The guitarist Keith Richards called “far better” than him
There isn’t much to what Keith Richards does on the guitar.
A lot of people think that you need to be touched by some divine god to be able to play as Richards did on every one of those Stones albums, but the reality is that most of the songs are actually fairly simple when you break everything down. What makes them classic is the way that he comes across when he’s playing, and there’s a good chance that no one is ever going to perform those songs the same way that he does whenever The Stones go out on tour.
Because that’s the purpose behind any great rock and roll band. The appeal is how everything sounds when playing together, and even if it’s not perfect, you can still hear what makes all of them sound great whenever they play together. Richards wasn’t looking to play like some of the greatest classical guitarists in the world, but if he could do a decent imitation of Muddy Waters or Robert Johnson, he would be perfectly happy.
But that’s not to say that there isn’t room for the more sophisticated styles of guitar playing. Rock and roll is still a genre that warmly welcomed Yngwie Malmsteen into the equation with his massive symphonic rock guitar lines, and it’s not like Richards didn’t have a massive amount of respect for people like that. Someone like Segovia could play the guitar beautifully, but that doesn’t tell the full story of what The Stones are about.
They needed to be a bit more guttural in their presentation, and that usually meant Richards digging deep until he found the right songs. He knew that there was no chance of him trying to make some of the biggest symphonic rock songs of all time, but he could still try to find a handful of tunes that could garner a bit more respect among the crowd that only listened to guitar pieces rather than songs.
But there’s hardly anyone who could have held a candle to Jose Feliciano back in the day. His way around the acoustic guitar was among the greatest fingerstyle playing anyone had ever heard, and that wasn’t Richards’s forte. He wanted to make music that had more bite to it, but he could definitely see what the rest of the world saw in the guitarist when he heard that Feliciano beat him in the guitar polls.
No one could question the amount of taste Feliciano put into everything, and Richards could only look on in awe at everything that he did, saying, “He’s a far better guitar player than me. No, I mean technically, classically. I ain’t trained that way. I force the thing to do as it’s told.” But Richards’s way around a fretboard isn’t exactly terrible either considering how many classics have come out of it.
The Stones have always been about the groove more than anything else, and while Feliciano has his moments of brilliance, no one would have been able to play like Richards did, either. That kind of fingerstyle playing never clicked with him, because when you’re in a band that had the kind of relentless rhythm behind it, it’s much easier to stick with chords and strum your way through a tune like ‘Start Me Up’.
There’s nothing wrong with Richards not being Feliciano by any means, but there was a lot more to him than being a decent rhythm guitarist. Feliciano was the kind of virtuoso most people spend years trying to play like, but Richards wanted the chance to play what he felt every single time he picked up his instrument.
