Mother Nature knows how to welcome Keith Richards.

Mother Nature knows how to welcome Keith Richards.
The afternoon is warm and sunny minutes before Richards is to be interviewed at his manager's office in downtown Manhattan. At the top of the hour, the clouds darken. The door swings open and the grinning Rolling Stone arrives.
"It's been a much harder journey than I expected. At first, it was like, ‘Oh, sure, I'll tell you anything,' without realizing how things connect together and the effect they have on you," he said. "Hey, it's not easy to relive the death of your own son (Tara, who died in infancy in 1976). Old wounds are opened here and there, only to heal them."
Co-written by journalist and "White Mischief" author James Fox, "Life" topped the best-seller list on Amazon.com even before publication Tuesday. "Life," a firsthand journey from wartime London through the wilder parts of the 1960s, 1970s and beyond, could as easily be filed among the works of Richards' friend William Burroughs as alongside the memoirs of Bob Dylan or Eric Clapton.
"Life" is told in Richards' offhand, conversational rhythms, through recording sessions and concerts, drugs and drug busts, family fights and domestic comforts, guitar tunings and adventures with Mick.
Jagger writes most of the Rolling Stones' lyrics, but in countless interviews Richards has laid down his own take. He is candid and philosophical, jaded and tender, Bogart with a guitar.Quotes from over the decades — "I'll just keep on rocking and hope for the best," "I've never had a problem with drugs; I've had problems with the police" — are mottos for his fans.
"Life" is like the ultimate Keith Richards album, as if all the interviews were scraps of music that Richards and co-author Fox fleshed out and arranged. Private letters, diaries and journals were discovered, old friends consulted. Fox worked hard with Richards to freshen his memory.
He remembers "landscapes of rubble," bombed-out streets and beatings in the schoolyard. His father, a foreman at General Electric, was often away. But Richards was close to his mother and adored his grandfather, Gus Dupree, a bohemian and musician who harmonized with Keith on radio songs and taught him a few chords on guitar. One of the great discoveries of working on "Life" was remembering his grandfather and "how much in his own way he had to do with what I became, how much I learned from him."
He was a choir boy crushed at age 13 when his voice changed and his talents were no longer needed. "It still rankles, that humiliation. It still hasn't gone out, that fire," he writes. "That's when I realized there's bigger bullies than just bullies. There's them, the authorities."
"It just opened me up, just, wow," Richards says of J.D. Salinger's novel. "A kid from another country, and a certain sense that the emotions were pretty much universal. You could feel just as disconnected in Iowa or New York as you can in Berlin or London or anywhere else"