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THURSDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2010


A rocker and a punk hit some of the same notes musicians from C1


generation’s indictment of its pot- bellied predecessor, and some punk rockers, especially in Brit- ain, didmake a point of their raw youth. But Richards’s and Smith’s books, which have been widely reviewed, aren’t as distant as sep- arate critiques might suggest. Read “Life” and “Just Kids” to- gether, and the striking thing is howmuch they overlap.


Richards was born on Dec. 18,


1943; Smith followed three years later, on Dec. 30, 1946. Both are the children of factory workers andgrewupwithlittlemoneyand big aspirations. Each loved art, literature and classical music as well as rock-and-roll, andhadcul- tured elders. Richards’s grandfa- ther, a jazz-band veteran, encour- aged the boy to play guitar; Smith’s father read Plato out loud at the dinner table. Richards’s book covers amuch


longer period—fromhis birth all the way to 2007 — while Smith’s concentrates on the eight years when she was closest to friend, lover and artistic co-conspirator Robert Mapplethorpe. But the two accounts often dovetail, and some of the same supporting characters appear in both sagas. One explanation for the paral-


lels is thatpunkrockwasnot,orat least did not begin as, a genera- tional movement. The early punks were very nearly contem- poraries of the rockers they ac- cused of spiritual starvation. The ’60s rock generation, Smith writes, “was just a beat before mine.” Yet the Rolling Stones released


their firstalbumin1964,whilethe Patti Smith Group’s debut didn’t arrive for another 11 years—more than just a beat. The gap reflects, in part, the one between Rich- ards’s single-mindedness and Smith’s dabbling: He was utterly possessed by music, while she pursued art, poetry and (briefly) acting before making the fateful decision to enlist Lenny Kaye to accompany her on electric guitar at her first poetry reading. But there are two other significant factors: SmithwasAmerican and, well, a girl. Ruthless with time-wasters


and no-hopers, the 1960s British educational system dumped working-class kids into the job market in their mid-teens. Rich- ardswas expelledfromvocational school in his home town of Dart- ford, outside London, but man- aged to slide to nearby SidcupArt College.The curriculumwas com- mercial art, preparation for a ca- reer in advertising. As at many British art schools then, however, the real courseof studywasAmer- icanblues, jazzandrock.Richards had learned a lot of Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed by 1962,when he firstmet pianist Ian Stewart, one of several candi- dates for “leader” of the Rolling Stones.Art schoolwasout forever. Around the same time, Smith


won an art competition at the Sherwin-Williams paint store near her southern New Jersey home. She began collecting cheap used folios of the great painters and planning her career as an artist. But her father feared that his gangly, tomboy daughter “was not attractive enough to find a husband.” So she enrolled at Glassboro State College to work toward a teaching degree and a profession that would guarantee “security.” What liberated Smith, oddly,


was an unwanted pregnancy.And here’s one of the placeswhere her life significantly diverges from Richards’s.DismissedfromGlass- boro, the 19-year-old Smith


ETHAN RUSSELL


ROCKROYALTY: In the pages of “Life,”Keith Richards, a working-class kid who became a wealthy superstar, relates stories of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, but also of family and quieter domestic life.


agreedtoaprivateadoptionofher firstborn, thenmovedtoBrooklyn with vague notions of studying at the Pratt Institute. Instead, she met Mapplethorpe, and became his supporter and protector. Her role could be described asmater- nal, especially after Mappletho- rpe came out — to himself as much as anyone—as gay. So it was hardly out of charac-


ter when Smith, in 1980, began a long sabbatical from rock music to be a full-time wife (to former MC5guitaristFred“Sonic”Smith) and mother. Her synthesis of the Ronettes and Arthur Rimbaud, Jim Morrison and Antonin Ar- taud couldwait until son Jackson and daughter Jesse grewup. This was not Richards’s ap-


proach. While taunting both death and the cops, the guitarist sired five children — three with model-actress Anita Pallenberg (one died as an infant) and two with model Patti Hansen. There are pictures of the four surviving kids in “Life,” and they seemto be doingfine.But it’shardtoreadthe book and not fear for the older two, Marlon and Angela. Their father was a junkie when they were born, and for years after that. So, by the way, was their mother. Incredibly, Marlon became his


