Keith Richards, James Fox: Life

From The New York Times: For legions of Rolling Stones fans, Keith Richards is not only the heart and soul of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, he’s also the very avatar of rebellion: the desperado, the buccaneer, the poète maudit, the soul survivor and main offender, the torn and frayed outlaw, and the coolest dude on the planet, named both No. 1 on the rock stars most-likely-to-die list and the one life form (besides the cockroach) capable of surviving nuclear war. Halfway through his electrifying new memoir, “Life,” Keith Richards writes about the consequences of fame: the nearly complete loss of privacy and the weirdness of being mythologized by fans as a sort of folk-hero renegade. “I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me,” he says. “I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl. Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s 30 years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it.” By turns earnest and wicked, sweet and sarcastic and unsparing, Mr. Richards, now 66, writes with uncommon candor and immediacy. He’s decided that he’s going to tell it as he remembers it, and helped along with notebooks, letters and a diary he once kept, he remembers almost everything. [...] One of this galvanic book’s many achievements is that Mr. Richards has found a way to channel to the reader his own avidity, his own deep soul hunger for music and to make us feel the connections that bind one generation of musicians to another. Along the way he even manages to communicate something of that magic, electromagnetic experience of playing on stage with his mates, be it in a little club or a huge stadium.

"There’s a certain moment when you realize that you’ve actually just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you[...] You’re elevated because you’re with a bunch of guys that want to do the same thing as you. And when it works, baby, you’ve got wings[...] flying without a license."

From The Guardian: The survivor's story is one of the predominant narratives of our time. It usually traces a familiar arc from excess through despair to redemption, and, as such, allows us to enjoy the vicarious thrill of voyeurism within the framework of a cautionary or salutary tale. Life by Keith Richards, the most famous survivor of them all, breaks with this tradition insofar as it contains excess aplenty but hardly any despair and very little redemption. Keith did it all, had a hell of a good time, and survived to brag about it. Life has the macho swagger that rock'n'roll in general – and the Rolling Stones in particular – once possessed. This is both its strength and its weakness. It often reads like a historical document of another time: a lost world in which women were always "chicks" or "bitches", an inflatable giant penis was a non-ironic stage prop, and a bottle of Jack Daniel's was the de rigueur rock'n'roll accessory. The Keith Richards book is a drug memoir of sorts, albeit without the hardcore confessional descriptiveness of the genre. Instead, it is almost casual in its cataloguing of excess: heroin, cocaine, Tuinal, Nembutal, STP, LSD, speedballs, Moroccan hashish, Jamaican ganja, and, inevitably, methadone, are just some of the substances mentioned – often in passing. Consider, for instance, the following passage from the book, which describes his daily breakfast routine during the 70s: "I would take a barbiturate to wake up … a Tuinal, pin it, put a needle in it so it would come on quicker. And then take a hot cup of tea, and then consider getting up or not. And later maybe a Mandrax or a Quaalude… And when the effect wears off after about two hours, you're feeling mellow, you've had a bit of breakfast and you're ready for work."

"People love that image[...] They imagined me, they made me[...] Bless their hearts. And 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 to do this job, they've got this life, they're an insurance salesman[...] but, inside them, there's a raging Keith Richards."

Keith Richards's upbringing: Keith Richards was the only child of Bert Richards and Doris Dupree Richards. He was born in Dartford, Kent. His father was a factory laborer, who was injured during World War II. Their flat on Chastilian Road was hit by a Nazi V-1 flying bomb on July 5, 1944, while he and his mother were at the hospital, visiting with Bert Richards, who'd been wounded in the Normandy invasion. Keith Richards's paternal grandparents were socialists and civic leaders. His maternal grandfather (Augustus Theodore Dupree), who toured the U.K. in a jazz big band called "Gus Dupree and His Boys," was an early influence on Richards's musical ambitions; it's this grandfather that got Richards interested in the guitar. Richards's mother introduced him to the music of Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and bought him his first guitar, a Rosetti acoustic. His father was less encouraging, telling his son to "Stop that bloody noise!" Richards's first guitar hero was Scotty Moore. Richards attended Wentworth Primary School, as did Mick Jagger. The two knew each other as schoolboys, and lived in the same neighborhood until 1954. That year, the family moved to what Keith Richards has described as "a fucking soul-destroying council estate at completely the other end of town" that looked like "a disgusting concrete jungle". The move was disorienting for the young Richards, as was his transfer a year later to Dartford Technical School (now and split into two schools named Wilmington Grammar School for Boys and Wilmington Enterprise College), which he attended from 1955 to 1959. The Dartford Tech choirmaster Jake Clair noticed Richards's singing voice and recruited him into the school choir. In a trio of boy sopranos Richards sang (amongst other performances) at Westminster Abbey in front of Queen Elizabeth II.



