This, as the title implies, the autobiography of Keith Richards, guitarist and founding member of the Rolling Stones. Richards had an eventful life and his story is interesting reading. His prose style is conversational, filled with asides and peppered with expletives and politically incorrect language (for instance, he frequently refers to gay people he’s known as “fags”, though he doesn’t seem to be actually prejudiced against them). It’s hard to tell where his own writing stops and his co-writer’s begins, though it’s possible the latter basically transcribed and organized accounts that Richards gave orally. In any event, the book certainly seems to be entirely in Richards’ own voice and it provides a fairly full picture of him. It ranges from his childhood up to around 2007 or so, though the 1960s and 1970s take up the most space, perhaps as they were the most eventful period of his life (though quite a few notable events come before and after those decades as well), and towards the end he even throws in a recipe and talks a bit about the kind of books he reads (a lot of historical fiction, among other things – he says that when he fell off a ladder in his library after a bookshelf collapsed on him, resulting in a punctured lung, the book he was trying to get was a Leonardo da Vinci book on anatomy). But of course most of the book is about the people in his life, the things that happened to him, and music in general.
Richards himself seems like a mostly decent guy, though by his own account he has a bit of a nasty temper and a propensity to violence. Some of the occasions where he flipped out (occasions he describes as “red mist” or “a red curtain” falling in front of his eyes) seemed justified, at least based on his version of events, but in some cases it seemed like a bit of an overreaction. It might be understandable for him to be annoyed when some music industry bigwig came into the studio and started pontificating on how they could improve the song they were working on, but taking a knife and throwing it between the guy’s legs seems a bit more than was called for. Likewise, when a DJ in a bar he was in persisted in playing Rolling Stones songs after Richards “politely” asked him not to, it is understandable that he lost his temper with him, but perhaps grabbing him and throwing him on the ground was a little much. Other examples include the time he waved a knife at Billy Preston backstage because the latter was playing too loud and drawing all the attention to himself, or the time when some foolish young man inadvertently took the spring onions that Richards was going to put in a dish he was cooking at a party at his house, with the result that Richards ended up chasing the guy around the backyard with sabers in his hands. At the same time, he also did things like rescuing an abandoned kitten, which Richards named Voodoo – hence the name of the Stones’ 1994 album, Voodoo Lounge, from the terrace Voodoo spent much of his time on (“Voodoo’s Lounge”). He occasionally intervened in other situations (for instance, he talks about stopping Billy Preston from beating up his boyfriend), though at other times he seemed to content to just observe, such as when Brian Jones was being nasty to someone. He makes a point of saying that he generally trusts people until they prove untrustworthy, whereas Mick Jagger is the opposite. He also had rather interesting friends over the years; while Jagger became something of a socialite, hanging out with the rich and famous, Richards seemed to prefer a completely different crowd. While he did hang out with some relatively upper crust or famous people in the 1960s, including John Lennon and Gram Parsons, a lot of his friends in later years were not at all famous, though as he notes, one thing they often had in common is that they had done time in prison at some point. Most of them weren’t musicians or really in the industry at all, though one close friend was a Texan sax player named Bobby Keys, who ended up playing with the Stones for many years, though with a long gap after he infuriated Jagger by being irresponsible during a tour.
Inevitably, Richards’ drug use comes into the book quite often; in fact, he opens the book with an episode from the 1970s when he and several companions were stopped in Arkansas while in a car full of drugs. For the most part, he doesn’t try to excuse or justify his drug use, though he does argue that he managed it better than a lot of the people around him and it sometimes served a useful purpose. But he admits by the mid to late 1970s his heroin addiction had gotten out of control (as had that of his longtime girlfriend Anita Pallenberg), and he concludes that it’s just a bad idea to start. Even aside from the legal problems and the sheer desperation of being a junkie always worrying about his next fix, his heroin problems in this period indirectly led to the deterioration of his relationship with Jagger.
