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| Gimme Shelter |
Publishers bid for Richards memoir Thu Jul 26, 3:00 PM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Publishers vying for the rights to rocker Keith Richards' autobiography have pushed up the Rolling Stones co-founder's advance to $7.3 million (3.6 million pounds), according to a report.
The bidding has narrowed down to two publishing houses, HarperCollins, a unit of News Corp., and Little Brown, a division of Hachette Filipacchi, the New York Post reported on Thursday.
The choice will come down to the editor and the marketing campaign planned for the book, since the bidders are deadlocked on price, the Post said, citing an unnamed source.
Neither publisher was immediately available for comment.
Richards' only goal was to beat the nearly $5 million advance that Eric Clapton snagged for his memoir, due out this October, the Post reported.
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| voodoopug |
This will be awful as Keith will only reveal certain stories (or maybe he cannot remember many of them). This will be full of fabricated stories such as the "falling out of a tree", etc. I am sure we will also get more first hand accounts of Muddy Waters painting Chess Studios, etc |
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| gimmekeef |
The only sure fire thing will be the title:
"Good To Be Here..Good To Be Anywhere"....
Although a better choice might be the.."The Rolly Stolly Man" |
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| voodoopug |
quote:
gimmekeef wrote:
The only sure fire thing will be the title:
"Good To Be Here..Good To Be Anywhere"....
Although a better choice might be the.."The Rolly Stolly Man"
or maybe "Brains, Heart, and Balls" |
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| Gazza |
quote:
voodoopug wrote:
This will be awful as Keith will only reveal certain stories (or maybe he cannot remember many of them). This will be full of fabricated stories such as the "falling out of a tree", etc. I am sure we will also get more first hand accounts of Muddy Waters painting Chess Studios, etc
he may be prone to exaggeration, but Keith's memory is almost certainly much better than any of the rest of the band. He's also not so guarded an individual that he'll "only reveal certain stories". Wrong Glimmer twin.
Lots of jokes in the press today along the lines of "how is he going to remember anything?", but they obviously dont know what they're talking about. |
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| voodoopug |
quote:
Gazza wrote:
he may be prone to exaggeration, but Keith's memory is almost certainly much better than any of the rest of the band. He's also not so guarded an individual that he'll "only reveal certain stories". Wrong Glimmer twin.
Lots of jokes in the press today along the lines of "how is he going to remember anything?", but they obviously dont know what they're talking about.
See Fiji injury as the prime example. Don't kid yourself, Keith is as protective of his image just as much as Mick is. (see: protests of Mick's knighthood when he should have simply faxed him a note of congratulations). Mark my words, this book will not let the truth get in the way of a good story! |
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| Gazza |
How do you know his memory is suddenly shot post-Fiji? Something to do with the stroke? If he's affected in some way, it could be a short-term memory problem anyway....
Wyman said a few years ago that Keith's memory is superb. I know people who've met him who will back that up. I know of one French fan who met him when he arrived in Paris for a solo gig in 1992 and offered to carry his bags at the airport for him.
Three or four years later, Keith saw him in a crowd of people outside his hotel and came over to him right away and had a chat with him. Remembered him instantly despite having only met the guy once years earlier for about five minutes. Pretty amazing memory for detail when you consider the amount of fans and hangers on the guy must encounter on a regular basis.
'The truth' and 'having a good memory' arent necessarily the same thing anyway. Damn right he'll be able to put a good story together. Whilst hes certainly image conscious, he's clearly not as defensive about it as Mick is.
Mick would never write a memoir where he can bare his soul. His memory is 'hopeless' to quote Bill many years ago. No wonder he gave back that multi-million pound advance for his autobiography in the mid 80s, when he admitted he couldnt remember anything worth a damn.
[Edited by Gazza] |
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| gimmekeef |
quote:
Gazza wrote:
How do you know his memory is suddenly shot post-Fiji? Something to do with the stroke? If he's affected in some way, it could be a short-term memory problem anyway....
Wyman said a few years ago that Keith's memory is superb. I know people who've met him who will back that up. I know of one French fan who met him when he arrived in Paris for a solo gig in 1992 and offered to carry his bags at the airport for him.
Three or four years later, Keith saw him in a crowd of people outside his hotel and came over to him right away and had a chat with him. Remembered him instantly despite having only met the guy once years earlier for about five minutes. Pretty amazing memory for detail when you consider the amount of fans and hangers on the guy must encounter on a regular basis.
