The “beautiful” guitarist who gave Bruce Springsteen a career
Bruce Springsteen lived and breathed all things rock and roll from the moment that he started playing.
Something about the way that Chuck Berry and Little Richard sang about having fun stirred something inside of him, and while he had a much different story to tell every time he played with the E Street Band, he felt that there was still some DNA that traced all the way back to the glory days of rock and roll. But even if the first generation of rock and roll set everything in motion, ‘The Boss’ felt that there were far greater influences that taught him everything he knew.
Because when listening to the way that Springsteen sang, it was always about capturing a feeling the same way that his idols did. He wanted to sound like Roy Orbison when he made Born to Run, and while no one could possibly do justice to what the crooner could do in his prime, Springsteen always sounded as if the drama of Orbison had clashed with the kind of lyrical complexity of Bob Dylan.
And that’s just scratching the surface. He was just as impressed with what people like Van Morrison were doing when he listened to Astral Weeks, and the biggest names in Motown also held a special place in his heart, but there’s not a single person from Springsteen’s generation who wouldn’t say that they didn’t get their first musical wake-up call when listening to the British invasion.
Every single one of those bands seemed to make rock and roll look effortlessly cool every single time they played. The Beatles brought rock and roll to people’s living rooms and made it okay for even the most uptight listeners, and ‘The Boss’ practically built his entire empire on the kinds of songs that Eric Burdon was singing in The Animals, but there weren’t many people who seemed to have the same kind of swagger that Keith Richards did every single time they performed.
Richards was born to be a guitar player in lots of ways, and the way that he made The Rolling Stones jump was what he always after. He had learned that the greatest blues players were the ones who could lay down a groove, so when Springsteen got the opportunity to perform with them over the years, he was shocked that Richards still had that same fire years after the fact.
His wife had already sung on some of Richards’s solo records, but the idea of him coming up onstage with the rest of the group meant coming face to face with his first guitar teacher, saying, “These are the guys who INVENTED my job! They have been stamped on my heart since the chunking chords of ‘Not Fade Away’ came ripping off the little 45 I bought. I’ve come across many spirit-filled folk in my travels but no one as spectrally beautiful as Keith Richards.”
A lot of what Richards did on guitar wasn’t necessarily the most technical thing in the world, but that’s not what it was about. He lived for the kind of music that made people want to groove every single time they played, and even when they make some of their more recent songs these days, you can still hear them trying to maintain that same kind of groove that they had back in the days when they were making ‘Satisfaction’.
The rock and roll world can be downright cruel to some of their veterans, but the reason why Richards has seemed to last this long is about so much more than having a deal with the devil. At the end of the day, he seemed to genuinely love everything that he was doing, and nothing was going to stop him for playing the kind of music that he loved every single time he got up onstage.
