The 1966 Rolling Stones song Keith Richards couldn’t stand: “It sounds rushed”
If Keith Richards had put out nothing but classics during his time with The Rolling Stones, we would probably be looking at him like some holy god of rock and roll.
While there’s many people that already think that even after the career they’ve had, Richards was never one to look through rose-coloured glasses, and even he could see the moments where he felt like their songs could have been better. And while there are countless times where he could have done something more for a song, he was a bit more jaded when the mixing of a song ended up ruining the whole thing.
Because even if the band is playing to the best of their abilities, sometimes it’s hard to capture what they’re going for every single time they walk into a room. Getting the proper mic placement for everything and making sure that there’s no clipping is half the reason why some bands end up sounding like trash when they put together their first major demos, and when you go through a lot of what Richards is talking about, you can hear him slowly start to fall out of love with some of his tunes in real time.
Then again, those “accidents” that Richards talks about is half the reason why some of their songs sound great. ‘Satisfaction’ might have been made to create a horn line out of the central riff, but if you take the fuzz off of those guitars, the entire song would have sounded different. He may have screwed it up every so often, but it was worth it to get something someone hadn’t heard before.
And when they started embracing the same kind of textures that The Beatles were back in the day, getting a sitar on one of their songs was the next logical step for them. But whereas ‘Norwegian Wood’ sounded a lot more ethereal when George Harrison added his new instrument to the mix, The Stones went for a much darker vibe whenever Richards came up with the central riff.
The whole thing could have easily been played on a guitar, but in an effort to get everything sounding right, Richards couldn’t stand hearing all of the blemishes in the mix shortly after recording it, saying, “It’s over-recorded at the end. The electric guitar doesn’t sound quite right to me, the one I play. I should have used a different guitar; at least, a different sound. And I think it sounds rushed. I think it sounds as if we’ve said – as we actually did – That’s great. If we do anymore we’ll lose the feel of it. Because that’s what we said, and that’s why, I think, if we’d done a few more takes of it, to my mind it would have been a slightly better record.”
You can definitely hear what he’s talking about, but that cacophony of sound isn’t exactly a bad thing. Rock and roll is meant to sound a little bit ugly from time to time, and you can hear the band doing everything they can to bring out the lyrical themes whenever the tempo kicks up and Charlie Watts goes to town on his tom-toms.
It also suits the lyrics perfectly. Mick Jagger was already singing about someone that sees the world through darkened eyes every time they leave their house, and when you look at the way that the band is playing off of him, hearing them getting more and more chaotic in their playing actually does a better job at putting someone in the mindset of the person singing about their blacked-out existence.
Did they think about it that hard? Probably not, but there’s no reason to chastise them about having a happy accident happen in the studio. Most of the biggest names in music are only trying to make the best music that they can, and if Richards happened to make one of the greatest tunes of the band’s career along the way, that may as well have been an extra bonus once the song hit the charts.
