Papa was a Rolling Stone

LIFE

By Keith Richards

Little Brown, 564 pages

Available at National Bookstore

Outlaw. Junkie. Knife fighter. Husband. Father. Rolling Stone.

All of these describe Keith Richards at some point in his autobiography titled Life.

The one word that doesn’t get used too often, though, long after the blood transfusion jokes fade, is “survivor.” Instead, as Keith tells us in Life with no little pride, he regularly topped New Musical Express’s watch list of “Rock Stars Most Likely To Die” for a decade straight.

Ten years I was number one on that list! It used to make me laugh. That was the only chart on which I was number one for 10 years in a row. I was kind of proud of that position. I was really disappointed when I went down the charts. Finally dropping down to number nine. Oh my God, it’s over.

Sure, we all make jokes about Keith Richards. But the truth is, who better to give us a guided tour through Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Mausoleum than the Cryptkeeper himself? Richards was there on the front lines of most of rock history, and he’s an engaging storyteller to boot. Life has an “as told to” quality (James Fox was the recipient of all these anecdotes and shaped them into a book), but Richards emerges as a true voice here, full of language that only Keith (and maybe Jack Sparrow) could ever cook up. Example: on his discovery of five-string open tuning: “You’re out of the realms of normal music there. You’re up the Limpopo with Yellow Jack.”

Huh??

Oh, yeah. It’s just Keith Richards. That’s the way he talks. After all, it’s a miracle he’s still breathing.

Ever since picking up his uncle’s acoustic guitar at age 11, Richards had a strong love affair with wood and strings. To this day, he says, “to open up a guitar case, when it’s an old wooden guitar, I could crawl in and close the lid.” But it wasn’t the Beatles or pop music he aspired to: it was Chicago blues: Chess Records legends like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Little Walter. Meeting up with fellow wannabe bluesman Mick Jagger in Watford, England back in ‘62, they formed a band that had a single-minded mission: bring the blues to a British audience. The Rolling Stones went much further, of course, but as Richards explains it, fashioning themselves as the anti-Beatles was part of manager Andrew Loog Oldham’s master plan: no suits for these moptops; instead the Stones were arrested for public urination, vilified for their bad skin and surly speech, and increasingly hounded for drug use.

Richards opens the book with a rambling tale of a drug bust in Arkansas during a Stones tour in 1975. A Chevrolet Impala loaded with heroin, coke and other illicit substances: no wonder the cracker cops pulled them over. But in typical nine lives fashion, Richards escapes the jailhouse yet again, thanks to a high-level lawyer friend and the Stones’ publicity power. While the arresting sheriff gnashes his teeth, the starstruck judge finally settles for a photo op with the band members. Case dismissed!

So how does Richards get away with it? In his own reckoning, he got used to the “dirty tricks” cops liked to play from the Stones’ early days in England: there was planted evidence, relentless hounding of the band, constant warrants to search property. To hear Richards tell it, the British authorities simply wanted to stamp out what they considered the bad seed embodied by the Rolling Stones. It didn’t work. Richards developed a sixth sense about cops: when to hide dope, when to flush it, when to pull out a knife and when not to. Oh, yes: Richards likes his big Bowie knife. One friend describes Keith tossing the knife between the legs of one record executive who gave unsolicited advice during the Stones’ recording of Steel Wheels: “It landed right between the bloke’s legs, boinnggg. It was really like William Tell; it was great. Keith says, ‘Listen, sonny, I was writing songs before you were a glint on your father’s d**k.’”

To compare Richards with a pirate or a swaggering old sailor is tempting. He did actually play such a character in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (alongside Johnny Depp). Tom Waits, who worked with Richards on “Rain Dogs” and “Bone Machine,” likens him to a “common laborer in a lot of ways. He’s like a swabby, like a sailor.” The image fits.

