One Keith Richards, there’s only one Keith Richards book

Life (Weidenfield & Nicholson)

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“I used to love to hang with Mick, but I haven\’t gone into his dressing room in, I don\’t think, twenty years. Sometimes I miss my friend. Where the hell did he go?”

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That quote is from page 467 of Life, Keith’s engaging 547-page autobiography.

James Fox, the co-writer, has done a masterful editing job that explains his friend’s attitudes.

He smoothly sets up the key episodes of an eventful narrative, capturing the pain, the comedy, the satisfactions, aggravations and dramas, right up to the accident in Fiji which left Keith needing six titanium pins in his skull.

Obviously, a Rolling Stone can do things that mere mortals can’t do, like buy houses in Jamaica, Mexico and Connecticut, book a whole floor of a hotel to get some privacy, and hire Charles De Gaulle\’s lawyer when he gets into bother in France.

The main interest in Life, of course, is in the inside story, the relationships within the band, how certain notorious events came about, all the private details that have been hidden from authors who have written countless books about the Stones.

In other words, the things that only Keith knows.

How much of that is he going to spill?

Answer: a helluva lot, but not everything.

He never tells us whether he thinks it’s possible for a junkie couple to be good parents, or what it costs to keep four houses going, and he’s obviously ashamed to mention such coked-out fiascos as the Stones at Earls Court in 1976, or the gig at Kilburn State with Ronnie Wood, Willie Weeks and Andy Newmark. Altamont was a major blunder but he expresses no regrets for the decision to play a free concert in a ridiculously unsuitable desert location in December.

Lifelong fans will relish the sections about how some of their classic albums were created.

For Beggars Banquet, Keith wrote the songs on an acoustic guitar and recorded them quietly in motel rooms on a cassette recorder. By overloading the microphone, he found he could get a “grinding, dirty sound”. To retain that demo quality, he played the cassette through a speaker in the studio and re-recorded it using a proper microphone to give it extra depth and breadth. He notes that, “There are no electric instruments on Street Fighting Man at all, apart from the bass.”

He says Beggars Banquet took the group to a different level, thanks to the production genius of Jimmy Miller, an American who had done beautiful things with Traffic. Surprisingly, he says, “The best thing we ever did with Jimmy was Jumping Jack Flash.”

If you play guitar, the stuff about his Open G tuning will be fascinating, as is his assertion that, “Flash is basically Satisfaction in reverse” and the revelation that Brown Sugar is the one monster that rock & roll\’s greatest riffmeister didn\’t write: “I did tidy it up a bit, but that was his, words and music.”

Predictably, the people Keith loves most are fellow musicians like Bobby Keys, Gram Parsons, Johnny Johnson, who was Chuck Berry\’s pianist, and Charlie Watts, whose way of stretching out the beat is one of the secrets of the Stones sound.

At Nellcote, the mansion where Exile on Main Street was recorded, fat Jacques, the cook, was his heroin dealer.

Some Girls, Ronnie Wood\’s first album with them, was supposed to be recorded at the Pathe Marconi Studios in Paris, owned by EMI, their new record company. To prepare, they booked into the rehearsal studio next door and then their engineer Chris Kimsey realised that the sound in the room and the 16-track console was just right for the rougher, “live” sound they wanted.

Keith admits: “A lot of it was, we\’ve got to out-punk the punks. Because they can’t play, and we can.”

We know most of the facts of the group’s early history.

An only child growing up in Dartford, Kent, he remembers cratered streets, landscapes of rubble, and not being able of buy a bag of sweets till 1954. Dartford was where German aircraft dropped their bombs when they didn’t fancy the heavy flak over London, and Keith was born during an air raid in 1943. His parents, Bert and Doris, met while working in a factory in Edmonton and used to ride a tandem around Essex and go camping with friends. Simple pre-1939 activities.

“Everyone from Dartford is a thief, it runs in the blood,” he reckons. The Roman road from Dover to London runs through his hometown and that was where the stagecoaches were robbed by highwaymen. As a boy he cycled through woods where deserters, tramps and madmen used to hide, keeping children away by firing air guns. One day Keith and his pal found a dead tramp but didn\’t report it.

His Uncle Gus had played violin in a dance band in the Thirties and took him on trips to London’s West End where he knew the repairmen in the musical instrument shops. Gus sat little Keith on a shelf where he saw instruments hanging all round him, vats of glue, and men in brown coats working. Later on Gus allowed Keith to play his classical Spanish guitar and it’s not long before Keith says, “My first amp was a radio.”