'The truth' and 'having a good memory' arent necessarily the same thing anyway. Damn right he'll be able to put a good story together. Whilst hes certainly image conscious, he's clearly not as defensive about it as Mick is.
Mick would never write a memoir where he can bare his soul. His memory is 'hopeless' to quote Bill many years ago. No wonder he gave back that multi-million pound advance for his autobiography in the mid 80s, when he admitted he couldnt remember anything worth a damn.
[Edited by Gazza]
Too bad that French fellow wasnt named Brown Sugar...we could use Keith remembering that...... |
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| Gazza |
LOL
Someone on IORR the other day actually posted that Keith ISNT making cock ups in 'Brown sugar', but that its actually a new way (a semi tone higher) he's CHOSEN to play it and that there's no 'rules' that it should be in the right key.
And he was being serious....
[Edited by Gazza] |
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| gimmekeef |
LOL..Now thats funny....some of us will go to all ends to defend our heroes..... |
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| voodoopug |
quote:
Gazza wrote:
How do you know his memory is suddenly shot post-Fiji? Something to do with the stroke? If he's affected in some way, it could be a short-term memory problem anyway....
Wyman said a few years ago that Keith's memory is superb. I know people who've met him who will back that up. I know of one French fan who met him when he arrived in Paris for a solo gig in 1992 and offered to carry his bags at the airport for him.
Three or four years later, Keith saw him in a crowd of people outside his hotel and came over to him right away and had a chat with him. Remembered him instantly despite having only met the guy once years earlier for about five minutes. Pretty amazing memory for detail when you consider the amount of fans and hangers on the guy must encounter on a regular basis.
'The truth' and 'having a good memory' arent necessarily the same thing anyway. Damn right he'll be able to put a good story together. Whilst hes certainly image conscious, he's clearly not as defensive about it as Mick is.
Mick would never write a memoir where he can bare his soul. His memory is 'hopeless' to quote Bill many years ago. No wonder he gave back that multi-million pound advance for his autobiography in the mid 80s, when he admitted he couldnt remember anything worth a damn.
[Edited by Gazza]
PUt the Guinness down and go back and read what I wrote again. I didn't say the "injury" affected his memory, I listed it as an example of how the truth doesn't get in the way of a good story. Anyone who believes Keith climbed a tree needs to have their head examined.
I am not saying Keith cannot remember the stories, I am saying that he is very protective of his image. To think otherwise is remedial. |
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| gimmekeef |
Remedial pug?..careful..lol..theres already enough "short bus" thinking on this board... |
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| Gazza |
I dont drink Guinness! Enough of the stereotypes!!! |
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| gimmekeef |
Gazza..I thought you were gonna tell pug to put down his.."Michelob Ultra Lite".....American water in a can |
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| voodoopug |
quote:
gimmekeef wrote:
Gazza..I thought you were gonna tell pug to put down his.."Michelob Ultra Lite".....American water in a can
although AMerican beer is not nearly as good as most beer we import, I did have one of those Mich Ultra Lights before....humiliatingly bad, I actually threw up a little bit in my mouth and had to swallow it back down.
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| Dan |
quote:
voodoopug wrote:
although AMerican beer is not nearly as good as most beer we import, I did have one of those Mich Ultra Lights before....humiliatingly bad, I actually threw up a little bit in my mouth and had to swallow it back down.
I once saw a dog eat his own vomit. |
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| gimmekeef |
quote:
voodoopug wrote:
although AMerican beer is not nearly as good as most beer we import, I did have one of those Mich Ultra Lights before....humiliatingly bad, I actually threw up a little bit in my mouth and had to swallow it back down.
Pug..life is too short to put ourselves through such things!....Gutter water is superior to that stuff....Speaking of booze..if you enjoy scotch at all you must try Highland Park 12.....truly a delight and good price too! |
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| voodoopug |
quote:
gimmekeef wrote:
Pug..life is too short to put ourselves through such things!....Gutter water is superior to that stuff....Speaking of booze..if you enjoy scotch at all you must try Highland Park 12.....truly a delight and good price too!
I do enjoy scotch, and have not tried it, I shall try it in the near future based on your recomendation! |
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| gimmekeef |
quote:
voodoopug wrote:
I do enjoy scotch, and have not tried it, I shall try it in the near future based on your recomendation!
