Perhaps it’s no surprise that a musician’s autobiography would be filled with the same sort of lyricism that defined his career. Keith Richards’ “Life,” the star’s long-awaited tell-all, sounds a bit like the music he creates – direct, rapturous and a little bruised. He gives every fiber of his being to us and presents it as the truth, demanding that we accept it.
Richards, aided in his writing by journalist James Fox, crafts his words into a looking glass. We walk through his life, his past, exactly as he remembers it. It’s an autobiography that’s curiously devoid of any new-age drivel or explicit self-reflection, instead filled with a recreation of an earlier time that’s surprisingly vivid. Creating an invariable sense of time and place, we suddenly become part of the cultural zeitgeist that defined that era. Slowly, we realize how absorbing that kind of world is, how easily one can be swept up in it.
Richards’ writing illuminates the obvious – that even rock stars, in all their deified glory, come from somewhere. His recollections of childhood reveal exactly why someone from his upbringing just had to play music. He, too, writes fondly of the men and women who inspired him – and there were many.
“He was one of those Texan guys who could sail through anything, including his whole tragic life,” Richards reminisced about Roy Orbison. “We watch the opening number. And out walks this totally transformed thing that seems to have grown at least a foot with presence and command over the crowd.”
A life like Richards’ can easily become monochromatic when retold. There are times, just rarely, when his experiences take on a sort of blurred cyclicality, beginning to blend together. But this is a minor quibble. For the most part, Richards reveals his experience with such passion, such urgency, that his rock star life – which can easily be reduced to vignettes of coke binges and road shows – becomes tangible, and the public figure suddenly takes on human form. He slips between tones with surprising fluidity and ease. At times sarcastic, at others sincere, he communicates how his life’s been filled with assuming so many faces, so many different identities: the oft-worshipped rock messiah, the confidant, the loner.
Like Richards’ guitar playing, his prose seems saturated with melancholy. For one, he’s as humble and honest about his own personal flaws as he is about those of others, most infamously Mick Jagger. His recollections of the women he loved are as achingly damp as they are electric. To Richards, love became a necessity, unbounded by typical notions of time and space.
“A lot of times I’ve ended up in bed with a woman and never done anything, just cuddled and slept,” he recalled. “And I’ve loved loads of them. I’ve always been so impressed that they actually loved me in return.”
Keith Richards is a legend. Fittingly, he has crafted his narrative into exquisite, immaculate form. We cannot touch him. But “Life” has so much feeling, so much nakedness, that he creates the illusion that we can touch this god, this paragon of musical brilliance, and share a part of his experience.