By turns earnest and wicked, sweet and sarcastic and unsparing, Mr. Richards, now 66, writes with uncommon candor and immediacy. He’s decided that he’s going to tell it as he remembers it, and helped along with notebooks, letters and a diary he once kept, he remembers almost everything ... But Life — which was written with the veteran journalist James Fox — is way more than a revealing showbiz memoir. It is also a high-def, high-velocity portrait of the era when rock ’n’ roll came of age, a raw report from deep inside the counterculture maelstrom of how that music swept like a tsunami over Britain and the United States. It’s an eye-opening all-nighter in the studio with a master craftsman disclosing the alchemical secrets of his art. And it’s the intimate and moving story of one man’s long strange trip over the decades, told in dead-on, visceral prose without any of the pretense, caution or self-consciousness that usually attend great artists sitting for their self-portraits.
Life has the macho swagger that rock'n'roll in general – and the Rolling Stones in particular – once possessed. This is both its strength and its weakness. It often reads like a historical document of another time: a lost world in which women were always 'chicks' or 'bitches', an inflatable giant penis was a non-ironic stage prop, and a bottle of Jack Daniel's was the de rigueur rock'n'roll accessory ... It is a drug memoir of sorts, albeit without the hardcore confessional descriptiveness of the genre ... Richards is cavalier about death – his own and others' – seeing it as a kind of occupational hazard best avoided by 'pacing yourself' ... He is surprisingly illuminating on chord structures and the like, the kind of thing that in most rock memoirs has me skipping pages to get to the next drug bust or wrecked hotel room. He brilliantly summons up the suffocating drabness of postwar English suburbia and the cathartic effect of hearing raw blues and rock'n'roll on imported albums.
Richards’s reiterative narrative of Stones songs, gigs and internal warfare in Life was all news to me, and not all of it riveting ... This marvel of collation and super-light editing has produced what feels like an authentic experience of many hours and days of sitting at a bar, or worse, in a Caribbean hideaway (with no train or clipper home) while some over the hill geezer (rhymes with ‘sneezer’) a.k.a. Richards – who has given up smack and coke but not booze and dope – rambles about his 66 years on the planet ... He boasts and whines about more or less everything else, but he talks intricately and interestingly about music, and even if knowing a fret from a fifth string is a struggle for me, I want to read about it.
Half book, half brand extension, it’s an entertaining, rambling monologue, a slurry romp through the life of a man who knew every pleasure, denied himself nothing, and never paid the price. Maybe you can’t always get what you want. The rule doesn’t apply to Keith ... At times, the book sounds like a consequence-free version of William Burroughs’s Junky ... Another staple of the rock memoir or biography is the catalogue of sexual conquests, and, on this subject, Richards is almost shy ... Some readers may delight in Richards’s sly have-it-all-ways self-regard, but for me the most winning sections of the book are the tales of his becoming, the way his close adolescent friendship with Jagger and their mutual love for their blues heroes rapidly led to the formation of the Greatest Rock-and-Roll Band in the World.
...it’s impossible to read “Life” without experiencing a peculiar kind of double vision, between the stories we have read and what Richards means to tell us — between, in the most essential sense, the myth and the man ... Richards’ solution is to give us a book that reads, in many places, like an extended interview transcript, full of digressions and blind alleys, repetitions and riffs ... We get the sense that he’s being candid, saying what he feels because he has no reason to hide. Nowhere is that more compelling than when Richards writes about music, which he does with insight and grace. Here we have the brilliant stuff, worth the price of admission ... Forget the war stories, the biographical details; if that’s what interests you, you’re better off with Stanley Booth’s book. But if it’s some connection with the music that you’re after, you might want to start right here.
Keith’s values were set early and have remained consistent to a remarkable degree. Disloyalty is about as low as you can go in his book, one step lower, even, than screwing up the music ... Believe me, you won’t want to miss a thing. The most impressive part of Life is the wealth of knowledge Keith shares, whether he’s telling you how to layer an acoustic guitar until it sounds electric, as he did on the classic Stones track 'Street Fighting Man,' or how to win a knife fight ... One theme in the book that really stuns is the extent to which Keith Richards has been pursued by the police on nearly every continent for the duration of his career ... If Keith weren’t such a brilliant character, the reader might weary of his hypocrisy. But the truth is, he’s hilarious ... Reading Life is like getting to corner Keith Richards in a room and ask him everything you ever wanted to know about the Rolling Stones, and have him be completely honest with you.
Early in Life, Richards describes his first guitar, 'a gut-string job,' given to him by his mother when he was 15: 'I took it everywhere and I went to sleep with my arm laid across it.' It's the kind of honest, guileless moment that makes this book so charming, so unexpectedly moving. Richards might epitomize the popular idea of the rock lifestyle more than any other living artist -- and he doesn't shy away from admitting his deep affections for women and drugs -- but he's at his best, unsurprisingly, when he's rhapsodizing about rock ... The tone of Life veers dangerously close to humorless spite when Richards recounts his frustrations with his bandmates ... Richards's memoir, like his now universally famous guitar riffs, is likable and infectious; co-author James Fox has done an admirable job preserving the rocker's unique voice, while weaving a compelling and sometimes fascinating narrative ...
