Keith: Standing in the Shadows

As someone who's had a very high-calibre Thing for Keith all my conscious life - and who's been praising Stanley Booth to the skies ever since I first got ahold of his "True Adventures of the Rolling Stones" - all I can say is: Stanley honey, I feel really bad for you! You sound so bitter and downhearted in this book, and that comes through stronger than your resonance with your subject, and stronger than your talent. I know being ripped off & cannibalized hurts. But you know you can do way way better than this, and you know Keith deserves way better than this. And even if you don't know it, Keith's and your (yes your!) loyal admirers deserve better too.Two of the stars are for the handful of new quotes and vignettes you put in this work for us to cherish. The other two are to encourage you to write the thing the way you know you can. You wrote the best book ever about the Stones. This book reads like the start of a rough outline of the best book ever about Keith - and that's the book I'm waiting for.

Stanley Booth's biography of Keith Richards is a pretty good book. It is well researched, it's well written, and it says a lot about Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones. One of the things that make particularly interesting (for those who are interested in Keith Richards anyway)is that Booth knows Keith personally and some of Keith's quotes are taken from personal conversations. However, the book like many other biographies of Keith and the Stones does not pay much attention to what is really important about Richards--that is, he is one of the greatest rock composers and one of the great music composers of the century.He wrote, either by himself of with Jagger, some 500 songs. Several of which have defined the terms, the syntax and the grammar of rock.Yet, biographers pay little if any attention to this simple and quite remarkable fact. I have never read any serious, detailed account of Keith's style. He's the riff master, yes, but what does that mean? Keith often said that he's a juggler rather than a musician. Because he claims that all is doing is playing around with the same notes. Great. But has anybody paid any attention to this? That is to how certain musical patterns emerge from Keith's compositions? To how these patterns have generated various rock classics over the years? To how Keith's use of the open tuning has influenced the way he writes his songs? My impression is that this biography of Keith, like several others, focus more on the superficial features of Keith's persona and much less on what's really relevant: Keith's music . It's really a pity.

Stanley Booth is overqualified, to say the very least, to write this biography of Keith Richards, the muscle behind the music of the Rolling Stones; having toured with the band in 1969, he chronicled the events leading up to their December, 1969 brush with darkness at Altamont. His focus here is not on the whole band, but on the Keith himself, the Human Riff, "the world's blackest white man" and the creator of such rock classics as "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Happy." This book draws heavily from previously published material - that's a drawback; however, said material is superior in almost every respect to just about anything else you'll find about the place, concerning rock music, American culture, sex, drugs, religion, and politics. Booth, a Southern boy, obviously loves how this Englishman took to his own heart the Mississippi Delta blues of black American musicians, and made it into something...else. Booth is not incapable of being critical towards his subject; he is unsparing in his criticisms of Keith's bull-in-a-china-shop lifestyle, his drug addictions and self-denial concerning his addiction problems, but mostly, this book celebrates the life, music, and adventures of the greatest living symbol of rock's defiant spirit.

This book is the tops! If you want a insiders look at the man who started it all, then pick this book up.