Ronnie...

Poor Ronnie Wood. He might be 60 but he's destined to always be the "new one" of The Rolling Stones. I'm currently reading his autobiography, the aptly, if lazily, titled Ronnie. It is not a very good autobiography, and is, indeed, the kind of work you'd expect a recovering alcoholic to produce. Think Ronnie and Keith and Dylan at Live Aid and imagine that kind of shambles in bookform. No sign of a ghost writer, which pretty much explains the words on the pages. Which is a shame - Ronnie sure does have an interesting story to tell. But he seems to have been content just to spray everything out haphazardly, scattering bits and pieces here and there but never really revealing anything we didn't know (and repeating a lot of stuff we do, often in a patronising, ridiculously simplistic manner), nor really offering any anecdotes worthy of inclusion in a 358pp hard back volume. I like Woody but his contribution to the Stones is mainly his 1970s hair, a drunken swagger and as an on and off-stage playmate for Keith Richards. Other than ape Richards' riffology Ronnie's something of a non-entity musically and it appears that he thinks similar thoughts about Stones' founder Brian Jones: "as a musician he was a functional guitarist". Which isn't what the target audience will want to read, I shouldn't think.
Ronnie appeared on Richard & Judy's Christmas Books show today, and did a fine job of reviewing Ian Harrison's Earth: A Visitor's Book. "My favourite numbers are like, three, seven and nine and I opened this book up. I looked up three, and learned everything there is about three, I looked up seven, and learned everything there is about seven, I looked up nine, and learned everything there is about nine. It's a great book." Quite.