Pug..I think you'll like it..Any of your faves to recommend?... |
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| voodoopug |
quote:
gimmekeef wrote:
Pug..I think you'll like it..Any of your faves to recommend?...
I tend to like the bigger bodied single malts, Macallan 12 is pretty good if you haven't tried it before. |
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| gimmekeef |
Yes Macallan 12 is very good...You'll love Highland Park 12 then...even better than its own 15 or 18....Aberlour 15 is another good one...Lagavulin 16 for the heavy peat... |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Sex, drugs and guns: As rocker Keith Richards releases his memoirs, how much can the hellraiser really remember?
by CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD
Last updated at 21:38pm on 27th July 2007
Daily Mail
They say that if you can remember the 1960s you weren't there.
And certainly Keith Richards, once described as "the world's most elegantly wasted human being", would seem to be a prime candidate for full-scale amnesia when it comes to recalling large parts of his extraordinary career as a Rolling Stone.
But now the publishing world is being convulsed by a bidding frenzy for the guitarist's autobiography. Yesterday a figure of more than £3m was being bandied about by agent Ed Victor as the current highest bid.
Given that Bob Dylan had to appeal to friends to help him 'remember' what had gone on during the Sixties, it seems likely that Richards, whose excesses far outdid those of Dylan, would need very considerable assistance.
But Richards does have one advantage: his was a life full of drama long before he even picked up his first guitar. Born in Dartford, Kent, on December 18, 1943, in the same cottage hospital where a boy named Mike Jagger had been delivered five months earlier, he entered the world at an unpropitious time.
Years later, Richards was to recall: "If I'm walking through a hotel and I hear a TV, and it's playing one of those Blitz movies, the hair goes up on the back of my neck and I get goose bumps. It's a reaction - something I picked up from what happened to me in the first 18 months of my life."
When the Germans launched their V1 attacks in the summer of 1944, Dartford was among the worst affected towns. The Richards' modest flat above a grocer's shop on Chastilian Road was in a row of houses hit on the night of July 5.
According to the official report, "the weapon streaked in over the town centre, cut its motor and dropped silently out of the sky" on to the terrace street.
In the ensuing explosion, two houses, numbers 27 and 29, were destroyed and five people killed. The Richards' flat, at number 33, lost its front windows and part of its roof, but otherwise survived intact.
"Hitler dumped one of his V1s on us - nothing [was] left of the place," Keith said later, proving that his powers of recall can be somewhat unreliable.
On the night of July 5, he and his mother had actually been 150 miles away, visiting Keith's father who had been wounded in the Normandy landings and was convalescing in hospital in Mansfield, Notts.
Despite, or because of, his narrow escape, in later years Richards cultivated something of an appreciation of the Nazis' visual impact but not, it should be stressed, of their politics. One of his first stops on reaching America was at an armysurplus shop in West Hollywood, where he took the opportunity to invest in a variety of black leather coats, jackboots and other accessories.
When the Rolling Stones headlined on the top-rated Ed Sullivan Show in the summer of 1965, Keith nonchalantly performed three songs while wearing a Panzerkorps tunic.
The following night, he and the Stones went to a party at the home of the film director Jerry Schatzberg, where all five musicians appeared in a variety of highly distinctive military regalia - to the obvious dismay of some of the guests.
In May 1971, Mick Jagger married his first wife, Bianca, at a small, whitewashed chapel on a hillside above St Tropez. The British blues singer Terry Reid remembers having later gone to a room in the nearby Hotel Byblos where he and other Jagger guests could change before the reception.
"By and by we could hear a clanking noise growing ever louder," Reid told me. "It was coming down the corridor towards us. Clanking and rattling; very weird. All of a sudden it stopped right outside. The door swung open, and everyone did a double take.
"A man stood on the threshold. He was in full Nazi uniform. He seemed to be standing to attention, all SS tunic, with an Iron Cross or two dangling round his neck, and black jackboots. It was Keith."
In an industry where "peace, love and understanding" was the preferred slogan, Richards stood out as "something of a hard nut" as his long-time minder, Tom Keylock, admiringly described him to me.
After flying back from a concert in January 1964, the Stones were enjoying a late night meal at Heathrow airport when a party of three or four middle-aged Americans started yelling insults at them. The gist of their remarks was that the five long-haired musicians were of possibly dubious sexual orientation.
