The following is an article from the November 11,2010 issue of Rolling Stone. This issue is available on Friday October 29th on newsstands and via Rolling Stone's premium subscription plan.

Rich Cohen

In 1994, when I was 26 years old, I was sent, by this magazine, on the road with the Rolling Stones. The band was promoting Voodoo Lounge, the second album it had released since “the break,” the unofficial split that came in 1987, when Mick Jagger announced his decision to skip a Stones tour and instead go on tour to support his solo album. I spent the first weeks of that assignment in Toronto, where the band was piecing together a set list, picking songs. There were long nights, nasty asides, great music and, now and then, moments of transcendence.

Read about the Stones' debaucherous 1972 tour in an exclusive excerpt of Keith Richards' 'Life'

Over time, I began to catch glimpses of the constant tension between Jagger and Keith Richards. Before a show in South Carolina, I watched Richards, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, smirk as Jagger went through vocal scales in a nearby trailer. “What can he do there that we can’t do here?” asked Richards, dropping to do five quick one-arm push-ups, the tip of his cigarette burning a kind of signature into the carpet.

But it wasn’t until after my story, when I got an angry phone call from Jagger’s assistant, that I came to really understand the steel behind the Stones. “You’ve misnamed this article, haven’t you?” he snapped at me. “You have called it ‘On the road with the Rolling Stones,’ but that’s not right. You should have called it ‘I love Keith Richards and want to have his baby.’”

There it was, laid out for me, the essence of the Stones. It’s not just the music, Chicago blues run through the blender, that ignites the band. It’s the play of styles, the push and pull of magnetic forces, the frontman grooving before the riff machine. That’s why there will always be more demand for Mick and Keith together than there will ever be for Mick or Keith apart.

Photos: Classic shots of the Rolling Stones on the road

And yet, never once, in the entire course of that summer, did I see the men stand together, talk or laugh together. Onstage, in arenas where fans had come to see the spectacle of a friendship as much as they’d come to hear the music, they were in separate orbits. Richards interacted with the band, shouted to the bass player or drummer, while Jagger danced in the ether, in a system of his own.

When I questioned Jagger about the rift, he smiled and changed the subject. I asked Richards the same questions: What happened? How can you still work together? He laughed in that deep way of pirates and lifelong smokers. “When you break a bone,” he told me, “you take time, let it heal, then be careful never to break that same bone in the same place again.”

With his new book, Life by Keith Richards (with James Fox), the guitarist has broken that bone again, that one and many others. He has opened the old wounds, relived the ancient rivalries, binges, busts, cold turkeys, near-deaths and actual deaths. The book is a chronicle of an era, rock & roll in its golden age, little clubs and struggling bands, studio musicians and recording sessions. It’s a drug memoir, too, among the best ever written, but mostly it’s the story of a friendship, in its first flush, and in its death throes. “I used to love to hang with Mick,” Richards writes, “but I haven’t gone to his dressing room in, I don’t think, 20 years. Sometimes I miss my friend. Where the hell did he go?”

Q&A: Keith Richards on Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and more

The book starts in Dartford, England, a small, glum town outside London, which Richards makes sound almost Dickensian. “Everyone in Dartford was a thief,” he writes. “It runs in the blood. The old rhyme commemorates the unchanging character of the place: ‘Sutton for mutton, Kirkby for beef, South Darne for gingerbread, Dartford for a thief.'”

This is where Keith picks up his first guitar (“a sweet, lovely, little lady”), and hears “Heartbreak Hotel” on the radio for the first time. (“When I woke up the next day, I was a different guy.”) Most important, Dartford is where Keith meets Mick, first as boys then again when Keith is at art school, being trained for a career as an ad man, and Mick is commuting to the London School of Economics. This meeting, on a train platform, is one of the mythic encounters of the pop age. Trotsky meets Lenin; Bill Gates meets Paul Allen. There would be consequences.

