What happened to the Keith Richards and Jack White collaboration?
Back in 2012, The Rolling Stones‘ legendary guitarist Keith Richards shared some exciting news: he and The White Stripes’ leader Jack White had recorded some music together. It wasn’t certain at the time whether these were cover songs, new tracks, or reworked classics from each musician’s catalogue, but Richards seemed pretty high on the results.
“I enjoy working with Jack. We’ve done a couple of tracks,” Richards told Rolling Stone at the time. “I don’t know if [Jack] ever considered that it was actually, like, master cuts. But at the same time, if Jack wanted to do it, I’d probably say, ‘Yeah.’ I know Jack pretty well. He’s a lovely player.”
Richards even left the door open for White to possibly produce a new Rolling Stones album, telling the magazine: “That’s always a possibility. The door is wide open.” In 2006, White joined The Rolling Stones onstage at the Beacon Theatre in New York to perform ‘Loving Cup’, a performance that later appeared in the Martin Scorsese documentary film Shine a Light. Richards and White even did a joint interview around the film’s release in 2008.
Then…radio silence. Not a peep out of either Richards or White regarding the songs that they recorded together. In the time since Richards’ revelation, The Rolling Stones have released just one studio album, the blues covers LP Blue & Lonesome, produced by longtime collaborator Don Was. Richards himself released his third solo studio album, Crosseyed Heart, in 2015 without White appearing on it.
Of course, White has kept plenty busy since 2012 as well. That includes five solo studio albums and a record apiece with his bands The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather. White also put out a compilation of his acoustic outtakes, Acoustic Recordings 1998 – 2016. None of these releases had any feature credit for Richards, meaning that their collaboration continues to languish in either White’s or Richards’ vault (or possibly both).
We may never see those fabled recordings, so at the moment, the only on-record collaboration between Richards and White remains this performance on ‘Loving Cup’, lovingly preserved by Martin Scorsese. Check out that performance down below.
