Book Review
LIFE by Keith Richards w/James Fox
Little, Brown, and Company
by Sharon Schneider
You might think it strange that the Blues Foundation’s 2012 Literature award went to rocker, Keith Richards, for his new bio, Life. But the choice is not as odd as you might think, because the common interest and bond that first brought Keith and Mick Jagger together was a love for the blues. They started talking and comparing notes when Keith noticed Mick carrying a Chuck Berry album during a chance meeting at a train station. Jagger actually had been ordering directly from Chess Records in Chicago, and at first, had the bigger collection and more exposure to blues. “I was a yokel compared to Mick.”
This is one large tome—564 pages—and in the reading, you can picture Keith and his co-writer having long, rambling but often informative and uncensored conversations. Two main occupations in his life are prominently apparent—his great, true love for music, all kinds of music, and his life on hard drugs. “I could kick smack; I could not kick music.” Keith holds nothing off limits. What clearly pushes his buttons is pretentiousness and what he feels is invasive authority.
Keith’s Grandpa Gus, who played guitar and played in bands, sparked his interest when Keith was about nine or ten. Gus taught him some licks and chords, but the song Keith really learned well was Malaguena. While still young, Keith listened to Radio Luxembourg, and suddenly, a whole, new musical universe revealed itself. “It was almost as if I was waiting for it to happen…I was overwhelmed…Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Fats, and, of course, Elvis.” He called it “the emancipation of music...stripped down, no violins, no ladies’ choruses and schmaltz.” Chuck Berry was his earliest idol, as were the Everly Brothers.
Keith started on a gut-stringed acoustic Spanish guitar, and his advice to all guitarists is to start on acoustic and graduate to electric. His mother, Doris, bought him his first electric guitar, a Rosetti, when he was about 15. He started buying the “crème de la crème” of Elvis’s Sun records and soon began noticing the bands behind the front men. Scotty Moore and D. J. Fontana tantalized his ears. “I never bought a Ricky Nelson record; I bought a James Burton record. Fats Domino’s band was actually Dave Bartholomew’s band.” Keith threw himself into learning their methods; “that was my other world.”
He was an only child growing up in post-war England in a town called Dartford. He looked for male friendships, since he “came from a matriarchy on both sides of the family.” Through the years, Keith gravitated towards people that some would politely call “characters”. “For some reason all of my close friends have been jailbirds at one time or another.” He admits he still fears dentists, was bullied for a while at school, and comes from a family that never went to church--Keith always thought of them as “nobles in exile”. Though Keith and Mick knew each other from their neighborhood in early youth, Mick’s family became more upwardly mobile and moved into a better one.
He never quite got over his booting from his quite renowned school choir when his 13-year-old voice changed. Since the group often traveled or had missed many classes due to rehearsals, it was decided that the group should repeat that school year. Then he said, he developed “a life-long antipathy towards authority…I had adopted a criminal mind.” Eventually he was expelled, but he admitted that the choir experience did help him learn “a lot about singing and music, working with musicians, and how to put a band together.” Thanks to a teacher’s recommendation, he wound up at Sidcup Art College in London, and that’s where the Stones started their metamorphosis from a club band, to one of national prominence, and finally, to one with world-wide recognition.
There was a musical divide between “beats”, which liked traditional jazz and were sticklers about authenticity, and “mods”, who were more into R & B and modern jazz. Mick and Keith started hanging around the city’s music clubs, where “there were ludicrous discussions about authenticity.” Blues fans “met in little gatherings like early Christians.” Keith and Mick attended the concert where Muddy Waters was booed during the second half of his act for presuming to play an electric guitar—“Cat’s playing the same notes, it’s just a little louder.” They spent many an hour parsing and dissecting their blues recordings—“I’d learn guitar, and he would learn the lyrics.” College was abandoned—“I’m going to become a bluesman.” They acquired a drummer and bass player and started practicing two or three nights a week. Sometimes they got invited up to play at the clubs they frequented, and they originally went by the name Little Boy Blue and the Blues Boys. They were “unpaid promoters for Chicago blues.”
Brian Jones, who called himself Elmo Lewis at the time, got invited to join the band because he could play slide. They picked up an experienced piano player, Ian Stewart, who threw his lot with the budding band. Keith says of him, “The Rolling Stones is his band. Without his knowledge and organization, we’d be nowhere.” Soon the band started attracting fans. “The band’s entire goal was to be the best London blues band. You were supposed to spend all your waking hours studying Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, and Robert Johnson.” During a Q and A, a jazz magazine reporter asked the name of the band. Apparently they were looking for a new one, as one of them read off the title of the first cut of an LP just lying on the floor—The Best of Muddy Waters. It was the birth of the Stones.
Bill Wyman arrived--“or, more important, his Vox amplifier appeared. We went for the Chicago blues sound, two guitars, bass, drums, and piano.” The band came up with a plan to steal jazz drummer, Charlie Watts, from another band. They were successful, and more and more gigs came their way. Keith praises Mick as a “natural harp player” and that “on a stage the size of a table, he could work it better than anybody. He was brilliant, like watching a Spanish dancer.”