father’s “roadbuddy” at 7.Theboy navigated as Richards drove to gigs onthe Stones’ 1976European tour, andwas designated to awak- en his father when he nodded off before a show. That’s because Richards kept a “shooter” under his pillow, and the road crew de- cided that Marlon was the mem- ber of the entourage least likely to get plugged for awakening the zoned-out guitarist. “He was a great minder,” Rich-


ards writes of Marlon, with no apparent irony. Angela soon became the re-


sponsibility of Richards’smother, still living in Dartford. Marlon later joined a Long Island rock- and-roll household headed by the guitarist’s father. (Richards’s par- entshadsplit as soonas their only child left home.) Eventually,Mar- lon sent himself to school in Brit- ain.


Despite his routine references


to “bitches” and“oldladies,”Rich- ards doesn’t seemto be awoman- hater.He insistshe’snot a soulless seducer like longtime bandmates Jagger and Bill Wyman, or a bat- terer like the late Brian Jones, another “leader” of the Stones.He claims to prefer cuddling to sex and to “have never put the make


on a girl in my life.” His affection for early love Veronica Bennett— later Ronnie Spector — seems genuine, and he’s beenmarried to Hansen for 27 years. But many of the people on


“Life’s” enemies list are there be- cause of the brief period in 1968 when Pallenberg slipped from Jones to Richards to Jagger and then back to Richards. If the gui- taristunderestimates Jones’s con- tributionto the Stones, it’s at least in part because Jones abused Pal- lenberg. (Actually, most of Rich- ards’s stories about thismistreat- ment involve Jones’s failed at- tempts to hit his then-girlfriend, often injuring himself in the pro- cess.) Among the many injuries sus-


tained during Richards and Jag- ger’s long working relationship, one that still festers is the singer’s alleged fling with Pallenberg on thesetof “Performance.”Richards continues to seethe at Donald Cammell, themovie’s co-director, calling him “a twister and a ma- nipulator” for casting Jagger and Pallenberg as lovers in the film. The guitarist is clearly pleased that the director (who also has a cameo in “Just Kids”) ultimately “topped himself.” Although Richards says he


“never put themake on a girl,” he responded to Jagger and Pallen- berg’s supposed dalliance by bed- ding Marianne Faithfull, Jagger’s girlfriend at the time. He crows about it in one of “Life’s” most discussed passages, where he calls Jagger (or some part of him) a “tiny todger.” But the betrayal didn’t reallybotherhim,Richards protests, and besides, his distress inspired him to write “Gimme Shelter.” “Just Kids” has a gentler tone,


but it’s not free of jealousy.When Mapplethorpefirst startedhaving sexwithmen, he kept his exploits secret from Smith, who was shockedandhurt tolearnof them. (Although a devotee ofGenet and Rimbaud, shewas initially unpre- pared to learn that her real live boyfriend had this desire in com- monwithherpoetic crushes.)Lat- er, Mapplethorpe regarded Smith’s lovers with suspicion. That’s not unreasonable, since she had a string of affairs with menwhomade no commitments. “Just Kids” and the first part of


“Life” each recount their authors’ apprenticeships, but much of Richards’seducationwaspursued from a position of strength: He wasmale and a rock star.Hemay not have been a great guitarist when he first started encounter- ing such musical heroes as Wa-


ters,Don Everly and Elvis Presley sidemanScottyMoore,buthewas somehow on their level. An inge- nue who lucked into a spot in the ChelseaHotel scene,Smithlacked that status. She was fed and sup- ported, educated and encouraged by such lovers as poet JimCarroll (who turned tricks on the side), playwright Sam Shepard (who wasmarried at the time) andBlue Oyster Cult keyboardist Allen La- nier (who lived the promiscuous rock-star life onthe road).But she wasn’t their peer. As a woman in the late 1960s


