You better believe it. This cat put the joie in joie de vivre. As the legendary guitarist for the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards has done more, been more and seen more than you or I will ever dream of, and reading his autobiography, “Life,” should awaken (if you have a pulse and an I.Q. north of 100) a little bit of the rock star in you.
“If you want to get to the top, you’ve got to start at the bottom,” he says, “same with anything.” Born in 1943 to parents who met as factory workers, Keith was raised in Dartford, an industrial suburb of London. Through the marshes behind the many “lunatic asylums” that seemed to populate Dartford in disproportionate numbers, Keith learned what it felt like to be helpless and afraid, serving as a daily punching bag for bullies on his way home from school. By the time he fought back and won, he’d discovered a fury in himself for which he would later become infamous. The plight of the underdog was his passionate crusade, and anyone or anything that represented injustice in his eyes was fair game. Kate Moss recounts a hilarious anecdote from 1998 in which Keith, sidestepping the festivities of his daughter Angela’s wedding at his manor house, Redlands, finds he’s short some spring onions he laid on a chopping block while fixing himself a light nosh of bangers and mash. When the thieving guest totters into the kitchen with the greens playfully tucked behind his ears, Keith grabs two sabers from the mantelpiece and goes chasing after the poor guy in a homicidal rage. I won’t even touch on the incident involving shepherd’s pie.
Music is at the core of “Life,” as it is at the core of Keith. His grandfather Gus, patriarch of the bohemian family on his mother’s side, played a pivotal role in developing Keith’s love and respect for music. They took long walks together, sometimes all day, talking about the world and stopping at various establishments where Gus, ushered into a back room by his hosts, would leave the young Keith outside, with time to ponder his grandfather’s mischievous and gamboling private life. Gus had been a sax player in a dance band in the ’30s and knew just how to get a young boy interested in a musical instrument. “I’ll never forget the guitar on top of his upright piano every time I’d go and visit, starting maybe from the age of 5,” Keith says. “I thought it was always there. And I just kept looking at it, and he didn’t say anything, and a few years later I was still looking at it. ‘Hey, when you get tall enough, you can have a go at it,’ he said. I didn’t find out until after he was dead that he only brought that out and put it up there when he knew I was coming to visit.” Keith’s first guitar, bought when he was 15, became so much a part of him he was rarely without it, sleeping with his arm draped across its body like a girlfriend: his primary relationship.
Keith’s values were set early and have remained consistent to a remarkable degree. Disloyalty is about as low as you can go in his book, one step lower, even, than screwing up the music. Women? Take ’em. Vices? First round’s on me! But never, ever, EVER cross a mate. It’s an idea born of his Boy Scout days as head of the Beaver Patrol. He found he had a knack for marshaling troops, leading by example and rarely pulling rank. (For parents keen on enrolling their children in wholesome activities to secure a respectable future and avoid exactly what became of Keith Richards, keep in mind: he was a choirboy, too.)
It’s only after Keith’s been kicked out of technical school that he hits his stride as a musician, obsessively studying Chess Records artists of the ’50s like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. His old school pal Mick Jagger shares his passion for Delta blues, and soon they form a band whose nascent lineup will become the Rolling Stones.
Musically, these are the formative years. Keith learns to play against the silence, to make what isn’t there as audible as what is, standing on the shoulders of the American blues greats. He marvels: “It wasn’t loud, necessarily, it just came from way down deep. The whole body was involved; they weren’t just singing from the heart, they were singing from the guts.” He describes his style: “I find myself trying to play horn lines all the time on the guitar. . . . If it’s an A chord, a hint of D. Or if it’s a song with a different feeling . . . a hint of G should come in somewhere, which makes a seventh, which then can lead you on. Readers who wish to can skip Keef’s Guitar Workshop, but I’m passing on the simple secrets anyway, which led to the open chord riffs of later years — the ‘Jack Flash’ and ‘Gimme Shelter’ ones.”
