The highly self-regarding Keith Richards is a master guitarist and Mick Jagger’s better half in the Rolling Stones. He was a prodigious user of hard drugs and a womanizer. He is remarkably disciplined, even in a narcotic haze, and frightfully accident-prone.
He also is funny, sharp and insightful, qualities that inform Life, the bawdy, rambling autobiography he wrote with journalist and White Mischief author James Fox. It tracks the riff master from a scruffy childhood in suburban London to his comfortable later years in suburban Connecticut as a grandpa who spends time in a tall, dangerous library (yes, he fell there, too) reading British naval history books and pondering yet another Stones tour. Life is a brand extension for the Stones, who apparently don’t want, or know when, to pack it in. It’s also a very readable addition to rock lit.
Life is stuffed with accounts of near-death experiences like Richards’ skull-busting fall from a tree in Fiji in 2006, burning his finger to the bone in a phosphorus flash during the 1989 “Steel Wheels” tour, various car crashes, and drug busts that dogged this notorious heroin lover from the late '60s to the late '70s, the Stones’ most creative decade. It attests to a robust constitution, intellectual curiosity, and a fearlessness that informs Richards’s relationships, spanning a perpetually prickly one with Jagger, a long affair with ruinous siren Anita Pallenberg, and musical bonds with everyone from jazzy drummer Charlie Watts (his closest ally after original Stone Ian Stewart, the keyboardist who gave the band its grounding in the early ‘60s) to soulmates Bobby Keys, Gram Parsons and John Lennon.
Richards also is deeply macho and can be tart, even nasty. He calls Allen Ginsberg an “old gasbag,” says LSD proselytizer Ken Kesey “has a lot to answer for” and says Lennon “couldn’t really keep up” when the two were drug competitors in the late ‘60s. He clearly disliked the Stones’ first guitarist, Brian Jones, considers Mick Taylor, Jones’s successor, a waste, dismisses Jagger as an effete narcissist, and portrays Wyman as a bore. An only child and natural leader, he learned early how to take charge, cowing a schoolyard bully. Life delivers such personal information, as expected. What’s not is Richards’ ability to explain music, illuminating the open-G tuning that animates such classic tunes as “Brown Sugar,” “Happy,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Honky Tonk Women,” and “Start Me Up” (which began as a reggae song). “Satisfaction,” which Richards came up with in his sleep, brought fuzztone guitar to prominence and became the first number one US hit for the Stones in summer 1965.
“I would say on a general scale, I would come up with the song and the basic idea, and Mick would do all the hard work of filling it in and making it interesting,” he writes.
“I would come up with ‘I can’t get no satisfaction… I can’t get no satisfaction… I tried and I tried and I tried and I tried, but I can’t get no satisfaction,’ and then we’d put ourselves together and say, ‘Hey, when I’m riding in my car… same cigarettes as me,’ and then we’d tinker about with that… I wrote the melody, he wrote the lyrics.”
Such work still occasionally joins the Glimmer Twins, though they’ve been spent as a creative force for 30 years. Richards doesn’t address that; rather, he celebrates music, the refinement of presentation and the spectacle that has come to dominate Stones shows since the ‘80s. Fortunately, stories of the Stones, his joy in his own great band, the X-Pensive Winos, and the Wingless Angels, his foray into Rastaland, brighten what might have been a valedictory. About bloody time Keef shared this stuff.
