“Could hardly stand the sight”: The guitarist that Keith Richards hated for years
Many people in the music industry aren’t meant to stay friends forever. It’s important to realise the people who will be around for your entire career, but it’s safe to say that decades around the same person doesn’t happen without getting into a few disagreements here and there. And while Keith Richards was more than happy to talk about the people that he could play with forever, he had his fair share of people that he needed to burn bridges with after a while in the spotlight.
Then again, Richards always seemed to be the most easygoing member of The Rolling Stones during his career. Mick Jagger was the one more set on finding the right path for the band to take on next, but if Richards had his way, he would have gladly played nothing but rock and roll, blues and country music throughout his career and not give a damn about what any critic had to say.
Granted, that would also leave a lot of great music on the table in the case of The Stones. Blues was only a facet of what they could do, and when they started exploring further, some of their greatest tunes in the 1960s were about them finding some magic they didn’t realise was there, like their version of ‘Hey Jude’ on ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ and their experiment with baroque pop on Between the Buttons.
Even when they lost Brian Jones, their next iterations gave them great albums like Some Girls as well. They were still mining the same blues and country textures, but there was always a little bit of new flavours seeping in. Some may not have worked like ‘Miss You’, but when they managed to make something as aggressive as ‘Respectable’, it was hard to fault them for looking outside their comfort zone.
Although that might have come from the sense of collaboration, things could have been far different had the band chosen Jeff Beck as one of their guitarists. Beck was always his only unique entity, and while he may have stuck with his own approach to fusion, Richards remembered that there was a tense period where it seemed like any hope of them reconciling was dead and gone.
According to Richards, he didn’t have one nice thing to say about Beck for years because of how unprofessional both of them were during their prime, saying, “Guitar players, for me, are the hardest ones to know, all this professional shit going on. Very unprofessional, really. I mean, Jeff Beck and I, for years, could hardly stand the sight of each other. It’s only been over the last few years that that’s all fallen by the wayside. Thank God it’s all over and we can sit around and have a drink and talk. That’s a guy I admire a lot. He’s a great player.”
At the same time, comparing Richards and Beck during the 1970s isn’t exactly fair. Both of them had started out with the blues, but whereas Richards eventually found his style using open-G tuning, Beck was always willing to learn something new whenever he strapped on his guitar, whether that was fusion or learning more about the mechanics behind getting the right sound out of a note.
Since Beck has now passed on, Richards stands alongside people like Eric Clapton, keeping the spirit of that scene alive. He and Beck may have had two totally different approaches to the guitar, but the main goal was always to pass this music along so that people from all walks of life could appreciate what was going on with this piece of wood with strings on it.
