“Horseshit”: the musical movement Keith Richards wanted nothing to do with
Rock and roll was never intended to be stagnant throughout its time in the spotlight. The more you stay the same, the more chances you have of becoming boring, and even some of the greatest of all time tend to fall into a rut when fans start to realise that they are only going to be getting the exact same thing out of them whenever a new album comes out. It’s important to change with the times, but that didn’t mean Keith Richards had to enjoy every single trend that passed him by during The Rolling Stones’ lifetime.
Ever since the band started, Richards always seemed a little bit set in his ways. He was always willing to take a chance if it was for the right reasons, but his taste always gravitated towards the blues before anything else, which probably explains why his most spirited playing came when playing the odd Robert Johnson tune or stretching out tracks like ‘Monkey Man’ on Sticky Fingers.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg with Richards as well. As much as Mick Jagger saw a genre like country as a joke whenever he sang it, Richards was far more receptive to it when he visited America, hooking up with Gram Parsons while he was over there and having the kind of heartache in his lyrics that Hank Williams would have approved of when writing tracks like ‘Angie’ and ‘No Expectations’.
When it comes to the biggest movements in rock history, historians like to put bands in little boxes every time they start talking about them. Although they may have a lot more to offer, everyone’s first impression is normally what jumps out before anything else, and when The Stones started having their first hits, it was easy to lump them in with the same English rock and roll acts like The Beatles and The Animals.
“It was just an explosion of music in England at that time that just somehow made it.”
keith richards
The British Invasion may have been one of the biggest musical moments of the 1960s, but limiting them to those few years is drastically underselling The Stones. Richards knew he had a lot more to offer than playing riffs like ‘Satisfaction’ every time he got onstage, and as far as he was concerned, anyone calling him a member of the aforementioned scene could should their opinions up where the sun doesn’t shine.
Because in Richards’s mind, there was no real point in lumping all of his colleagues together, saying, “That was a bunch of horseshit. Suddenly, at last, some English bands got lucky and managed to go across the pond. It was just an explosion of music in England at that time that just somehow made it. And some of it was very bad, you know? A lot of it was just covers of American R&B.”
While Richards may be underselling the contributions of later Mod favourites like The Who by discounting the British invasion, it all came from a need for diversity in his material. The Stones could do a lot of things outside of rock and roll, and they were set to prove that over the course of their career. Country music? Absolutely. Old-school blues? Why not. Disco? Well, not that they should, but they could when they wanted to.
So, while Richards probably does have a few warm feelings about the movement that got him to the big time, he knew not to have it be an albatross around his neck. He was about making something different, and he would spend the rest of his life trying to show fans the real musician behind those riffs.
