“Life’’ tells the story of this reluctantly reformed outlaw who prizes his guns and knives and built rock and pop classics on the bedrock of Chicago blues (Richards’s commentary on Jimmy Reed is terrific). Stones and Richards fans will delight in the trove of anecdotes and insider dirt here. But beyond those pleasures, the book is an important addition to the canon of rock lit, chronicling not just the life of an iconic musician and a seminal band but a significant slice of the golden age of rock.
No book about Keith Richards would be complete without an accounting of his physical mishaps. “Life’’ is stuffed with accounts of the musician’s near-death experiences, among them his skull-busting fall from a tree in Fiji in 2006, burning his finger to the bone in a phosphorus flash during the 1989 “Steel Wheels’’ tour, various car crashes, and drug busts that dogged this notorious heroin lover from the late ’60s to the late ’70s, the Stones’ most creative decade.
The book attests to his robust constitution, intellectual curiosity, and a fearlessness that informs Richards’s relationships, including a perpetually prickly one with Jagger, a long affair with ruinous siren Anita Pallenberg (and a fling with the troubled Marianne Faithfull, who ended up getting busted at Richards’s house attired in nothing but a fur rug), and musical bonds with everyone from the band’s jazzy drummer Charlie Watts (his closest ally after original Stone Ian Stewart, the keyboardist who gave the band its grounding in the early ’60s) to soulmates Bobby Keys, Gram Parsons, and John Lennon.
Richards reveals himself as a big music fan, reveling in playing with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Don Everly, and George Jones. A good dad, too: Among the most touching threads is his relationship with son Marlon.
