Book Review: Life, by Keith Richards (2010)

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This is the autobiography of The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards (with help from James Fox). The Stones were one of my favorite bands when I was an adolescent, and they turned me on to American blues and early Rock n Roll with their own English interpretations sent back to us.
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My friend Ron D. and I would sit down with pencil and paper by the phonograph, playing and replaying their early records to try and decipher their lyrics. “Because I used to love her, but it’s all over now.” I had all the earliest Stones records but stopped buying them sometime well before the end of the ‘60s when I was more into Dylan.
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I was in Vietnam in 1969 when my father sent me a newspaper clipping about Brian Jones dying. I still refer to Ron Woods as “that new guy”. By the ‘70s I was no longer buying albums of any kind (except for maybe Classical) and so I was only hearing Stones’ songs on radio, although I may have borrowed Let It Bleed from someone for a while. I have enjoyed catching up on the Stones’ long epic story via this book.
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Some surprises: Keith Richards was in Boy Scouts and speaks favorably of them and of what he learned there, e.g., knotting broken guitar strings, lighting a fire, being prepared, etc. (He mistakenly reports that his father was an “Eagle Scout”; that is the American highest rank; he means the equivalent British “King’s” or “Queen’s” Scout.) His experiences with and manner of interacting with women were remarkably like my own have always been. His frank discussions about his substance abuse – including a stretch of heroin dependency from about 1969 to 1978 – were insightful and valuable, and, although I never went with heroin as he did, I appreciated his insights into general substance use and abuse. His frank descriptions of the in-fighting between the Rolling Stones band members throughout the band’s entire history were revealing and solved some mysteries for me.
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I thoroughly enjoyed this trip back into the farthest reaches of my own life’s soundtrack, one in which the Rolling Stones played a big part.
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“But it’s all right now, in fact it’s a gas
But it’s all right
I’m Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas, gas, gas.”
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-Zenwind.
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