Ever wondered what’s the longest Keith Richards had stayed up while pursuing a song, drugs, kicks, the next misadventure?

    Nine days, it turns out.

    “I have been conscious for at least three lifetimes,” Richards writes in his fast-paced, pull-no-punches autobiography, “Life” (Little Brown), estimating that he sleeps on average twice a week. The Rolling Stones guitarist has built a well-deserved reputation for indestructibility in those three lifetimes, surviving drug addiction, legal shakedowns, life-threatening accidents, a parade of unsavory companions and unstable lovers, and his own reckless nature. Along the way he cowrote some of the greatest songs in rock history and created an archetype of cool that seems only to expand with the years. In a culture awash with impermanence, the guitarist with the skull ring and the half-cocked smile endures as a symbol of outlaw integrity.

    Underpinning it all is a devotion to music, and an innate musicality as a guitarist, songwriter and band leader that make all the rest seem like a series of distractions. For what really matters about Richards is the sound of those records he created with the Stones at their best, and this book unpacks the secrets of that quest with a passion as searing as the guitar solo on “Sympathy for the Devil” or the ringing, distorted riff that ushers in “Gimme Shelter.”

 
The Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show" (AP file photo)/Mick Jagger and Keith Richards perform in 2006 (AP photo)

In “The Beatles vs. the Rolling Stones: Sound Opinions on the Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Rivalry” (Voyageur Press), Tribune music critic Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis,  cohosts of the nationally syndicated public-radio show “Sound Opinions,” tackle one of the liveliest debates in rock history: Who’s cooler, the Beatles or the Stones? The dueling critics discuss and debate the bands’ hard-scrabble beginnings in Britain during the early ‘60s, make head-to-head comparisons of iconic albums (which is the better double album, the Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” or the Beatles’ self-titled “white album”?), evaluate the band members’ individual contributions (who’s really the more accomplished drummer, Charlie Watts or Ringo Starr?) and assess the bands’ legacies as trend-setters, image-makers and musical visionaries. In the following excerpt about the bands’ psychedelic phase, Kot (GK) and DeRogatis (JD) dish on the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and the Stones’ “Their Satanic Majesties Request.” 

JD: When it comes to the psychedelic years, I have to say that it always bugs me that the Beatles are portrayed as the “Acid Apostles of the New Age,” leading rock ’n’ roll into the psychedelic flowering of the mid-‘60s. The Rolling Stones are considered to have sneered at the genre — the drugs, the sounds, and the whole "peace and love" hippie movement — dabbling in it reluctantly, at best, and laughing at it, at worst. Conventional wisdom is that the Stones were mocking “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” with “Their Satanic Majesties Request,” never really buying into the idea of using psychedelic drugs as the portal to journey "toward the white light," to use the phraseology of the time. I’m going to argue that this view isn’t right at all, and that the Beatles and the Stones really got to psychedelia at pretty much the same time, beginning in 1965 and coming to full fruition in 1966.

GK: Yes, the Stones did more than just dabble in the sounds of that era, and the key was Brian Jones. Many remember him as being the purest of the blues purists among the Stones, at least initially, but he was also the guy visiting Morocco to study and record the Master Musicians of Joujouka. During the Stones’ middle period (1965-67), Jones’ influence on those records was profound in the way he was able to bring in all these exotic instruments and help Mick Jagger and Keith Richards turn this blues-rock band into a Swinging London pop group — edgy and nasty, sure, but still a force on the pop charts with distinctive-sounding singles (“Paint It, Black,” “Ruby Tuesday,” “Lady Jane,” “Under My Thumb”). A lot of these instruments, most of them played by Jones, influenced the psychedelic sound that you’re talking about: dulcimer, sitar, marimba, recorder, oboe, Mellotron.

 

Read interview with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Check out pictures from the recording session for the original "Exile on Main St."

"Exile on Main St." is widely regarded as the Rolling Stones' masterpiece. It's also an album surrounded by so much dark myth and debauched legend that if the working conditions were really that out of control, it's a wonder it was even made.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in Richards' mansion in the south of France, where the Rolling Stones recorded "Exile on Main Street." View more pictures from the original "Exile on Main St." recording session.

The latest re-release of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 masterpiece, “Exile on Main St.,” will be available next week, and it’s the most ambitious repackaging yet. It includes a deluxe edition with bonus tracks, a documentary DVD and hard-cover book. (Read Kot's review of the album HERE.)

"Exile on Main Street" re-relase.

Keith Richards talks about the forthcoming reissue of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 masterpiece “Exile on Main St.” (Read Kot's review of the album HERE.) Much of the original album was tracked in the basement of the 16-room mansion, Nellcote, that he rented in the south of France during the summer of 1971. (Also, read an interview with Mick Jagger HERE.)

Q: How come we didn’t get more unreleased stuff besides the 10 tracks?