and early ’70s, Smith was limited by other people’s expectations, but also by her own sense of possibilities and responsibilities. She wanted to be an artist and a poet, but her exemplars for those vocations were mostly male. Of- ten she looked to famous wives and lovers as role models. She prayed for “the mistress of Jules Laforgue,” identified with the “mutinous spirit” of Zelda Fitzgerald and constructed a poem “from the perspective of Jesse James’s girlfriend.” She writes that “the girls interested me:MarianneFaithfull,AnitaPal- lenberg, Amelia Earhart, Mary Magdalene.” That might seem an odd list,


but it’s characteristic of Smith, whoequallyprizedglamour,brav- ery and suffering. As a child, she was intensely religious and often ill, and found herself “privileged with a new level of awareness” when she suffered such routine ailments as measles and chicken pox. Then shemetMapplethorpe, a lapsed Catholic whose work usedpoetic imagesofmartyrdom. Anguish and death were among the things that united them. “Life” and “Just Kids” are both


booksof thedead.Smith’smemoir is explicitly a tribute to Map- plethorpe, who succumbed to AIDS in 1989. It also pays tribute to other casualties of the era, only some of whom Smith actually knew. One of her most cherished ghosts is Brian Jones, the pretty- boy martyr of the Rolling Stones. Hearing of his death in 1969, Smith “laid my drawing pencils aside and began a cycle of poems to Brian Jones, for the first time expressing my love of rock-and- rollwithinmy ownwork.” Richards’s reaction to Jones’s


demise was less flowery. He calls hima “whining son of a bitch.” While he doesn’tmourn Jones,


Richards does pay tribute to Ian Stewart, another lost Stone. And to his infant son, Tara, and his parents. (Did the guitarist actual- ly snort his father’s ashes? Well,


ARISTA RECORDS


JUSTAGIRL: Patti Smith writes in “Just Kids” that women ranging fromMarianne Faithfull to Amelia Earhart fascinated her.


kinda.)One loss that hit Richards hard was that of GramParsons, a close friend and crucial influence on the Stones’ forays into country music. It doesn’t make much sense in retrospect, but at the time of Parsons’s death in 1973, Richards was convinced that he had to pay tribute to his departed comrade by driving from Inns- bruck, Austria, toMunich to see a German model he barely knew. (His explanation to her: “I don’t know why, a friend of mine’s just died, and I’mpretty [screwed] up. I justwant to say hello.”)


Irreverent and unchurched but


respectful of loss, both Richards and Smith sought fresh rituals to mark life’s great changes. It’s fit- ting that this quest recalls the cultural improvisations of the Beats. If ’70s punkwas just a twist on’60s rock,many ofhippiedom’s enthusiasms were handed down fromthe likesof JackKerouacand Allen Ginsberg. They too loved “Negro” music, and chanted mash-ups of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu incanta- tions. In the early 1960s, Richards


struck bluesman poses at posh parties in suburban London, and enjoyed appearing exotic and dangerous. “I love to be treated as black,” hewrites.Once the guitar- ist had time andmoney to travel, hewas drawn to places populated by wise primitives with mind- altering rituals. In 1967, in the wake of Richards and Jagger’s first big drug bust, they headed to Morocco, the Beats’ hashish- perfumed 1950s playground. Lat- er, Richards was proud to be ac- cepted in Jamaica’s Steer Town, a ganja-fogged Rastafarian enclave where fewwhite people tread. The Beats were still around, of


course, to scorewalk-ons in “Life” and “Just Kids.” William S. Bur- roughs counseled both Richards and Smith, at different times, and Ginsberg tried to pick up Smith at aHorn&Hardart automat, think- ing she was a he. Even when the Beats are not there, they sort of are. Richards’s globe-trotting “outlaw” phase reads like “On the Road” with an unlimited expense account. All that money bought Rich-


ards “pure pharmaceutical” hero- in and cocaine, which kept him,


hewrites, frombeing a “pop star.” It also paid the attorneys who saved himfromever doing a long stretch in prison. But the cash helpedtamehim.After theguitar- ist kicked junk in 1978, hewas left with pop—okay, rock—stardom and even a sort of respectability. For decades, his home base has been that casbah of theNortheast Corridor,Westport, Conn. Richards didn’t go so far as to


