Keith Richards's 'Life': An unexpectedly clear look at years as a Rolling Stone

(LP note: I read this; loved it. Richards is bright (despite the body and brain abuse), forthright, entertaining, funny, and — most of all — a survivor. He either (A) is gifted with incredible genes or (B) has made a pact with the devil. Okay, so I'm not enamored with the Stones' music after, say, Sticky Fingers, but I was enthralled with Life.)

By Lou Bayard
WashPost
Thursday, October 28, 2010

LIFE
By Keith Richards
Little, Brown. 564 pp. $29.99

Mick Jagger has always looked -- will always look -- like Mick Jagger. But try to connect the glum schoolboy-guitarist of early '60s black-and-white pics with the Keith Richards of today. A heap of living and occasional bouts of near-dying have gone into that flayed, weathered, kohl-eyed visage, whose topography suggests a moonscape irrigated with Jack Daniel's. After half a century on the road, Richards has the face he deserves -- but not, it appears, the brain. Against all pharmaceutical odds, he has held on to a substantial portion of his own history and has turned it into the most scabrously honest and essential rock memoir in a long time.

Then again, where's the competition? The gods of rock-and-roll tend to falter on the printed page. (Even Bob Dylan disappoints.) Maybe that's what comes from being a frontman: Gazing night after night into fame's corona blinds you to everything else. It's the guys prowling around behind you, the Harrisons and the Townshends, who take the fullest measure. How else to explain why Richards's "Life" is almost as densely packed as his life? Seemingly everything is here: the shabby origins in an East London suburb ("Everyone from Dartford is a thief. It runs in the blood"); the brief career as, yes, a boy soprano; the first guitar at 15; the astonishingly rapid rise to fame; the groupies and birds and dealers and sidemen; the booms, the busts, the loves lost and won; the hard-won and faintly miraculous old age.

In some cases, Richards's memories are supplemented by others; on every page, they are shaped by co-writer James Fox. But the voice that emerges is unmistakably the dark lord's: growly and profane and black with comedy. And, for all that, surprisingly charming, particularly in limning the Rolling Stones' origins, which can be traced, mundanely enough, to a fateful encounter in a train station.

Here is how the young Keith described it at the time in a letter to his aunt: "You know I was keen on Chuck Berry and I thought I was the only fan for miles but one mornin' on Dartford Stn. (that's so I don't have to write a long word like station) I was holding one of Chuck's records when a guy I knew at primary school 7-11 yrs y'know came up to me. He's got every record Chuck Berry ever made and all his mates have too. . . . Anyways the guy on the station, he is called Mick Jagger . . . the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don't mean maybe."

(More here.)