The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 7 February 2024
by Keith Richards & James Fox
The Rolling Stones are, perhaps, the iconic rock and roll band, rising out of the early 1960s, and enduring deep into the 21st century, still rocking with band members beyond 80 years old. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Stones were seen as a raucous drug-soaked band of rebels, the dirty version of the Beatles. By the time of the Steel Wheels tour in the 1980s, they already seemed kind of old (in their early 40s), and now it seems the Rolling Stones have been old for a very long time! Still, they're making records (do they call them records any more?) and still they're touring, currently out on their Hackney Diamonds tour of the world. Can they still rock and roll? Probably, but the tour itself is sponsored by the AARP.
The band has had a number of outstanding musicians, and the band-members have idolized many others. It's how they got their start, as London-based blues-rockers. And their early stuff is amazing, groundbreaking, and still the stuff we listen to the most. The core of the group had long been Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and Keith Richards. They're all legendary in their own way. Richards, though, became the ultimate poster-child of rock and roll junkie, drug and sex driven excess. Here, in this revealing memoir and almost-autobiography, Richards is here to more or less confirm all of the stories you've heard about his bizarre behavior and experiences. Everything is here, from the heroin addictions, to snorting his father's ashes. It's all told in a straightforward and entirely unapologetic manner, even when the reader might think an apology is certainly in order.
While the book (first published in 2010) opens with a highly entertaining story about an arrest in Fordyce (four dice?) Arkansas, its second chapter is an engrossing exploration of Keith (and Mick's) childhood in suburban London in the immediate grim years of the postwar period. The details of his youth, the brutality and family closeness are all drawn out in detail that one could easily find sepia-toned. But both Keith and Mick were drawn to the music of American (usually Black) blues musicians. They found a mutual fascination with the records of that place and time, and were soon on the road to making music themselves. Drawing a band together, by the early 1960s, via numerous tales of paying their dues (and taking drugs and getting laid), they became a top London blues band. By the end of the 1960s, they were making money hand over fist, and their places in rock history were assured.
For Richards, the 1970s was a decade of excess, the quintessential sex, drugs and rock & roll lifestyle. He was dependent on pharmaceutical-grade cocaine and heroin, usually in combination. It kept him alert, and it kept him mellow. That he didn't immediately murder himself he ascribes to the very high quality of the drugs he was able to access. In a heroin fever dream with John Lennon, Lennon's own excesses shocked the unshockable Richards. It's a little bizarre, but the fact he survived at all suggests its veracity. Repeatedly, when the dependency became overarching, Keith would get clean, but it took several iterations of this before he finally quit the drugs for good sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, when he returned to the band to take a little better hold of its operations, only to find that Mick Jagger was running the show and wanted it to stay that way. The resulting crackup between them is the stuff of rock legend. The fact that they're still perfoming today is the stuff of this book.
It is an epic journey and one which does include deep dives into the music, how it was made, and who were inspirations for the Stones; and perhaps there is a lot more to say about it. In the end, it's best that we know we're never to mess with Keith Richards's shepherd's pie...
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