Of course this is inevitably one of the big points of interest in a book like this; what does he say about his relationship with his bandmates. Oddly, he doesn’t really talk about his relationship with Bill Wyman or Charlie Watts much; Wyman in particular doesn’t get mentioned very often. He says “the closest emotional thing” he ever had with Wyman was when he was arrested for heroin possession in Toronto, and Wyman helped him out by managing to score some heroin to tide him over until he got out. Watts gets a little more attention, including their musical rapport, but not much. Richards credits Ian Stewart with being the real founder of the band and talks about his distress when Stewart died of a heart attack, though otherwise he’s fairly peripheral to the story as well. He does dwell a bit more on Brian Jones, though a lot of what he has to stay about Jones is negative. He does speak positively about his ability to pick up instruments and says that they did sometimes have fun together, as Jones could be funny and they shared a love for R&B, but he says he was erratic, couldn’t handle drugs or fame, and was cruel to friends and girlfriends. He says that Jones and Pallenberg (who were a couple before the latter got involved in Richards) often got in violent fights, though as often as not Jones would come out the worst. In later years, in contrast, Richards had a fairly close relationship with Ronnie Wood, who he sometimes actually hung out with in contrast to other members of the band, though he also says he slugged him once when Wood’s drug use was causing problems during a tour.
But of course his most important relationship was with Mick Jagger. He talks about how closely in sympathy they were in the early years, particularly with regard to their musical tastes, and how they started writing songs together. They started to drift apart somewhat in the early 1970s, with goings-on like sleeping with each other’s girlfriends or Jagger getting jealous about Richards’ friendship with Gram Parsons. He admits that in this period Jagger generally came through for him when the chips were down, but it’s clear that they weren’t hanging out together as much as before. Then when Richards’ heroin problem was at its worst, Jagger had to basically take over running the band’s affairs. Richards notes that he had no reason to object, as he was too wrapped up in his addiction to care about business matters, though he was still reasonably dedicated to making music. But he explains the real crunch came when he finally kicked the habit and basically let Jagger know he was ready to take on his share of the leadership duties. He says he expected Jagger to be relieved to give up part of the burden, but to his surprise he found Jagger was now used to being in control and wanted to things to remain that way. From then on, things went downhill. By Richards’ account, it wasn’t only him that got fed up with Jagger’s seeming arrogance (which he attributes in part to what he calls LVS – lead vocalist syndrome). He says the normally staid Charlie Watts punched Jagger out when Jagger called him up and referred to him as “my drummer”. Jagger’s secret signing of a solo deal a lot of anger, though the biggest rupture came in when he went on tour without the band. Eventually Richards and Jagger patched things up to the point where they could continue to write together, but from Richards’ account, they still didn’t talk much, and they still had conflicting ideas about the music – he says Jagger too often wanted to follow the latest fad, whereas Richards just wanted them to do what they did best. Richards says now their relationship is in more like that of brothers or even a marriage than that of friends; even their dressing rooms on tour are kept far apart, and their producer Don Was was surprised to note how little they talked. Richards at one point talks about his regret for the fact that they don’t really hang out together anymore. Interestingly, Richards says that in these later years, they got on best when it was just the two of them sitting down to write songs for an album.
While Richards doesn’t go over the creation of every song, he does comment on the origins of some of them, as well as making some general observations about how he and Jagger usually wrote together. He ironically observes that a lot of their very first songs, all of which they gave to other artists as they didn’t consider them suitable for the Stones, were not very successful, and often did worse than those artists’ previous singles: “Our songwriting had this other function of hobbling the opposition while we got paid for it” (though he notes that Marianne Faithfull’s very successful recording of “As Tears Go By” was an exception). He says that “Satisfaction” was a typical example of how he and Jagger collaborated in the early days, as he came up with the basic idea, including the chorus line, and Jagger would fill things in. He says that with “Paint It Black”, he wrote the melody and he wrote the lyrics (this contradicts a claim by Bill Wyman that the song was a group composition). He says that generally he came up with the musical riffs, though he mentions some exceptions, such as “Brown Sugar”. He names the riff for “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” as his favorite riff of all (his claim of authorship here contradicts an assertion by Wyman that he originally came up with the riff). He implies that “Ruby Tuesday” is basically his work (another Stones book claims it started as a collaboration with Jones, but Richards says Jones couldn’t write and that there was no “spark” on the occasions when they tried to do something together). He takes credit for “Gimme Shelter”, but says “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is basically Jagger’s. He credits Jagger with “Tumbling Dice” and “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll”, but says “Happy” and “Angie” were his own work. He implies that “Miss You” was mainly Jagger’s, while engineer/producer Chris Kimsey is quoted as saying “Start Me Up” was “Keith’s song”. Of course many more songs are mentioned, including some Richards did solo.
