7 star book!

One of the best books I've read this year. Keith Richards was a clever kid, a talented artist, a choirboy who sang for the Queen and became an outstanding musician in one of the world's best bands. What is most on display in this book is his tremendous interest in music and musicians, not in rock, bands, money and fame - a lot of which he finds a bit of a pain but to be endured because that goes with the job. If you aren't fairly knowledgeable about music, blues in particular, there More...

I started listening to the Rolling Stones back in the early 1970s. “Hot Rocks” (an early “greatest hits collection – and still one of the best by any band), “Sticky Fingers,” “Exile on Main Street,” “It’s Only Rock and Roll,” etc. In terms of the group and its history, I caught them in their second wave, the one where they had morphed into the “World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band.” I saw the band once, during their “Tour of the Americas” tour (the one where Ron Wood joined the band). I hung with More...

Growing up in Dartford for Keith – was somewhere to get out of. After WWII it was pungent with horse manure & desperation and he never forgot the story that he was born in an air raid shelter. It wasn’t London. It wasn’t hip or cool - it was the backside of the wrong side of the tracks. But when his father Gus gave him an old wooden guitar and showed him a few chords and licks, London loomed closer. Especially after he could play “Malaguena” and managed to escape National Service – that grea More...

What can I say?
I am a fervent Stones fan, more of a Mick than Keith although Andrew loves Keef and has shown me the "way." But it is the combination of the group that makes the band, and the times they have lived through. KR makes this abundantly clear throughout Life and is at times all possible sides of a character: arrogant, nasty, mean, kind, loving, fun, crazy, menacing, clueless, dangerous, and incredibly talented while still being very modest. This book is amazing, sounds just like him wi More...

It was fascinating! If you have always loved The Rolling Stones and rock and roll and have a lot of nostalgia about the 60's... then I think you'd find Keith Richards memoir fascinating, too. It is long, but most of the time, well, I was just blown away hearing about all the stuff Keith Richards did. He has a great conversational style; listening was fun - kind of like sitting in the living room hearing him tell about his life (with help from Johnny Depp and one other reader.) What really shines More...

Ok, Keith Richards.... ever since I first heard SATISFACTION on my little portable AM radio....I have loved the Stones. I had to have been 12 years old or so.....

I have listened,and loved their music to the present. I had heard the stories,and knew that drug use, etc.etc. etc. but there was a lot about Keith that I didn't know.

This book thrilled me...parts of it I loved. Parts I found tedious. Parts made me laugh.....other parts really pissed me off .....pissed off at Keith....How could he act l More...

Keith Richards’ autobiography starts really well and holds that momentum for a long time; although when it reaches the period covering the Eighties it does fall somewhat into score settling, and after that becomes somewhat bland and without spark. As such you have to hand it to this book, it really does mirror The Rolling Stones’ career.

Ghost writer James Fox does a fantastic job of catching his master’s voice. No doubt Keef was sat down in front of a microphone and told to talk about his life i More...

How in the hell did this guy live so long? After Jimi and Janis died, all the smart money was on Keith Richard to be Rock n' Roll's next burnt-out flame. He fooled us all. And his secret to a long and exciting life?

He was damn lucky.

Maybe not in his music. He worked hard to be the rock n' roll genius he is. But lucky in that he didn't make a fatal mistake between the drugs and general madness his life style resulted in. I loved his frankness but shook my head a little when he discussed his fault More...

Did y'all know that Keith Richards is a huge booklover and once wanted to be a librarian?

Aug - I finally decided this was the quintessential summer read so read it on our camping trips. Having been a fan since the Stones first came on the scene (I vacillated between loving them and the Beatles) I was interested in learning more about the early days and how he has managed to stay alive (we are all aware that he looks like the living dead). I also wanted to know more about the song writing proces More...

So far this is fascinating... I didn't read the Dylan Chronicles because I heard a bit too much about them, and have read about Dylan a lot--and he's so capable of making himself a hero and overlooking the collateral damage--in other words, he's such a writer!--I just didn't want to be one more dupe. But I'm loving Keith's autobiography because he's really good at taking you into the music, and he's not apologetic about his own part in things, his own presumed jerkiness, and I'm getting a look i More...

