Keith Richards with Michael Fox Life
Having acquired the iPad and downloaded the iBooks and Kindle apps on Christmas Eve, it probably comes as no surprise to learn that Hughesy was almost immediately checking out the options at iTunes (where, to be quite honest there was relatively little of interest and the items were priced uncomfortably close to bookshop price tags) and Amazon, where the range was much wider and much more reasonably priced.
Sighting Keith Richards' Life for $US9.99 it was fairly obvious that I'd found my Christmas holiday reading, and, in any case, it was one of those books I'd been eyeing warily since it would probably tie comfortably in with my Interesting Times project.
In a way I couldn't help thinking Interesting Times may well have been a suitable title for this story detailing how a working class kid from an unremarkable background was transformed into the most elegantly wasted man alive, but Life, in its own way, sums up a story which has that unremarkable bloke going through the last fifty years or so doing what he does for a living.
The fact that what he did for a living involved playing guitar, writing songs, sitting around recording studios and ingesting enough chemical stimulants to keep him going might, on one plane be miles away from the routine of the nine to five wage slave, but when you look at it from Keef's perspective it's probably not a whole lot different.
It’s a job, and the lifestyle comes with it.
The differences, and for that matter the whole phenomenon of the Rolling Stones, comes across, in this account, as a remarkable combination of chance, coincidence, dumb luck and external factors over which the key protagonists had no control.
Anyone from my vintage would, of course, be familiar with most of the story, and while the narrative covers all the incidents you'd expect, Keef's version of most incidents is remarkably prosaic.
Drug busts are the result of carelessness, bad luck or zealous law enforcement officers and are circumvented by a combination of luck, well-connected lawyers and the presence of the Canadian Prime Minister's wife in the Stones' entourage.
Born into a family with an interest in American music at a time when he was able to recognize Chuck Berry as a continuation of a tradition rather than an electric rock'n'roll heretic (don't laugh, Robert Gordon's biography of Muddy Waters has one well-known critic and his associates getting up and walking out of St Pancras Town Hall in 1958 when Muddy Waters struck the first note on his electric guitar once he picks up the guitar it’s fairly clear where he’s headed.
Then there's the coincidental meeting of two teenagers who's known each other at primary school meeting up as teenagers with Mick Jagger carrying a bundle of Chess LPs into a train compartment and explaining he was getting his albums by mail order.
As Richards points out it was a time when you hung out with whoever had the records, so it may well have been a case of no Rolling Stones had either of them missed the train or chosen another compartment.
There's also a sense of the rush of events that transformed a bunch of blokes doing their best to replicate Chicago blues to the target of hysterical assaults from hordes of screaming feral, body-snatching teenage girls.
From there on, of course, much of the content covers familiar territory, and while there's not much that's new or overly outrageous, the events are largely given fairly mundane explanations. The explanation of the presence of a Mars Bar on a table beside a naked Marianne Faithful wrapped in a fur rug is because on acid suddenly you get sugar lack and you're munching away.
Not that such an explanation would have gotten the gutter press’s mind out of the gutter.
The demise of Brian Jones comes across as inevitable rather than tragic, as does the mayhem surrounding the Stones’ appearance at Altamont. Tours on one level are unbridled orgies, while Keef wanders around the itinerary wrapped in the tour cocoon and largely unaffected and uninfluenced by his surroundings.
The subjects of drug use and heroin addiction are treated with a matter of factness that’s totally unromantic. Those of us who remember the kerfuffle about hard drugs back in the day will be a little bemused by Richards’ assertion that under the National Health scheme addicts could, at that time, register with their GP and be given a regular supply of heroin pills along with the equivalent in pharmaceutical quality cocaine.
Addicts, of course, doubled their alleged consumption and sold off whatever was surplus to requirements.
He’s equally candid about most matters through the rest of the book, the recording of Exile On Main Street and the subsequent albums, the various tours, his slide into addiction and its influence on the power relationships within the band and the inevitable consequences for his working relationship with Mick Jagger when he stopped using.
One could continue, ticking off the topics as each is addressed, but that’s probably enough to be going on with.
Still, regardless of your familiarity with the plot line, it's an entertaining read, and ghost writer Michael Fox does an excellent job of capturing Richards' vocal mannerisms on paper. The audiobook, apparently, is read by Johnny Depp, who allegedly delivers a similar degree of verisimilitude.
As an initial foray into reading on the iPad, Life has prompted frequent return visits to Amazon, and in terms of a reading platform an index containing hyper-links actually works better than the index on a paper-based hard copy.
Life, in other words, will be sitting on the iPad for a while in case I need to check something for Interesting Times.