It’s this workmanlike approach that led Richards, by his account, to do most of the heavy lifting in the Jagger-Richards songwriting over the decades. The best parts of Life, for me, revolve around Keith discussing his craft. He learned a lot from Count Basie and Chicago blues ensembles that had “a beautiful flippancy” in their playing. He talks at length about “the age-old magic of guitar weaving” — the way his rhythm lines intersect with Brian Jones or Mick Taylor or Ron Wood. Hearing Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel in 1955 was a revelation: not because of the voice, but the sparseness of the instruments, the way the guitar only wanders in when it’s ready, wrings out a few tears, then leaves the scene. This probably influenced Richards’ unique rhythm playing, one of the most underrated presences in rock history. (By the way, Richards hates the term “rock” music, “It’s not rock, it’s roll,” he likes to say.)

During a studio session with Ry Cooder in the late ‘60s, Richards learned about alternate tunings — open G, open D, etc. — and removed the bottom string of his guitar. An amazing trail of five-string wonder riffs followed: Jumping Jack Flash, Gimme Shelter, Brown Sugar, Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, Tumbling Dice, Rocks Off, Happy, Start Me Up. If you needed a riff that sounded like it was hewn out of stone, Keith Richards was your man for about 20 years.

But of course, Richards was also an unrepentant junkie during the Stones’ most creative years, a fact he neither sugarcoats nor glamorizes. It apparently worked for him; while under the influence — when he was conscious, at least — all he did was write, play or think about music, 24/7. So the bulk of the Stones catalogue had to have come from that period of self-indulgence.

And Jagger? Obviously, Richards still works with him. He credits the singer with almost effortlessly weaving his lyrics and melodies into the Richards riff machine: it’s a process that famously began when manager Oldham locked the two in a kitchen, telling them to write a hit song. They came up with As Tears Go By, and never looked back.

But Richards has little affection for the man, despite their partnership. He labels him “a bitch,” and claims the relationship changed when Jagger began to realize how big the Stones were becoming in the late ‘60s. The singer, an economics major in college, took control of the Stones’ business deals while Richards was busy with, er, other things in the ‘70s. As Keith memorably puts it: “Mick picked up the slack, I picked up the smack.”

He has little affection for Brian Jones, the ill-fated guitarist who drowned in a swimming pool after self-destructing in 1969; nor does Mick Taylor receive any affectionate ink space, being a member who rarely laughed or “got down” with the Stones, brilliant player though he was. Nor is Bill Wyman, who quit the band, given much praise. That leaves drummer Charlie Watts, who famously slugged Mick Jagger, knocking him onto “a silver platter of smoked salmon” in a hotel room after the singer referred to him as “my drummer.” Perhaps Richards was afraid to slag off Watts, who seems to take little shit from anybody.

But there is a sinister aspect to all this chummy rock ‘n’ roll madness. Richards describes inadvertently turning fellow musician John Phillips (of the Mamas and the Papas) into a junkie by giving him his first shot of heroin. He doesn’t seem proud of this, just mildly self-deprecating. Many of Richards’ friends, it seems, were drug suppliers, low-life characters who offered bags of pharmaceutical-quality dope. Then there was Gram Parsons, a musical visionary who shared Richards’ affection for the needle. When Parsons died of a drug overdose in 1973, Richards chose not to attend the funeral, but to tear off on his own debauched road trip; he says that’s what Parsons would have done. But it’s tempting to think that Richards simply managed to develop a very thick hide over the years, along with an impressive array of track marks. People leaving life suddenly was no strange phenomenon to Keith Richards.

Worse, he seems to have enlisted his young son, Marlon, to hide dope whenever cops were ready to raid the Richards homestead. Richards took on the task of raising Marlon when mother Anita Pallenberg disappeared into her own junkie wasteland, but one wonders who did a lot of the actual parenting? Marlon is loyal to his dad, as sons tend to be; but it couldn’t have been the easiest life for a kid, growing up with a stoned father.

Since quitting drugs in the early ‘80s, Richards has continued to keep busy, inside and outside the Stones. The band’s best work may be far behind them, but with generations of fans still eager to hear the live jukebox that is the Rolling Stones on tour, there’s no immediate danger that the riff machine will pack up his gear and crawl into a guitar case anytime soon. His later years with model Patti Hansen seem like a more settled affair, though danger never seems fully banished from the Richards picture. His famous topple from a tree branch in 2005 — leading to brain surgery and a delay in a Stones tour — proves he still has a few lives left, incredibly. Otherwise, it’s just another chapter in the bizarre, charmed life of Keith Richards.