Keith: Standing In The Shadows

Keith: Standing In The Shadows
Stanley Booth
St. Martin's Press, 1995

Stanley Booth, author of The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, has also written a biography of Keith Richards called Keith. At 210 pages, with rather large printing on small paper, this book is rather short but the number of Keith quotes makes it fun reading.

Although the quotations are interesting, they are also one of the book's faults. Booth tends to use quotation after quotation strung together so that you lose all sense of who is talking. A simple "Keith said" or "Stu said" in the middle of two-page quotations would make reading easier. A small kvetch, I know, but it did slow down my reading every time I had to go back and check out who was speaking.

If you're looking for any new information in this book, forget it. The years go by really fast as chapter follows chapter and you never get deeply into any of the scenes played out. This is strange considering that Booth was supposedly there with the Stones when what he's talking about was going down. What the book lacks is depth. And a good fact checker. At one point Booth refers to Keith's car the Blue Lena as a Mercedes. After reading the canonization of Brian in Bill Wyman's Stone Alone, it was good to get a second opinion from none other than Ian Stewart. Booth quotes Stu as saying:

"There are two ways of looking at it. You can say that Brian formed the group or you can say if Brian never existed Mick and Keith would have formed a group that sounded pretty much like the Rolling Stones. Chronologically, Brian did form the group.

But Mick, Keith and Dick Taylor would have done it anyway. In a lot of respects Brian was very little help musically. Brian worked hard at being a rebel. Keith was a born rebel." - p. 56

To be fair, Booth does say that Stu never liked Brian to begin with and liked him even less as the years went by. Booth has his own bias: he considers Keith a friend and got into heroin at the same time. Seen in that light, the book becomes a homage to a friend who Booth sees as "heroic." Booth also seems to have liked Stu and I wonder what a book about Stu would be like. It's too bad Stu never wrote a book. His would be a very

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