Keith : Standing in the Shadows

Rating:
Summary: ah, stanley stanley stanley ... !
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Slumping in the shadows
Review: Don't you just hate it when a biographer researches, investigates, does all the right things -- and churns out a boring, rushed-feeling book? Me too. So it is with Stanley Booth and "Keith: Standing in the Shadows," a biography that has been stripped down to the barest bones of Keith Richards' life.

The main focus of the book is Keith as Rolling Stone -- his childhood is handled in relatively few pages, and the book kicks in as he meets Mick Jagger for the first time. From there it follows Richards from a rather stormy middle-class youth to life as one of the biggest rock stars in the world. And, additionally, into the depths of addiction and self-destruction, and how he managed to crawl out before it could kill him.

But the problem is that Booth seems to be getting a bit TOO respectful of Richards, and doesn't dip more than a toe into Richards' personal life. His destructive, loving, dynamic relationship with Anita Pallenberg is put on the sidelines, as is his marriage to Patti Hansen and the death of his third child. The poor kid doesn't merit more than one sentence, despite the devastation it caused his parents.

The problem is, the stay-out-of-personal-lives approach does not work in the biography of an artist -- several songs were written about events in Richards' life. For example, Booth doesn't bother to note that Linda Keith was anything other than Richards' girlfriend du jour, but he apparently wrote "Ruby Tuesday" about her and considered her his first love. His music and personal life can't be easily separated.

That hands-off approach ruins most of the book -- while it has some interesting anecdotes, like the first tape of "Satisfaction" ever made, it feels as though Booth is just showing us a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. Where is the rest? He never tells us, only gives us a few tantalizing glimpses and not a great deal more.

What is more, Booth displays a rather boring writing style here. Richards' life has been a colorful and sometimes explosive one, but it sounds positively dull here -- the most exciting parts of the whole book are when Richards himself is being quoted. Those anecdotes make the book come alive in places.

Stanley Booth's business-only approach to Keith Richards causes a major stumble in what could have been a really good book. But the end result is very, very dull.

Rating:
Summary: not bad, not good enough.
Review: Stanley Booth bases his capability of writing keith richards' life on the fact that he 'lived in social intercourse with him'. although he manages to create few moments of intimacy, his book is more like a glance on the stones career through richards' eyes, rather than a true biography of keith. if you like to read the story of the stones, you would find Booth's previous book - 'the true adventures of the stones' - more complete. if you are interested in keith's biography, Victor bockris' book ( 'keith richards - the biography') is more focused. most of 'standing in the shadows' is based on conversations with keith. when not recycled, some of the quotes are valuable for those who, like me, find keith richards interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Keith Is Rock
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Keith's Life
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Keith deserves better; Booth has done better
Review: That Stanley Booth is one of America's finest profile writers AND a close friend of Keith Richards should have ensured this biography would be a moving, essential read. Instead, it is sloppy and a little sad.
Most disappointing is the fact that a significant chunk of the material seems lifted from Booth's far superior "True Adventures of the Rolling Stones." Admittedly "True Adventures," is great source material, even when cannibalized. Unfortunately, Stones fans must still endure Booth's account of his first meeting with Mick Jagger in which songs such as "Backstreet Girl" and "Connection" are linked to the album "Beggars Banquet" rather than "Between the Buttons."
To be fair, accounts of Keith's childhood and adolescence are enlightening, as are some anecdotes from the '70s and '80s. But this is a book that needed re-thinking, or at least savvy editing. Those who want a fresh, revelatory biography on Keith, or a worthy example of music writing from Booth, will have to look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: not bad, not good enough.
Review: This book is the tops! If you want a insiders look at the man who started it all, then pick this book up.

Rating:
Summary: Keith is The Man
Review: This book is the tops! If you want a insiders look at the man who started it all, then pick this book up.