0.cached.png
By David Gates
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
Keith Richards: The Biography. By Victor Bockris. 409 pages. Poseidon. $24. The hair raising yarns in Victor Bockris's "Keith Richards: The Biography" confirm again what we've been hearing for years: that the quintessential rock-and-roll guitarist is also popular music's all-time icon of excess. Forget Hank Williams, Charlie Parker, even Elvis Presley. Williams, dead at 29, just wasn't around long enough, and lost more glamour points for being primarily a boozehound. Parker, dead at 34, didn't have the money for true epic decadence: no drug shipments by private plane, and precious little chance to shoot first-rate pharmaceuticals. Elvis, who made it to 42, had money but no style: his drugs were strictly prescription, and he dispatched his jetliner not for cocaine but for cheeseburgers The King collected police badges; Richards collects switchblades. Incongruously, Richards is the one who's still alive: 48 and apparently going strong.
"Keith Richards"is the druggiest biography since "Wired," Bob Woodward's 1984 portrait of John Belushi. Bockris gets us swiftly through Richards's early years (the Stones are up and Rolling before page 50) and the highlights of his career with the band and as a solo performer. He deals briskly with such familiar but obligatory matters as Richards's five-string, opentuned guitar style and the legend that he kicked heroin with the human equivalent of an oil change: having his blood drained and replaced. (In 1973 a Swiss clinic treated his addiction with hemodialysis This leaves plenty of room for scuttlebutt about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Except that Bockris doesn't pretend to be a rock critic, and by Rolling Stones standards, Richards never had an outrageous sex life. His first great love, Anita Pallenberg, loudly complained that he neglected her for months at a time. (He does have two children by Pallenberg and two by his wife, Patti Hansen.)
Read More on News
In 1992, of course, one must no longer see unrepentant drug abuse as heroic. And shouldn't some of the money that's gone up Richards's hawklike nose have gone to Oxfam instead? Bockris, who's written books on Andy Warhol and William Burroughs, is no prude, but he disputes Richards's recent clauses to self-understanding. "Keith never examined the causes of his addictions, nor had he really given up drugs." Before the Stones' 1989 tour, says Bockris, Richards was doing "so much alcohol, hash, cocaine and downers that many of his friends found it difficult to understand how he could talk, let alone perform"--and Bockris gives no hint that much has changed since. What makes Richards charming is his lack of self-pity. If he's a tortured soul, he lets it show where it does the least harm and gives the most pleasure: in the yearning snarl of his guitar.
Bockris is right in suggesting that someone who puts away a quart or so of bourbon a day has problems he's not coming to grips with. But while Richards's extravagant appetites may be lifethreatening,in the short term they seem the very reverse of self-destructive: they're self-perpetuating, self-exalting. He's been known to blast his stereo for 120 hours straight, drive his car 100 miles an hour and make his wants known with the directness of Old King Cole. One visitor to his Manhattan apartment recalls a hiatus in the smoking, snorting, drinking and listening. "He goes, 'You guys want some meat? Want some steaks?' Picked up the phone and said, 'Patti! The guys want some meat! Put on some steaks!'" Once, after staying up for nine days, Richards conked out in the studio and smashed his nose against a speaker. "It was just that life was so interesting for nine days that I couldn't give it up," he explained. "Not even for a minute."
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines