“What a songwriter”: The artist Keith Richards called superior to everyone else
All great music of the past century tends to have its roots in the blues. Although the genres have developed a few more snappy names since then, everything from hip-hop to rock and roll to even some flavours of R&B tends to be passed down from the years when all people had was three chords and the truth to their name when putting together their classics. Keith Richards may as well have been a student of that music flavour, but in terms of raw execution, he thought that no one set the stage for them quite like Willie Dixon.
Then again, it’s hard to think of one of the greatest progenitors of rock and roll to be a bass player. If anything, the fact that someone playing the four-string impacted the genre that hard should be a small form of revenge for modern bass players who are told that all they do is play a less challenging version of what guitarists are playing.
But Dixon came from an era when it didn’t matter what instrument someone played. You could play the hardest blues of all time with nothing but your voice and slapping your hands together to provide a rhythm, and with that stand-up bass, Dixon turned in some of the first templates for rock and roll songs.
Looking through the songs that he wrote for Howlin Wolf as well as what he recorded on his own, Dixon’s influence was about putting that signature swagger into rock and roll. Elvis Presley may have made people fall in love with the art form from the perspective of a frontman, but anyone who wanted to excite people without even looking at them would have had to study tunes like ‘You Need Love’.
It’s not like the millions of groups didn’t know how to do their homework with Dixon, either. The Yardbirds had been known to cover a handful of his tunes, and if it weren’t for ‘You Need Love’, chances are Robert Plant would have never had the idea to twist it into the signature opening lines of ‘Whole Lotta Love’.
Whereas Richards was still an acolyte of Chuck Berry and Little Richard, Dixon was ground zero for what blues sounded like to him, saying, “I mean, what a songwriter! When I was getting into the blues, it was, Who wrote this? I was lookin’ at Muddy Waters records, and who wrote it? Dixon, Dixon, Dixon. And then I’m lookin’ at Howlin’ Wolf: Dixon, Dixon, Dixon. He’s the backbone of postwar blues writing, the absolute. Personally, I talk of him and Muddy in the same breath, and John Lee (Hooker), come to that. You know, gents… Willie, man, what a guy. It was a pleasure for us to do his songs. Willie Dixon is SUPERIOR.”
Then again, Richards knew how to sprinkle his own magic onto those songs once he got ahold of them. While The Stones’ version of a tune like ‘I Just Want To Make Love To You’ is a tip of the hat to Dixon, having them put roaring guitars behind it set the template for what bluesy rock was going to sound like once the blues boom started in the late 1960s.
For all of the great music that Dixon made, though, it was never about Richards making the most accurate recreation of the tune or everything. The goal was to make something that would hit the audience in the gut the same way that music did for him.
