The song Keith Richards called the best R&B song ever: “The most classic”
The Rolling Stones have always been about a certain brotherhood for Keith Richards.
Although many people could have held their own if they were jamming with the band, the difference between someone who stays for a life and a fairweather player usually comes from the kind of attitude that someone has whenever they play a riff. And while that might come from the pure love of rock and roll, Richards felt that there was also some element of heart that came from a lot of different genres.
Because of all the members of the band, Richards seemed to always know what worked best for the band. Despite Mick Jagger insisting that the band switch up their styles on occasion whenever they began work on tracks like ‘Miss You’ or every other track that turned up on Dirty Work, Richards knew that they couldn’t go wrong if he put his guitar into an open tuning and started jamming away until he found something that worked well for him.
But beyond rock and roll, The Stones were always fans of countless genres of music. Although it would be hard to think of the immense influence that jazz had on their lives or anything, the blues and especially genres like country music tended to resonate more with what Richards wanted to say, which probably explains all of the lessons that he took from someone like Gram Parsons when working on their classic records like Exile on Main St.
If someone has that kind of fire in them, though, it’s not about simply singing a catchy tune. Richards was already playing from the heart, but the real soul behind the music always came from the sounds of R&B. They had already grown up in an era where Ray Charles meant as much to them as Elvis Presley, and the sounds of someone like Freddie Scott was right up his alley when he heard tunes like ‘Are You Lonely For Me’.
There had already been the blues belters that Jagger was learning from, but what Richards heard from Scott was the sound of pure emotion, saying, “It’s probably the most classic Rhythm and Blues record of all time. It’s produced by Bert Berns, who also produced Van Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, a great producer. Here (he is with) Freddie Scott, one of the greatest Soul singers.”
Then again, this isn’t really a song that needs a Jagger-fied vocal thrown on top of it, either. He was a belter in the traditional sense, and while Scott does have his impressive moments behind the microphone, a lot of what he does is usually a lot more subtle than what you would get out of the likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.
Some of the notes that he’s hitting aren’t necessarily the most difficult things in the world to sing, but what’s more important is hearing the actual person behind every word. Anyone in Richards’s shoes would have felt like they knew this man’s life story within the span of a few lines, and judging by his own songs of heartache, it’s safe to say that Richards took more than a few cues from him when making some of the best ballads that The Stones ever made.
It wasn’t the first thing that most people would think of when it comes to the greatest rock band of all time, but the sounds of rock and soul have never been that far apart. Both of them were about trying to get the most primal emotions imaginable down on tape, and Richards figured that his job was done if he could get the same kind of emotion that he heard out of Scott’s voice.
