Keef's guide to life

If the Rolling Stones weren't already staid and ancient, then their new coffee-table book might make them look that way. Its saving grace: Keith Richards.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Nov 7, 2003 | There's only one reason to read "According to the Rolling Stones," and his name is Keith Richards. I wonder if anyone else who's spent any time with this semiluxurious, bloaty tome has had the same experience: I started out looking at the pictures (there are lots of them), and then dutifully proceeded to reading the text, in which Richards, Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood recount the band's story in their own words. (Longtime bass player Bill Wyman is a spectral presence who blows through now and then, when the others remember to mention him.) There's the reliable, eternally elegant Watts (who reveals that on "Street Fighting Man" he played a 1930 toy drum kit that folded up into a little suitcase, and which he still has); the affable, regular-guy guitarist Wood (whose dad stopped calling him just plain Ronnie and began calling him "Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones" when he joined the band in 1975, replacing Mick Taylor); and old-granny-in-a-dress Jagger, who sounds mostly as if he's waiting for the prune juice to take effect ("'Exile on Main Street' is not one of my favorite albums, although I think it does have a particular feeling ... I had to finish the whole record myself, because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies. I was in L.A. trying to finish the record, up against a deadline. It was a joke").

Jagger, God love him (because somebody has to), comes off as an almighty pest, and Wood and Watts are perfectly charming and occasionally incisive. But after cruising through some 100 of the book's 360 pages -- or is it 3,600? -- I found myself bypassing just about everyone else and heading straight for Keith.

Who else is going to come right out and say, "After all, the only thing Bill [Wyman] did was to leave the band and have three babies and one fish-and-chip shop!" (And on the next page, when he says, "I love Bill dearly," you absolutely believe it.) When the others speak of poor Brian Jones, they make tiptoeing pronouncements about his insecurity, his low self-esteem, his confusion about his own direction and how it meshed (or, more accurately, didn't) with that of the band. Keith -- who had, of course, hooked up with Jones' girlfriend, the glamorous, long-leggedy-beasty Anita Pallenberg -- says, "He was a pain in the arse, quite honestly."

For those who want to know more (and who doesn't?), in another passage he lays everything out in more detail: "With Brian it was all self-consuming pride. If we'd been living in another century I'd have been having a duel with the motherfucker every single day. He would stand on his little hind legs about some piece of bullshit and turn it into a big deal -- 'You didn't smile at me today' -- and then he started to get so stoned, he became something you just sat in the corner."

Poor, dead Brian. And yet there's something bracingly sympathetic about the way Richards talks about him -- as if he realizes that making mealy-mouthed pronouncements about the dead does them no favors.

Even more than that, Richards, with his plain talk and his dedication to showmanship even when he's being interviewed for a book and not performing, is exactly the kind of voice the Stones need right now. The Stones, it seems, want to be both a legend and a working band. How does any band pull that off, after sticking together (more or less) for 40 years? Even though rock 'n' roll seems to have been around forever, the Stones are only 10 years younger than the form itself; in that context, records like "12 x 5" and "Aftermath" are rough parallels to the cave drawings at Lascaux.

In theory, I wholeheartedly believe that you're never too old to rock 'n' roll. But in practice -- well, I haven't been interested in a new Stones record in years. Yet I can't help being fascinated by the Stones themselves, partly because so much of their work has given me such great pleasure over the years, and partly because I'm awed that they're still kicking around. I respect them for that, and in a way, I feel sorry for them: When the Beatles broke up, the fracture seemed premature, a crack in the universe the world wasn't ready for (even if the band members themselves had more than had it by then).

But the Stones never granted themselves the luxury of leaving their audience wanting more: Instead, they've gone on playing past the point where many of their fans might have preferred less. And now they've stepped over yet another line, edging even closer to Steve and Eydie-dom: They've put out a coffee-table book about themselves. How un-rock 'n' roll is that?

"According to the Rolling Stones" is one of those leaden Christmasy books, the kind of thing desperate wives, girlfriends, moms and daughters buy for the men in their lives when they have no idea what else to get. In the book and elsewhere, the Stones are very cagey about their unspoken competition with the Beatles. Supposedly, of course, there was no real competition between the two outfits -- and the cover of "Their Satanic Majesties Request" looks nothing like that of a swinging little record that the Liverpool four just happened to have put out some five months earlier.

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