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But if rock and roll, Richards-style, is all about your crotch and not your mind, why did he call his autobiography Life? Obviously there’s some trademark Richards irony in that choice. There he is on the jacket cover, the rock star with a legendary reputation for life-saving blood transfusions, sporting a skull-ring and lighting his seven-hundred thousandth some-odd cigarette (figure two packs a day for fifty years) next to the word “life.” Irony aside, Keith would say it’s simply because that’s what his book’s about. And there’s no doubt that Keith has lived intensely. He’s been pursued by fans who adore him and cops and politicians who hate him. He’s thrived at the pinnacle of rock star success and hit bottom (and bounced a few times). He’s rubbed elbows and traded riffs with the greatest of musicians and songwriters, dated, married, or bedded some of the most beautiful women in the world, and glimmered alongside rock’s greatest vocalist, even when the twins weren’t speaking or writing classic albums together.

Had he gone for double entendre instead of irony, he could have called the book History. Along with The Beatles (though, more about them later), Keith, Mick, and the rest were front-row-center participants in some of the massive cultural changes happening in the 1960s in the wake of the free speech and civil rights movements and, of course, the British Invasion. Thirty years later, they were still on top of things. On August 17th, 1990, Keith and Mick and the band started up a stadium full of Czechoslovakian Stones fans who had endured over twenty years of Soviet occupation during which The Stones and other bands were not permitted to play. After Keith’s opening riff, these Czechs spent two hours “jumping, clapping, shouting, dancing and singing along, surprising themselves” according to Eduard Freisler, there with his dad as a teenager, who watched The Stones officially liberate his father and his country from Soviet rules and attitudes.

With posters around the stadium declaring “The Rolling Stones roll in, Soviet army rolls out” (New York Times, August 17th, 2010) you might say that if The Stones and what they represent had not helped defeat communism in the Cold War, they obviously outlasted it and got over the obstacle it put in their way. But that’s what Keith and The Stones are good at. They survived the death of their founder Brian Jones, the disaster at Altamont, the shadow of The Beatles (who were always a little more respectable and successful), drug arrests, near bankruptcy, disco, “artistic differences,” romantic jealousy, enough cigarettes, drinks, and drugs to bury weaker constitutions, and of course the big guns of heroin that almost put Keith in a Canadian jail and sooner rather than later, we all figured in the 1970s, would make Keith history.

Yet all of this life and all this history, Keith would have us believe, has nothing to do with philosophy? Philosophy involves many things, but one is an attitude and an approach to life that puts things in a certain framework and perspective. Keith’s book is exemplary, for there is no doubt it could have been a much darker, more depressing, and even tragic book about the darker sides of human nature. It could have been about greed, jealousy, insecurity, and addiction, or Spinal-Tap stories about managers stealing money and publishing rights. Or it could have been a sad display of old rockers trying to settle old scores before the spotlights finally go out. Life is often like that, and anyone who’s closely observed the long career of The Stones knows it. But Keith’s Life is optimistic and uplifting. It has a distinctive focus and a mental discipline that says scholar or philosopher more than it says world’s greatest rock star. But Life is full of surprises—like the fact that Keith owns what sounds like a world-class collection of books (and guitars).

Don’t Trust Anyone Over Seventy-Five

The focus that keeps Keith’s life and his book on track is music. Even after four decades, he