The one genre Keith Richards never enjoyed listening to
When the Almighty Book of Rock and Roll is finally made, the only thing that’s going to be left is Keith Richards sitting there signing copies.
He may look like he’s been mummified a few times over, but his status as one of the ultimate rock and roll survivors is half the reason why he’s still able to stand upright to this day. But even in an age where The Rolling Stones’ flavour of blues rock has gone in and out of style, Richards knew that he could outplay just about any of the new kids on the block.
And that’s not him giving himself a pat on the back, either. Some of the best rhythm guitarists in the business wouldn’t have even come close to matching his right hand technique, and even though he gets a lot of his magic from locking in with Charlie Watts and Steve Jordan over the years, you could tell that he could keep any kind of rhythm that you threw at him from the moment that he hits the first chords of any song.
Because for him, rock and roll wasn’t about just making badass riffs every single time he walked into the studio. That was a core part of everything, but if the rest of the world played ‘rock’, he needed to add the ‘roll’ back into everything whenever he played. And for anyone who didn’t know the difference, that sense of rhythm was all about keeping in touch with the vibe in the room every time a drummer started playing.
That’s what the greatest blues songs were based on, after all, but the status of a band like The Stones did end up looking a little bit different circa 1977. They had been going for well over a decade, and while they were an institution by that point, there were more than a few rock fans who didn’t want to listen to dinosaurs anymore. The real stuff was coming from the streets, and when bands like Sex Pistols emerged, the world got a much better look at what punk rock was supposed to be.
It wasn’t the cleanest genre in the world, and there were more than a few fashion choices that many would have considered abnormal, but it all somehow fit within a rock context. The greatest artists of their generation were going back to basics just like Richards had done when he started listening to the blues again, but rock’s favourite gunslinger wasn’t exactly in love with the idea of kids picking up guitars without having that much experience.
He did have a lot of respect for those who went back and listened to the classics, but Richards felt he didn’t need to waste his time trying to work his way through any punk album, saying, “I think what they were trying to do was try and sound like what they heard when they were kids, which was our rougher records. They dug that. I just don’t think they’ve had enough time to get the music together. It was more like a theatre thing, the punk movement. More like actors putting on a rock and roll show.”
That might not have been all that far from the truth, given that no one in the Sex Pistols could play their instruments properly, but that doesn’t mean that they were talentless. Nevermind the Bollocks did have a lot of great guitar riffs from Steve Jones, and if you look at what The Stones were doing a few years later, it did seem like they were trying to outdo a bunch of their competition when making tunes like ‘Respectable’.
But one of the reasons why punk works so well is because of what Richards pioneered back in the day. Rock and roll started out being music to piss your parents off with, and while Richards did start moving in a lot of different directions after the early 1970s, punk rock was about everyone taking that kind of music to its most logical conclusion.
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