The most difficult musician Keith Richards ever worked with: “I didn’t expect it to be easy”
To be in the creative orbit of Keith Richards must be quite something. Not only is he a guitar hero of storied proportions, with a unique fingerstyle that has long perplexed fans, but he’s also a notoriously capricious figure. This character was no doubt exacerbated by years of pushing his body and mind to the brink with alcohol and drugs. However, The Rolling Stones guitarist is certain that he’s not the most difficult creative icon to be found in the extensive annals of music.
While Richards and his band became infamous for their rowdy ways in the 1960s, symbolising the counterculture’s transgressive spirit, this penchant for hellraising landed them in all kinds of bother. From his own various brushes with death and the law to creative nadirs and inner-band turmoil, when you add unfettered artistic aptitude to the effects of hard narcotics and a naturally prominent character, you get a life that hasn’t always been easy, and has had its fair share of challenges. A lot of them have been his own doing, too.
Despite Richards being a prickly figure, he maintains that he’s not the most challenging musician to be around. He claims that the accolade goes to his late hero Chuck Berry, the artist who infused rock ‘n’ roll with a transgressive spirit in the 1950s.
During the late 1980s, when The Rolling Stones were mostly inactive due to Richards and frontman Mick Jagger’s relations being at an all-time low, the guitarist set his sites on other projects. One was his 1988 debut album, Talk Is Cheap, but before that, Richards formed the ‘X-Pensive Winos’ supergroup with Steve Jordan for the two 1986 concerts that celebrated Chuck Berry’s life and 60th birthday. They were made into the documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, the following year.
In 1988, speaking to Denmark’s Friday night TV show Eleva2ren, Richards clarified that Berry was the most difficult musician he had ever worked with. He explained: “I didn’t expect it to be easy. Just because something’s difficult to do, doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy it, as long as you know it’s gonna be difficult, and I’m used to working with difficult people; I work with Mick Jagger. Chucky Berry… yeah, I have more experience working with difficult people than most. And also, I thought, well, if I can handle that, then, only the idea of making God’s first album would be, maybe, more difficult. It was a test for myself, as well as something that I really wanted to do, and in a way, had to do.”
While Richards felt that he’d paid his artistic debt to Berry with the project, that was never what it was about. For him, as a lifelong fan of the ‘Father of Rock and Roll’, this was the greatest opportunity he would ever get to capture good live performances from him, as it was an aspect of the profession that the American never took seriously. In this vein, he encountered just how challenging his highly mythologised hero was.
“Chuck doesn’t really take too much care about his live performances,” Richards said. “As long as the band is the cheapest one in town, that’s what you’re gonna hear him with, because Chuck believes that Chuck’s enough, he doesn’t need a band. I rehearsed the band and Chuck Berry for almost two weeks. And Chuck believes that it’s the band that’s being rehearsed; it wouldn’t occur to Chuck that in actual fact it’s him that’s being rehearsed, that would never occur to him, you see.”
Richards’s statement that Berry was far more difficult than Jagger, whom he was feuding with at the time and had even taken to calling ‘Brenda’ or ‘Your Majesty’ because of his diva status, says a lot about the ‘Johnny B. Goode’ musicians and Berry’s notoriously tricky character. Unsurprisingly, Berry also got himself embroiled in a variety of scandals outside of music.
