing they were built to do and was heading toward the bus and had almost not seen the girl on the concrete step at all. Her name was Sarah, 19 years old from a town in New Jersey 40 minutes from the arena.
Sarah’s father had bought the two tickets for this show 5 months earlier in May 1997 at the first opportunity they went on sale because Sarah’s father had loved The Rolling Stones since 1965 and had been telling Sarah since she was 10 years old that they were going to see them together properly someday.
Not the recordings, not the television appearances, but the actual thing in an actual arena, the way it was supposed to be experienced. In May 1997, the someday had finally had a date attached to it. Sarah’s father had bought two tickets for October 9th and had put them on the kitchen refrigerator where they stayed for 3 weeks before he went to the doctor about the pain in his chest that had been there for 2 months and that he had been explaining to himself with one thing or another.
The pain was not any of the things he had been explaining it as. The diagnosis was delivered on a Tuesday morning in June, clearly and without the softening that might have made it easier to absorb and that the doctor apparently decided would not serve anyone’s interest in the limited time available.
Sarah’s father had 2 months. He used them carefully and without complaint in the particular way of people who have spent a life not complaining about things that are hard and who do not change this approach when the hardest thing arrives. He called the people he loved. He said the things that needed to be said to the people they needed to be said to.
He told Sarah specifically that she should still go to the concert. He told her to take her mother. He told her to go to the merchandise table and get the shirt he would have wanted and to think of him when they played Gimme Shelter. Sarah’s father died on September 18th, 3 weeks before the concert.
Sarah had not been able to throw the tickets away. Sarah had brought her mother instead. The show had been extraordinary. Sarah had cried through most of it. Not the crying that means something is wrong, but the kind that means something is very right in the way that only things containing loss can be right.
After the show, Sarah had gone to the merchandise area inside the arena and bought the T-shirt her father would have wanted. She had been standing outside the backstage entrance with the T-shirt still sealed in the plastic wrap because she could not decide whether to open it, and her mother had her arm around her when Keith Richards came through the backstage door.
The mother’s name was Carol. When Keith Richards said, “Is everything okay?” and looked at the sealed T-shirt in Sarah’s hands and at Sarah’s face, Carol looked at Keith Richards and said, in the direct unadorned way of someone who has spent 3 weeks saying the most important things as plainly as possible because the time for anything other than plain had passed, that Sarah’s father had bought those tickets in May and had died 3 weeks before the show, and Sarah had brought the shirt because her father would have wanted it, but couldn’t bring herself to open it because opening it meant it was for her instead of for him. Carol said all of this in 30 seconds. Carol had not planned to say it to a stranger. Carol said it because Keith Richards had asked if everything was okay, and the answer required it. Keith Richards listened to all 30 seconds. Keith Richards looked at the sealed T-shirt in Sarah’s hands. Keith Richards looked at Sarah. Keith Richards did two things. The first was to take the acoustic guitar off his shoulder. He had
been carrying it from the stage, one of the guitars he played during the acoustic section, still slung across his back, and set it on the concrete step. The second was to sit down next to Sarah on the same step, not beside her mother, next to Sarah. “What was his name?” Keith Richards said.
“Tell us in the comments where you’re watching from. And if you’re not subscribed yet, this is the moment because the tour manager was standing 10 ft away and the bus was 30 ft away, and 58 cities and 13 months had produced a schedule that did not build in room for anything that was not the next thing. And Keith Richards had just sat down on a concrete step outside a New Jersey arena and was not getting up.
” Sara told Keith Richards her father’s name was Robert. Keith Richards nodded. “What did Robert love?” Keith Richards said. “Not what songs. What did he love?” Sara thought about it. She said her father had loved the Stones the way people love things that found them at exactly the right moment. In 1965, when he was 17, when the world was moving in a direction and the music was the sound of the direction.
She said her father had played Let’s Spend the Night Together on a record player at a volume that made the walls feel it and that had once caused a neighbor to knock on the door. She said her father had a theory that the first eight bars of Gimme Shelter were the most important eight bars in rock history and could explain why if you gave him enough time.
She said all of this to Keith Richards on a concrete step outside a backstage entrance while her mother sat on her other side and the rest of the tour moved toward the bus and Keith Richards listened to every word. When Sara had said everything she had to say about Robert, Keith Richards picked up the acoustic guitar from the step beside him.
Keith Richards did not ask Sara if she wanted him to play. Keith Richards did not ask if it was okay. Keith Richards simply picked up the guitar with the unquestioned ease of someone reaching for the thing that is most naturally available to them in any situation, thought for a moment, and began to play the first eight bars of Gimme Shelter. Just the eight bars.
