“He’s my fucking god”: Keith Richards on how much he admired Muddy Waters
No artist can claim not to be a child of their influences. Even though bands like Radiohead have made a living crafting the most adventurous tunes that anyone has ever heard of, it’s easy to pick up on everything from progressive rock on OK Computer or hear them inhabiting the same digital aesthetics as someone like Aphex Twin when they started work on Kid A. Although Keith Richards is normally more diplomatic when it comes to his favourite acts, he can’t help but gush when it comes to certain musical deities.
But Richards’s musical diet was never limited to strictly rock and roll. He had learned most of his favourite licks copying off of what Chuck Berry had done, but looking through some of his own classics, you can tell when he had been listening to the Everly Brothers when sculpting his ballads, when he started dipping his toes into reggae during The Stones’s later period, or when he was strumming away with Gram Parsons when working on the softer numbers from Exile on Main St.
When Richards was growing up, though, the language all came from the blues. The Beatles may have shown people what could happen if they embraced the sounds of pop music, but in London, everyone was still studying the texts that everyone from Sonny Boy Williamson to BB King had started to work with and put a solid backbeat behind it.
While The Yardbirds were a more straight-ahead blues outfit than what The Stones would become, it’s not like Richards didn’t know what he was talking about, either. Looking back on some of his best moments in the early days, he was always hoping to make something that would do his idols proud, whether that was nailing the perfect Robert Johnson lick or turning the Bo Diddley beat inside out.
Of all the lead guitarists from around that time, though, no one could touch Muddy Waters. He may have had issues with various businessmen throughout his life, but when listening back to a song like ‘I Got My Mojo Working’, you’re listening to someone who’s completely in tune with the blues to the point where the music seemed to drip off of them whenever they got up onstage.
And while Waters was far from the star that Richards would ultimately become, he saw his job as being a missionary of what his hero had done, saying, “I have several memories of Muddy Waters. The weirdest one is when we first went into Chess Studios in ’64, the first time we came. As we walked by into the studio, somebody said, ‘Oh, by the way, this is Muddy Waters,’ and he’s painting the ceiling. He wasn’t selling records at the time, and this is the way he got treated. He’s my fucking god, right – and he’s painting the ceiling! When we started The Rolling Stones, we were just little kids. Our aim was to turn other people onto Muddy Waters.”
While Richards is still known primarily for being the author of a dozen classic riffs with The Stones, the influence from Waters isn’t lost on him. Whether it’s him trying to find the next mysterious chord that launches a new song or working in another blues shuffle, it all comes from trying to match what Waters did when he put out his classics.
Waters deserved a much better fate than being treated as a glorified maintenance worker by his higher-ups, but even if he couldn’t get his respect back home, his memory was going to live on in his imitators. Because looking at how many people have been indirectly copying his licks at this point, he seems to be more of a blues myth than a man these days.
