"A New York Treasure" --Village Voice

It’s Only Rock n Roll (but I like it)

Dig Michiko Kakutani’s review of Keith Richard’s memoir today in the Times:

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. He gives us an indelible, time-capsule feel for the madness that was life on the road with the Stones in the years before and after Altamont; harrowing accounts of his many close shaves and narrow escapes (from the police, prison time, drug hell); and a heap of sharp-edged snapshots of friends and colleagues — most notably, his longtime musical partner and sometime bête noire, Mick Jagger.

3 comments

1 kenboyer made me cry   ~  Oct 26, 2010 10:43 am

The review piqued my interest. Tried to reserve the book in the Westchester Library system....the result, #107 on the waiting list. I can wait...

2 Chyll Will   ~  Oct 26, 2010 11:06 am

I might actually check this out as well. Nothing like non-fiction psychodrama to inspire one's creativity!

3 Matt Blankman   ~  Oct 26, 2010 11:13 am

I'll be reading it for sure.

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