The ones Robert had had a theory about. Keith Richards played them slowly and clearly at the tempo that exposes rather than conceals in the specific stripped-back way that a guitar part sounds when it is extracted from a full production and played alone on a concrete step outside a venue at 11:30 p.m.
with no amplification except the brick wall behind them and the open night air above. The notes landed one at a time in the space outside the backstage door. Sarah said nothing. Carol said nothing. The tour manager, still standing 10 ft away with the bus 30 ft further down the lot, said nothing. Nobody moved. Keith Richards played the eight bars and allowed the last chord to fully die before he stopped and looked at Sarah.
A long pause. “Your father was right.” Keith Richards said. “Those are important.” The eight bars were the right eight bars to cite. Anyone who knew the song would understand why Robert had chosen them specifically, and Keith Richards knew the song better than anyone. Sarah laughed.
It was the first time she had laughed all evening, and the quality of it, surprised by itself, arriving at the one angle from which the situation was briefly funny while still being entirely what it was, was the kind of laugh that tells you more about someone than anything they have said. Carol laughed, too, briefly and warmly.
Keith Richards smiled, a genuine small smile, and turned back to the guitar and played the opening of Let’s Spend the Night Together quietly, as though being careful not to wake anyone who might be sleeping in the vicinity. Keith Richards sat on the concrete step outside the Continental Airlines Arena for 1 hour and 53 minutes that evening.
Keith Richards played. Keith Richards asked questions about Robert and listened to the answers with the specific quality of attention that is available to someone who is not waiting to say the next thing, but genuinely taking in the previous one. Keith Richards told Sarah two things he remembered about specific moments from the early years of touring that Robert would have wanted to know.
Not famous stories, nothing that appeared in interviews, just the kind of small true thing that exists only in the memory of the person who was there, and that therefore has a different weight than the documented version of events. The tour manager had gotten on the bus at some point during the first hour, and the bus had pulled out of the parking lot at some point after that, and Keith Richards had continued to sit on the concrete step with the acoustic guitar across his knee, and New Jersey continued to be New Jersey around them, and by 12:45 in the morning, the parking lot was mostly empty, and the venue was mostly dark, and it was just the three of them on the concrete step outside the closed backstage door. Before Keith Richards left, Sarah held the sealed T-shirt in her hands and looked at it for a long moment, the way you look at something you have been trying to decide about for 2 hours and have finally decided about. She put it back in the bag without opening it. “I’m going to keep it for him,” Sarah said. Keith Richards looked at the bag, then Keith Richards looked at Sarah, then Keith
Richards said something that Sarah has repeated exactly the same way every time she has told this story since. He said, “That’s the right thing.” Not that’s a good idea, or I understand, or even I’m sorry. The right thing. Said with the specific certainty of someone who has been playing music for enough years to know the difference between a choice that is correct and a choice that merely feels correct, and who had just heard a correct choice being made.
Keith Richards stood up from the concrete step, picked up the acoustic guitar, shook hands with Carol, looked at Sarah for a moment, and walked toward the waiting car. The car took Keith Richards to the hotel at 1:30 in the morning. Sarah kept the shirt sealed. 2 weeks later, on what would have been Robert’s 52nd birthday, October 25th, a Saturday, the kind of autumn Saturday in New Jersey that has a specific quality of light that arrives in October and no other month, Sarah drove to the cemetery where her father was buried and left the sealed shirt on his grave. Sarah has has fully explained the decision in words that she has found satisfying, which she has noted is itself a kind of answer. There are decisions that are made below the level at which language can reach them, and the decision about what to do with the shirt was one of those. What Sarah has said is that it was Keith Richards who made it possible to arrive at the decision, not by telling her what to do. Keith Richards had never told her what to do with it. By sitting on the
step, by asking Robert’s name, by playing the eight bars, by saying that her father was right about them. By doing all of these things on a concrete step at 11:30 p.m. outside an arena in New Jersey while everybody else went home, which had the cumulative effect of making the shirt mean something specific and clear enough that the right thing to do with it became knowable.
Carol sent a letter to the Rolling Stones management office 3 weeks after the concert. The letter was two pages. The letter described the concrete step and the guitar and the 1 hour and 53 minutes. The letter ended with a single sentence that Carol said she had revised many times and had not been able to improve upon, which was he gave her a way to say goodbye to her father that we could not have found without him.
If this story gave you something, the reminder that the most important thing you can do for someone who is carrying a loss is to sit down next to them, ask what the person’s name was, and stay long enough to hear the answer in full. Share it today with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe to this channel if you haven’t already, and tell us in the comments where in the world you’re watching from and who you’re thinking of right now as this ends.
Every week another story from a life that always knew the difference between walking past a concrete step and stopping at it, and every single time, without exception, chose to stop.
