Life

Life is a 2010 memoir by the Rolling Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards, written with British journalist James Fox. The book narrates Richards’s life from his London childhood, through the formation of the Rolling Stones, Richards’s songwriting partnership with bandmate Mick Jagger, his drug use, and his family life. Richards was reportedly paid a $7 million advance for his memoir, which hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list less than a week after its release.

The book opens with an anecdote of the kind for which Richards is best known: on tour in Arkansas in 1975, the guitarist and two friends are caught in possession of drugs. While Richards tries to throw the evidence away, the police are starstruck: “The choice always was a tricky one for the authorities who arrested us. Do you want to lock them up, or have your photograph taken with them and give them a motorcade to see them on their way?”

From here, Richards returns to his childhood in Dartford, a working-class area of London: “If you want to get to the top, you’ve got to start at the bottom,” he reflects. Bullied and beaten up at school, Richards discovers an inner rage and acquires a lifelong preference for the underdog.



Richards first discovers music through his grandfather Gus, the loose-living patriarch of his mother’s family. Richards would go on long walks with his grandfather, who had been a sax player in the 1930s, and at Gus’s house, Richards was intrigued by the guitar he apparently kept balanced atop his piano. It wasn’t until after Gus’s death that Richards learned his grandfather had put the guitar there when Richards was visiting in order to make the boy curious about it. Richards buys his first guitar at fifteen: he is soon inseparable from it.

Expelled from high school, Richards devotes himself full-time to mastering the guitar style of his favorite American Delta blues artists: Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, and many others. When he discovers that his former schoolmate Mick Jagger shares his love of his music, the Rolling Stones are born.

Between 1963 and 1966, the Stones perform virtually every night, sometimes twice a night, “well over a thousand gigs, almost back to back.” It is this extreme routine which first inclines Richards to drug use, as a way of staying sharp. He boasts that thanks to cocaine and speed, “for many years I slept, on average, twice a week. This means that I have been conscious for at least three lifetimes.”



In 1964, cultural upheaval transforms British and US social life, and the Stones are at the heart of it. Their irreverent personas, black influences, and open sexuality make them popular with their fans and a target for the establishment. This success and pressure intensify Richards’s drug habit, but also his creativity. He and Mick spend long hours in the studio, perfecting the songs for which they are best known. Fuelled by cocaine, Richards becomes a hard-driving taskmaster: “I realized, I’m running on fuel and everybody else isn’t. They’re trying to keep up with me and I’m just burning. I can keep going because I’m on pure cocaine…I’m running on high octane, and if I feel I’m pushing it a little bit, need to relax it, have a little bump of smack.”

Richards and Jagger’s relationship becomes increasingly rocky. Richards diagnoses Jagger with “L.V.S.” or “lead vocalist syndrome,” suggesting that Jagger took to flattery as Richards took to heroin. The conflict comes to a head when Jagger sleeps with Richards’ girlfriend Anita Pallenberg and Richards retaliates by sleeping with Jagger’s paramour Marianne Faithfull: “It probably put a bigger gap between me and Mick than anything else, but mainly on Mick’s part, not mine. And probably forever.”

Richards’s relationship with Anita survives, and they have three children. Their young son, Tara, dies while Keith is on the road, and Richards observes that he has never overcome the grief. The company of his son Marlon is his main comfort.



The Stones are becoming very wealthy, and for a time, they are easy targets for the unscrupulous. Their manager, Allen Klein, costs them millions in royalties. Between this financial squeeze and England’s high tax rate for top earners, the Stones decide to move abroad. Exile on Main Street is recorded in France, while Goats’ Head Soup is recorded in Jamaica, where Richards decides to stay. He finds himself revitalized by reggae music and the Rastafarian tradition.

His relationship with Anita breaks down and he meets Patti Hansen, with whom he has two daughters. Richards begins to dial back his drug use, and he embarks on a solo project in response to Jagger’s solo work.

The book closes with a reflection of where Richards has ended up. He notes that after a near-fatal fall from a tree in 2006, he received a note from then Prime Minister Tony Blair, who hailed Richards as “one of my heroes.” Richards is amazed. He never expected to become so accepted and integrated into the mainstream. “I’m not here just to make records and money,” he concludes. “I’m here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation: ‘Do you know this feeling?’”