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.)

"Teddy Roosevelt And The 'Burn' That Saved Forests" from WHYY Radio, NPR Fresh Air with Terry Gross [original posting, broadcast: Oct, 2009]

Timothy Egan's "The Big Burn" was just released on paperback, and so, WHYY Radio, NPR Fresh Air rebroadcast last year's interview with the author.

In his new book The Big Burn, author Timothy Egan takes us back to 1910, to the scene of the largest forest fire in American history. Three million acres — an area the size of Connecticut — burned down in Idaho and Montana over the course of a single weekend. More than 70 people died. The Idaho Statesman has since remembered it as "a conflagration of biblical proportions," and Egan says the fire was of a singular kind, "a monster that takes on a life of its own." But in The Big Burn — subtitled Teddy Roosevelt and The Fire That Saved America — Egan argues that the fire actually saved the nation's forests, even as its flames charred the trees. The disaster served to strengthen the fledgling U.S. Forest Service, and rally public opinion behind Theodore Roosevelt's plan to protect national lands. Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of five books. He won the National Book Award for his critically acclaimed Dust Bowl chronicle The Worst Hard Time.

Download the NPR WHYY Fresh Air podcast here. Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer and journalist. He maintains the New York Times blog, "The Opinionator," and recently wrote about two personalities, a "junkie" and an "atheist," Keith Richards and Christopher Hitchens respectively. His column, blog, whatever you want to call it, is usually enlightening in the sense that it doesn't get caught up in over opinions about current affairs, but rather sheds true opinions, unique and enlightening ideas, and in his recent posting, relationships; the relationship between a junkie and an atheist. In his latest post, Hitchens' bout cancer is evoked. It cuts to the materialism of our ideals, and it's the ideas in posts like this, that make a subscription to The New York Times on the Kindle worth it (even if you can get it at the desk or on the laptop for free). Check that latest entry out, here. See also: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (Vintage Departures), Breaking Blue, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

"Keith Richards' 'Life': Sex, Drugs And Brown Sugar" from NPR's Arts & Life by MICHAEL SCHAUB

Rock and roll, by its nature, doesn't have many rules; if it did it wouldn't be rock and roll. It does have, however, an unwritten code, and this is part of it: real rockers never quit. Retirement isn't hardcore, which explains why the Rolling Stones haven't called it quits after nearly 50 years as, arguably, the world's second most famous band. Keith Richards, the legendary founding guitarist of the Stones, is 66, but don't mistake his new memoir for a valedictory. It's more like a statement of purpose; a lead-off track, not a final cut. "I can't retire until I croak," he writes — more than once — in Life. It seems like as safe a bet as you're ever going to find in rock. Rock and roll, after all, is his first love. Early in Life, Richards describes his first guitar, "a gut-string job," given to him by his mother when he was 15: "I took it everywhere and I went to sleep with my arm laid across it." It's the kind of honest, guileless moment that makes this book so charming, so unexpectedly moving. Richards might epitomize the popular idea of the rock lifestyle more than any other living artist — and he doesn't shy away from admitting his deep affections for women and drugs — but he's at his best, unsurprisingly, when he's rhapsodizing about rock. "[W]hen it works, baby, you've got wings," he writes. "It's flying without a license."

Read an excerpt of the book here. There was also this NPR WHYY Fresh Air show, with Richards. See also: What Would Keith Richards Do?: Daily Affirmations from a Rock and Roll Survivor, Stone Me: The Wit and Wisdom of Keith Richards, Keith Richards: The Biography, Keith Richards: Satisfaction