What is Life about?

Keith Richards's Life was written with journalist James Fox and published when Richards was 66, after more than fifty years with the Rolling Stones. It is one of the better rock memoirs on the grounds that Richards is genuinely interested in music — in the mechanics of guitar playing, the theory behind the riffs, the specific ways American blues found its way to a generation of working-class British teenagers in the early 1960s — and not merely in his own legendary status. The book is also unusually candid about both the pleasures and the genuine costs of his years as a heroin addict, without performing either glamour or regret.

The early chapters are the most historically interesting. Richards grew up in Dartford, Kent, in postwar working-class austerity; his grandmother was a musician and an early formative influence; he discovered American blues through mail-order records and obsessive radio listening in a way that still sounds like revelation. He reconnected with Mick Jagger on a train platform in 1961, both of them carrying blues and R&B records, and the story of how two art-school kids translated American music into something that eventually eclipsed its sources is one of the more compelling origin stories in popular culture.

The Stones years are covered decade by decade, and Richards is fair-minded about the conflicts that defined them: the long creative partnership and mutual dependency with Jagger, the tensions over the band's direction in the 1980s when Jagger attempted a solo career, the chaotic management and financial exploitation of their early years by Allen Klein, and the peculiar internal democracy that kept a band of five difficult people working together for half a century. His account of writing "Satisfaction," "Jumping Jack Flash," and "Gimme Shelter" — the technical and circumstantial details behind songs that millions of people know — is the kind of insider material that a memoir should provide and often doesn't.

The drug sections are not minimized. Richards spent years as a functioning heroin addict, was arrested multiple times in multiple countries, and came close to permanent imprisonment in Canada in 1977 after a heroin bust that ultimately resulted in a suspended sentence. His account of why he used, how he managed it, and how he eventually stopped is matter-of-fact rather than confessional — he describes drug addiction with the same analytical intelligence he applies to guitar tuning. The book's tone throughout is that of a man who has survived things that would have killed most people and is mildly interested in understanding why.