The blues legend Keith Richards was intimidated by: “It was overpowering”
It’s tough to imagine Keith Richards being intimidated by anything. As The Rolling Stones guitarist and one-half of their era-soundtracking songwriting team, he sits at the pinnacle of not only success but respect too. Richards is revered and regularly honoured by peers and new upstarts alike as one of the most influential players around. But still, there was one man that scared him.
The key to it goes all the way back to his early days. Before he was the Keith Richards or the infamous Keef, he was just a kid in Dartford – But he was a kid obsessed with music. Bunking off school classes, he’d instead be found sitting with his guitar, learning to play the songs he’d heard on the radio, tuning into channels beyond the mainstream as he became fixated on the sound floating across the Atlantic from America.
While the other kids loved Elvis and the sound of early rock and roll, Richards liked something less clean-cut than the cookie-cutter stuff that had finally filtered through into the UK. He liked the stuff it all derived from, as he became obsessed with blues music in as much of an undiluted form as he could find it as he went out into London, digging through record shops to find new and exciting stuff.
That’s how he eventually connected with Mick Jagger. “I thought I was the only fan for miles,” he wrote to his Aunt after one morning seeing Jagger on the train platform, holding a record for a Chuck Berry album. “He’s got every record Chuck Berry ever made and all his mates have too, they are all rhythm and blues fans, real R&B I mean (not this Dinah Shore, Brook Benton crap) Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Chuck, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker all the Chicago bluesmen real lowdown stuff,” he wrote, adding, “marvellous”.
Among them is the king, the one man who would eventually scare him as young Keith Richards would soon become a star himself. But despite all the fame he found, the minute he met Howlin’ Wolf, he was that kid again. When asked by a fan what it was like to meet Howlin Wolf, a glimmer of that young fan came out. “Awesome, actually,” he said with a laugh like he still can’t quite believe it happened.
“It’s like meeting a great big old bull elephant that knew it all,” he said of their eventual encounter. “He would just sort of wisely nod his head: ‘Very good.’ To me, at that age, it was overpowering,” he continued, admitting to feeling completely overwhelmed and intimidated by meeting such a hero of his. But the longer they chatted, the more he relaxed as Richards recalled, “He was such a big guy, and gentle. The strong guys are gentle, always. It’s only weak guys that come on strong. These guys were so kind to us.”
But it wasn’t just that Richards got to meet his idol, he was granted his praise and respect too. “He sticks out his hand and say, ‘love the stuff you’ve been doing with my stuff’”, Richards recalled, seeing that as the exact moment when, in his words, he’d “passed the test.”
