Books of The Times

A Writing Stone: Chapter and Verse
by Michicko Kakutani
The New York Times, October 25, 2010

“For legions of Rolling Stones fans, Keith Richards
is not only the heart and soul
of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band,
he’s also the very avatar of rebellion:
the desperado, the buccaneer, the poète maudit,
the soul survivor and main offender,
the torn and frayed outlaw,
and the coolest dude on the planet,
named both No. 1 on the rock stars
most-likely-to-die list and the one
life form (besides the cockroach)
capable of surviving nuclear war.”

LIFE
By Keith Richards with James Fox
Illustrated. 564 pages.
Little, Brown & Company. $29.99.


Halfway through
his electrifying new memoir,
“Life,” Keith Richards writes
about the consequences of fame:
the nearly complete loss of privacy
and the weirdness of being
mythologized by fans
as a sort of folk-hero renegade.

“I can’t untie the threads
of how much I played up
to the part that was
written for me,” he says.

“I mean the skull ring
and the broken tooth and the kohl.

Is it half and half?

I think in a way your persona,
your image, as it used to be known,
is like a ball and chain.

People think I’m still a goddamn junkie.
It’s 30 years since I gave up the dope!
Image is like a long shadow.
Even when the sun goes down, you can see it.”

By turns earnest and wicked,
sweet and sarcastic and unsparing,
Mr. Richards, now 66,
writes with uncommon
candor and immediacy.

He’s decided that he’s going to tell it
as he remembers it, and helped along
with notebooks, letters and a diary he once kept,
he remembers almost everything.

He gives us an indelible, time-capsule feel
for the madness that was life
on the road with the Stones
in the years before and after Altamont;
harrowing accounts
of his many close shaves and narrow escapes
(from the police, prison time, drug hell);
and a heap of sharp-edged snapshots
of friends and colleagues
— most notably, his longtime musical partner
and sometime bête noire, Mick Jagger.

But “Life” — which was written
with the veteran journalist James Fox —
is way more than a revealing showbiz memoir.

It is also a high-def, high-velocity portrait
of the era when rock ’n’ roll came of age,
a raw report from deep inside
the counterculture maelstrom
of how that music swept like a tsunami
over Britain and the United States.

It’s an eye-opening all-nighter in the studio
with a master craftsman disclosing
the alchemical secrets of his art.

And it’s the intimate and moving story
of one man’s long strange trip over the decades,
told in dead-on, visceral prose
without any of the pretense,
caution or self-consciousness
that usually attend great artists
sitting for their self-portraits.

Die-hard Stones fans, of course,
will pore over the detailed discussions
of how songs like “Ruby Tuesday”
and “Gimme Shelter” came to be written,
the birthing process of some
of Mr. Richards’s classic guitar riffs
and the collaborative dynamic
between him and Mr. Jagger.

But the book will also dazzle the uninitiated,
who thought they had only a casual interest in the Stones
or who thought of Mr. Richards, vaguely,
as a rock god who was mad, bad and dangerous to know.

The book is that compelling and eloquently told.

Mr. Richards’s prose is like his guitar playing:
intense, elemental, utterly distinctive
and achingly, emotionally direct.

Just as the Stones perfected a signature sound
that could accommodate everything
from ferocious Dionysian anthems
to melancholy ballads about love and time and loss,
so Mr. Richards has found a voice in these pages
— a kind of rich, primal Keith-Speak —
that enables him to dispense funny,
streetwise observations,
tender family reminiscences,
casually profane yarns
and wry literary allusions
with both heart-felt sincerity
and bad-boy charm.

Songwriting, Mr. Richards says,
long ago turned him into an observer
always on the lookout for “ammo,”
and he does a highly tactile job here
of conjuring the past, whether
he’s describing his post-World War II childhood
in the little town of Dartford
(memorialized here
with affectionate, Dickensian detail);
the smoky blues clubs
that he and his friends haunted
in their early days in London;
or the wretched excess
of the Stones’ later tours,
when they had “become a pirate nation,”
booking entire floors in hotels
and “moving on a huge scale
under our own flag,
with lawyers, clowns, attendants.”

In these pages we see Keith
through the scrolling chapters of his life.

There’s the choir boy and Boy Scout,
who was bullied by schoolmates
and kept a pet mouse named Gladys.

The former art student,
dedicating himself like a monk
to mastering the blues:

“You were supposed to spend
all your waking hours
studying Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters,
Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson.
That was your gig. Every other moment
taken away from it was a sin.”

And later, the rock star,
known for his pirate swagger,
who actually remains something
of a shy romantic with women,
worrying about finding “the right line,
or one that hadn’t been used before.”

