Richard Gere names his favourite musicians: “That’s where I’m coming from”
If you’re looking for an actor who embodies the word ‘classic’, Richard Gere should be an instant pick.
The epitome of cool and class, Gere captured everyone’s hearts in the 1980s with films like An Officer and a Gentleman and American Gigolo. He wove himself into the fabric of rom-com history with his soft yet commanding performance in Pretty Woman, striking up one of the most memorable on-screen partnerships with the gorgeous red-headed Julia Roberts. So much so that they even tried to replicate this success with Runaway Bride to…mixed results.
Given how strongly he embodies old-school charm, you’d expect Gere to have a similarly retro music taste. According to an interview with Entertainment Weekly, that’s precisely right. He outlined some of his favourite artists, zeroing in on a very specific genre.
“Almost any of the deep blues guys,” he said of those on his playlist. “Whether it’s Muddy Waters, Albert King, Freddie King, BB King, that’s where I’m coming from. I’m a dinosaur.” This scans not only with Gere’s timeless image but also his passion for the guitar as an instrument. He’s a talented musician in his own right, contributing to the soundtracks of several of his own films. In 2011, he auctioned off over 100 of his own guitars, including a 1958 ‘Flying V’ that once belonged to Albert King himself.
Albert, Freddie, and BB are collectively known as the ‘Three Kings of the Blues’, though none of them are related. They might have shared a name and a genre, but each ‘King’ represented a very different strand of the art form; Freddie combined Texas- and Chicago-style playing to great effect; Albert’s deeper, rockier sound inspired the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn, and BB was the most famous Delta blues musician to have ever lived. As for Muddy Waters, if you don’t know who he is, where have you been?
These four pillars of the blues aren’t the only musicians to get Gere going. In addition to expressing a love for Bob Dylan in the past, he’s also a big fan of The Beatles, particularly their 2000 compilation album 1. The record contains tracks like ‘She Loves You’, ‘Yesterday’, ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Something’, and more, all of which topped the charts in the UK or the US. The album itself went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic— a nice full-circle moment for fans of the Fab Four.
According to Gere, it’s not just him who enjoys this collection. “We listen to this in the car. My son, who’s seven, perks up whenever we put [it on],” he said. It’s nice to see that the future is in good hands.
Music has played a key part in Gere’s film career. He starred in the big screen version of the musical Chicago and appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1984 movie The Cotton Club. Set in the New York City jazz club of the same name, Gere plays a key figure in the story, a musician named ‘Dixie’ Dwyer, who becomes a big star thanks to the aid of the mafia. This sort of music was the forerunner to the genre Gere would come to love in real life.
If you were expecting Gere to have a boring music taste, then you clearly haven’t been paying attention to anything he’s done throughout his career. The man couldn’t be uncool even if he tried.
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