Article & Journal Resources

By Ira Robbins

Ronnie The Autobiography By Ronnie Wood Illustrated. 358 pages. $25.95. St. Martin's Press.

In his fourth decade as a Rolling Stone, Ron Wood is still "the new boy" - as close as anyone alive to the band's surviving core, but never an equal member. As he puts it in "Ronnie," his entertaining memoir of a career divided between rocking and painting, he is the "little brother" and "sparring partner" to Keith Richards, which leaves his insider's perspective something of an outsider's tale. He's up there all right, a jolly passenger on the Stones' superstar ride, but he never conveys a substantial sense of steering the ship, or even of being certain where it's headed.

In the generous and sincere tone of a speechmaker at a retirement party, Wood recounts the earning and spending of several fortunes, copious cocaine and alcohol intake, women he's loved, the great musicians and celebrities he's known and farcical scrapes with the law, drug dealers and other nefarious businessmen - none of which he takes too seriously. But what could have been the saddening diary of a dissolute scoundrel finds its charm in his unabashed enthusiasms for his second wife, Jo; snooker; thoroughbreds; the television show "CSI"; and Ireland. The balance of mischief and decency seesaws comfortably until the coda, which lards on the happily-ever-after clichés in praise of sobriety, art and family.

Wood writes extensively about the rigors and comforts of touring, and describes the characters and conflicts of other Stones, but doesn't say much about the music. He runs quickly through prior parts of his rock career, with Rod Stewart in the Jeff Beck Group and the Faces, where he had a much stronger creative voice than in the Stones; his solo albums are ticked off like signposts on a road. Evincing at least as much pride in his artwork as in his music, Wood includes 30 of his own illustrations along with handwritten epigrams.

The stories here are amusing, with some minor revelations. Wood boasts of a fling with George Harrison's wife Pattie Boyd before she ran off with Eric Clapton. He once emptied Tony Curtis's wine cellar, has had to remind Mick Jagger and Richards how to play songs they wrote, and was first considered for membership in the Stones in 1969. In a dubious recollection that contradicts the historical record, Wood says he was asked to join Led Zeppelin before Jimmy Page. (Page instigated the band's creation.) Otherwise, considering the understandably blurred memories of his lengthy fast-lane life, Wood seems to have a detailed and realistic grip on names, events and places. There is one serious omission - the death of his first wife - and a few misapprehensions and typos, but the story feels truthful and carefully observed.

Like any good memoirist, Wood is shamelessly honest and devoted to his own irresponsibility. And like any good addict, he has a huge blind spot.

If alcohol has had a "tricky role" in his life, then the Stones are a promising little combo.

Explaining that he thought about cleaning up for a Stones tour in the early 1980s, he writes, "I knew it was dope and drink messing me up and clouding my judgment. . . I'm not sure at that point I even wanted to stop"; he then pivots into a story about stealing cocaine from a dealer sleeping in his house. Much farther down the road, without having mentioned any grave concerns about his physical condition, Wood admits that he "came close to being left out" of a Stones tour in 2002 because of his drug and alcohol use.

Instead, he got sober (temporarily, as it happens). "Now I was taking the music seriously," he exults. Well, it's about bloody time, mate.

Ira Robbins, a music journalist and the editor of TrouserPress.com, is completing a novel about 1960s radicalism.