“I just never had that thing with women,” he writes.

“I would do it silently. Very Charlie Chaplin.
The scratch, the look, the body language.
Get my drift? Now it’s up to you.
‘Hey, baby’ is just not my come-on.”

Mr. Richards communicates
the boyish astonishment he felt
when the Stones found
their dream of being missionaries
for the American music they loved
suddenly giving way to pop fame of their own,
and their hand-to-mouth existence
in a London tenement (financed in part
by redeeming empty beer bottles stolen from parties)
metamorphosed into full-on stardom,
complete with rioting teenagers and screaming girls.

He conveys the exhausting rigors of life on the road,
even as he captures the absurdities
of what was rock star life back in the day:
the pharmaceutical cocaine,
the impulsive jaunts abroad
(“let’s jump in the Bentley and go to Morocco”),
the spectacle of the police
perched in the trees outside his home.

Of the years of living dangerously,
when he was zonked out on heroin,
Mr. Richards recalls that he slept
with a gun under his pillow;
turned his 7-year-old son, Marlon,
into his minder on the road;
and forced all his band mates
to live on “Keith Time,”
in which 2 p.m. recording sessions
had a way of becoming
1 a.m. dates the following day.

He writes candidly about
how everything
began to revolve around
“organizing the next fix”
— elaborate stratagems,
which at one point included
buying doctor and nurse play sets
at FAO Schwarz —
and the difficulties
of getting and staying clean.

Why did he become an addict in the first place?

“I never particularly liked being that famous,” Mr. Richards says.

“I could face people easier on the stuff,
but I could do that with booze too.

It isn’t really the whole answer.

I also felt I was doing it not to be a ‘pop star.’

There was something I didn’t really like
about that end of what I was doing, the blah blah blah.

That was very difficult to handle,
and I could handle it better on smack.

Mick chose flattery, which is very like junk
— a departure from reality. I chose junk.”

During the worst of his years on heroin, Mr. Richards writes,
Mr. Jagger stepped up and dealt with the day-to-day business
of running the band but was reluctant to relinquish
his increased control once Mr. Richards returned to action.

He writes that Mr. Jagger had begun to treat
the rest of the band as “basically hirelings,”
and he describes the sense of hurt and betrayal
he felt when he read in an English newspaper
that Mr. Jagger, then intent on a solo career,
had described the Stones as a “millstone” around his neck.

Mr. Richards also mocks Mr. Jagger
(whom he jokingly began referring
to as “Brenda” or “Her Majesty”)
as a social climber and swollen head,
and says that Mr. Jagger
“started second-guessing his own talent”
and chasing after musical trends.

But while this book’s passages about Mr. Jagger
have made lots of headlines, especially in England,
they are not all that different
from the volleys of accusations
the two have exchanged over the years,
and Mr. Richards adds that deep down
he and Mr. Jagger remain brothers.

It’s really less a case
of “North and South Korea,” he says,
than “East and West Berlin.”

Mr. Richards’s verbal photos
of other colleagues and acquaintances
are razor-sharp as well.

He describes Hugh Hefner
as “a nut” and “a pimp,”
and Truman Capote as a “snooty” whiner.

He writes that Chuck Berry
was his “numero uno hero”
(from whom Richards says
he stole “every lick he ever played”)
but “a big disappointment”
when he met him in person.

In another chapter he writes
that success turned
his former band mate Brian Jones
“into this sort of freak,
devouring celebs and fame and attention.”

In the course of “Life,”
Mr. Richards discusses
his clashes with the police
and his much-chronicled court appearances,
as well as all the other headlines
generated by the tabloids over the years.

But the most insistent melodic line in this volume
has nothing to do with drugs or celebrity or scandal.

It has to do with the spongelike love of music
Mr. Richards inherited from his grandfather
and his own sense of musical history,
his reverence for the blues
and R&B masters he has studied
his entire life (“the tablets of stone”),
and his determination to pass
his own knowledge on down the line.

One of this galvanic book’s many achievements
is that Mr. Richards has found a way
to channel to the reader his own avidity,
his own deep soul hunger for music
and to make us feel the connections
that bind one generation of musicians to another.

Along the way he even manages
to communicate something of that magic,
electromagnetic experience
of playing on stage with his mates,
be it in a little club or a huge stadium.

“There’s a certain moment
when you realize that you’ve actually
just left the planet for a bit
and that nobody can touch you,”
Mr. Richards writes.

“You’re elevated because
you’re with a bunch of guys
that want to do the same thing as you.

And when it works, baby, you’ve got wings.”
You are, he says, “flying without a license.”