Believe me, you won’t want to miss a thing. The most impressive part of “Life” is the wealth of knowledge Keith shares, whether he’s telling you how to layer an acoustic guitar until it sounds electric, as he did on the classic Stones track “Street Fighting Man,” or how to win a knife fight. He delivers recipe after recipe for everything rock ’n’ roll, and let me say it’s quite an education.
In 1964, the year of the British Invasion, when both the Stones and the Beatles broke big in America, Keith and the band had been touring for a while in Britain, sharing the stage with colorful characters like Little Richard and the Ronettes, whose lead singer, Ronnie Bennett (later Ronnie Spector), was one of Keith’s early romances. The Stones cut their teeth on the road, starting in 1963: “Between then and 1966 — for three years — we played virtually every night, or every day, sometimes two gigs a day. We played well over a thousand gigs, almost back to back, with barely a break and perhaps 10 days off in that whole period.” It was a lifestyle that would lead Keith toward drugs as a way to cope with its extremity.
Nineteen sixty-four was also a year of great cultural shifts: the burgeoning youth culture, the civil rights movement and the early antiwar protests all intersected in the irreverent personas of the Rolling Stones. They were white, but sounded black. They played American music, but came from England. They dressed like women and didn’t cut their hair, yet everyone’s wife, girlfriend or daughter went mad for their raw sexuality. Worst of all, they remained resolutely lax about the strictures of the law. As Bobby Keys, Keith’s best friend and the sax player on some Stones records, tells it, “The American music scene, the whole set of teenage idols and clean-cut boys from next door and nice little songs, all that went right out the . . . window when these guys showed up!”
One theme in the book that really stuns is the extent to which Keith Richards has been pursued by the police on nearly every continent for the duration of his career. They’re pulling over buses, battering down doors and hanging out of trees trying to get a charge that will stick to music’s most notorious and, thus far, ne’er-long-incarcerated bad boy. The archetype of the rock ’n’ roll antihero is, by now, a familiar image. What is shocking to remember is that Keith himself invented it. It’s obvious he just doesn’t give a damn about the rules the rest of us live by.
The book opens with a Keystone Kops-worthy caper in which Keith, his bandmate Ronnie Wood and a friend are busted in Arkansas while on tour in 1975, all three of them flinging drugs off their persons like spigots in the Trevi Fountain, attempting to rid themselves of illegal substances before they are searched. Neither the hunters nor their prey play their parts well in this farce. Keith and his companions are too stoned to dodge the incoming, and the authorities too compromised by the heady publicity of it all to get the job done. It’s a dilemma that proves to be an enduring asset for the Stones: “The choice always was a tricky one for the authorities who arrested us. Do you want to lock them up, or have your photograph taken with them and give them a motorcade to see them on their way?”
As their popularity grows, so does their stardust. “Suddenly we were being courted by half the aristocracy, the younger scions, the heirs to some ancient pile, the Ormsby-Gores, the Tennants, the whole lot. I’ve never known if they were slumming or we were snobbing.” It’s a blue-collar fairy tale, but distance between Mick and Keith begins to steadily expand — so much so, Keith confesses, that “I haven’t gone to his dressing room in, I don’t think, 20 years.” The Glimmer Twins, once so close Keith claims they had “identical taste in music,” now get caught up in the drug-fueled circus that defines middle-period Rolling Stones, the late ’60s and early ’70s. These are the golden years, the years of “Sticky Fingers” and “Beggars Banquet,” when excess converges with success in such a way as to make it all seem causal. But a certain guest at the party makes quite an impression and stubbornly refuses to leave: heroin.