From there, the story unfolds in flashes: first Mick and Keith and friends playing in a tiny club (they call themselves Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys); then Mick and Keith answering an ad put in Jazz News by Brian Jones (“He was calling himself Elmo Lewis. He wanted to be Elmore James”); then living in the squalor of dirty dishes and high jinks (“Mick had come back drunk to visit Brian, found he wasn’t there and screwed his old lady”); followed by the picturesque hassle of early days (“We despised money, we despised cleanliness, we just wanted to be black @#$%&. . . .”) – culminating in the rocket ship to stardom. “The Beatles couldn’t fill all the spots on the charts. We filled in the gaps.”



Richards carefully explains the process by which he and Jagger wrote all those tunes. It usually started with a riff dreamed up by Richards, a sharp Chuck Berry-like run of chords; Richards would attach a phrase (“Can’t get no satisfaction,” “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away”), then pass it to Jagger, who figured out a melody and wrote the lyrics.

Richards never explicitly says that his contribution is the greater one. But he makes it clear where he thinks the art lies. Once the foundation is in place, he implies, the rest is almost busywork. Even when he has something nice to say about Jagger, he gets in a dig: “Mick is one of the best natural blues harp players I’ve heard,” he says. “[It’s] the one place where you don’t hear any calculation.”

As you read on, you feel that all those little swipes are about something bigger, grander. Betrayal. Honor. What a friend owes. How people grow apart. Though Life tells so much about the creation of music, the art of guitar, the rise of rock & roll, the pettiness of the legal authorities, it’s really about the way things fall apart.

Addiction is the recurring theme – sessions in which Richards did not sleep for days, and he makes heroin addiction sound sensible. How else can you toil 200 straight hours? In one passage, he writes of feeding his habit on the road: “It was difficult in the 70s to get hypodermics in America. So when I traveled I would wear a hat and use a needle to fix a little feather to the hatband. . . . OK, but now I need the syringe. I’d go down to FAO Schwarz, the toy shop right across . . . from the Plaza. And if you went to the third floor, you could buy a doctor and nurse play set, a little plastic box with a red cross on it. That had the barrel and the syringe that fitted the needle that I’d brought. I’d go round, ‘I’ll have three teddy bears, I’ll have that remote-control car, oh, and give me two doctor and nurse kits! My niece, you know, she’s really into that. Must encourage her.’”

You can quote a thousand episodes in this book just as great. After a few hours, you feel like you’ve been with Richards when he is hungover and rundown nasty, and with him when he is coked-up and flying. But the very things that make the book so much fun – this is the junkie’s eye view of the world – limit the view the reader gets of the world around Richards. He jabs Jagger again and again (“It was the beginning of the ’80s when Mick started to become unbearable”). But what we never see is what those years must have been like for Jagger – to be in business with a junkie is no easy trick. Richards’ world consists of best friends and father figures, all of whom happen to be junkies; and to any junkie, a nonuser is an enemy, i.e., Jagger. By Richards’ own account, Jagger is always there to come to his rescue. “I have to say that during the bust in Toronto, in fact during all busts, Mick looked after me with great sweetness. He ran things . . . and marshaled the forces that saved me.”

Of course, it’s never enough.

Richards’ real beef comes later, in the late 1970s, when he gets off heroin and wants to reassert himself. But Jagger had taken control in the drug years and didn’t want to relinquish it. “I realized Mick had got all of the strings in his hands and he didn’t want to let go of a single one,” writes Richards. “I didn’t know power and control were that important to Mick.”

The injury was compounded in 1983 when Jagger cut a deal with Sony Music for three solo albums. “The Rolling Stones spent a lot of time building up integrity,” Richards writes, “and the way Mick handled his solo career jeopardized all that, and it severely pissed me off.”

But where Richards sees abandonment, another person might see Jagger fleeing a madhouse. The way Richards speaks of his addiction might be fascinating, but it’s probably less so if you were depending on the guy not just for a laugh but for a livelihood. Explaining why he survived, Richards credits the nature of the shit he ingested. “The reason I’m here is probably that we only ever took, as much as possible, the real stuff, the top-quality stuff. Cocaine I got into because it was pure pharmaceutical – boom.”

Of course, this is classic junkie talk: I’m fine so long as I get the top drawer, etc. And though Richards does make standard warnings of the don’t-try-this-at-home variety, drug abuse has never seemed so fun or glamorous as it does here. This might be the only celebrity drug memoir ever written that features no redemptive cleanup, no 12 steps, no regrets, no apologies.