Even in nearly 600 pages—and sometimes drawing on rare letters and diary entries—Richards can’t cover all the details, but he’s quite good with the essence ... The real miracle of Richards is his survival through serious encounters with hard drugs, especially as he watched many friends and colleagues succumb to their ravages. His reflections on substance abuse seem serious-minded as far as it goes, but the fact is that he partied like a monster and simply happened to be one of the lucky ones ... Later chapters find Richards rather tempered by concerns such as recipes for a favorite dish or two, family pets, a daughter’s wedding and other items on the domestic agenda. That situation guarantees a certain amount of laconic audience interest as the book winds down, but until then, Life is probably one of the best pop music books ever assembled. It’s informative, entertaining, crafted with style—and there’s something reassuring about knowing that its likable author has lived to tell the tale.
In Life, he collects many of the wildly improbable tales of success, excess and obsession that have made him rock’s most revered rascal, but with one significant exception (and more on that later), the book stops short of offering the level of personal insight that could make it a stone-cold classic ... The festering conflicts that drive Life’s most absorbing passages arise between Richards and those closest to him: his bandmates, his girlfriends and, ultimately, himself ... Richards paints a disturbingly fascinating picture of the late ’60s and early ’70s as a time when battle lines were drawn clearly between culture and counterculture, when the antagonism and oppression of the powers-that-be spurred those who defined themselves as 'outlaws' to greater, and ultimately self-destructive, heights of hedonism ... The one deeply considered relationship in Life — and the best reason to read it — is that between Richards and his muse.
Life is really driven by not by Richards’ hates but by his loves. And what an engagingly idiosyncratic, and often unexpected, collection they turn out to be ... He also writes with huge passion about music and devotes several pages to his love for open guitar tunings, a subject that he manages to make much more interesting than you might imagine. On a more personal level — although one suspects matters don’t get much personal to Keith than the subject of music — he reflects heartbreakingly on the many treasured people he has lost along the way, from his young son Tara to country-rock legend Gram Parsons.
Over more than 500 pages, its narrative only rarely fails to grip. Written in collaboration with James Fox (the author of White Mischief) I’d guess that Keef mostly talked and Fox merely tidied up the tape. The effect is mesmerising. It’s like being button-holed by a piratical ancient mariner with amazing tales to tell ... Life offers much more than vicarious thrills. It captures the true spirit of rock and roll, the nitty-gritty of life on the road, and just what it feels like to be a heroin addict who doesn’t know where his next fix is coming from ... It also movingly captures Richards’s extraordinary love of music – an even more powerful addiction for him than smack – and perhaps more surprisingly, his manifest decency as a human being.
Life is unaffected and blunt, and in its dozy, casual sketchiness, it mirrors its author’s guitar playing. Still, the book is something other than—not something less, but something different than—a masterpiece of literary autobiography. Richards’s great resource as both a musician and a writer is his offhandedness, an attribute that prevents him from probing into his life with a great deal of analytical depth ... a monument of lucidity.
For all of its tales of narrow escapes and derring-do, of fortunes made and squandered, glamorous women, hit records, historic tours, honor paid to and scores settled with the living and the dead, Life is a dispiriting and finally tedious book ... The result is preening, plodding, with the grating overuse of the same adjectives and phrases and flat-footed transitions ... There’s no sense of a writer seeking the right word, the right tone, the way to shape a story and make it stick, except when Richards is writing about music: what songs are, how they’re written, how they come to life, what they’re for — and these sections, the beating heart of the book and the reason to read it, do feel written, not talked.
The 500-plus pages of Life throb with energy, pulsate with rhythm and reverberate with good stories. It's a chronicle that takes the only-child Keith, with his shifty eyes and sticky-out ears, from wartime Dartford to the furthest shores of stardom, as the living essence of rock 'n' roll, the walking spliff, the human riff ... He tells it with complete, reckless, disclosure. Sometimes it sounds like a man ranting into a tape machine; sometimes, in the tidier and more reflective sections, you can detect the hand of his co-writer, James Fox. But the watchwords of this book are honesty, confessionalism, telling it straight.
...part of the joy of this altogether enjoyable, if sometimes mean-spirited, book is the damn-the-torpedoes take on things. Indeed, when he’s not slagging or praising, Richards provides useful life pointers, from how to keep several packs of dogs in different places to the virtues of open guitar tunings. He even turns in a creditable recipe for bangers and mash, complete with a pointed tale that speaks to why you would not want to make off with his spring onions while he’s in the middle of cooking ... Let no mere mortal judge him, then, but merely admire both his well-written pages and his stamina.
