Happy 80th birthday, Keith Richards

I’m an unlikely fan of Keith — I come from a different generation, and my exposure to the music of the Rolling Stones was of a peculiar kind. The sounds of Western music were dulled by the big, fat Iron Curtain. I grew up in Soviet Moscow.

But this stands as a testament to the band’s greatness — the guys’ longevity and influence were greater than the empires that battled each other or tried to control pop culture.

To be fair, in the 1980s, the Iron Curtain wasn’t that big or fat. My father loved music, and there was always a way to get the records — either from other people or, in the second half of the 1980s, we bought cassettes in kiosks in narrow passageways in central Moscow, for example, around Arbat, one of the city’s main pedestrian streets. We came home and played them on our magnetofon in the living room. It was a Soviet brand magnetofon and not bad at all. It had a digital screen with green lines moving, in an oscillating rhythm, with the music. I loved it! Dad didn’t realize how much I loved and absorbed music until I started surprising him with my erudition. We’d hear a song outside of our home, and I’d recognize it immediately. This is Queen! This is Pink Floyd! And this is Dire Straits.

But I hated the Rolling Stones! It was the band that my father always liked, and I couldn’t stand it. I liked straight-forward rock, not blue or rock’n’roll.

In the 1990s, when I was a teenager, I opened my heart just a little to the Rolling Stones. In 1998, we saw the band…