“Said it all right there”: Keith Richards on the ultimate guitar riff
Rock and roll has never stopped being a riff-based genre. Even though artists like The Beatles and Bob Dylan have been able to grab their audience through the power of melodies or the strength of their lyrics, there’s normally some unknown power in getting the right guitar riff that drives listeners wild when they blast it out of a car window. Although Keith Richards could be considered one of the almighty kings of what a riff is supposed to be, he felt that one riff towered above anything else he would ever write.
Then again, that’s a tall order for someone with as many iconic licks as Richards has. Despite being born and bred in the same movement the Fab Four came from, Richards had all of his Liverpool counterparts beat with his guitar licks, whether that was the opening fuzz tone of ‘Satisfaction’ or him creating an ominous atmosphere with only a few chords on tunes like ‘Gimme Shelter’.
Compared to any other guitarist, Richards almost seems to have his own language on guitar at this point. Even though the world will never grow tired of those signature Chuck Berry licks, anyone who has ever tuned their guitar to open G and started jamming has tried to sound like The Stones at least once.
But that was all a part of Richards’s musical vocabulary. After all, his greatest lessons came from watching hardened bluesmen, and although not all of them were easy to learn, hearing artists like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters emote through their licks helped Richards understand the meaning behind getting a great riff under his belt.
While there are a ton of great licks throughout blues history, nothing could compare to Muddy Waters laying it down on ‘Rollin’ Stone’. Despite its simple basis, the sleazy rhythm behind this lick and the way that it plays off the rest of the band may as well have been the moment where rock and roll was conceived, complete with the same kind of swagger that would be adopted by blues rockers like Eric Clapton.
Despite Richards admitting to his influences every time he wrote a lick, he admitted that no one could manage to touch what Waters did in those few bars, saying, “I felt an immediate affinity when I heard Muddy go [picks up guitar and plays the opening lick from ‘Rollin’ Stone’]. You can’t be harder than that, man. He said it all right there. So all I want to do is be able to do that.”
Aside from giving the group their name, there are also a few more lessons that Richards may have picked up from this riff. Outside of it being soaked in blues cliches, the bad-boy attitude that Waters plays with is what made Richards into the superstar he is today, usually taking the foundation of that lick and either building on it or inverting it in a slightly different way so it sounds refreshing and new.
You can call it stealing, but Richards was never that concerned with who wrote what riff throughout history. It was all about whether it moved something in your gut when you heard it, and from the first moment that Richards picked up that riff on the guitar, it was love at first sight, or strum in this case.
