From ‘the most powerful book critic in the English-speaking world’ (Vanity Fair) comes an inspiring and beautifully illustrated selection of the life-changing books that none of us should miss.
“LIFE (2010) by Keith Richards with James Fox
For legions of Rolling Stones fans, Keith Richards is not only the heart and soul of the world’s greatest rock-and-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.
In his electrifying memoir, ‘Life,’ Richards writes about the weirdness of being mythologized by fans as a sort of folk-hero renegade and chronicles the exhausting rituals of life on the road and the magic of writing and recording new music in the studio.
By turns earnest and wicked, sweet and sarcastic and unsparing, Richards writes with uncommon immediacy and candor. 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; unnerving accounts of the author’s many close shaves and narrow escapes (from the police, prison time, heroin addiction); and a deck of sharp-edged snapshots of friends and colleagues.
But ‘Life’ is way more than a revealing showbiz memoir. It is also a high-def, high-velocity portrait of the era when rock and 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 without any of the pretense, caution, or self-consciousness that usually attends 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 Richards’s classic guitar riffs, and the collaborative dynamic between him and Mick Jagger. But the book will also dazzle the uninitiated who thought they had only a casual interest in the Stones or who viewed Richards, vaguely, as a rock god who was mad, bad, and dangerous to know. The book is that compelling.
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 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 heartfelt sincerity and bad-boy charm.
Songwriting, 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, 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.”
Richards communicates the boyish astonishment he felt whenthe Stones found their dream of being missionaries for the American music they loved suddenly giving way to pop fame of their ownand 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, pharmaceutical cocaine, and impulsive jaunts abroad (“let’s jump in the Bentley and go to Morocco”).
But the most insistent melodic line in this volume has nothingto do with drugs or celebrity or scandal. It has to do with the sponge-like love of music 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 Richards has found a way to channel to the reader his own passion for music, and to make us feel the connections that bind one generationof musicians to another. Along the way he even manages to communicate something of that magic, electromagnetic experience of playing onstage 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,” 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.””