Keith’s drug habit progresses, but he moves into one of the most prolific writing periods of his career. He and Mick compose most of the songs for “Beggars Banquet,” “Let It Bleed,” “Sticky Fingers” and “Exile on Main Street” while Keith is under the influence. Pulled by the poppy and pushed by cocaine, Keith acquires a taste for working unholy hours in the studio that damn near kill his colleagues. He goes round the clock and considers it mutiny if anyone toiling with him leaves the deck. “I realized, I’m running on fuel and everybody else isn’t. They’re trying to keep up with me and I’m just burning. I can keep going because I’m on pure cocaine . . . I’m running on high octane, and if I feel I’m pushing it a little bit, need to relax it, have a little bump of smack.” He’s trying to impress upon his readers not the foolishness of this diet but rather the impossibility of its being replicated, since drugs of this caliber are no longer available, and few have the discipline to stick to the recommended doses. No wonder Johnny Depp modeled his “Pirates of the Caribbean” character, Capt. Jack Sparrow, on this rakish and tippling taskmaster.
Around this time, Keith hooks up with the Rolling Stones’ answer to Yoko Ono: Anita Pallenberg. She and Keith fall for each other hard while she’s still the girlfriend of his bandmate Brian Jones. Keith takes pains to describe what an ass Brian was at the time, falling prey to the vanity of fame, as a way to excuse himself. And indeed, Keith levies the same complaint against Mick Jagger, offering a diagnosis of L.V.S., or “lead vocalist syndrome.” In regard to their differing approaches to the pressures of stardom, he says: “Mick chose flattery, which is very like junk — a departure from reality. I chose junk.” Mick and Anita end up having an affair while thrown together on the set of the film “Performance,” and Keith makes sure to give as good as he got, sleeping with Marianne Faithfull, Mick’s main squeeze at the time, behind his back. “While you’re missing it, I’m kissing it,” Keith says with boyish glee, adding: “It probably put a bigger gap between me and Mick than anything else, but mainly on Mick’s part, not mine. And probably forever.”
If Keith weren’t such a brilliant character, the reader might weary of his hypocrisy. But the truth is, he’s hilarious. I got tired of jotting “hahahaha” and “LOL” in the margins. James Fox, Keith’s co-author, deserves a lot of credit for editing, organizing and elegantly stepping out of the way of Keith’s remembrances. Reading “Life” is like getting to corner Keith Richards in a room and ask him everything you ever wanted to know about the Rolling Stones, and have him be completely honest with you. Here’s how he describes recording: “Well, I’ve got to tame this beast one way or another. But how to tame it? Gently, or give it a beating? . . . I’ll take you twice the speed I wrote you! You have this sort of relationship with the songs. . . . You ain’t finished till you’re finished, O.K.? . . . No, you weren’t supposed to go there. Or sometimes you’re apologizing: I’m sorry about that. No, that was certainly not the way to go. Ah, they’re funny things. They’re babies.”
Keith and Anita have three children together, but their 2-month-old son, Tara, dies while Keith is away working. The pain will stay with him forever. At the time, Marlon, his elder son, is on the road for a spell with his dad, providing a light at the end of the tunnel for Keith, who deals with these tough emotions in the midst of a bacchanalia on overdrive. According to Marlon, there was never anything that crazy on tour. This is where the two photo sections really tell the story: a beautiful shot of Keith, wind in his hair, turning his back on the crowd, barely conscious, and another of Keith rolling off the jetway into his private limo, Jack Daniel’s in hand, with all the self-assurance of the heir apparent, flanked by a beefy, uncomprehending, and likely disapproving, fleet of drivers. “We had become a pirate nation,” he says about the 1972 American tour, “moving on a huge scale under our own flag, with lawyers, clowns, attendants.”
Money is the dark matter of the Rolling Stones’ universe, warping and shifting things from the background. In the lean years, Keith would double-string his guitar so the strings would last longer. Later, as the money came in fast and thick, more serious consequences followed mistakes they made, like blindly signing a contract drawn up by their manager Allen Klein that caused them to lose millions. Klein, Keith says, “ended up owning the copyright and the master tapes of all our work — anything written or recorded in the time of our contract with Decca. . . . He got the publishing of years of our songs and we got a cut of the royalties.” There was more trouble as they tried to climb out of the financial hole Klein had dug for them in England: “We were in the ludicrous situation where Klein would be lending us money that we could never afford to repay because he hadn’t paid the tax and anyway we’d spent the money. The tax rate in the early ’70s on the highest earners was 83 percent, and that went up to 98 percent for investments and so-called unearned income. So that’s the same as being told to leave the country.” Heading for Villa Nellcôte in France, the Stones record perhaps their most critically acclaimed album, “Exile on Main Street.”