After that, all the stuff that Stones fans already know : poverty in a scuzzy flat in Edith Grove, Fulham, how Andrew Oldham got John and Paul to give them a song, I Wanna Be Your Man, how Keith took Anita from the abusive Brian during a road trip to Morocco in his three-ton Bentley, and the famous William Rees-Mogg Times editorial that asked, Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?

Originally, Brian Jones put an ad in Jazz News for musicians who wanted to start an R&B band. But the way Keith tells it, Ian Stewart was more important than Brian, since, as he says here, “The band was his vision because he picked who was going to be in it, “

The first rehearsal Keith attended was in a room at The Bricklayers Arms, a pub in Soho. When Keith arrived the barlady saw his guitar case and said “Upstairs!” and as he was walking up the stairs he could hear wonderful boogie-boogie piano being played by Ian Stewart, an older guy who had a day job at ICI on the Victoria Embankment.

At a previous rehearsal, Mick had told Stu, “I\’m not doin\’ it if Keith\’s not doin\’ it.”

The trad jazz of Acker Bilk and Chris Barber was soon eclipsed by the blues boom, whose progenitors are well-known. As Keith notes, “Without Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies there would have been nothing.”

On July 12, 1962, Alexis Korner was doing a live broadcast on BBC radio, so he asked the Rolling Stones to deputise for him at the Marquee. At the Crawdaddy club in Richmond, run by Russian émigré Giorgio Gomelsky, they used to sit on stools to play as Mick wiggled round them on a tiny stage. Enter Andrew Oldham, who had been sacked by Brian Epstein : “At first Andrew put us in uniforms.” They hated the hound-tooth checked jackets they wore for Thank Your Lucky Stars, an ITV pop show of the day.

Before Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts joined, Keith played with Screaming Lord Sutch\’s bass player and drummer and had his first experience of lift-off : “Suddenly I had this rhythm section behind me, whoa! That was the first time I got three feet off the ground and into the stratosphere.”

Originally, they were a sixpiece band with Ian Stewart on piano but Decca only wanted five members. Instead of storming off in a huff, Stu just said, OK, I\’ll drive you about. He played on all the records.

Keith can be quite droll, leaving a lot to your imagination. On Bianca, he just says, “She was never one for a joke.”

When he recalls touring with Little Richard, formerly the Reverend Richard Penniman, he says “Al Green, Little Richard, Solomon Burke, they all got ordained. Preaching is tax free. Very little to do with God, a lot to do with money.”

Of Brian Jones, he says, “After we did a couple of TV shows, Brian turned into this sort of freak, devouring celebs and fame and attention. Mick and Charlie and I were looking at it all sceptically…I never saw a guy so much affected by fame.”

Brian met model Anita Pallenberg at a gig in Munich in September 1965 and he soon became a passenger who dropped out of a US tour : “Brian disappeared late in 1965 when we were in mid tour with the usual complaints of ill health and surfaced in New York, jamming with Bob Dylan, hanging out with Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, and doing acid.”

Anita did the  controversial Performance film with Mick and the inevitable happened, but Keith was quite hip about it, although that put a distance between guitarist and singer that was never there before, more on Mick’s side, Keith insists. He was realistic : “I mean, I’d stolen her off Brian, I didn’t expect Mick not to knock her off, under the direction of Donald Cammell. I doubt whether it would have happened without Cammell. But, you know, while you were doing that, I was knocking Marianne, man. While you’re missing it, I\’m kissing it.”

There were scores of colourful characters around in the Sixties, not just Alexis, Giorgio and Brian Epstein. Another was Robert Fraser, who had been a captain in the King\’s African Rifles in Uganda, where Idi Amin had been his sergeant,. Fraser became a hipster gallery owner who represented Roy Lichtenstein, showed Jim Dine, Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg, screened Warhol\’s Chelsea Girls in his flat, and was arrested with Jagger and did four months in prison for heroin. He was Richard Hamilton’s art dealer and that was why Hamilton did the famous painting of Fraser handcuffed to Jagger, from a news photo in The Daily Sketch.

American heavy Allen Klein renegotiated their deal with Decca, so Keith was very impressed by Klein and saw him as a manager who did what Colonel Porker did for Elvis, a deal-maker who gave his artist anything he wanted: “When I rang and asked him for £80,00 to buy a house on Chelsea Embankment near to Mick\’s, so that we could wander back and forth and write songs, it came the next day.”

