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the rule to the art of rock’n’roll). Keith says, for example, that when Mick would bring in a song that was largely complete, like “Brown Sugar,” he (Keith) would start out playing it on a six-string guitar in standard tuning, not his five-string guitar in open G tuning. The reason is that Mick plays standard and Keith didn’t want to just assume the song should be crammed into his favorite nook. But often the songs would take on a wonderful new life when Keith did pick up the five-string and say to Mick, “What about this … ?”

I have a friend and old band mate, a well-known guitar player in Memphis, who is a Keith Richards expert and has learned to do everything Keith does. I remember him telling me about the first time “Brown Sugar” came on the radio in Memphis in 1968. “From the first chord, you just knew,” he said. Knew what? “It was a number one song.” I have to agree. That was certainly one that “Mick wrote,” but it received some ineffable part of its life, of its nature, of its genius from the five-string tuning and from that tight sound, so different from “Honky Tonk Women” or “Start Me Up,” where you can hear just a bit of the separation among the five strings, as the chord is stroked. On “Brown Sugar,” not only is the guitar sound a little more like a green cherry than a ripe apple, it’s also exactly the tart thing it just has to be to convey the song, to make it a work of genius. Did Mick write “Brown Sugar”? Not alone, in the important sense, because without that perfect sound, and the perfect riffs (both the three-note and the six- note riffs that punctuate that rhythm guitar), it just isn’t genius.

The boundary between what Mick did and what Keith did would be impossible to draw. There were also boundary problems in their partnership, mainly because there apparently weren’t any healthy ones ever established, and maybe that was a needed feature for them to succeed. The twins reversed roles of bad guy and good guy even though they always were, to their later and mutual consternation, better together than apart and thus rendered creatively (and emotionally) interdependent early in life. The things they could do only together became, at times, an open wound, so for the sake of better art they just let it bleed. At other times their interdependence was a scab they couldn’t resist picking.

Keith says it’s “in the DNA code” that “sooner or later the two principals will turn on each other because one of them will be driven crazy by the knowledge that to be at their best they need to perform with the other person and therefore they need that other person to be successful, or even to be heard. It makes you hate that person. Well, it didn’t in my case, because I wanted us to depend on each other and carry on” (Life, p. 501). It doesn’t appear the twins have been genuinely happy with each other since about late 1968 (the Anita Pallenberg film debacle), which is to say that there are people in this world with grandchildren, who weren’t themselves even born the last time Mick and Keith were really “good mates,” as they might put it.

Anyone can see why they “stay together,” practically speaking. Each wants what he can get only with the co-operation of the other, sort of like why people stay in difficult marriages to be with their children. In this case it looks more complicated, though, because the creative side of their partnership, especially the songwriting process, requires more than a set of practical decisions concerning the kids, more than détente. It requires at least some genuine vulnerability to the judgments of the other, along with an openness to finding complementary wavelengths. There is a kind of pre-verbal communication that occurs in artistic (and any creative) collaboration, and it seems to require a kind of trust, at least if the songs have any depth (so these are not like those Nashville-style arranged songwriting dates).

In past years, Keith would stand at the microphone with his musical ideas and sing fragments of lines and make vowel sounds in a semi-linguistic encounter with possible language, while