Free Life by Keith Richards; James Fox

to London. You got out of physics and chemistry, and I would have done anything for that. That’s where I learned a lot about singing and music and working with musicians. I learned how to put a band together—it’s basically the same job—and how to keep it together. And then the shit hit the fan.
    Your voice breaks, aged thirteen, and Jake Clare gave the three of us sopranos the pink slip. But they also demoted us, kept us down one class. We had to stay down a year because we hadn’t got physics and chemistry and hadn’t done our maths. “Yeah, but you let us off that because of choir practice. We worked our butts off.” That was a rough thank-you. The great depression came right after that. Suddenly at thirteen I had to sit down and start again with the year under. Redo a whole school year. This was the kick in the guts, pure and unmixed. The moment that happened, Spike, Terry and I, we became terrorists. I was so mad, I had a burning desire for revenge. I had reason then to bring down this country and everything it stood for.
    I spent the next three years trying to fuck them up. If you want to breed a rebel, that’s the way to do it. No more haircuts. Two pairs of trousers, the skin-tight ones under the regulation flannels, which came off the minute I was out the gate. Anything to annoy them. It didn’t get me anywhere; it got me a lot of black looks from my dad, but even that didn’t stop me. I really didn’t like to disappoint my dad, but… sorry, Dad.
    It still rankles, that humiliation. It still hasn’t gone out, the fire. That’s when I started to look at the world in a different way, not their way anymore. That’s when I realized that there’s bigger bullies than just bullies. There’s them, the authorities. And a slow-burning fuse was lit. I could have got expelled easily after that, in any different way, but then I’d have had to face my dad. And he would have spotted that immediately—that I’d manipulated it. So it had to be a slow-moving campaign. I just lost total interest in authority or trying to make good under their terms. School reports? Give me a bad one, I’ll forge it. I got very good at forgery. He could do better . Somehow I managed to find the same ink, make it He could not do better . My dad would look at it. “ He could not do better . Why does he give you a B-minus?” Pushing my luck a bit there. But they never detected the forgeries. I was actually hoping they would, because then I could be done, expelled for forgery. But apparently it was too good, or they decided that that one is not going to work, boy.
    I lost total interest in school after choir went down the tube. Technical drawing, physics, mathematics, a yawn, because it doesn’t matter how much they try to teach me algebra, I just don’t get it, and I don’t see why I should. I’ll understand at gunpoint, on bread and water and a whip. I would learn it, I could learn it, but there’s something inside of me saying this is going to be no help to you, and if you do want to learn it, you’ll learn it by yourself. At first, after the voice broke and we were given that boot down, I stuck very close together with the guys I used to sing with, because we all felt the same burning resentment for winning them all the medals and shields that they were always so proud of in their assembly hall. Meanwhile, we’re cleaning their bloody shoes round the back, and that’s the thanks you get.
    You cut some rebel style. In the High Street there was Leonards, where they sold very cheap jeans, just as jeans were becoming jeans. And they would sell fluorescent socks around ’56, ’57—rock-and-roll socks that glow in the dark so she always knows where I am, with black musical notes on them, pink and green. Used to have a pair of each. More daring still, I’d have pink on one foot and green on the other. That was really, like, wow.
    Dimashio’s was the ice cream parlor–coffee shop. Old Dimashio’s son went to school with