AUTOBIOGRAPHY:Keith Richards, the indestructible Rolling Stones guitarist, is one of the greatest swashbucklers in rock history – and this is a life-affirming riot of a book, writes KEVIN COURTNEY
LifeBy Keith Richards Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 564pp. £20
A ROLLING STONE writes his autobiography after almost 50 years on the road? Seems a little premature. Surely the indestructible Keith Richards has a few more rock'n'roll years in him – or at least another sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean. Who knows if Richards is planning to publish Life: Part 2, but Lifetells the story so far of one of the greatest swashbucklers in rock history – and one of its rare survivors.
It’s the story of how five mates from London hijacked pop music and bent it to their dark ends, setting themselves up as the anti-Beatles, refusing to wear uniforms and deliberately playing up to the image of dirty, rebellious rockers out to seduce your daughter.
But The Rolling Stones were not satanic creations trying to corrupt the morals of Britain’s youth or undermine society with their long hair and cavernous cheekbones. They just wanted to be the best blues band in town. All the other stuff – the sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, riots, busts, bust-ups and betrayals – came afterwards, and just kept coming.
Richards looks through the past darkly and, amazingly, remembers it all, with just a little jogging from his co-writer, James Fox, the author of White Mischief.Happily, there's no shortage of mischief here – Richards's adventures in excess are well chronicled – but there's something about hearing it from the horse's mouth that puts the seal of realness on it.
Richards dispels a few long-held myths along the way, but he’s happy to reinforce our perception of him as a loose-hipped troubadour with a fast-beating rock’n’roll heart. The Human Riff? He’s not arguing with that.
Richards relives his childhood in Dartmouth in Kent, the only child of Bert and Doris. He got his passion for playing the guitar from his grandad Gus Dupree, a bandleader. His anti-authoritarian streak came in after he was kicked out of the school choir because his voice had broken. And he learned survival skills from dodging bullies on the way home from school, and from his time in the Eagle Scouts, Beaver Patrol (no sniggering at the back).
Richards comes across as an erudite geezer, the type who could sit in an East End pub and spout off about Nietzsche without getting his head kicked in. He talks with the candidness of someone who has nothing to hide, and nothing to hide behind.
Central to the memoir is Richards’s most passionate, and most enduring, relationship – no, not with Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg or Patti Hansen but with his guitar. This is a book about the thrill of finding the right lick, the joy of getting the perfect, messed-up guitar sound, the sheer exhilaration of leaping into the empty silence and building a bridge to heaven using just a G tuning, a few repeated phrases and lashings of feel. It’s the Tao of guitar playing, with a few tasty licks of scandal thrown in to keep it all spiced up.
Although Richards became known as the uberjunkie of rock, it’s clear that he was made of stronger stuff than most – or maybe it was because his drugs were purer. He doesn’t just write about his drug-fuelled antics: he writes with a rare clarity and precision about the experience of being a drug taker, the highs, the lows and the plateaus, stepping outside himself and looking back with pharmaceutically sharp vision. “Don’t try this at home,” he warns.
Richards could go days without sleep, and few of his friends could keep up with him. John Lennon tried and failed. “I don’t think John ever left my house except horizontally,” writes Richards.
The real burnout in The Rolling Stones, however, was the guitarist Brian Jones, whose disintegration Richards details with cruel pragmatism. Jones thought he was the leader of the band – he even arranged to have himself paid more than the other members – and while Jagger and Richards were busy writing the band’s next hit, Jones would be swanning about like a 1960s Lord Byron, with an entourage of high-society hangers-on. He became increasingly absent from Stones gigs and recording sessions, and Richards ended up playing most of Jones’s guitar parts in the studio.
He also ended up with Jones’s girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, though, as Richards recounts it, he didn’t steal her: he simply rescued her from an abusive relationship. The band eventually fired Jones, and he was found dead in his swimming pool three weeks later. Richards’s dismissive tone suggests a certain hint of “good riddance”.
The alpha-male rivalry between Richards and Jagger is altogether more friendly and more respectful, but that doesn’t stop Richards from getting a few digs in below the belt. Jagger had a fling with Pallenberg on the set of Performance, and Richards took his revenge by sleeping with Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull. “While you were missing it, I was kissing it,” he says, with a glint of malice. He also pulls out the “small penis” insult – hey, Keef, you don’t do that to your mate, even if he does have a tiny todger.
Such is the pervasive influence of The Beatles that we tend to see the 1960s through Lennon-shaded lenses. Richards tells an alternative story of those times that shows a different side to the looking glass. In the beginning the stories are not dissimilar: two young lads meet, discover a mutual love of music from across the Atlantic and form a band. But while The Beatles’ roots were in rockabilly, skiffle and rock’n’roll, the Stones were driven by a passion for Chicago blues, country and rhythm and blues.
Sure, they shared a respect for Elvis and Buddy Holly, but the Stones’ lodestone ran deeper, and farther down the Mississippi, than any other white, middle-class English group dared to go.
The Stones, it seemed, ran against the grain of every prevailing trend. While the world was welcoming Sgt Pepper and the summer of love with open-toed sandalwood, the Stones were being persecuted by the police and judiciary, who seemed determined to put their satanic majesties behind bars.
The planets realigned again in 1969, when the summer of love was dealt a double death blow by the Manson murders and the killing at the infamous Altamont Speedway Free Festival. But while The Beatles fell apart, the Stones just kept rolling on.
For a man who should be dead by now, Richards has written a life-affirming riot of an autobiography. Long may he rock’n’roll.
Kevin Courtney is an Irish Timesjournalist