One glorious image from this period is of Keith driving his speedboat, Mandrax, across the crystal blue waters of the Mediterranean, out for a morning cruise with his mates: “We would record from late in the afternoon until 5 or 6 in the morning, and suddenly the dawn comes up and I’ve got this boat. Go down the steps through the cave to the dockside; let’s take Mandrax to Italy for breakfast. . . . No passport, right past Monte Carlo as the sun’s coming up with music ringing in our ears.”
The Stones record “Goats Head Soup” in Jamaica, and after the session’s over, Keith and family decide to stay on. He immerses himself in Rasta culture, fascinated by reggae music and its defiant political tradition. “They’re not going to work for Babylon; they’re not going to work for the government. For them that was being taken into slavery.” He finds renewed inspiration in the hybrid musical form and takes pride in being accepted. Though it’s his capacity to tolerate marijuana in large doses that initially endears him to the Rastafarians, it’s easy to see how Keith’s core values harmonize with this way of life. He may be famous, but first and foremost, he’s a musician.
Notable names tramp through Keith’s remarkably preserved memory by the dozens, almost too ubiquitous to lend an impact. John Lennon makes a cameo, hunched over a toilet after having tried to keep up with Keith. When Bob Marley is described as a Johnny-come-lately, you know you’re dealing with the crème de la crème. There are poignant moments, too, tossed out with no more windup than the chuck of one’s car keys to a valet, like this insightful gem about Ronnie Wood: “Ronnie is the most malleable character I’ve ever met and a real chameleon. He doesn’t really know who he is. It’s not insincere. He’s just looking for a home. He has a sort of desperation for brotherly love. He needs to belong. He needs a band.”
Keith and Anita’s relationship runs aground, and he falls in love with the sunny Patti Hansen, finally an influence of stability and relative restraint in his life. They have two daughters, Alexandra and Theodora, and Keith begins to clear his head of drugs and take stock of his career. Frankly, he has the time. “Brenda,” as he calls Mick, has gone off to do a solo project with which Keith takes great umbrage, believing it an unparalleled betrayal of their principles and the pact they made when they formed the Rolling Stones. “Mick had become uncertain, had started second-guessing his own talent. . . . He forgot his natural rhythm. I know he disagrees with me. What somebody else was doing was far more interesting to him than what he was doing. He even began to act as if he wanted to be someone else.”
Keith’s response is to dive headlong into a project of his own, sinking deeper roots as a rhythm and blues guitar player in the X-Pensive Winos. He loves putting together a dream team of guys he’s always wanted to work with, and takes to the stage as if it were a fresh pursuit. But neither Mick nor Keith can escape the fact that they are better together than alone. People feel a certain way about the music that first made them feel a certain way about themselves. In the end, Mick and Keef are like an old married couple, trading sharp jabs but devoted.
After Keith falls out of a tree in 2006 and incurs a life-threatening hematoma, he receives get-well wishes from world dignitaries, Tony Blair included: “Dear Keith, you’ve always been one of my heroes.” Keith does a double take: “England’s in the hands of somebody who I’m a hero of?” For the original antiestablishment bad boy, it’s hard to believe how far he’s come: “The streets named for us only a few years after we were being shoved up against the wall.”
“I’m not here just to make records and money,” he says. “I’m here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation: ‘Do you know this feeling?’ ” The irony is, his feeling of fighting the world is exactly what the world loves so much about Keith: he did it his way.
Liz Phair’s albums include “Exile in Guyville” and, most recently, “Funstyle.”
