
Photo: Patrick Lichfield, St Tropez 1971
I recently finished reading Keith Richards's autobiography, Life. I loved it. It's not your average celebrity memoir. For one thing, he's got a truly amazing story to tell, of a boy from Dartford who fell in love with the strange fruit of the blues and went on to shake the world by making his own very distinctive version of it, at a time when Anglo-American culture was at its most innovative and exciting. The life that came with that was, of course, like nobody else's, despite the casual, free-floating noun of the title, and it provides a fund of breathtaking and horrifying anecdotes (of which the drug stories are the least interesting). For another thing, it's brilliantly written. Not in the sense that its sentences are elegantly turned or its grammar is correct - far from it. But boy, has it got 'voice', as they say in writing school. Much or most of it was dictated, and it's a compliment to say that it sounds like it, because Richards's way of expressing himself in words is as distinctive as his guitar-playing, somehow wrong-sounding and utterly right at the same time, and always crackling with dark energy. He had a fine collaborator in James Fox, who corralled Richards's reminisces into something readable and structured without draining them of vitality (Richards can spin some wonderful metaphors; the book includes a copy of a fax he sent to Fox in which he sketches some musical notes on a stave and below them scrawls out his feeling that the blues represented a jail break for music out of classical western forms; the notes busted right out from behind those bars).
At the heart of the book are two things: music (about which Richards is never less than fascinating) and Mick Jagger. Jagger, as has been widely noted, comes out badly. Not only has he got a tiny todger, according to Anita Pallenburg according to Keith, but he is a soulless egomaniac, obsessed by his own image, his status within the band, and money - all at the expense of the music, which is all that Keith cares about, apparently. Despite Richards's scorn and derision of his partner, there's a plaintive tone to this stuff; a sense that's he's addressing Jagger directly, tugging his sleeve, asking him what happened to the man he met and fell in love with on a train into London.
What does Mick think of this? We'll probably never know, because Jagger is too self-contained to tell us. But it may well be something like this, an imagined riposte to Richards, penned by a journalist who, rather confusingly, is called Bill Wyman. It's a wonderful piece of writing in its own right, informed by an intimate knowledge of the Stones' music and career, funny, astute and very convincing in its assumption of the Jagger perspective. It's a reminder, for one thing, of what a bloody nightmare it must have been to be in a band with Keith Richards:
Keith likes to talk a lot about his getting clean from heroin. It is not correspondingly apprehended that he replaced the heroin comprehensively with liquor. Given a choice I select the slurring alcoholic over the comatose junkie as a lifelong professional partner, and I say this with some knowledge of the two alternatives. But neither is strictly desirable. And, yes, they do fall over onstage... In our organization, inside this rather unusual floating circus we call home, I am forced into the role of martinet, the one who gets blamed for silly arbitrary rules. (Like, for a show in front of 60,000 people for which we are being paid some $6 or $7 million for a few hours' work, I like to suggest to everyone that we start on time, and that we each have in place a personal plan, in whatever way suits us best, to stay conscious for the duration of the show.)...No sooner did Keith kick heroin than Charlie took it up. In the book Keith blames me for not touring during the 1980s. I was quoted, unfortunately, saying words to the effect of "the Rolling Stones are a millstone around my neck." This hurt Keith's feelings. He thinks it was a canard flung from a fleeting position of advantage in my solo career, the failing of which he delights in. He's not appreciating the cause and effect. Can you imagine going on tour with an alcoholic, a junkie, and a crackhead? Millstone wasn't even the word.
Read the whole thing. Though Paul McCartney is friends with Richards, I suspect he might empathise with Jagger a little more (at least, more than Richards seems to be able to). By 1970, all the other Beatles, and most of the world, turned on McCartney and accused him of being a bossy, overbearing, egotistical tyrant. But without McCartney's bossing and harrying of the others, particularly a Lennon sunk deep into smack and LSD, there would be no Abbey Road or Let It Be - and probably only half a White Album (the less good half).
Of course, people will always find Richards the more attractive figure than Jagger, just as John Lennon will always be cooler than Paul McCartney. We have inherited from the Romantics an idea of genius that is all heart and no head, all feel and no logic, all inspiration and no effort. The idea that great art is the product, not just of inspiration, but of hard work, dogged focus, and cool calculation, is not something we're used to. It doesn't seem to have struck Richards that he reason he's been able to focus so single-mindedly on the music is that Jagger was taking care of everything else. At his peak, Richards made magic every time he picked up a guitar. But somebody had to make sure there was an audience to hear it.