But the victims of his excess certainly pile up. There is an impressive list of people who partied with Richards and died or just went batty: among them, Gram Parsons and John Phillips, his friends; Anita Pallenberg, his love. Richards takes responsibility for none of it, unaware of his effect on all the would-be madmen who wanted to trade shots with a legend. “The thing with John [Lennon] – for all his vaunted bravado – he couldn’t really keep up,” writes Richards. “He’d try and take everything I took but without my good training. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, couple of downers, a couple of uppers, coke and smack, then I’m going to work. I was freewheeling. And John would inevitably end up in my john, hugging the porcelain. . . . I don’t think John ever left my house except horizontally.”

Life is not a standard addiction memoir, because Richards sees his addiction as anything but standard. It’s not a weakness, not a disease. It’s martyrdom. “They imagined me, they made me, the folks out there created this hero,” he writes. “Bless their hearts. I’ll do the best I can to fulfill their needs. They’re wishing me to do things that they can’t. They’ve got this job, they’ve got this life . . . but at the same time, inside them, is a raging Keith Richards. When you talk of a folk hero, they’ve written the script for you and you better fulfill it. And I did my best.” In other words, Richards taunts death so that we can be free.

Much of the trouble between Jagger and Richards must come from the simple fact of longevity. They are locked in a partnership that started when they were too young to make lifelong commitments. How would you get along with your high school friends if you still had to depend on them today? Richards, a sentimentalist, cannot help but compare how it was then to how it is now with sadness. “Mick has changed tremendously,” he writes, “only thinking [back] do I remember with regret how completely tight we were in the early years of the Stones. First off, we never had to question aims. We were unerring in where we wanted to go, what it should sound like, so we didn’t have to discuss it.”

In the end, it does not matter that Richards is unfair to Jagger or that Richards sees the world through a coke-addled lens. In this book, as in his music, Richards’ real obligation belongs not to Jagger or anyone else. It belongs to the reader, and to the art. At this, Richards succeeds brilliantly. The result is a classic book of rock & roll. Of course, it’s interesting to remember that the Stones are still a working band. This book is not just an artifact, but part of the story it chronicles. So here’s the big question: Will the Rolling Stones, who survived the drugs, death, madness and chaos, survive the prose of Keith Richards?

Good read; fair analysis. Straight to the bottom line everywhere... I dig his conclusion!

["I can hear the Bullfrog calling me..."]

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MississippiBullfrog
Good read; fair analysis. Straight to the bottom line everywhere... I dig his conclusion!

So here’s the big question: Will the Rolling Stones, who survived the drugs, death, madness and chaos, survive the prose of Keith Richards?

Yeah, I ask the same question

You can quote a thousand episodes in this book just as great. After a few hours, you feel like you’ve been with Richards when he is hungover and rundown nasty, and with him when he is coked-up and flying. But the very things that make the book so much fun – this is the junkie’s eye view of the world – limit the view the reader gets of the world around Richards. He jabs Jagger again and again (“It was the beginning of the ’80s when Mick started to become unbearable”). But what we never see is what those years must have been like for Jagger – to be in business with a junkie is no easy trick. Richards’ world consists of best friends and father figures, all of whom happen to be junkies; and to any junkie, a nonuser is an enemy, i.e., Jagger. By Richards’ own account, Jagger is always there to come to his rescue. “I have to say that during the bust in Toronto, in fact during all busts, Mick looked after me with great sweetness. He ran things . . . and marshaled the forces that saved me.”

Of course, it’s never enough.

Great review. Instead of reading it as a Pirate's Memoir, Cohen is perceptive enough to recognise Keith's self-revealing short-sightedness. Excellent points. While the book looks fascinating and Keith really can be funny and irreverent, as a fan of Mick's - I have mixed feelings about the book.

What a great analysis! Kinda makes you REALLY think about the 'behind close doors' workings of The Stones. I want to read this book but I am sure I would be thinking of Micks rebutle after every slam Keith gives Mick.... Kinda torn about Keith writing this book.......

As big a fan as I am of Keith Richards I do not like him taking a swipe at Mick and insinuating that Keith writes the difficult parts of the songs.