be knighted, and says he coun- seled Sir Mick to decline that honor. Yet he likes his private library, his country homes and a good cup of tea. (No wonder he usually refers to himself as “Eng- lish,” although when feeling or- neryhe’sa“Celt,”oreven“Welsh.”) “Life” has some OMG moments, but its outlook often seems old- fashioned. As his references to “bitches” and “poofters” reveal, Richards hasn’t updated his mid-’60s attitudes. He’s a repro- batewitha strong senseofhetero- sexual-male privilege. In the 1970s, the bitches and


the poofters claimed bigger and better roles for themselves, a his- tory “JustKids” tells inminiature. But it was an evolution, not an insurrection. Punk turned out to be a reform movement, and one thing it mellowed was the fetish for self-destruction. Some punks flamed out, but others practiced moderation or “straight edge,” cool in their uncoolness. At least one got married and quietly raised her kids. The life goes out of “Life” after


the 1970s, and the three decades since claim only about 100 of its 564 pages. The beat goes on, but the adventure is over. Much like the music he plays, Richards grows up to become familiar, as- similated andmanageable. If Smith knows she’s no longer


a kid, Richards is still nurturing his adolescent defiance. “I’m not in show business,” he asserts to- ward the end of his autobiogra- phy.But that’s beyond his control. TheBizprovedcapableofexpand- ing to include junkie-pirate- bluesman as just another special- ty act.


style@washpost.com Mark Jenkins is a freelancewriter. 6 BY DAVEMCKENNA Fantasia performed at Consti-


tutionHall on Tuesday as if all the publicdramashe’spackedintoher years in the spotlight had taken a toll. The 2004 “American Idol” win-


ner was introduced to themasses as an unwed teen mother, then wrote a book to tell everybody she was illiterate. More recently, there’sherattemptedsuicideclose to the release date of her latest disc, “Back toMe,” afterwhich she denied that swallowing a bottle of aspirin was a ploy to generate PR for the R&B record. The self- destructive act, she said, was in- stead related to the end of a love affair with a married cellphone


salesman who, according to the salesman’s then-wife, filmed inti- mateencountersbetweentheillic- it lovebirds.Whew. Fantasia looked much older


than her 26 years, and though she can still hit the freakishly high shrieks that earned her the talent show title, she rarely seemed fo- cused on the songs during her 90-minute set. New tunes “I’m Doin’ Me” and


KYLE GUSTAFSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST


DRAMAQUEEN: Former “American Idol” winner Fantasia Barrino packed plenty of emotion into her concert atDARConstitutionHall.


“Manof theHouse”werescattered affairs that went nowhere despite theeffortsofherpowerfulbacking band. She took breaks every few songs to change hairdos and out- fits,andeventookoffher shoes for much of the night, but no ensem- ble lefther comfortable. The show had some musical highlights, most coming on cov-


ers. She briefly ignored her de- mons while dancing through Prince’s “Kiss” and crooning the Diana Ross smash “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?” She put onabigAfrowig,andas thescreen above the stage showed vintage imagesof theBlackPanthers,Fan- tasia asked everybody in the audi- ence to give the “Black Power” fist salute while the band broke into the Beatles’ “Come Together” (key parts ofwhich John Lennon lifted fromChuckBerry). And after telling security to let


fansbehaveas theywished,Fanta- sia,whohadbeenshouting “D.C.!” every 45 seconds or so, paid trib- utetothetown’s indigenousmusic and caused a claustrophobic’s nightmare by launching into “Overnight Scenario” from go-go


ONWASHINGTONPOST.COMTo read reviews of bothmemoirs,


go towashingtonpost.com/style. At DAR Constitution Hall, Fantasia does a convincing impression of a pop idol unraveling


favesRareEssence. But the wacky vibe was over-


bearing while she reprised “I’m Here,” a song she sang on Broad- waywhileplaying the leadin“The Color Purple.” Fantasia’s eyes started tearing up and her lips began quivering wildly, and she took time between each line to look skyward and mouth “Oh, Lord” and “Oh, God!” away from themicrophone. She fully bawled throughthe last lines, “I’mbeauti- ful! And I’m here!” then walked offstage. For anybody who’d ever seen the climactic scenes of “The Rose,” the 1979 feature filmabout anunravelingpopidol, thislooked familiar.


style@washpost.com McKenna is a freelancewriter.


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