“Barbaric pirate”: Billy Gibbons on why Keith Richards one of the greatest instrumentalists
One of The Rolling Stones‘ most unfair assessments came from their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. In an interview, he said that The Beatles were the band that pioneered the British Invasion, and as a result, other British bands likely wouldn’t have made it big in the States were it not for them.
“There was no real future for a British band before The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. That was the turning point, after which there was an avalanche,” he said, “It totally transformed the possibilities, and as usual, The Beatles were the frontrunners. In music, there is The Beatles, and then there is everybody else.”
While there is undoubtedly some truth to the idea that The Beatles were one of the biggest British bands to land in America, it seems harsh to suggest that the Rolling Stones wouldn’t have been successful were it not for them. The sound that The Rolling Stones championed was very different to that which The Beatles put forward, as they loved blues and R&B and championed the sound of artists like Muddy Waters.
This is best reflected in the fact that much of the Rolling Stones’ earliest music was covers of blues and R&B artists. They didn’t write their first original until Oldham forced them to, locking Keith Richards and Mick Jagger in a kitchen and not letting them out until they had written a song. The result wasn’t great, as Richards called it an “Anti-Stones sort of song.”
“When you start writing, it doesn’t matter where the first one comes from,” he said, “You’ve got to start somewhere, right? So Andrew locked Mick and myself into a kitchen in this horrible little apartment we had. He said, ‘You ain’t comin’ out’, and there was no way out.”
Eventually, the band found their creative voice and made music that straddled the line between blues and R&B but also had a unique tone of voice exclusive to the Rolling Stones. This kind of music was already popular in America, and subsequently, it’s likely the Rolling Stones would have found some level of success in the States, even if The Beatles had never made music.
Billy Gibbons attested to this, saying that Keith Richards’s guitar work helped people in America fall in love with the blues again. This is one of the factors that led the ZZ Top guitarist to name Richards one of the best instrumentalists of all time.
“Keith Richards. It’s incredible to think that the Stones, Keith, these guys were sort of heroes of mine when I was starting out, and they’re now friends,” he said, “They rescued US blues music with their work, bringing the music back home to the USA and giving the original US bluesmen a career and recognition. [Keith] is a dear friend, and he is the character; he is the barbaric pirate.”
That injection of blues music is evident in ZZ Top’s sound, as they take the traditional music style and inject modern funk elements. This development in the genre likely wouldn’t have happened were it not for The Rolling Stones.
