"Oh Carol" and "Little Queenie" - The Rolling Stones
Well I'm back and intact -- the junk remains inviolate. (For those of you who must endure redeyes in coach, let me recommend a cocktail of two gin and tonics and two Ambien -- about an hour into an eight hour flight I drained the second G&T, knocked down the Ambien and the next thing I knew we were circling Chicago -- pure flying bliss.)
Speaking of junk of a different sort, I just finished up "Life" by Keith Richards on my previous flight. He was a lively travel companion I must say.
A few thoughts on the book and the somewhat improbable life it recounts -- improbable in large part simply because it continues to this day, sixty-seven plus years into the gig. And that's one of the things that strikes you early on in the book -- that Keith Richards, born in Dartford, just outside of London while World War II raged, was a child of a very different world than those of us born fifteen to twenty years later, especially those of us born in the U.S., a place virtually unscarred by the War. Richards early memories include walking in still bomb-ruined parts of greater London, of a world still marked by rationing and privation. I tend to think that the excesses of Richards and his musical cohorts stem in part from this very circumscribed world in which they were born, a place of both material scarcity and a kind of muted emotional palette. Richards was, amusingly enough, both a boy scout and a choir boy. But not for long.
It's a remarkable tale really. A young English boy of exceedingly modest means and prospects, falls in love with the guitar and the blues of black Americans -- not because there was a career in it, but just because. He is obsessed and falls in with a group of similar obsessives, including his former Dartford elementary school mate, Mick Jagger. They practice and practice and practice some more, eventually getting to play live in London for laughably little, if any, money. (Interestingly, Richards meticulously recorded both the dates and places of the gigs and the payments, modest though they were.) And then, in an insanely short time, the Rolling Stones were an international phenomenon, following on the heels of the Beatles (who also inspired Richards and Jagger to become songwriters).
The most striking thing about the book -- after all the drugs ingested, the arrests made, the prison terms narrowly averted, and the dirt dealt -- is the seriousness that Richards brings to music. It is a passion that seemingly remains undimmed to this day, the deep desire to unlock the sounds in his head, to play guitar and lead a band. Everything else, the money (made and lost), the fame, the women, and yes, the drugs, are, at best, secondary. Indeed, the drugs -- and there are shit tons of them -- seem less recreational than vocational to some substantial degree. Richards relies on a mind boggling regimen of heroin and cocaine -- pure Merck pharmaceutical cocaine if you must know (a great endorsement deal just waiting for our legal system to lighten up) -- to give him both the patience and endurance to extract those precious sounds, the riffs and rhythms, the weaving guitars, the whip crack drums, the raucous horns, the rollicking piano -- everything that made the Stones the greatest band in the world for an astonishingly fecund five years from the release of Beggar's Banquet through Exile on Main Street, the latter being the culmination of, and perhaps the breaking point, associated with Richards' drug-fueled, sleep deprived, writing and recording style.
Thereafter, the drugs, arrests, and fame lead to diminishing artistic returns, although the passion to play remains. The Stones continue to undertake periodic mega-stadium tours and make a fortune while so doing (after ending their peak years in near penury), although the new music produced over the last thirty or so years is rarely memorable. The songs from the late 60s-early 70s golden age remain the core of the play list -- one senses that like many veteran rock and roll writers, Richards and Jagger just don't have the juice left to produce a full album's worth of memorable material, where once the songs flowed effortlessly, almost unconsciously.
Much has been made of Richards talking trash about Jagger. And it's true -- the book has a series of snipes at Jagger, implying that he is a shameless social climber, a poseur, an egomaniac, and, the greatest of sins in Richards' view, not fully loyal. One gets the sense of a deeply complicated relationship -- a nearly fifty year marriage between difficult personalities filled with all kinds of hurt and betrayals (each slept with the others significant other -- something that still seems to rankle Richards forty years later), and yet an irrevocable, and, mutually dependent, bond. My favorite take on this part of the book is this fictional reply that appeared in Slate drafted by the ironically named Bill Wyman. (Bass player Bill Wyman is also the subject of Richards' scorn -- only Watts is spared.) I am struck by Richards lack of perspective and gratitude with respect to Jagger who tended to business when Richards was incapable of it, in such a way that Richards is a very wealthy man today; and sprung to Richards' defense and mobilized resources whenever (and it was quite frequent) legal problems threatened to send him to jail.
Richards is frank in the book without always being insightful. He doesn't seem to fully grasp how difficult it might be to work with someone whose drug dependency is so profound that he is habitually, impossibly late, peridoically burns his house or hotel room to the ground, not to mention the air of legal jeopardy that surrounds him. Friends and associates follow him into addiction and, in some cases, self-destruction -- Gram Parsons, producer Jimmy Miller, engineer Andy Johns, paramour Anita Pallenberg, even Charlie Watts for a time -- with little recognition by Richards of any possible culpability. He also has the disconcerting habit of referring to women as bitches (although he prides himself on not being a compulsive groupie puller, unlike Wyman) and dropping the odd homophobic remark, usually in snide reference to Jagger (e.g. "Brenda" or "her majesty").
In the end, most of us fans will be inclined to forgive Richards for his trespasses -- because of the pleasure of the tunes he has written, the sheer enthusiasm he brings to the music, his rapscallion's charm, and, hell, out of sheer admiration for his survival. It's a pretty fun read, one which I would imagine would be even more rewarding for a musician (love to have mhb's input on this one).
[I love this clip of the Stones in 1969 performing two Chuck Berry songs, showing what a tight band they were and how naturally compelling Jagger was, before he became a bit of a self-parody playing stadium shows -- it's interesting to see how compact the band was -- Richards is almost rooted to Watts throughout and everyone, except Jagger, are but a few feet from one another. I fear this will be one of a series of Richards related youtube posts -- I hate to go to heavy on the nostalgia, but they were, in fact, that good.]
