The one song Keith Richards said Mick Jagger outwrote him on: “He got me”
There’s no questioning that Keith Richards deserves a place in rock and roll heaven when all is said and done. Despite the ongoing understanding that he will outlive us all, Keef will forever be the living embodiment of what rock and roll is supposed to be, thanks to the fantastic riffs that he put into every single Rolling Stones record. Not all of them had to be the most complicated thing in the world, though. They only needed to be catchy, but Richards had those times when he had to admit defeat.
But it’s not like Richards didn’t have some competition when he was first breaking out, either. Everyone and their brother were ripping off what Chuck Berry was doing when he first picked up a guitar, but there were already people like George Harrison coming up as part of the British invasion that would turn heads with his country-influenced technique that he picked up on from Carl Perkins.
Even if The Beatles had better songs, Richards knew the perfect way to make any of his songs sound a bit more sinister. ‘Satisfaction’ had the same blues foundation as half of their songs, but when he hit on that distortion pedal, everything sounded much more vicious behind Mick Jagger’s voice. Then again, Jagger was never a slouch behind the fretboard, either. It was just a different vocabulary he was working with.
Whenever he talked about his bandmate’s playing, Richards always felt that Jagger had his own unique sense of rhythm. It wasn’t always on the beat, but it blended in perfectly with how Charlie Watts played the drums, and when they reached their classic period on records like Beggars Banquet, Richards never saw a tune like ‘Brown Sugar’ coming when Jagger presented it to the rest of the group.
Ignoring the lyrics about doing despicable things to women on a slave ship, Richards thought that Jagger outpaced him for the first time when writing that tune, saying, “I’m the riff master. The only one I missed and that Mick Jagger got was ‘Brown Sugar’, and I’ll tip my hat there. There he got me. I mean, I did tidy it up a bit, but that was his words and music.” But then again, there’s no question that Jagger was paying attention to what Richards was doing to land on that lick.
Richards had already been a student of open-G tuning, and since the entire song is based on those shapes that he learned, it’s easy to picture Jagger coming up with that riff after jamming away on one of the guitarist’s spare guitars and that riff falling out of him. If Richards felt outmatched, though, he more than made up for it when making Exile on Main St a few years later.
Compared to every other Stones record, Exile really feels like Richards’s baby, being a one-stop shop for every single piece of music that The Stones excelled at. There would be the occasional country tune and the rock and roll number, but songs like ‘Turd on the Run’ and ‘Rip This Joint’ felt like they were meant for genres that hadn’t been born yet like grunge and punk rock.
But looking at the lyrics nowadays, all The Stones need to do is make a revised version of the tune so that they can keep playing it live. Because, as much as the words can come off as deplorable by a lot of people, it would be a crime against any rock and roll fan to be robbed of that classic lick.