Keith promptly knocked down one of the offenders, scared off another and raised his red-knuckled fist at a third, who also then beat a hasty retreat.
In June of that year, after Richards got into a shoving match with an irate customer backstage at the San Antonio State Fair, he went downtown and, for $35, bought himself a fully loaded Browning Automatic. He would never again be without a gun when touring America - or even while relaxing at home.
This particular habit was to have dramatic, and nearly fatal, consequences in 1971, when, for tax-avoidance purposes, Richards found himself living in Nellcote, a mock-Roman villa perched on a clifftop overlooking Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera.
Relations between the haggard-looking rock star and the local community were to prove strained throughout the two years of Richards' tenancy. One afternoon he got into a minor traffic accident in the nearby town of Beaulieu.
The harbourmaster, Jacques Raymond, wandered out of his office to investigate and Richards addressed him as a "f***ing idiot". From this point on, things began to deteriorate rapidly. Keith rashly pulled out a toy gun belonging to his two-year- old son, and M Raymond in turn drew his own very real revolver before calling the gendarmes.
A fast-thinking minder intervened to calm things down, and Richards later invited the local mayor up to Nellcote for dinner and a few autographed albums, after which the incident was officially considered closed.
For a man who famously knew how to handle himself, Richards was also surprisingly soft-spoken and well mannered when it came to women.
His first serious girlfriend, Linda Keith, was in a head-on collision while on her way back from a summer-solstice party at Stonehenge, just as the Rolling Stones were returning from their first tour of America.
Despite having already stayed up for two straight nights drinking and listening to soul records, Richards went straight from the airport to his lover's bedside. As Linda Keith recalled: "My face was messed up so badly my family couldn't recognise me. I wasn't allowed mirrors and I was frightened.
"Keith came to the hospital and leant down and kissed me on my face, and at that moment - I'll never forget - he showed me that I wasn't a monster and I wasn't revolting. And that was Keith."
Some years later, a London music journalist named Judy Flanders met Richards one night at Blazes club, and was immediately taken by the "yawning gap" between the public performer and the private man.
"Forget what you read," Flanders told me. "He wasn't macho at all - he courted me. Keith was a very, very sweet guy. You'd laugh all night with him, sleep on silk cushions and in the morning he'd serenade you with his guitar. What's not to love about a man like that?"
An even more striking example of Richards' too-little known courtesy is provided by his bodyguard Tom Keylock. Keylock recalls that, even at the depths of his alcohol and various other addictions, Richards still retained his 'straight' side.
He enjoyed visiting his mother Doris, for example, and gossiping about Dartford; a pie, a pint and an old war film - preferably Kenneth More in Reach For The Sky - were "his idea of a big night out".
Some 40 years later, Keylock could still vividly remember the day when "I snapped at my missus on the phone at Keith's house. He overheard me and was well p***ed off. I got a b******ing - it was all about 'she's your lady' and 'show some respect', incredible stuff, really. I admired Keith for that."
But when the full story comes to be written, it may be Richards' legendary drug intake where the fine detail proves hardest to recall. One common misconception, which Keith himself has tacitly encouraged from time to time, is that he fell prey to addiction in the first place only because of the Stones' crippling schedule, specifically the intense touring they undertook after 1969.
At a drug possession trial in 1978, Richards' lawyer said his client had begun snorting heroin nine years earlier because he was 'exhausted', and had soon found himself doing twoanda-half grams a day "just to keep normal".
The inference was that the drugs had been a regrettable but understandable lapse brought about by "the pressures of Mr Richards' professional success".
The truth was somewhat different. The pre-Rolling Stones Richards was as precocious a student of narcotics as he was of the guitar. As early as 1960, when he was 16, Keith was on terms of some familiarity with the stimulant Benzedrine.
His adolescent friend Dick Taylor, briefly one of the early Stones and later a founder member of the Pretty Things, recalls: 'He was a real Teddy boy, and I used to love him for that. We were both on a pretty steady diet of speed [amphetamines] and other stuff, sprays, inhalers, anything.
"Right across the street there was this little wood with an aviary that had a cockatoo in it. Keith used to go over and feed it pep pills. When he was bored he'd bung the bird another one and watch it flap around on its perch."
