WWKRD?

When the question of "who would you invite to your ultimate dinner party" comes up, the first name on my guest list is always Keith Richards. If the dinner chatter ever stalled, you could always talk about all that stuff he's got hanging in his hair.

Having kicked the drug thing and now relatively mature at 65, he's gotten down to his philosophical core, which as the book "What Would Keith Richards Do?" shows, is fairly deep, generous, accepting and irresistably honest. Author Jessica Pallington West lays it all out in a chapter titled "The 26 Ten Commandments of Keith Richards," which probably could be condensed to know yourself and "there's always the future." Drawing on Keith's mumblings over the past 40 years, she compares his thoughts to the likes of heavyweights like Socrates, Plato, Nietzsche and John Locke and the old boy comes off pretty well.

"The good die young but, hey, where does that leave me?" he asks.

It leaves him still going strong despite all the booze, drugs, debauchery, arrests, fistfights, house fires, car wrecks, cigarettes, falls from ladders and trees and a close working relationship with Mick Jagger.

"It's not that easy to be Keith Richards," he says, "but it's not so hard either."

Here are my favorite Keith-talks-guitar quotes from the book:

• "You look at it and it's a ... tennis racquet but the more you find out about it, the more you don't know. Which is great because it means you've still got more to find out."
• "Everybody should be born with a guitar. There'd be far less suicides."
• "If I was suddenly stuck alone, I could probably stop myself from going mad as long as I had a guitar."
• "I found a new chord the other day ... That's what's beautiful about the guitar. You think you know it all but it keeps opening up doors. I look at life as six strings and 12 frets. If I can't figure out everything that's in there, what chance do I have of figuring out anything else?"

Keith's fingers aren't just sticky; they're gnarled and swollen at the knuckles. I came across this photograph in a Google search and was amazed that he can even hold a guitar, much less play one. A London newspaper speculates that he's got some major arthritis going on.