I really want to read the book. Whatever one may think it sounds fascinating.

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slew
As big a fan as I am of Keith Richards I do not like him taking a swipe at Mick and insinuating that Keith writes the difficult parts of the songs.


I really want to read the book. Whatever one may think it sounds fascinating.

Would you feel happy-er if Mick told you the opposite? its the same in composite colours, you know.

I'm waiting and looking forward for my copy of the book, aswell.

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stupidguy2
You can quote a thousand episodes in this book just as great. After a few hours, you feel like you’ve been with Richards when he is hungover and rundown nasty, and with him when he is coked-up and flying. But the very things that make the book so much fun – this is the junkie’s eye view of the world – limit the view the reader gets of the world around Richards. He jabs Jagger again and again (“It was the beginning of the ’80s when Mick started to become unbearable”). But what we never see is what those years must have been like for Jagger – to be in business with a junkie is no easy trick. Richards’ world consists of best friends and father figures, all of whom happen to be junkies; and to any junkie, a nonuser is an enemy, i.e., Jagger. By Richards’ own account, Jagger is always there to come to his rescue. “I have to say that during the bust in Toronto, in fact during all busts, Mick looked after me with great sweetness. He ran things . . . and marshaled the forces that saved me.”

Of course, it’s never enough.

Great review. Instead of reading it as a Pirate's Memoir, Cohen is perceptive enough to recognise Keith's self-revealing short-sightedness. Excellent points. While the book looks fascinating and Keith really can be funny and irreverent, as a fan of Mick's - I have mixed feelings about the book.

Yes, great review. But I wander why is there little interest to it on RS board while the article from Daily Mail was all of sudden so popular?

Jeezuz H Krist,,, yes they will survive, Jagger had the book along time ago,, long before the exile promotion,,

im a 3rd of the way through the book,, so far nothing spectacular but some little tid bits,,

proudmary get the book yourself, read it, quit seeing it through other peoples glasses,,

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northernale1
Jeezuz H Krist,,, yes they will survive, Jagger had the book along time ago,, long before the exile promotion,,

im a 3rd of the way through the book,, so far nothing spectacular but some little tid bits,,

proudmary get the book yourself, read it, quit seeing it through other peoples glasses,,

I pre ordered it from Amazon, and still waiting. But we're talking about the RS review, which i think is pretty good.

and you keep asking if they will survive,, and everyone keeps telling you YES

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northernale1
and you keep asking if they will survive,, and everyone keeps telling you YES

You sound like you're trying to convince yourself.
The review is a very objective analysis from someone who is looking without Keef's glasses. The author brings up issues we've all been discussing.

Rolling Stones did a good job w/ the excepts and pic! go buy it

"Well my heavy throbbers itchin' just to lay a solid rhythm down"

stupidguy,,,,

i dont have to convince myself of shit,,,,

STUPIDGUY, I agree totally and have said similar things on other threads, especially about Mick's saving Keith's ass so many times. I also think that KARMA will take care of things and Mick won't have to fling one bit of mud back in Keith's direction, nor would he because he's way too kind...and because he knows the value of SILENCE! Funny that Keith at least acknowledges that Mick stood by him countless times, especially during the Toronto bust of '77. I don't really want to buy the book but my best friend is insisting on getting it for me. I am a Rolling Stone fan but I also am a Jagger supporter and my loyalties lie with the Rolling Stone with the CLASS!

“What can he do there that we can’t do here?” asked Richards, dropping to do five quick one-arm push-ups, the tip of his cigarette burning a kind of signature into the carpet."

One-arm push-ups? Fantastic. Couldn't he work that into the live show?

mickschix - I will give you that. Mick has never been one to fling things back through the press at Keith. I give him a lot of credit for that. Maybe if Mick sat down and talked to Keith things would go along better between them I think that Mick isolates himself from everyone including Keith because he thinks people will try and take advantage of him and Keith. i have heard him state in the past that Keith needs to rid himself of the hanger ons. Its complex and yes Mick does seem to have more class than Keith. Keith's main problem is he is a 66 you old adolescant who has lived this life and never grown up. Mick is the same in his own way.