By then Keith had discovered that one hit demands another very quickly, or you start to lose momentum. His mindset changed: “We start to think like songwriters, and once you get that habit, it stays with you all your life. It motors along in your subconscious, in the way you listen…..Our songs were taking on some kind of edge in the lyrics, or at least they were beginning to sound like the image projected onto us. Cynical, nasty, sceptical, rude.” On the same subject, “The radar is on whether you know it or not. You hear this piece of conversation from across the room, I just cant stand you anymore”…That\’s a song…you\’re constantly on the alert….everything\’s a subject for a song. The banal phrase, which is the one that makes it…… Luckily there are more phrases than songwriters, just about.”

Any music fan knows that the aggro in British rock bands is usually between the singer and the guitarist. Invariably, both feel they’re the main man but neither can do what they do without the other, so it’s often love-hate. Keith calls it Lead Vocalist Syndrome and in the Stones it took 20 years for LVS to make their partnership really ghastly : “It was the beginning of the 80s when Mick started to become “ Her Majesty” or “that bitch Brenda!”

Summing up the schism, he says, “Now there was Mick\’s world, which was a socialite world, and our world. That didn\’t work at all well with keeping a band together or keeping them happy.”

So Undercover was recorded in Paris in an atmosphere of open hostility, and in shifts, with Mick in the studio between noon and 5pm, and Keith working from midnight to 5 a.m.

Looking back on the last 50 years, one of the old rocker\’s main conclusions, obvious but profoundly true, is that, “We turned American people back onto their own music. And that\’s probably our greatest contribution to music.”

Joe Walsh told Keith that he first heard the Stones when he was in high school : “He was listening to doo-wop and that was about it. He had never heard Muddy Waters. Amazingly, he was first exposed to the blues, he said, by hearing us.”

As a renegade and former junkie, he likes to play up his outlaw image, and fondly notes that, “For some reason all my close friends have been jailbirds at one time or another.” He’s candid about the self-loathing of heroin addicts, who live in a tiny world. “Any way you look at it, junkies are people waiting for the man. Your world gets diminished to dope.”

He disapproved of parties in Ronnie Wood\’s hotel room in 1981, where his mate was doing crack, and reveals that Woody’s increasingly farcical “rehab” efforts included one “clinic” in Ireland that lets you go out to the pub for three hours every night. The description of his wife Patti\’s Swedish-American family is interesting because I didn\’t know anything about Patti Hansen, the model he married on his 40th birthday in 1983.

Overall, Keith is funnier than you might imagine, especially about Mick. He hated the singer cultivating Columbia CEO Walter Yetnikoff, phoning him all the time to let the company know he was on top of everything. Unknown to the rest of the group, the CBS deal had included provisions for three Mick Jagger solo albums ! The biggest betrayal of Keith, I always thought, came when Mick did a solo tour of Japan/Australia and his set was so boring that his band had to play some Stones numbers. At the time I didn’t think Keith would ever forgive Mick such a betrayal. He confirms that emphatically on Page 470.

It’s no surprise to read that he was horrified when Mick phoned him to say, “Tony Blair\’s insisting that I accept a knighthood.” Keith’s mynah bird became so annoying that he gave it away : “To me it was like living with Mick in the room in a cage, always pursing his beak.”

Last week a songwriter friend asked if I’d read this book. He said he got Life at Tesco for £8 and read it over five nights at Xmas and really enjoyed it. I replied that my wife gave me the book and I started reading it on Xmas Day and had the same reaction. I reckon the page which describes Charlie punching Mick and knocking him over the back of a sofa is worth £8 on its own.

Life is a rocking, rolling, compelling story that leaves out some of the stuff I wanted to know, but it’s a classic nevertheless.

I loved every chapter and it’s taken me a while to realise why I love it so much. I’ve seen the Stones six times and Keith three times. With 20 Stones  tracks on my iPod, which also contains his Main Offender album, Keith’s always with me, although we’ve never met.

And over the years  when I wasn\’t meeting him, I was meeting Mick, Woody, Rod, Van, Alice, Stevie Wonder and guitar players like Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Dave Gilmour, J.Geils, Jerry Garcia, Glenn Frey, B.B. King, Dr.John, Bonnie Raitt and many others, so Keith Richards is just about the only one I haven\’t met. Having read his  autobiography  and enjoyed  its easy colloquial flow, I almost feel I\’ve met him too. That’s quite nice and it’s  a reaction I’ve never had to any other book.

Way back in 1962, Mick Jagger thought the Rolling Stones would last two and half years, max. For a while their ambition was to be the best blues band in London, and then they were fired by another ambition : to make a record.

In 2011, we can safely say that this particular rock group has demonstrated more talent, personality and stamina than any other, and they’ve earned a ton of money.

Their most recent tour grossed $558 million.That\’s right.

A Stones tour in 2005-2007 grossed half a billion dollars.