I had been intrigued by this book on enough shelves and in enough train passengers’ hands to jump at the mint copy owned by a friend of mine. “Like getting to corner Keith and ask him everything you always wanted to know about the Rolling Stones, and him be, like, COMPLETELY honest, you guys!! :-)” (giddiness mine) read the back cover’s review by “Fuck and Run” songstress Liz Phair. A bit of false advertising, but not far enough off the mark that I felt that I wanted to know more about the Rolling Stones by the end. My frame of mind going into the book was as follows: “I like the Rolling Stones OK. Their now-generic brand of appropriated American music is pleasing to me. They helped create the bad-boy rock n’ roll image, especially guitarist Keith Richards, whose merit I have never appreciated apart from his bafflingly continued existence. I will read this book.”
Turns out Keef is pretty smart. A ghostwriter helped organize the memories, but the glittering confidence with which Richards sublimates his past no one could fake. The book opens with a ferociously witty recollection of his lower-class British childhood. Animating these pages is a sense of escape, of him looking back on what he got away from, not just as a rock star, but as a vulnerable witness to England's postwar gloom. Then the Rolling Stones start to kick in, and the story starts to fall into “and the rest is history” type parlance. Liz Phair isn’t quite right, though; one question I would want to ask someone like Keith Richards is if he ever reflected on the preposterousness of a life so unbelievably superior to the rest of the human race. If you grow up like me, for example, you learn that some people are famous, and we treat them this way. Some people are rich, and they have this. Some people are poor, and we feel sorry for them like this. I know where I am in that social suspension, and it comforts me. How does a rock star justify his Olympian status? What is your opinion of life when the only one you know turns out so fabulously so effortlessly? What could you think of the world when the only one we have serves you? Keith shows none of this awareness. Richards was always, as far as I can tell, a supremely average guitar player. Some of his riffs are great, but then again, if you spend an entire career in one style of music, you better come up with some good stuff. There’s a story in the book about how once on stage Keith tried to start a song and couldn’t remember “which one” of his hundreds of intros it was. Probably because most of them sound almost entirely alike. Yet Keith never really shies away from accepting the praise he expects of you. He thinks he’s a great songwriter, and though he never says it, a really artistic visionary genius type. I wouldn’t expect him to make concessions to those of us who once paid $100 to see him at Soldier Field only to be confused as to which song was playing because they were all so similar, but, Jesus. He really thinks he earned all of this? I’m not scolding, I’m just saying it never comes out. When Pete Townshend writes his book, it will be chock full of that kind of introspection, because Pete was the most aware human being ever to play on a rock stage. He was also addicted to heroin for significantly less time than Richards was, which probably helped.
Starting at an early point in this narrative, there is mention of a drug on every single page of the book. Keith’s use of drugs is fascinating, as is the way he recollects them. First of all, he never says, Kids, don’t do drugs. He’s not repentant: “You’ve got a body. It’s supposed to work” is his mantra of health. Whatever keeps your boat afloat. Heroin is remembered as not that big of an issue—he had easy access and just went cold turkey whenever he needed to. What’s funny is that as his addiction elapses, his recollection of the drug changes. His first cold turkey was described as basically an annoying slumber party with Gram Parsons, the experience of heroin withdrawal NBD. By the time he finally cleans up for good, it is traumatic. He speaks of that experience (and everything else apart from 5-sting open tuning) insouciantly these days, but it’s hard not to detect the sheen of selective memory as he glosses over a description of a fireplace bloodied by his hands trying to dig out of the room he was turkeying in for the millionth time. He never describes heroin with the fear and awe that you usually see, that you kind of like to see. Not, “It had me hooked,” but, “I was hooked.” He takes responsibility. He never considers going to rehab, because he can do all the dirty work on his own. He owns himself and his decisions, and that’s admirable even if being addicted to heroin isn’t.
I don’t think he is even now aware of how pathetic a junkie he was. While Richards waxes freely about artistic inspiration and expanding horizons and how great he is at playing with open tuning, (congrats) you realize that this guy toured the world with a revolver and 500 rounds of ammo, slept with it under his pillow—and who’s going to attack him?—and who fell asleep while driving his family on the highway and almost collided full-speed with a tree. He must have been an insane, distant motherfucker, and yet he wonders why Mick Jagger couldn’t stand him by the end of the seventies. Like I say, kind of a pathetic junkie.
There’s no denying, though, that Keith Richards has one of the most epic lives a real person has ever lived. He’s not been around the world, he’s been in the whole world. Like, well, I’m kicked out of that hemisphere, I think I’ll live in Australia for a while. He has had the ultimate male fantasy. He travels freely, faces and bests epic dangers, befriends interesting people, and loves women all over the place. He has serious romances in places he’ll be for a week total, welcomed as a god wherever in the world he can think to go.
Ultimately, Life is an adventure story, and that's what makes it so much fun. It dragged on in parts, but on the whole was incredibly engaging. His narration slips into solipsism occasionally, and he’s not particularly incisive about himself, but he makes up for it in spades with his Kentish charm. Maybe that’s the point: his success is due in part to the fact that he never second-guessed himself, and always was confident. Ok Keith, I got you.
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