Finished Reading Life by Keith Richards

I just finished reading the autobiography of Rolling Stones guitarist and songwriter Keith Richards, a quite lengthy book with a short, simple title: Life.  It's not, though, as if Richards just decided to sit down one day and crank out his life's story: on the contrary the book is essentially written by "co-writer" and friend James Fox, who conducted a series of sometimes intensive interviews with Richards over a five-year period.  It reads very well, though, as if the lead Stones guitarist is recounting in the first person his own personal experiences and beliefs.  I liked the book a lot, but not necessarily because I liked Keith Richards.  On the contrary, I never did like him, even from early childhood in the 1960's, and found a lot of stuff in Life to dislike him even more.  What I did appreciate about this particular autobiography is that he didn't just set out to justify himself in it, but rather put both the good and bad out on display, including the "dirty linen" of his extensive drug use over the years.  As a matter of fact, he was so candid about how badly it had gotten out of control that he opened the book with an incident relating to a drug bust that happened while on tour in the U.S. in 1975...and only then launched into recounts of his childhood as traditional biographies do.

I think that this book is something worth examining in future articles, for there is a lot to cover here.  There is a way, an approach to encountering people and befriending them that appealed to me in Keith Richards.  On the other hand, without explicitly coming out and saying it, he seemed to display some of the classic behavioral patterns of a bully at times, sorry to say.  Well, I'll leave some of that for a future article and just say right now that I'd recommended Life for anyone who either knew and liked some of what the Rolling Stones did over their incredibly long run as a rock and roll band or is interested in what went on (and probably still goes on) behind the scenes with rock and roll acts going back to the sixties and seventies.  And in spite of Keith Richards' excesses and personality flaws, some of the personality factors that contributed to his material and artistic success are revealed in this book...as a matter of fact, they become so self-evident that they seem to scream at me!