Life

The Facts:  Here it is:  Life!  Once I was done rolling my eyes, I started in and had a few more pages of eye rolling as I got used to a slightly disjointed, slightly sexist, slightly huh? style.  At about page three, I realized that this was no rock star, drug-addled affectation, that we were getting the story from the man himself, as he saw it, and more importantly, as he experienced - a life that most of us cannot begin to imagine.  I was completely won over and on for the whole ride.

Is it good?  In a word, yes.  This is not a golden trip down memory lane, stopping off at every awards show in a Rolls Royce, but rather a long hard look at a long life lived hard.  After an opening anecdote about an ill conceived drive through the South with a car full of drugs, an extremely entertaining bit complete with a court scene in the format of a play, Keith starts up with the business of playing the guitar.  He has complete insight and understanding of playing music, manipulating sounds - both vocal and instrumental to write songs, and the daily toil necessary to the process of creation.  What about the drugs?  Yes, there are drugs drugs drugs, neither glorified nor vilified, just there as part of the story because they were there as part of his life - an unflinching look at years wasted on heroin and in the pursuit of heroin.

Cringey bit:  I don't have many complaints about this book, but on toward the end I got the sense that he was getting sick of writing it as he started to chuck in tales of recent vacations and back stage musings about chicken pie.  This is a really mild complaint, because the book has a strong and satisfying ending.

Favorite part:  The book is chock full of quotables that are just hilarious:  "Mick picked up the slack; I picked up the smack" for example, or the part where Keith compares Mick Jaggers solo outing to Hitler's Mein Kampf - so funny.  Bitchiness aside, and I don't think it's all that terrible - it's pretty entertaining, my absolute favorite parts were the sections where Keith talked about playing guitar and the craft of song writing.  It was an unexpected look into the work that goes into creating music.