The best riff ever made, according to Keith Richards: “He said it all right there”
The essence of any Keith Richards guitar part can always be summed up in one word: riff.
Make no mistake, there are some great Rolling Stones songs that rely on just a few cowboy chords to get the job done, but a lot of what made Keef one of the biggest stars in the world is first finding the riff to ‘Satisfaction’ or being able to kick off a song like ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and still sound like one of the single coolest artists in the entire world. But a lot of his greatest inspirations usually came from him doing his homework on other guitar players.
Because there’s not a single guitar player who idolised Keith Richards that weren’t taking their cues from Chuck Berry as well. Some of the biggest names in the world had been trying their hand at figuring out what the ‘Father of Rock and Roll’ was doing on tunes like ‘School Days’, and you can draw a direct parallel from Berry’s playing to the way that Richards approached many of his greatest solos.
But a lot of Richards’s guitar playing went a lot deeper than rock and roll. Sure, there were a lot of great tunes that came from his early days, but that didn’t stop him from throwing in a few country ditties here and there. That’s where his heart was half the time, and even though Mick Jagger wasn’t always in love with singing those kinds of songs every single time he made a new record, he and Richards could at least agree on everything coming back to the blues at the end of the day.
The sounds of everyone from Howlin’ Wolf to early Robert Johnson recordings are always what kept the band coming back for more, and a lot of what Richards did was simply trying to emulate those guys. He wasn’t going to have the same pristine touch that BB King had whenever he made a new record, but there was something beautiful hidden in Muddy Waters’s guitar parts every single time he performed.
Waters never claimed to be one of the greatest guitarists to ever live by any stretch, but you can hear his soul in his playing better than pretty much any guitar player. And since Brian Jones took the band’s name from Waters’s song ‘Rollin’ Stone’, Richards knew that it was about more than just a few great licks. Waters was speaking through his instrument, and that’s what all great guitarists should strive for.
Anyone can claim to write a handful of great licks in their time, but even by Richards’s standards for perfect tunes, he felt that the lick in ‘Rollin’ Stone’ was better than pretty much anything else, saying, “(Muddy)’s my man. He’s the guy I listened to… I felt an immediate affinity when I heard Muddy go [plays the opening lick from ‘Rollin’ Stone’]. You can’t be harder than that, man. He said it all right there. So all I want to do is be able to do that.”
Richards wasn’t going to be able to play the song with the same gravitas that Waters did, but that was never the point. The blues was always about making music that spoke to the soul, and that meant that every guitarist needed to find their own voice on the instrument. They may have had the same licks, but it was about the way that someone articulated themselves that mattered in the long run.
And given how dangerous The Stones sounded in the early days, they were willing to bring their signature brand of menace into the blues. The genre had been around for decades at that point, but even if Richards is known for being a legend of rock these days, there are hardly any licks in his library that don’t owe a small debt to what Waters had done for the rest of the world.
