Keith Richards – he’s the heart and soul of the Rolling Stones. Because of all the substance abuse to which he’d subjected himself, for years he was at the top of everybody’s list of “rock star most likely to die.” When he refused to die, then he became the guy most likely survive a nuclear holocaust [him and the cockroaches]. During all that time, he’s got rhythm guitar playing down to an art form. He’s not in the engine room – he is the engine room. Bill Wyman once said [and Ron Wood concurred]: “Our band does not follow the drummer; our drummer follows the rhythm guitarist.” All of the blogs I’ve written about guitar players featured lead guitarists, until now.
Rhythm. He’s not a flashy guitar player, but he does know his limitations. According to Keef: “As a guitar player I know what I can do. It doesn't matter about the B.B. Kings, Eric Claptons and Mick Taylors, 'cause they do what they do - but I know they can't do what I do. They can play as many notes under the sun but they just can't hold that rhythm down, BABY. I know what I can do and what I can't. Everything I do is strongly based on rhythm 'cause that's what I'm best at. I've tried being a great guitar player and, like Chuck Berry, I have failed.” He’s made two contributions to rhythm guitar – one is the use of open tunings to play rhythm instead of just slide. The other is to blur the line between rhythm and lead.
Don Was: “His rhythm guitar parts are often the melody of the song, just by virtue of the way the Stones write. Normally the rhythm guitar player plays in the holes, where the singer isn’t singing. But in the Stones’ case, Keith is doing what the lead guitar player normally does.”
Keef likes playing with other guitar players. He calls what he does with Ron Wood “an ancient form of weaving.” Keef’s take on guitar playing: “See, this lead and rhythm thing – there’s no such thing. You play guitar. In a good band, it should swap and shift. You know, licks will come from there and that one will pick up the rhythm. And then you swirl it around, and you don’t have to think lead and rhythm. What we are looking for is to break the barriers down. And that’s why I love playing with Woody.”
Best example: Beast of Burden [Some Girls, 1978]
Open Tunings. Before 1968, the Rolling Stones were the “bad boy” alternative to the Beatles. After they strayed from their blues roots they played pop songs just like everyone else, including said Mop Tops. That changed in 1968, when Keef discovered open tunings. He thought he had gone as far as he could with the guitar in standard tuning. Then he discovered the Open E and Open D tunings. While Ry Cooder worked with the Stones, Keef nicked the Open G from him. That’s when the Stones started to sound like “the Stones.” This was something that set them apart from everyone else. This began the Stones’ Golden Age [Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, & Exile on Main St.], as the list of songs below shows. You might recognize a few… Try to play these songs in standard tuning and it just sounds wrong.
According to Keef - “The beauty, the majesty of the five-string open G tuning for an electric guitar is that you’ve got only three notes – the other two are repetitions of each other an octave apart. It’s tuned GDGBD. Certain strings run through the whole song, so you get a drone going all the time, and because it’s electric they reverberate. Only three notes, but because of the different octaves, it fills the gap between bass and top notes with sound. It gives you this beautiful resonance and ring. I found working with open tunings that there’s a million places you don’t need to put your fingers. The notes are there already. You can leave certain strings wide open. It’s finding the spaces in between that makes the open tuning work. And if you’re working the right chord, you can hear this other chord going on behind it, which actually you’re not playing.”
As a bonus, chords in open tunings are easy to play, even for knuckle-draggers like me. Thank you Keef!
Open D
You Got the Silver / Prodigal Son / Stray Cat Blues
Open E
Jumping Jack Flash / Street Fighting Man / Gimme Shelter / You Can’t Always Get What You Want / Salt of the Earth / Jig-Saw Puzzle
Open G
Honky Tonk Women / Hand of Fate / If You Can’t Rock Me / Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’ / Brown Sugar / Turd on the Run / Ventilator Blues / Rip This Joint / Casino Boogie / Tumbling Dice / All Down the Line / Soul Survivor / Silver Train / Hey Negrita / Crazy Mama / Before They Make Me Run / Start Me Up / Undercover of the Night / It Must Be Hell / One Hit [To The Body] / Hold On To Your Hat / Sparks Will Fly / Tops / Low Down / It Won’t Take Long / Wicked As It Seems / Love Is Strong / You Got Me Rocking / Doom and Gloom / Sad Sad Sad / Mixed Emotions
The Riff. Keith Richards has written many, many riffs. The only person I can think of who has written more memorable riffs is Tony Iommi. Satisfaction may be Keith’s most memorable riff, [though I think The Last Time is more interesting]. Perhaps not coincidentally, the list of songs in open tunings [above] also presented the best riffs.