Keith Richards was a major influence in my musical education.

In the middle 60s in Boston, pop music was strictly AM, and restricted to a couple of big stations that played what sold to the masses. That had its benefits. Without niche marketing, Dean Martin bumped up against the Dave Clark Five. And the Drifters.

So it wasn’t like you couldn’t hear black music.

You just couldn’t hear all of the black music out there by listening to those stations.

When the Stones came on the scene, I gravitated t More...

Life by Keith Richards
Little, Brown and Company, 576 pages

Keith Richards’ memoir, Life is a thorough and engrossing portrait of a man with an overabundance of passion for life. More than the music, the parties, the whirlwind of fame and over-indulgence, it is his unrelenting need to keep moving that is the key to understanding his life, which he describes in clean, clear prose with a pirate’s sly humor. We get all the things we would expect in a memoir of a music legend like Richards: childhood More...

5 stars for the music – the best part. Guitarists will appreciate the description of how Keith came up with 5 string open G tuning, which he often used.

4 stars for historical detail.

2 stars for long rambling tales of drug use and the resulting busts. Much of it sounds like Keith talking to a tape recorder. It wasn’t all boring. The keystone cops and courtroom episodes were funny. The Stones had some good lawyers. Anyone else would have gone to jail.

A bonus star for the inserts – short narratives More...

I was somewhat surprised by how much I enjoyed this book (perhaps this was due, in large part, to my low expectations and regard for Mr. Richards' lifestyle). Despite not holding out a lot of hope for the book, I pressed on as I am a fan of music in general and of the history and roots of rock in particular. I was impressed with the articulation and candor of the author; I was really surprised by his (to me, shocking) ability to recollect life's minutiae, given his drug culture notoriety and eve More...

What a glorious mess is Keith Richards' life... and Keith Richards' Life. Rough-hewn and discursive, this autobiography sounds as if Richards' offstage collaborator (the book is written "with James Fox") just sat him down, turned on the tape recorder and let him ramble. Maybe that's exactly what they did. But when your life has been as long and eventful as Keith Richards', that's really all it takes. Just point the mike at the guy and let him talk it out.

After a Hunter S. Thompsonesque beginning More...

I'm on a delay at ATL. A perfect place and time to finally get around to my review of "Life." This review has had almost as slow a gestation as reading the flipping book! I have never had the experience of putting down a book on numerous occasions with varying feelings of disgust, dread of another diva story, awe, respect, cringing from another in a series of cruel choices all while feeling compelled to read on. I read three other book from the time I started "Life" 'til I finally finished. Many More...

A comprehensive autobiography by Keith Richards that covers his childhood, his lifestyle change from teenager who couldn't afford food and housing to multimillionaire within months to the evolving history of the Rolling Stones and frank discussions of his drug abuse and addictions.

One thing that struck me was his passion to his music. I don't know anything about music but still was intrigued by his discussion of chords, hand movement, what he learned from other muscians and why other bands could More...

It starts off with a story of not getting booked on felony drug charges in Arkansas because they have on tour with them a good ol' boy lawyer who happened to be having a barbecue at the judge's house when they got busted. There's a press conference, the judge is hammered with a pint of booze hidden in his sock, the redneck chief of police is threatening to arrest him for public drunkenness. Their car has cocaine bursting from the side panels, but the lawyer prevents a search. They hug the judge More...

Obviously Keith didn't write this as you or I would write. He talked his memories into a tape recorder then someone transcribed his words into book form. It was great!

Keith had a bowl of sugar or smack or some shit that he enjoyed by big hands full. In my youth, I licked the end of my pinkie finger, stuck it into that same bowl and had a taste. I still remember that taste; I loved it! I did the weekend garage/dance band thing, but chose not to follow it in favor of marriage, fatherhood, etc. Now More...