Richards also has some interesting remarks about other musicians, whether his predecessors and influences or his contemporaries. He says that Linda Keith gave Jimi Hendrix a copy of a demo Richards’ had of Tim Rose singing “Hey Joe”, so that indirectly Hendrix got the song through him. The Beatles, not surprisingly, come up often, and Richards is generally complimentary about them, though he does say that the Beatles couldn’t play the blues like the Stones could and that he would tell John Lennon that the Beatles lacked swing and that they could only rock but couldn’t roll. But he talks about how Lennon and McCartney gave the Stones their first big hit (“I Wanna Be Your Man”) and how afterwards the two bands would coordinate releases so they wouldn’t conflict with each other. He credits the Beatles and the Stones with making the album the main vehicle for recording in place of the single, and he credits the Beatles and Bob Dylan with changing songwriting. He notes that he hung out quite a bit with Lennon, who he says was like Gram Parsons a “pure musician”. Near the end of the book, he talks about meeting Paul McCartney on a Caribbean beach in 2005. He says he hadn’t really hung out with McCartney in the past, but that they had some great talks on this occasion and even worked on a song together. He also talks about his experience with Chuck Berry. He worked with Berry on the 1987 bio pic Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, and he says that Berry was really difficult as a person, though he put up with because of all he owed to him musically. He also says he got Berry back together with pianist Johnnie Johnson for the film. Most notably, he says he asked Johnson about how songs like “Sweet Little Sixteen” and “Little Queenie” were written. Johnson said Berry would come in with all the words and then Johnson and the band would play a blues format with Johnson laying out the sequence. Richards’ reaction was hey, that means you co-wrote the songs. He goes on to note that he and the drummer went back and looked at Berry’s songs and realized that they were all in piano keys. So really most of Berry’s famous songs were probably Berry/Johnson compositions (however, according to Wikipedia, Johnson says that he didn’t have anything to do with arranging or recording “Johnny B. Goode”, which he said Berry told him was a tribute to Johnson), though the use of a “blues format” also might explain why musically a lot of Berry’s songs are similar to each other. Richards says the first time he met Jerry Lee Lewis he almost got in a fight with him, though they later became friends (if he’s aware of the rather strong possibility that Lewis killed at least one of his wives, he doesn’t mention it). Many other musicians and singers who Richards has crossed paths with in his long career also make appearances in the book.
The last major episode in the book, other than the death of Richards’ mother in 2007, occurred in 2006, when Richards fell off a tree branch he’d been sitting on on an island in Fiji and banged his head, then a couple of days later after a jolt on a boat he started to get blinding headaches. It turned out he’d cracked his skull, and he had to be flown to New Zealand and have an operation to open up his skull and drain the blood clots out of his head, with six titanium pins holding the skull cap in place. It was perhaps the closest Richards has come to dying in life full of close calls, from actually getting caught by some of the screaming teenage fans from the 1960s (he was trying to get in the car when the door handle broke off and the driver panicked and drove off, leaving Richards behind), a car accident, various hairy encounters when he was trying to score heroin, two occasions where he punctured a lung, and more. On this occasion, he says, he got “an interesting preview of my obituaries”, with notes and letters and tributes from people like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Jay Leno, Robin Williams and people in the music industry. He also reveals that he feels the same way about Jet Skis as I do; in mentioning that later accounts falsely claimed a Jet Ski was involved he notes that they are something he “really dislike[s] intensely because they’re noisy and stupid and disruptive to the reefs.” Anyway, through it all, he manages to keep going, a pretty impressive feat for a guy who beginning in 1973 spent ten years on the top of a New Musical Express list of rock stars most likely to die.
