The songwriter Keith Richards had an unspoken connection with: “What a great feel!”
When thinking about Keith Richards as a collaborator, one man comes to mind – Mick Jagger. Known as the Glimmer Twins, the two Rolling Stones songwriters are one of the most well-known musical duos of all time. But his bandmate wasn’t the one person Richards found an incredible musical synergy with.
Jagger was his first, though. As they came together in a band so young, the duo really learnt how to write songs together. Everything about The Stones is born out of that friendship and the collaborative energy within it. It’s what allowed the band to keep evolving and growing as the two writers. Even if they didn’t always see eye-to-eye personally, they always put it aside for the sake of the music.
For the most part, there seemed to be an unspoken understanding between them that the music came first. It’s probably expected that a connection like that only comes with time. But when Richards then met another musician with whom he found that same almost telepathic energy, he knew it wasn’t about the years but simply about what came to be known as ‘That Feel’.
‘That Feel’ is a Tom Waits song, made in collaboration with Keith Richards, but one that seemed to sum up the two musician’s friendship and connection. Waits is another artist who has had a truly fascinating and spanning career full of evolution, but he’s not an artist you’d ever immediately expect to get on well with a Rolling Stone. Richards is a rock legend, yes, but he’s also a commercial master who knows how to sell a song. Waits never cared about that.
But when he came to make his 1985 album, Rain Dogs, there was a guitar part he knew only Richards could carry. “I picked out a couple of songs that I thought he would understand, and he did. He’s got a great voice, and he’s just a great spirit in the studio,” Waits recalled. That was the start of their friendship, and he added, “He’s very spontaneous; he moves like some kind of animal.”
While Waits was blown away by how natural Richards was, Richards was also in awe of Waits. He came back again in 1992 to play on Bone Machine, working on the track ‘That Feel’ together as a song that seemed to sum up their connection.
“Really, our thing is about that feel – that’s why we wrote the song,” Richards told Uncut magazine. Attempting to articulate the ease and energy of their connection, both as friends and musical collaborators, Richards said, quite beautifully, “Things like that go unspoken; it’s only in retrospect that you realise that they are there because you can’t go around saying, ‘Hey, what a great feel!’”
For both musicians, their friendship seems almost written in the stars, as Richards concluded, “That sort of understanding that you have with some guys, it’s like, ‘I know you, even though we’ve never met before.’ You click without jousting, so to speak.”
