“Kick him up the arse”: When Keith Richards slated his friend as the laziest man in rock
You can accuse The Rolling Stones of numerous sins, but laziness is not among them; for upwards of 60 years, the blues rock trailblazers have been defining the landscape of rock and roll, and that has given the leathery features of Keith Richards a certain carte-blanche to call out his fellow guitarists for their apparent inferiority.
We have come a long way from the days of the early 1960s, when The Rolling Stones were the youthful blues devotees performing energetic cover versions of Howlin’ Wolf in the underground nightclubs of London. While you could hardly call the band workaholics, particularly during their hedonistic heights in the 1970s, you certainly don’t go from being little more than a garage band to selling out colossal stadiums all over the world for multiple decades on the trot without a degree of hard work and dedication.
It is easy to get distracted by the sensationalist headlines of drug busts, wild parties, and anarchic reputations, but at their core, The Rolling Stones have always been a hard-working rock and roll band. Back in the heady days of the swinging sixties, while their contemporaries were tuning in and dropping out, the Stones were always considerably more proactive, even if that meant parting ways with certain members.
Brian Jones’ sacking and subsequent death in 1969, for instance, left a gaping hole in the band’s line-up that was quickly filled by Mick Taylor. However, it didn’t take overly long for Taylor to reach the end of his tether, clashing with Keith Richards and ultimately resigning from the line-up during a notably chaotic time in the band’s history. Still, by the time he left in 1974, there was scarcely a guitarist in the world who wouldn’t have severed their own arteries for a chance to perform with The Stones.
Few of them, however, were quite as proactive as Taylor’s eventual replacement, Ronnie Wood. Reportedly, though, Eric Clapton was among the performers hoping for a call-up. “Eric wanted to jump in after Mick Taylor, but never did say so,” Keith Richards once revealed to Mojo. “But he expected us to call, although I only just found out.”
Clapton and The Rolling Stones went way back to when they were early contemporaries in mid-1960s London, but even still, it is difficult to imagine the former Cream guitarist seamlessly blending into the line-up of the band. According to Richards, it was his laziness that made him an outlier.
“There are certain guys that are band players, and there’s certain guys that ain’t,” the guitarist shared, in his infinite wisdom.
“If there’s anybody lazier than me, it’s Eric. He’s got it all, but Eric’s like Mick Taylor in a way. He needs to hire guys to play with him to kick him up the arse.”
Keith Richards
Never one to mince his words, Richards’ take on both Clapton and Taylor is likely a little harsh. Eric Clapton is, after all, among the most influential axemen in rock history, and his early work with The Yardbirds and, later, Cream formed a not-insignificant influence over The Stones’ development.
It is worth noting, however, that the mid-1970s were a particularly destructive, drug-addled time for Clapton, and that probably accounts both for his laziness in asking for Taylor’s job and his failure to land that role. Given that Ronnie Wood has never left The Rolling Stones in the half a century since that recruitment drive, it seems as though Richards and the gang certainly made the right decision.
