Keef's guide to life

In yet another feat of bold non-imitation, "According to the Rolling Stones" has the same glassy-eyed stiffness as "The Beatles Anthology," released a few years back. It's amusing enough to dip into, but there's something dispiriting about trying to read the damn thing -- you begin to feel like one of those obsessive completists who ostensibly loves music so much he can't bear to actually listen to it anymore, preferring to marshal facts and anecdotes and recording-date thingamabobs, which are much more manageable than the slippery moods and feelings that music teases out of us.

All that said, "According to the Rolling Stones" does have some nice pictures. Covering the band's nascence in the early '60s (in their trimly cut mismatched clothes, they looked much more "street" than the Beatles, and cooler in a rufty-tufty way) right up through the release of the 2002 retrospective "Forty Licks," the book is reasonably useful as a visual record of who the Stones were and who they have become.

There's a photo of the elfin Wood curled up uncomfortably in a guitar case, like a cat who has adamantly decided to have a nap in a box that's way too small for it. We get numerous pictures of the dapper Watts, who has aged the most beautifully of all the Stones -- young or old, he manages to come off both dapper and utterly, likably regular at the same time. And, of course, there are many, many pictures of Jagger looking self-important, both with and without makeup. Let no one accuse me of being unfair to poor Mick, though: I pick on him only because he invites deflating like no other rock star, not least because his place in the rock universe is so firmly assured. And there are photographs here -- including one very famous one, taken by David Bailey, of Jagger in a fur-trimmed hood, a blasé hipster Eskimo who's just dropped in from the land of cool -- that cement his position in the pantheon of the most beautiful creatures of the '60s.

And yet, again, it's Richards you can't look away from. The Richards of the late '60s and early '70s had more innate, scruffy elegance than any other rock star of his (and perhaps any) era: Swathed in scarves and decked out in chunky silver jewelry, he's both dashing prince and exotic princess, sly seducer and debauched maiden, a man so completely in control of his masculinity that he can't resist wrapping himself in its feminine complement. But he never came off as fey or affected: His look wasn't about bending genders, and it wasn't an art-school statement. Striped pants, ruffled blouses, white leather boots with lizard-skin cap toes: It appears that he simply wore (and to this day, continues to wear) what he likes, not as an affront to conventional notions of how men should look, but as an outright reinvention of them -- a way of saying that all men have something of womankind within them, and vice versa, so why not take advantage of all the available options?

And despite his infamous excess, Richards seems to remember more colorful details than anyone else in his band. At one point, Charlie Watts tries to downplay an episode during the '80s -- a period during which, he admits, he was drinking heavily -- when he went for Jagger: The group was spending some time in Amsterdam and Jagger decided he wanted to speak to Watts. Jagger got on the phone, asking, with obvious insolence, "Where's my drummer?"

"He annoyed me," Watts explains, "so I went storming upstairs and told him not to say things like that."

Keith picks up the story and runs with it: "There's a knock at the door and there's Charlie Watts, dressed in a Savile Row suit, tie, hair done, shaved, cologne. He walks across to Mick, grabs him and says, 'Never call me your drummer again' -- bang. On this table is a great silver platter of smoked salmon ..."

For the rest of the story, you'll have to read the book. Or at least just the Keith sections. At one point, Richards fumes about being hounded by law enforcement goons on both sides of the Atlantic, simply because they wanted to make an example of him as a symbol of excess: "At the end of the day you don't mess with me. There's no point in doing it. I'm only a guitar player, I write a few songs. I'm a troubadour, a minstrel -- it's a long-established profession. That's all I do. I don't have any big aspirations. I'm not Mozart."

Maybe that sounds a little too self-effacing, coming from one of the most revered guitarists in rock history. But it also sounds astonishingly sensible. Maybe next year's hot Christmas item should be one of those little books that grace bookstore checkout counters everywhere -- "The Wit and Wisdom of Keith Richards." It could even come with a companion volume: "Keith Richards' What Not to Wear," including tips for making a staid daytime outfit suitable for all-night rockin' just by adding a few key accessories, like a skull ring or a Moroccan scarf. Keith Richards is a man who knows how to live, and there's plenty we can learn from him. Chicken soup for the soul, bloody 'ell.

• View blog reactions