The 1969 song Keith Richards wishes never existed: “Got it right the first time”
It took a special kind of rock and roll song to get the approval of Keith Richards.
He was never going to settle for just any old rock and roll guitar riff on a Rolling Stones record, and a lot of his favourite songs were the ones that hit on something that felt human as opposed to the standard hard rock formula… He wanted the chance to make something that was a bit more nervy whenever he made a new record, but there were a few moments where he felt that his heroes were slipping just a little bit whenever he heard them perform.
Then again, being disappointed by any artist is almost inevitable at some point. No one can keep that artistic flame burning for the rest of their lives, and there are bound to be moments where even Richards had to wonder whether he still had the spark left in him. But he could at least rely on some of the biggest names in rock and roll and country music to help bring him back to his first musical love.
The blues may have been where everything started for him, but when you look at The Stones’ classic run of albums, they were definitely paying attention to the singer-songwriters coming out at the time. Richards had already learned to appreciate the biggest names in country music thanks to Gram Parsons, but even when looking at the giants of the 1970s, Richards felt that no one did as much for lyrics as Bob Dylan did when he first strapped on his acoustic guitar and harmonica.
Dylan was out there to tell people about the real horrors of the world, and while he wasn’t looking to preach necessarily, you could tell that he meant every single word that he said. His songs were like a confessional to him half the time he sang, and even if it was hard for everyone to enjoy his natural singing voice every single time he stepped up to the microphone, everything from his love songs to his political tunes were enough to get a rise out of someone.
But the number one rule about Dylan is that he does whatever the hell he wants, and he wasn’t going to cater to whatever Richards wanted all the time. He probably wasn’t even thinking about what his audience wanted half the time he played, and by the time that he became one of the leaders of rock and roll with an electric guitar in his hands, all it took was a little country album for him to turn everything around. Nashville Skyline was a pleasant enough detour, but the remake ‘Girl From the North Country’ never sat well with Richards.
Getting the chance to duet with Johnny Cash is probably something anyone would have wanted to do, but Richards felt that the song never worked as a duet, saying, “It’s got all the elements of beautiful folk writing without being pretentious. In the lyrics and the melody, there is an absence of Bob’s later cutting edge.”
Adding, “There’s none of that resentment. It’s very hard to write songs like that. He recorded it again later with Johnny Cash, but I just don’t think it’s a duo song. I think Bob got it right the first time.”
Then again, the duet version of the song does have its own charms to it half the time. It doesn’t always make the most sense having this song from the perspective of one person be sung by Cash and Dylan, but hearing them trading lines and Dylan forgetting which verse he is singing during the final part of the song is the perfect encapsulation of what he wanted Nashville Skyline to be in the first place.
He wasn’t looking to reinvent the wheel on this album, and even those screwups halfway through the mix are the essence of what it feels like playing music among friends. Richards may have wanted to go in a completely different direction, but that wasn’t about to stop Dylan from following his bliss.
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