In 1959, Keith Richards was expelled from Dartford Technical School for truancy, and the headmaster suggested he would be more at home at the art college in the neighboring town of Sidcup. At Sidcup Art College, Richards devoted his time to playing guitar after he heard American blues artists like Little Walter and Big Bill Broonzy. He swapped a pile of records for his first electric guitar, a hollow-body Höfner cutaway.

"There was a lot of music being played at Sidcup, and we'd go into the empty classrooms and fool around with our guitars. ... Even in those days Keith could play most of [Chuck Berry's] solos. In order to stay up late with our music and still get to Sidcup in the morning, Keith and I were on a pretty steady diet of pep pills, which not only kept us awake but gave us a lift. We took all kinds of things – pills that girls took for menstruation, inhalers like Nostrilene, and other stuff. Opposite the college there was this little park with an aviary that had a cockatoo in it. Cocky the Cockatoo we used to call it. Keith used to feed it pep pills and make it stagger around on its perch. If ever we were feeling bored we'd go and give another upper to Cocky." - Dick Taylor

One morning in 1961, on the train journey from Dartford to Sidcup, Richards happened to get into the same carriage as Mick Jagger, who was then a student at the London School of Economics. They recognized each other and began talking about the LPs Jagger had with him (blues as well as R&B albums he had acquired by mail-order from America). Keith Richards was surprised and impressed that Mick Jagger not only shared his enthusiasm for Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters but also that he owned such LPs, as these were extremely rare in Britain at the time. The two discovered that they had a mutual friend in Dick Taylor, with whom Jagger was singing in an amateur band called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. Jagger invited Richards to a rehearsal, and soon after, Richards also joined the line-up. The group disbanded after Jagger, Richards and Taylor met Brian Jones and Ian Stewart, with whom they went on to form The Rolling Stones (Taylor left the band in November 1962 to return to art school). By mid-1962 Richards had left Sidcup Art College in favor of pursuing his fledgling musical career and moved into a London flat with Jagger and Jones. His parents divorced at about the same time; Keith Richards maintained close ties with his mother, who was very supportive of his musical activities, but became estranged from his father and did not resume contact with him until 1982. In 1963 Richards dropped the "s" from his surname and began using the professional name "Keith Richard", because Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham felt it "looked more pop". (He used the s-less version as his pen name and stage name until the late 1970s.)

Greg Lawrence: Jackie as Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

The Wall Street Journal recently juxtaposed two books on the same topic:

William Kuhn's "Reading Jackie" and Greg Lawrence's "Jackie as Editor" are seemingly the same book—chronological accounts of her 19-year career at the publishers Viking and Doubleday—but they are actually very different. Mr. Kuhn's is heavy on hagiography and analysis, Mr. Lawrence's is an energetically reported and crisply written story of a whip-smart, middle-age working woman who marshaled wits, charm, steely will and, of course, unmatched connections to make a new life for herself. In 1975, Jackie (as both authors choose to call her) found herself stranded in a 15-room Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York after the death of her second husband, the coarse billionaire Aristotle Onassis. Two debonair godfathers rescued her from idleness and depression. The first was Tom Guinzburg, an old friend who had inherited Viking from his father and who invited Jackie to be a consulting editor for $10,000 a year. When that job ended badly, John Sargent, another charmer, brought her to Doubleday, where she had a long and productive run.

Read that article, in full, here. The Huffington Post also covered the book and author: Lawrence, just one of the many authors whose careers she touched, says that one of the most revealing anecdotes he's ever heard about Jackie came from a friend, editor Joe Armstrong, who visited her in Martha's Vineyard less than a year before she died. "I remember in her living room she had all these books," Armstrong told Lawrence. "And she said, `These are my other best friends.'" Read that blog post here.

