“Excellent player”: The band Keith Richards claimed to discover before anyone
One of the biggest strengths of an artist is their ability to be ahead of the curve. Even if someone has been around the block a couple of times and looks over the hill, none of that matters if it means that they can take music in different directions or point everyone towards the next big thing that will take over the world. Although Keith Richards seemed more than happy to kick back with his stacks of old records, he confessed that he was on the hype train for this bluesy group before anyone else.
Granted, anything that Richards ever did usually had the stamp of cool on it before it even came out. Despite being in one of the longest-lasting groups in the world, Keef never lost his rock and roll attitude, always making sure to keep that sly grin on his face at all times and keeping everything low to the ground and grooving every time he played a Rolling Stones tune.
But that groove comes from the blues before anything else. There are definitely traces of country and straight-up rock and roll in every one of the band’s tunes, but listening back to their best songs, it all centres around that same kind of electric feeling that Robert Johnson started on acoustic guitar and people like Muddy Waters refined years later.
So when the next generation came after The Stones, it was no surprise that everyone followed their lead by trying to make something a little more grizzly than before. But whereas a band like Aerosmith got called out for being too accurate a copycat, The Stray Cats took their audience back to a time before The Stones even existed.
While Brian Setzer was still happy to play the blues, his approach was like watching Chuck Berry’s leads being taken to their most extreme conclusion. On tunes like ‘Rock This Town’ and ‘Stray Cat Strut’, Setzer plays the guitar as if it’s second nature to him, all while making the entire band sound as tight as possible whenever they perform, even with ‘Slim’ Jim Phantom standing up to play the drums.
Although The Stones were still in the public’s good graces with tunes like ‘Start Me Up’ in the early 1980s, Richards thought that they could have been ahead of the game if they had signed The Stray Cats while they had the chance, saying, “Mick and I picked up on the Stray Cats before anybody else did and tried to sign them to the Stones’ label. Brian Setzer’s an excellent player, and they’re all nice guys.”
At the same time, it might have been a case of the group being pigeonholed if they had done that. No matter how great the songs might have been, it would be hard to rise to prominence on The Stones’ label without looking like they were riding the coattails of another group.
This wasn’t a band that needed someone else’s help so that people would notice their brilliance. They had that early style of rock and roll coursing through their veins since they started, and for anyone who has been in the game long enough, it doesn’t take for them to recognise brilliance like that.