By 1967, Richards' chemical locker had expanded to include marijuana, cocaine and LSD, along with copious draughts of what's authoritatively described as a "hellish grog" brewed in the hills of Kentucky.
That February, Keith, Mick Jagger and one of their friends were arrested and charged with various drug offences following a raid on Richards' country house.
The two Rolling Stones later won their appeals against conviction, although, for Keith, it was to be only the first of a series of court appearances that practically amounted to a residency. Over the course of the next decade he would be involved in four major possession trials, the charges ranging from hash to Chinese heroin.
On June 26, 1973, Luigi, his caretaker, opened the door of Richards' London home to a party of ten policemen. By then Keith could have had few illusions about what the dawn visit meant.
Between them, the officers carried off armfuls of grass, heroin, methadone, Mandrax tablets, water pipes and brass scales, as well as a .38 Smith & Wesson, a shotgun and several boxes of bullets. A month later, Richards and his family were relaxing at Redlands, his timbered country house near the sea in West Wittering, Sussex, when the property caught fire.
It was a desperate scene, with the dry thatch quickly going up in smoke above their heads. Keith and his common-law wife, Anita Pallenberg, managed to escape to the garden, where she apparently berated him while police and fire engines clanked up the lane.
"Bloody hell, Keith. Bloody hell! The only reason for coming down here was so that we could get some rest, and now look at it! Go on. Look at it."
"Not too good," Keith was forced to concede, as the roof fell in, sending up a shower of sparks, just as a minder managed to lug an armful of priceless guitars out on to the lawn.
Some ten weeks later, a judge in Nice handed down a suspended sentence for drugs offences against Richards and Pallenberg dating back to their residency at Nellcote two years earlier.
Immediately afterwards, Marlborough Street magistrates court in London declined to send the couple to prison following the latest raid on their home, instead giving Pallenberg a one-year conditional discharge, and Richards a fine.
Keith celebrated the verdict that night in the Londonderry House hotel, unfortunately managing to set fire to his room in the process.
On another occasion, the Stones' publicist, Les Perrin, and their road manager, Ian Stewart, helped Richards out of bed, into a car, up the motorway, through security at Heathrow, on to a jet, and, seven hours later, safely down the ramp in New York. He remained asleep throughout.
At the peak of what he later characterised as his 'lost weekend' on drugs, Richards would fly to Switzerland and subject himself to three days of haemodialysis, the filtering-out of waste and toxic substances by a kidney machine.
It was to prove a potent part of the Dracula legend that attached itself to the guitarist for much of the 1970s, in which he was said to have been 'sluiced out', or to have had a wholesale blood change, at a mysterious European clinic. At his subsequent pre-tour medical exam, the doctor pronounced Richards A1 fit, his visa was renewed and he was back on the road again.
Many of those who followed in Richards' path are long gone, and even some who survived appear never to have fully recovered their faculties.
As he apparently prepares to tell all, Keith himself can look back on a 45-year career that has cost him at least five court appearances, numerous hospital visits, assorted car crashes and near-cremations, as well as a permanent place on the Customs watch-list.
It's much to his credit that he has not only kept going but continued to make thrilling music, on stage if not always on record. His rumpled face is in itself an affront to the scrubbed, immaculate figures constantly bouncing around on MTV.
What's more, the Richards I know is an engaging, witty, wellread and kind individual. But it remains a curious fact these days that his speech patterns, much like his guitar playing, conform to a highly individual pattern, often punctuated by long, drawn- out pauses between sudden bursts of noise.
It's just possible that those strategic silences are the sound of Keith struggling to recall the details of an incredible past.
• Christopher Sandford's biography of Keith Richards (Headline) is available in paperback. His biography of Roman Polanski (Century) is published in September 2007.
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| Gazza |
quote:
Ten Thousand Motels wrote:
Sex, drugs and guns: As rocker Keith Richards releases his memoirs, how much can the hellraiser really remember?
by CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD
Amazing that someone who's actually written a biogrphy of the guy can actually come out with shite like this. Still, as he's writing his piece for the Daily Mail, I guess it has to toe their "one puff of cannabis and you'll turn into a junkie - we have proof" party line
Maybe he's just sore that HE wasnt asked to collaborate. |
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| glencar |
Keith's book will be a first day buy at my house! I agree that he seems like he's always been kind to women. |
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