Carrie Fisher on Her One-Woman Show, 'Wishful Drinking' from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

Carrie Fisher, perhaps best known for her role as Princess Leia in Star Wars, is also something of a real-world Hollywood princess. As the daughter of actress Debbie Reynolds and the late Eddie Fisher, Fisher's entire career and family life have been well documented by the media. In her one-woman show, "Wishful Drinking," Fisher re-tells the stories of her life. A cut-down version of the show premiered Sunday night on HBO. We talk with Carrie Fisher about growing up in a Hollywood family, and whether she's ever outlived the Princess Leia legend. Below, our full and uncut interview with Carrie Fisher, complete with family references to growing up with celebrity, behind the camera recollections from Star Wars, and stories from being on tour with her book, "Wishful Drinking."

Download the podcast here. See also: Postcards from the Edge,

"A History Of The 'Big' Business Of Hip-Hop" from NPR Fresh Air

In 1979, producer Sylvia Robinson heard hip-hop music at a birthday party in Harlem and had a hunch that it would be commercially successful. She called her son, Joey Robinson Jr., and asked him to gather a group of musicians who could perform like the rappers she saw in Harlem. She then held makeshift auditions for a rap group outside a pizza parlor in Englewood, N.J. "She put these three guys together who had never met each other before, had the backing track all ready and created a record in a matter of minutes," says Dan Charnas, a former rap industry executive who chronicles the history of hip-hop in a new book, The Big Payback. The group that Robinson put together, Charnas says, would become the Sugarhill Gang, and the track they recorded was "Rapper's Delight," the first hip-hop single to break into the Top 40 charts.

Download the podcast here. Read the full feature here. In the "'The Big Payback': How hip-hop went from penniless outlaw to penthouse mogul", Greg Kot blogged this, for the Chicago Tribune:

About 40 years ago, hip-hop started as a penniless outcast in some of America’s poorest neighborhoods. "Hip-hop is innovation out of necessity, the necessity of being broke," the rapper/producer El-P once said. Today it is a multibillion-dollar industry that transcends cultures and generations and permeates not just the pop music charts, but television, movies, comedy, fashion and product lines ranging from toys to liquor. It’s a classic American story of cultural innovation intertwined with capitalist opportunity, a tale of music creating a community which in turn attracted maverick investors who then were swallowed by corporations. The transformation bred multi-media stars, moguls and celebrities such as Jay-Z and Eminem. Author Dan Charnas tenaciously follows the money trail in “The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-hop” (New American Librarian), which celebrates hip-hop even as it details the backroom deals and marketing strategies that contributed to its explosive growth.

Read that blog post and article here. See also: Encyclopedia of Rap and Hip Hop Culture, Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA (Music Culture)The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Music Culture), Hip Hop Business Advisor, Rap Rich - How to Make Money in Hip Hop Business

David Rakoff: Half Empty from KQED: The Writers' Block Podcast

David Rakoff, author of FRAUD and DON'T GET TOO COMFORTABLE, reads a passage from his hilarious new book HALF EMPTY.

Download the podcast here. See also: Fraud: Essays, Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, This American Life Personalities: David Rakoff, Dan Savage, David Sedaris, John Hodgman, Sarah Vowell, Ira Glass, Jon Ronson, Julia Sweeney

Doubling Back on the Fantasy from WNYC's Soundcheck by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s album “Double Fantasy” heralded Lennon’s renewed interest in making music after a five-year hiatus from the public eye. But that potential was never fulfilled. Three weeks after it was released, Lennon was killed. Today: the legacy of the last album Lennon released in his lifetime. Guests include the album’s producer, Jack Douglas, and Ken Sharp, author of the new book “Starting Over: The Making of John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy.”

Check the webpage out, for this show, here. See also: Starting Over: The Making of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Double Fantasy, John Lennon: The Life, John Lennon: Life is What Happens

The Daily Show - December 7, 2010 - Seth Green

December 07, 2010 - Seth Green Views: 117,530 Aired: 12/07/10 Episode 15155 John Oliver describes trickle-down economics, and Seth Green admits to dating "Star Wars" in college.

View the full show here. See also: Without a Paddle (Widescreen Edition), AIRBORNE, The Green Hornet Movie Seth Rogen Jay Chou Car Poster Print - 22x34, Greg the Bunny - The Complete Series

The Colbert Report - December 6, 2010 - Garry Trudeau

December 06, 2010 - Garry Trudeau Views: 76,690 Aired: 12/06/10 Episode 06154 Obama tries to win over Republicans, and Garry Trudeau looks back on 40 years of "Doonesbury."

