Life

I read a lot of science fiction stories, but accounts of a real life spent off the fringe of ordinary existence, with passions and narrow escapes and achievements and losses can seem as fantastical as those sometimes. For all I know, none of the striking sentences in this memoir might have come originally from the hand of its subject, but there is something about the way the words come out that give a sense of being true at some level, not just something his writer friend has put together to spin a story. For one thing, the anecdotes don't all pull in one direction, making Keith Richards seem much better than his reputation or much worse, but instead try to go down the middle where the reader can kind of understand how things happened without necessarily agreeing with the course of action described. The first chapter is I think misleading, telling a story about exuberant lawbreaking in a part of America unequipped to put up with that kind of thing, and I was kind of put off by it. There are other passages like this in the book, some which leads the reader to do much head shaking, but they don't in fact constitute the majority of the autobiography. When the second chapter took the approach of describing his working class upbringing, the class and outlook he was equipped with when life went in a very different direction in school, I was back on board, and I felt like there was a little of this running throughout even when matters reached their most outlandish pitch.

The way the author talks about the songwriting process and the very different processes of live performance is not at all what I expected because of how thoughtful it all was. It was made clear that he absolutely loved what he was doing, and wouldn't have kept on at it for the money or the adulation or even the misdeeds that came out of the music. When he had the chance to honor the music in his heart his real enthusiasm showed through. It reminded me in a little way of how deeply I was into Chicago blues myself when I went there for college, and the Black role models he enjoyed meeting were often the same ones I appreciated and have gone to see, only he had the advantage of being able to get as close as he liked. All the other nonsense surrounding the music business, which would incentivize things very bad for the musicians themselves at the same time they brought the talent out to a gigantic audience sounds like a lousy way for things to work. When the celebrities make bad decisions about drugs or sex or money and ruin their lives it makes sense that that would happen, and the only real outlier is how the subject of this book managed not to go all the way down that road in the end. That is worth reading about, for anyone.

I can imagine a lot of people would pick this up to find out what the author has to say about the people he partnered with, musically and personally. Again, it is clear that there has to be a bias there, but it felt to me that there was also a ring of truth for most of it. The most complicated relationship he had, the one with Mick Jagger, is discussed from the viewpoint of a friendship that went back to the beginning of the band, of ego and power, of shared artistry, and finally of having put in all the hours together over the decades. It's too much to communicate fully to us as outsiders. And the description of the relation he had with the other members over time, including the lesser known session musicians and long-time collaborators, all helped to make it clear how huge the band became, and how heavy the responsibility became to Richards as the main songwriter.

Its been over a decade since this book came out, and with Keith Richards still around I would kind of like to know how this life story has kept going. He's now spent about as long living clean (relatively) as he did living far out on the edge, but everyone knows how he's remembered. I enjoyed taking a look at this rock and blues infused life, twenty-three hours in audiobook form, and I'm glad that the writing of the memoir didn't mean that he was close to finishing.