For my birthday this year a friend gave me two books that were logical choices, yet books I wouldn’t have bought for myself. I ended up fascinated by both for very different reasons.
The common thread of the books is rock and roll in the ’60s and ’70s, kind of a natural for a guy of a certain age who’s written 535 album reviews and counting. That and the two narratives’ occasional brief intersections aside, though, this pair of autobiographical pieces could hardly be more different.
We’ve known for a long time now that Keith Richards is (a) a brilliant musician who co-composed some of the most memorable rock and roll songs of the ’60s and ’70s, (b) an incorrigible, unrepentant, world-class hedonist, and (c) possibly also kind of a dick. His massive, rambling, deliriously candid memoir Life reminds us of the first two and confirms the third. Richards’ memory is remarkable for having been at one time the most famous junkie on earth; other than the occasional blackouts, he seems to have registered and stored away most of what was happening around him even at his most debauched.
In the end—which takes a long time getting to in this 547-page tome—the clearest message offered by Life is that Richards is a man who regrets nothing, least of all his own regrettable attitudes toward women ("bitches"), gays ("poofters"), parenting (he made his young son his on-tour houseboy as he traversed the depths of heroin addiction), and even his musical other half and longtime frenemy Mick Jagger. Jagger, to his credit, has not responded publicly to the many jibes Richards throws his way in Life -- so a veteran rock journalist by the serendipitous name of Bill Wyman has done it for him, penning an absolutely brilliant imagined response by Sir Mick. It should really be required reading for anyone who completes Richards’ winding, entertaining-when-not-horrifying, largely amoral and deeply self-serving tome.
Standing in stark contrast to Richards’ celebration of self is Patti Smith’s exquisite memoir Just Kids, a celebration of two young artists’ drive to create and the complicated relationship they forged and re-forged within that charged environment. Smith deftly and inexorably draws the reader into her life as a sometimes literally starving artist in early 1970s New York City, all the while tracing her long, layered, sometimes fraught relationship with the “hippie shepherd boy” who would later become the noted and controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Smith’s is a book I didn’t particularly expect to enjoy—my relationship with both her music and Mapplethorpe’s photography is one of detached respect, an admiration for their technique and execution rather than any sort of personal connection with their art. What Just Kids accomplishes through Smith’s gorgeously constructed sentences and vignettes is to expose the roots of their art even as it’s describing their struggle to create it.
I’m not done with Just Kids yet, but am captivated by it, and in awe of the drive to create that lies at its core. Best known as a poet and musical visionary (the “godmother of punk,” some have called her), Smith’s only real misstep in my eyes is that she hasn’t spent more time working with prose over the years; perhaps now she will. And of course, it doesn’t hurt my appreciation for Just Kids that one of the gigs Smith landed in her varied efforts to scrape together a living while working on her poetry was writing album reviews. Hope springs eternal.
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