Life

by Keith Richards

Other authorsJames Fox (Author)

Ebook, 2010

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Biography & Autobiography. Performing Arts. Nonfiction. HTML: The long-awaited autobiography of Keith Richards, guitarist, songwriter, singer, and founding member of the Rolling Stones. With The Rolling Stones, Keith Richards created the songs that roused the world, and he lived the original rock and roll life. Now, at last, the man himself tells his story of life in the crossfire hurricane. Listening obsessively to Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records, learning guitar and forming a band with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones. The Rolling Stones's first fame and the notorious drug busts that led to his enduring image as an outlaw folk hero. Creating immortal riffs like the ones in "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Honky Tonk Women." His relationship with Anita Pallenberg and the death of Brian Jones. Tax exile in France, wildfire tours of the U.S., isolation and addiction. Falling in love with Patti Hansen. Estrangement from Jagger and subsequent reconciliation. Marriage, family, solo albums and Xpensive Winos, and the road that goes on forever. With his trademark disarming honesty, Keith Richard brings us the story of a life we have all longed to know more of, unfettered, fearless, and true..… (more)

Media reviews

Nostalgia Special (#3 2011)

Troligtvis är det mesta sant då det gäller denna 68-årige gitarrhjälte. En sann bad boy med ibland överdriven smak för livets goda – och dåliga. Man behöver inte bläddra allt för många sidor innan den ena anekdoten radas upp efter den andra. [...] Den engelska originalversionen av

boken ger en mer rättvis känsla av Keith Richards berättande. Svenska översättningen räcker inte riktigt till och den torra brittiska humorn blir inte lika framträdande.

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The Telegraph

If you can remember the Sixties, blah blah blah. Boy can Keith Richards remember the Sixties, which is great. The real miracle is that he can remember the Seventies, considering that Keith’s poison was heroin, which would surely make performing in a high-energy band quite difficult, let alone

raising two children, with a heroin-addicted Anita Pallenberg. So the very existence of this book is a marker against the ravages of time. It suggests that Richards’s memory is fresh in a way that his face isn’t. His memory has had a little help: there are letters he sent to relatives, and even a diary, as well as testaments from friends and garnering from other people’s memoirs. Goodness, there’s enough material to start an archive in somewhere like Texas, or for Andrew Motion to contemplate an official biography. For now, though, we have a lot of kind, perhaps even indulgent, transcription from James Fox.

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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.

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The Washington Post

Mick Jagger has always looked -- will always look -- like Mick Jagger. But try to connect the glum schoolboy-guitarist of early '60s black-and-white pics with the Keith Richards of today. A heap of living and occasional bouts of near-dying have gone into that flayed, weathered, kohl-eyed visage,

whose topography suggests a moonscape irrigated with Jack Daniel's. After half a century on the road, Richards has the face he deserves -- but not, it appears, the brain. Against all pharmaceutical odds, he has held on to a substantial portion of his own history and has turned it into the most scabrously honest and essential rock memoir in a long time....And yet here he is, defiantly alive, and defiant in every other respect, too, his language just as politically incorrect, his judgments every bit as summary.

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The New York Times

“Life” is way more than a revealing showbiz memoir. It is also a high-def, high-velocity portrait of the era when rock ’n’ roll came of age, a raw report from deep inside the counterculture maelstrom of how that music swept like a tsunami over Britain and the United States. It’s an

eye-opening all-nighter in the studio with a master craftsman disclosing the alchemical secrets of his art. And it’s the intimate and moving story of one man’s long strange trip over the decades, told in dead-on, visceral prose without any of the pretense, caution or self-consciousness that usually attend great artists sitting for their self-portraits.

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