Keith Richards’ ‘Life’ as a rock star

Mother Nature knows how to welcome Keith Richards.

The afternoon is warm and sunny minutes before Richards is to be interviewed at his manager's office in downtown Manhattan. At the top of the hour, the clouds darken. The door swings open and the grinning Rolling Stone arrives.

He is 66, his face tanned and lined, his walk slightly bent, an old cowboy gone electric.

Unlike Mick Jagger, Richards has never been knighted. But he can claim honors in the world of letters. Nearly 30 years after Jagger gave up on writing a memoir, alleging he had forgotten everything, Richards has emerged as a best-selling author who seems to have retained it all.

"It's been a much harder journey than I expected. At first, it was like, ‘Oh, sure, I'll tell you anything,' without realizing how things connect together and the effect they have on you," he said. "Hey, it's not easy to relive the death of your own son (Tara, who died in infancy in 1976). Old wounds are opened here and there, only to heal them."

Co-written by journalist and "White Mischief" author James Fox, "Life" topped the best-seller list on Amazon.com even before publication Tuesday. "Life," a firsthand journey from wartime London through the wilder parts of the 1960s, 1970s and beyond, could as easily be filed among the works of Richards' friend William Burroughs as alongside the memoirs of Bob Dylan or Eric Clapton.

"Life" is told in Richards' offhand, conversational rhythms, through recording sessions and concerts, drugs and drug busts, family fights and domestic comforts, guitar tunings and adventures with Mick.

Jagger writes most of the Rolling Stones' lyrics, but in countless interviews Richards has laid down his own take. He is candid and philosophical, jaded and tender, Bogart with a guitar.Quotes from over the decades — "I'll just keep on rocking and hope for the best," "I've never had a problem with drugs; I've had problems with the police" — are mottos for his fans.

"Life" is like the ultimate Keith Richards album, as if all the interviews were scraps of music that Richards and co-author Fox fleshed out and arranged. Private letters, diaries and journals were discovered, old friends consulted. Fox worked hard with Richards to freshen his memory.

"We got underneath the years of telling the stories. They were always the best stories, and always good, but he had flattened some of them by repetition over the years," Fox says.

"I wanted to build them and we often returned to stories, just by accident or because I wanted more, and this always produced more detail each time, and it slowly built up and came more alive — at least in a literary way."

Richards was born east of London, in Dartford, in 1943. The Nazis were dropping bombs at the time, his mother told him. "That was evidence that Hitler was on my trail," Richards writes.

He remembers "landscapes of rubble," bombed-out streets and beatings in the schoolyard. His father, a foreman at General Electric, was often away. But Richards was close to his mother and adored his grandfather, Gus Dupree, a bohemian and musician who harmonized with Keith on radio songs and taught him a few chords on guitar. One of the great discoveries of working on "Life" was remembering his grandfather and "how much in his own way he had to do with what I became, how much I learned from him."

He was a choir boy crushed at age 13 when his voice changed and his talents were no longer needed. "It still rankles, that humiliation. It still hasn't gone out, that fire," he writes. "That's when I realized there's bigger bullies than just bullies. There's them, the authorities."

Rock 'n' roll, he likes to say, changed the world from black and white to Technicolor. On the radio, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry were shouts from a party he was dying to join. On paper, he found a lonely, fictional soulmate in Holden Caulfield of "The Catcher in the Rye."

"It just opened me up, just, wow," Richards says of J.D. Salinger's novel. "A kid from another country, and a certain sense that the emotions were pretty much universal. You could feel just as disconnected in Iowa or New York as you can in Berlin or London or anywhere else"

In 1961, he was on a train and ran into Mick Jagger, a childhood acquaintance from the cleaner side of town, Posh Town. Jagger was carrying rock and blues albums under his arms; a musical bond was born. Mick liked to sing. Keith could play. By 1962, the Rolling Stones were a working band, by 1963, a live sensation, and by the mid-1960s, international outlaws.

"I was hoping to explain a lot of what went down to be part of the Stones," Richards says. "Also, in a strange way, I wanted to put order into it myself. It's a very kaleidoscopic life, rock and roll, and trying to find some order and narrative is probably the hardest, because in real life, you don't think of things in such clear-cut terms."