Gathering No Moss (But Plenty of Girls and Drugs)

Just finished Keith Richards' autobiography, Life.

It took a while; it's a real tome.

And, while it is filled with preposterously charming vignettes wherein our hero sleeps with lovely women, procures drugs, and takes a piss at the law (sometimes literally), it is also, after a few hundred pages, a bit repetitive.

Every chapter after the first four or five, more or less, goes like this: look for drugs; find drugs; have argument with someone you love dearly but don't get along with; sleep with new girl; make new friend that you keep for life; record classic song; REPEAT.

Or maybe I'd say it like this: Keith Richards' life has been far more interesting that almost anyone's - in music or otherwise - but the story of that life, headshakingly strange and bigger than life as it is, suffers from a bit of "then i did this, then i did this, then i did this."

I mean, of course, everyone's life IS actually like that; lives don't have narrative arcs, climaxes, or denouements. But.

The Bob Dylan autobiography didn't suffer from this flaw because Dylan wasn't so slavish about the chronology. Dylan took the few parts of his life that he wanted to talk about and structured those narratively in such a way that the "story" was still incomplete but the story was better told. Though the jacket tells me that Keef had a co-writer on this, I can't tell exactly what he did, because the life is far more interesting than it has any right to be, but the writing itself doesn't live up to the events it describes most of the time.

Let' say this: if you love the Rolling Stones and picaresques, then this is a book that cannot fail to delight you, full as it is of the musical arcane, unbelievable escapes, sexual conquests, and debauches - but it won't all delight you equally, and that is a failure of editing and authorship, which is a bit of a shame.

Still, I enjoyed the shit out of it, so.