Even better than I hoped it would be, very conversational, and gossipy. When I got to chapter 10, and realized it the story had progressed only as far as "Some Girls," I worried that the last three chapters would be a gloss over. I guess since the Stones' output after "Tattoo You" is so lackluster, and Keith had kicked heroin around that time and soon thereafter met Patti Hansen, there wasn't as much to say, but the final three chapters were full of good bits. Mainly, they focused on Keith and M More...

Keith has always fascinated me. There's that joke about the end of the world and there will be cockroaches and Keith. He would enjoy that joke. He has a great voice, it's very stream-of-consciousness and shot from the hip. I did read it immediately after reading a biography of him so camparing the two points of view was enlightening. As with most (all?) autobiographies, he certainly airbrushes over the unsavory parts, but to his credit he mentions that a great party is the one you don't remember More...

I can honestly say this book surprised me. I am a long time lover of the Stones music and a fascination with the group members and Keith was nothing like I expected him to really be. He's a great storyteller and I felt a kinship with him while reading this book (even though I don't and never will have the musical knowledge he possesses). I felt like I was sitting in a circle of friends listening to him talk while reading this book. It was hard to put down, even though at times I just had to, but More...

It isn’t for the kids at bedtime or the faint of stomach, but Life is one raucous good read. We learn only at the very end that Keith Richards is a history buff, and it explains a lot. The book is suspiciously well documented throughout and written in the style of the popular histories that have filled the shelves of big box book emporia in the last decade or two. Life is something quite beyond celebrity journalism and may actually have literary value. Perhaps I was enjoying myself so much that More...

The Keef's memoir is a lot more than I expected and better than so many of the Rock n' Roll biographies that have crossed my path lately. More 'narrated' memoir than formal biography, this work is told in a mostly chronological order with the necessary flashback/forwards as required.

Richards and whatever writer(s) and editors aided in the storytelling, spin a yarn that rolls across the decades of his and the Rolling Stones lives like a tour bus on a pot holed local road on the way to some gig. B More...

I picked this book up because it was lying around the art colony where I was living for a month, and because NYT op-ed columnist, Maureen Dowd, of all people, had said Keith Richards had come off surprisingly chivalrously (high praise for a free swinging rock and roll star).

"Life" by Keith Richards, the guitarist for the British band the Rolling Stones, starts off like some druggie teenage wet dream, all groupies and pills and party attitude. Now, I'm a wannabe druggie teenager, and I was put o More...

As much as I would like to be a fan of the Stones, their music is a bit of a blocker for me. I mean sure they have some good stuff but they also have a lot of questionable stuff and sorry but Mick can NOT sing. But this book has a good "voice", you believe that ol' Keif sat nightly after gigs bashin' away on his type-writer (but the truth is Keif had only a sketchy memory at best, given why the ghost writer had to get the recollections of significant others in Keif' life) and it has the right am More...

Okay, so think that by now all of my friends are sick and tired or hearing, "You know what Keith said about that?" or "It's funny - something like that happened to Keith one time..." I realize that Keith Richards isn't exactly the kind of role model that should inspire bracelets inscribed with WWKD (What would Keith Do?), but this is one hell of an interesting read. There are the expected stories of endless debauchery - especially amusing are Keith's decision to lay of Jack Daniels in an effort More...

I don't like Mick Jagger's voice so I'm not a Rolling Stones fan, and normally wouldn't have read this book. But all of the NY Times' book reviewers put it in their lists of top books in 2010, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

It's surprisingly good. Not the party-hearty memoir I was expecting. A fair amount of discussion about music theory and how it plays out in the Stones' music, which was totally unexpected and really interesting. I really liked reading about how some of the most famous songs More...

On one hand, Mr. Richards is an ordinary guy: hardscrabble youth, dedicated musician, some drug problems, some marital confusion, and a wild financial dance. There are a couple of million guys his age with similar histories. The difference is he's a founding member of the Rolling Stones. The thing about fame is that it gives people a chance to mythologize -something we all like to do. While it is true he has a remarkable immune system etc., it is also true that he has not done heroin for some th More...