This examination of the rock musician's life concentrates on the relationship between Richards and his music "The interesting thing about music to me is that music has always seemed streaks ahead of any other art form of social expression."--Keith Richards "A close-up look at the hard-driving, passionate musician who was once a choirboy and a convict."-- Playboy "If there's one truth about the Rolling Stones, it's that people tend to die around them. Stanley Booth, God bless him, has lived to tell about it . . . Keith emerges quietly as the portrait of a specific kind of artist--a hard-working, record-mad, true musician."--Sarah Vowell "Stanley Booth's new bio, Keith, is pretty close to a Stones demythology. Booth gets out of the way and lets the guitarist tell it."-- Puncture Magazine "Booth has crafted a worthy adjunct to his own True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (easily the best chronicle of the band), weaving a tale that's one part straight rock bio and one part Richards-centric view of the rock universe."-- Request Magazine "Booth cuts through the Dionysian thickets of Richards' adult life as gracefully as a blue highway through the Mississippi backwoods. . . . Booth lovingly details forays into the relationship between the artist and his music that are more than just illuminating; they're X-rays that expose the true heart of rock 'n' roll."--David Sprague Keith 1You don't know about me, and what is presently more to the point, you don't know about Keith Richards, without your having read a book called The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. It is a mainly true book, with some stretchers, about these English boys, men, who called themselves that and played music and got to be hugely well known. That book has been cannibalized more times and has made more money for everybody save its author than he, that is, I, would care to count.In his book Keith Richards, The Biography (Poseidon Press, first edition 1992) Victor Bockris tells us that Richards was born on the 18th and 19th of December 1943 (pages 16 and 295; the error was subsequently corrected). For the sake of Keith's mother, born Doris Dupree thirty-three years before the birth of her only child, one hopes December 18 is the correct date.That soi-disant protracted delivery took place at Livingstone Hospital in the London suburb of Dartford, Kent. Dartford lies fifteen miles to the east and slightly south of London on the way to Canterbury, an easy first stop for London pilgrims. Dartford has been inhabited since the Stone Age; Julius Caesar, following a battle nearby, decided to leave Kent and return to Gaul, and royalty has visited the town many times. Isabella, sister of Henry III,was married by proxy to the Emperor Frederick II of Germany in Dartford Church in 1235. Edward III held a tournament in Dartford in 1331 and later founded there the Dominican Priory. In 1415 Henry V passed through the town on his return from Agincourt, and in 1422, his body rested in the Parish Church on its way to Westminster Abbey. During the Wars of the Roses (1452), Richard of York camped on the Brent and later surrendered to Henry VI at Dartford.In Tudor times, Henry VIII built a manor house on the site of the Priory and there for some years lived the Lady Anne of Cleves after her divorce. Here, too, Elizabeth "slept at her own house at Dartford," in 1573.Somehow these visits from royalty did not manage to impart to Dartford the same patina of fashion, elegance, and ease that Cheltenham--Rolling Stone Brian Jones's hometown and another hangout for royals-is considered by many to have. Dartford is just a London suburb rather than a center of vacation landscape, and almost as regularly as there were royal visits there were rebellions. Dartford is closely associated with the Wat Tyler Rebellion of English peasants against the young (fourteen) and inexperienced King Richard II in 1381. (And against most of the clergy, nobles, gentry, ministers, judges, lawyers, foreigners, and anyone who could write a letter-all these were to be killed.) During this civil disturbance, Dartford featured as the rallying point for the rebels on two occasions, and a John Tyler of Dartford is supposed to have killed one of the government tax-collectors. Wat Tyler paid the ultimate price for his rudeness, being dispatched by the scimitar of stalwart John Standwich, one of the king's squires. The other rebel leaders, they who had, accordingto the medieval historian Walsingham, "punished by beheading each and all who were acquainted with the laws of the country," were themselves executed, their severed heads displayed on London Bridge.During the reign of Mary Tudor, Dartford was one of the many places where martyrs suffered for conscience' sake. The stake was set up at Dartford Brent, about three-quarters of a mile out of the town, along Watling Street. There, on July 17, 1555, Christopher Wade was burned as a heretic; the memory of the Kent martyrs is perpetuated b