The Buddy Holly album that changed Keith Richards’ life forever: “A great impetus”
It would appear that no matter how hard it tries, through electric shocks, lethal doses of narcotics and enough sleepless nights to make him the patron saint of Seattle, life simply cannot stop Keith Richards‘ love of music.
It was his adoration of blues records that introduced his lifelong musical partner Mick Jagger, and it was a continued devotion to his craft that helped him become the ultimate riff machine as part of The Rolling Stones, for all intents and purposes, it is not a combination of haemoglobin, plasma and shepherd’s pie that make up the blood in Richards’ veins but notes, rock and a whole lotta roll.
Many musicians can become jaded with the art of music-making as their only expression. Paul McCartney and David Bowie both furiously painted. Bowie also took on roles in many on-screen productions. Elsewhere, Roger Daltrey is a trout farmer, Jack White is a furniture upholsterer, Kathleen Hanna is a devoted knitter, and Alice Cooper, inexplicably, loves golf. However, it seems as though, for Richards, music has always been the reason he gets up in the morning.
Over the years, he has continually shown his love for the lesser-known side of the music business, championing a whole range of artists who most Rolling Stones fans would have only a glimmer of knowledge about. For ‘Keef’, the very fabric of music is as important as the air we breathe. As he once said: “Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.”
Richards’ influences, therefore, all reside in the very nature of his being. Largely formed during his earliest dalliances into the artistic realm of guitar playing, he would take his love of the blues into his work with The Rolling Stones, with the Dartford band covering a lot of their heroes during their earliest moments both on the circuit and in the recording studio. However, one of those idols from his past would also give him the confidence to become a fully-fledged songwriter.
The guitarist had spent most of his childhood besotted by jazz and blues but was captivated by the hip-shaking prowess of Elvis Presley. But, in later years, he would soon change his affection for another rocker of the day: “Later on I found out that Elvis was the real mama’s boy backstage,” explained Richards in his biography Life. “It was Buddy who got the bitches over the fucking table. He never used to go on before he had a couple. It was totally the other way around from the images people had of them.”
Buddy Holly is a figure too often overlooked when considering the pillars of rock and roll. A sad victim in the plane crash that also saw the lives of The Big Bopper and Richie Valens cut short in a tragedy coined ‘The Day The Music Died‘, Holly’s contribution to the proliferation of rock music is wildly understated. He had a particulart effect on the young men and women of England who seemed to connect with Holly on a different level.
The first Buddy Holly record, The Chirping Crickets, released in 1957, would be cited by Richards in a 2011 interview with Q as the one LP that pushed him toward writing his own tunes. And it was something shared with another set of premiere songsmiths: “I remember talking to Lennon and McCartney about Buddy. The fact that he was writing his own songs was a great impetus for us.”
It might seem odd to us now, but for a long while, being a musician didn’t necessarily mean writing songs, as Richards explains: “In those days you were a musician and the idea of also being a writer was the difference between the green grocer and the blacksmith. When he came to England I caught him on TV through a neighbor’s window. We didn’t have a TV at the time, so they were kind enough to open their curtains so we could see.”
The impact of Buddy Holly is unquantifiable when considering just how many albums and artists were shaped simply by his willingness to write his own songs. But, if we were to try and break it down to brass tacks, simply encouraging one of the most prominent rock figures of the last century to become the icon he is, is probably enough to ensure Holly’s name never be taken in vain.
