Life by Keith Richards

"It's now famous, my rule on the road. Nobody touches the shepherd's pie until I've been in there. Don't bust my crust, baby. It's written into the contract. If you come into Keith Richards's room and he's got a shepherd's pie on the warmer, bubbling away, if it's still pristine, the only one that can bust the crust is me. Greedy m________________s, they'll come in and just scoop up anything."

And so he writes....

This is a rollicking story of Keith Richards's rise to fame and fortune with the Rolling Stones. It's very entertaining. He is smart, vulgar, oddly sweet and talented.. Richards loves the Stones and gets miffed when Mick Jagger flits around, coming and going, but acknowledges that they've been together forever....like a marriage with ups and downs.

Anyone who likes the Stones would almost certainly like this book. It's funny, informative, a bit gossipy, and often (but not always) self-deprecating. He does ramble some through the last chapters as though he started to lose interest in this tale, or perhaps he said everything he wanted to say, or perhaps the book was long enough already.

What does come through, over and over, is his love and respect for music, especially for the blues and all the blues musicians from Chicago, Memphis, the Mississippi Delta....

And of course, one reality that defines Keith Richards: drugs. He does not shy away from how, who, when, and where. He is alive, he says, because he didn't escalate his heroin use and he always knew the provenance. Luck also, I am sure, was on his side.

There are stories of the songs and the concerts, the legal troubles, the women, his kids, his parents...his mates.

A few years ago, KR fell out of a tree in Fiji and ends up having neurosurgery in New Zealand. The surgeon, Dr. Andrew Law, says: "I got a call...from Fiji..saying they had someone with an intracranial hemorrhage, and it was quite a prominent person, could I cope with that? And they said it's Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones. I remember having his poster on my wall when I was at university, so I was always a Rolling Stones fan...." He survived and was "back on stage" in 6 weeks and doing fine....

Near the end of the book, Keith says: "I can rest on my laurels. I've stirred up enough crap in my time.... There's carping about us being old men. The fact is, I've always said, if we were black and our name was Count Basie or Duke Ellington, everybody would be going, yeah, yeah, yeah. White rock and rollers apparently are not supposed to do this at our age. But I'm not here just to make records and money. I'm here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation...."