Jumpin’ Jack Flash / Street Fighting Man / Honky Tonk Women / Midnight Rambler / Gimme Shelter / Satisfaction / Can’t You Hear Me Knocking / Start Me Up / Bitch / Rocks Off / Tumbling Dice / All Down the Line / Soul Survivor / Dancing with Mr. D / Get Off of My Cloud / Paint It Black / 19th Nervous Breakdown / Ventilator Blues / Hand of Fate / Beast of Burden / Shattered / Dance Little Sister
The acoustic. The acoustic guitar is everywhere in Keith Richards’ work. As he wrote in Life: “I firmly believe if you want to be a guitar player, you better start on acoustic and then graduate to electric. Don’t think you’re going to be Townshend or Hendrix just because you can go wee wee wah wah, and all the electronic tricks of the trade. First you’ve got to know that fucker. And you go to bed with it. If there’s no babe around, you sleep with it. She’s just the right shape.”
It was there in the Stones’ earliest works, like their cover of Buddy Holly’s Not Fade Away, or the rhythm of Satisfaction or The Last Time. On some songs it shadows the electric, like on Brown Sugar and One Hit [To The Body]. He could play it quietly, like on I Am Waiting of Play With Fire. Or he could play it into a tiny cassette recorder and make it sound like an electric, like he did with Jumpin’ Jack Flash or Street Fighting Man. When the Rolling Stones began their career they played electric Chicago blues. After their flirtation with trippy psychedelia on Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Stones went farther back in time to pay homage to the Delta blues that inspired the Chicago bluesmen. That work is all over Beggars Banquet and continued to a lesser extent through Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers. In the late-1960s Gram Parson introduced him to country music. This influence can be heard on Country Honk, Sweet Virginia, Sweet Black Angel, Torn and Frayed, and Dead Flowers. It’s present in his solo album Talk Is Cheap [You Don’t Move Me and Locked Away] and can be heard all over Voodoo Lounge. Tony’s favorite KR acoustic song: Wild Horses [Sticky Fingers, 1971].
He wrote the coolest intro in the history of rock n’ roll. There’s only one song in the entire Stones catalog that fits this description – Gimme Shelter. In his memoir, Keith Richards recalled he wrote the song on a dark and stormy night while he was at home alone. His paramour Anita Pallenberg was away filming Performance with Mick Jagger. Keef just knew something sexually was happening between them - a reflection of his inner turmoil gave birth to this song.
Lead Guitar. Keef has played his share of leads. Brian Jones lost interest in guitar in the mid-1960. That’s why you hear him playing all sorts of other instruments – sitar [Paint It Black, Street Fighting Man], marimba [Under My Thumb], mellotron [all over Their Satanic Majesties Request], recorder [Ruby Tuesday], organ [Let’s Spend the Night Together], dulcimer [I Am Waiting], harpsichord [Lady Jane], etc. Somebody had to do all the guitar parts, so it was up to Keef to play them all, including the leads. He played the leads on all of Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed.
Tony’s favorite KR lead: Gimme Shelter [Let It Bleed, 1969].
He got schooled by Chuck Berry. Keef’s biggest influence was Chuck Berry. He’s often said that he ripped off every lick that Chuck Berry played. Keef was the musical director for the documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll. The film chronicled two 1986 concerts that celebrated Chuck Berry’s 60th birthday. In rehearsals it all started as an argument over the volume setting on Chuck’s on-stage amp and how it would sound on film. Then the band rehearsed Carol – Chuck kept riding Keef hard about getting the intro right. This went on for about five minutes. He could have hit Chuck, but he just took it for the film [see below]. Keef had the last laugh, though. Unbeknownst to Chuck, Keef slaved Chuck’s amp to another amp two sub-basements below the stage, and the sound that came out of that amp was what got captured on the film.
The slide. In the beginning, the Rolling Stones were a blues band, mostly of the electric Chicago variety. Brian Jones was the blues purist, and he played bottleneck slide [check out Little Red Rooster from The Rolling Stones, Now! - 1965]. When Brian Jones became too debilitated to play guitar because of his nasty habits, that left Keef to pick up the slack. Sometimes that meant he played the slide. There were a few songs from Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed where he played slide [see below]. Keef doesn’t play slide much anymore because he doesn’t have to. Ron Wood [and Mick Taylor before him] covered that well enough.
Parachute Woman / Jig-Saw Puzzle / Salt of the Earth / Let It Bleed / Midnight Rambler / You Got the Silver / Monkey Man / Ventilator Blues
The bass. Keith Richards is not a bass player, but he wrote and played the neatest bass line found in classic rock [IMHO anyway…] on Live With Me [Let It Bleed, 1969]. Sometimes he would play the bass because Bill Wyman was either late to the session or didn’t show up at all. Here are some songs on which the man played the bass:
Jumpin’ Jack Flash / Street Fighting Man / Sympathy for the Devil / Live With Me / Let’s Spend the Night Together / Connection / Heartbreaker / Casino Boogie / Happy / Soul Survivor / 100 Years Ago / Silver Train / Hide Your Love / If You Can’t Rock Me / Crazy Mama / Before They Make Me Run / Some Girls / All About You / Little T&A / Pretty Beat Up / Sleep Tonight / Brand New Car / Suck on the Jugular / Oh No, Not You Again / Infamy
Keith Richards on what is needed to play guitar: “Five strings, three chords, two hands and one asshole.”
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