Why you should check out "Life" by Keith Richards

So you may have a preconception of what this book is going to be like (as I did), but when I read it I was blown away by how wrong I was.

The whole thing is about his sincere love of music, growing up initially with this fiery hunger to get ahold of blues and jazz and rock and roll records when they were extremely hard to get in this weird back corner of England, and taking each one and dissecting it with his friends, trying to figure out what they were doing and create the same type of style.

They were all basically just dirtbags, in society’s eyes, and neither they nor anyone else expected them to have any kind of place in the world, and they basically just were resigned to play music and work at the gas station and mooch off their friends or whatever, and when it wound up to be successful they were as surprised as anybody. Even the name “Rolling Stones” came about sort of at random. Brian Jones was on the phone with somebody who needed to know their unnamed band’s name for a booking, and he looked at the floor where there was a Muddy Waters album, and said, “The Rolling Stones.”

Another story: They were touring in the US and some cops arrested them all on suspicion of drug possession, but they were right at the inflection point of their career where half the cops were excited to bust some dirtbag hippies and put them in jail where they belonged, and half the cops were excited to meet the Rolling Stones and wanted autographs. Etc.

He also addresses his drug use which is what everyone knows him for. It’s actually super simple: Richards says he was worried about getting all fucked up, or overdosing or etc, and he reasoned that basically it’s a simple pharmacological equation. Take amount X, you’ll have a good time, take amount Y, that’s too much and you won’t be able to have a good time and also maybe something bad will happen. So, he always just kept careful track of how many grams of whatever-it-was he was taking, how long since the last ingestion, and moderated his intake mathematically so he could keep having a good time. From this, people observed that he never got destroyed no matter how long he was partying, and the reputation that developed was that he’s some sort of indestructible wild man, but it’s actually 100% the opposite – he was just being smart about it, which for some reason didn’t occur to anyone else to do.

The whole book is like that. I was expecting, IDK, something not very impressive but still entertaining, but I wound up getting blown away by how capable, smart, and sincere he comes across as. It’s a great read. Check it out.