View the episode here. See also: 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective, Garry Trudeau: Doonesbury and the Aesthetics of Satire (Great Comics Artists Series), Signature Wound: Rocking TBI (Doonesbury Collection)

The Fresh Air Interview: Jay-Z 'Decoded' from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

Long before he sold 50 million records worldwide — and before he appeared alongside Warren Buffett on the cover of Fortune magazine, accumulated 10 Grammy Awards and became the CEO of his own record label — Jay-Z was living with his mom in the Marcy Houses housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, just trying to survive day by day. "It was a very intense and stressful situation," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we'd play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day. It was a weird mix of emotions. One day, your best friend could be killed. The day before, you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike."

Download the podcast here. See the full NPR Fresh Air feature here. See also: The Hits Collection, Vol. 1, Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office

Anthologizing Rap from WNYC's Soundcheck by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Rap music has given to pop culture some of its most compelling modern lyricists, yet for years the main resource for lyrics has been online. Now a major publisher has anthologized a book of lyrics. Today: rapping about this new textbook. Also: our Smackdown series taps into the competitive nature of hip-hop and pits the rhymes of two MCs -- Kanye West and Pusha T -- against each other. Later: Composer and pianist Anton Batagov finds connections between Eastern and Western cultures. He performs in the studio.

Download the podcast here. Check the full feature story out here. See also: Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, Decoded, One of the Last Great Poets Standing: Could Rap Be Poetry?

Charlie Rose's Thursday, October 21, 2010 Conversation with Robert Gottlieb - author of “Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt” -

CHARLIE ROSE: Robert Gottlieb is back. His publishing career spans
50 years. During that time has been editor in chief of Simon and Schuster,
Alfred A. Knopf, and "The New Yorker" magazine. He is, as you know, a
writer. His new book "Sarah -- the Life of Sarah Bernhardt" is the first
in Yale’s Jewish Lives series.

Bernhardt, also known as "The Divine Sarah," was once the most famous
actress in the world. I’m pleased to have Robert Gottlieb back at this
table. Welcome.

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: Charlie, thanks.

CHARLIE ROSE: What is this series about?

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: It is about Jewish lives, which is why it’s called
"Jewish Lives."

CHARLIE ROSE: But Yale initiated it?

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: Yes. A very benign person gave him a considerable
amount of money to launch this series and pay for it generously so that
they could hire sign on the writers it they wanted.

CHARLIE ROSE: And they signed on you to do this?

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: They did.

See: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11255. See also: Food Justice (Food, Health, and the Environment), Reading Dance: A Gathering of Memoirs, Reportage, Criticism, Profiles, Interviews, and Some Uncategorizable Extras, George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, Charlie Rose with Peter Whybrow; Robert Gottlieb; Terence Ward (March 18, 2005)

"Street style from The Sartorialist" from PRI's The Sound of Young America

Photographs from the popular street fashion photography blog, The Sartorialist, now published in a new book. One of America's most popular fashion bloggers, Scott Schuman is the creator of the street fashion photography blog, The Sartorialist. His new book of the same name collects some of his favorite photos from the blog. His subjects range from Hasidim on the streets of New York to garment industry insiders in Milan. Schuman worked in the fashion industry for some time before picking up a camera. He owned a showroom that sold fashion collections into major department stores. By the time he was a teenager, Schuman knew he wanted to work in fashion, and while he was limited by geography, he was able to pursue his passion through the retail side of the business. "Where I grew up in Indiana, there was no fashion business, there really was no fashion. So, the romantic idea of that world was great. I loved the romance of that kind of idea. I didn't know any designers growing up. I didn't know what that lifestyle was like.

Download The Sound of Young America podcast here. Of course, all of the fashion blogs are ablaze and giddy over the book. For example, the Fashion Bomb blog, blogged this:

So any of my friends will tell you that I have a serious weakness for fashion and literature. My shelves and drawers are overflowing with clothes and tons and tons of books on anything from art and history to fantasy. Whilst perusing the selection at W.H. Smith, a local English bookstore, I was of course driven to distraction by all the amazing offerings in the fashion section. I’ve been a fan of the Sartorialist‘s blog for a long time, and see Scott Schuman at every fashion week. Though I could just as easily look at all his hottest street looks online, I decided to pick up his book…and couldn’t put it down.

Check that post out, here. See also: FASHION BLOGS, Characterising Successful Fashion Blogs and Their Evaluation Metrics, Photo Fashion Book - Rosemount Australian by Fashion Media, Blogs: Slashdot, Blog, Bloggingheads.tv, Xanga, Digg, Gucci Gang controversy, Sousveillance, Fashion blog, EPIC FU, History of blogging