Recording was a “mere dream”, but once it happened, “things began to move at devastating speed.” Within two weeks they were signed with Decca Records. Soon realizing that they could not be copies of the Beatles, they strove to be the “anti-Beatles”. Unfortunately, Stewart had to be dropped from the lineup. “We were propelled into show business, and we were so anti-show business.” They still felt like a club band. Their first record put them into the U.K.’s Top 20, and TV appearances were scheduled. There were “armies of feral, body snatching girls. I was never more in fear for my life. They didn’t give a shit that I was trying to be a blues player.” The band was amazed to be put on the bill with Little Richard, Bo Diddley, even the Everly Brothers, and took to the road “every day of the week.”
The Beatles and Stones were a “mutual admiration society”. In fact, John and Paul gave them the song, I Wanna Be Your Man, before they recorded it themselves. But cover songs and others’ songs could not take them where they wanted to be, so Mick and Keith were “locked in a room and told to come out with a song.” They were disappointed that they were only coming up with ballads at first, though Marianne Faithful had a hit with As Tears Go By.
As wildly popular and successful as they were in the U.K. and beyond, they didn’t think their first trip to America in the summer of 1964 went very well. Most people hadn’t heard enough about them. They felt NYC was stodgy, endured jibes about their long hair (it was not as acceptable in much of the country), and were shocked to see Muddy Waters in overalls painting the ceiling in what they considered a blues shrine, the Chess Studio. They did do some recording there and were surprised they could tune into any kind of music on American radio. They began to realize that “America was civilized around the edges, but 50 miles inland from any city, you really did go into another world.” And it was on this trip that Keith started his long love affair with drugs.
The hits were finally coming—Get Off Of My Cloud, Paint It Black, Ruby Tuesday, It’s All Over Now. Global fame resulted after their hit Satisfaction. Mick and Keith referred to themselves as the “Glimmer Twins”. “We started to think like songwriters, and once you get that habit, it stays with you all your life.” They would sometimes tear pages from books, throw them on the floor, and “see what comes up.” Keith was mostly responsible for coming up with riffs and tunes, while Mick mainly handled lyrics. Brian Jones became a problem child. As well as letting success go to his head and trying to pit one band member against another, he would plead illness and skip shows, yet they’d find out he was in NY with Bob Dylan or the Velvet Underground. In 1967, Brian was invited to leave and around two weeks later was found dead in his swimming pool. Mick Taylor took his place. Well before this, Keith had started a relationship with Brian’s girl, Anita Pallenberg. It turned out to be a disastrous union, which almost ruined both of them, let alone their children.
Their 1969 American tour had B.B. King and Ike and Tina Turner as opening acts. The band was stunned to be headliners. They did some recording at the Muscle Shoals studio, when there were only eight tracks available, and which Keith still prefers. “Soon there were 16, then 24 tracks, and everyone’s scrambling around these huge desks. The canvas becomes much bigger, and it becomes much harder to focus.” And this was also the time of the Altamont Speedway incident.
Keith made the exciting discovery of open five-string tuning. “Suddenly, you’ve got a whole new universe under your fingers; it broke open a dam…incredible depth, instead of everything being filled in with curlicues.” You will hear it on Honky Tonk Woman, Brown Sugar, Tumbling Dice, and Jumping Jack Flash.
By 1972, the Nixon administration blustered that they were “the most dangerous rock and roll band in the world.” They were corrupting the youth and inciting riots. But when the law hauled them in, it was usually because someone in the band was carrying drugs. During a drug bust, Keith’s plea that he was “only a minstrel” didn’t work, but a team of lawyers stayed the heavier judicial hands. Their reputation preceding them, the law was now constantly watching and waiting for a bust no matter the country. As well as roadies, technicians, groupies, and hangers-on, the band hired a physician to go on tour with them. “He could write scripts in any city, anything you wanted.” All the while Keith was stoned, seeking drugs, being busted or fearing to be, and going through his many episodes of 72 hours of cold turkey hell, Mick became the decision maker by default. “Mick picked up the slack; I picked up the smack.”
The trouble started in the 80’s with the band resenting, they felt, Mick’s high-handed attempts for control. They were feeling like hirelings. “That’s when he became “Brenda” or her majesty. Mick was chasing musical fashion--that’s never the way we worked.” But Mick stepped over the line with Keith and the band when he made a separate deal with CBS to make three solo albums without telling or including them. The company envisioned Mick as another Michael Jackson. “You don’t piggyback on a Rolling Stones deal. Everybody felt betrayed; you reduce the band.”
Painful as this episode was, it did have the effect of allowing Keith a chance to explore and participate in other musical projects: He collaborated with Chuck Berry on Hail, Hail Rock And Roll, he started writing and singing more, and he formed and recorded with a band he started, the X-Pensive Winos. The Stones did no tours from 1982 to 1989 or recordings from 1985 to 1989. “Neither Mick or I sold a lot of records.” But almost 50 years of close collaboration and the desire to still be significant and top players in the Rock realm brought them to a wary peace. “We learned to live with our disagreements.” And he says with a degree of sadness, “I remember with regret how completely tight Mick and I were in the early years of the Stones.”
They did go on to present fabulously successful tours—Bridges To Babylon, Voodoo Lounge, and Steel Wheels to name a few. The thrill is never gone when he hears them announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones”. Keith enthuses, “It’s like sitting on the top of a rocket.” He seems to have now found stability in most aspects of his life and has come to terms with whatever inner demons used to have sway. In meticulous detail, Keith provides the reader with a candid and straightforward picture of this enduring and famed group from the in
side, rather than just from a distance. He wipes the sheen of idolatry clean off the table and lets you see them all as whole, mortal individuals.