The moment Keith Richards knew The Rolling Stones had made it: “It happened so fast”
If you gave someone a camera and unlimited funds and asked them to travel the world until they found someone who genuinely has never heard of The Rolling Stones, they would find themselves travelling for a while and in some obscure corners of the Earth until they completed their mission. Six decades after the band’s original inception, they continue to be people’s most listened-to artists, selling out arenas worldwide and appealing to fans young and old.
Of course, it wasn’t always this way for the band. There were periods when they were playing in borderline empty rooms. “It was a little ballroom in Twickenham, and there were 12 people there,” said Rod Stewart, recounting the first time that he ever saw the band live, “There was literally no one there; they were all sitting on stools playing…”
It goes back even further than this, too. Before they were known as The Rolling Stones, there was an earlier iteration of the band consisting of Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Alexis Korner and Cyril Davis. They had all seen Muddy Waters perform in the UK and decided to start a blues band in England; they were one of the first to do it. The band were destined to break up, and when they did, Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts headed off to form what would then become The Rolling Stones.
Their success was quick, as it felt like overnight they had gone from being a small band in England playing in empty pubs to worldwide sensations. It will undoubtedly have been a whirlwind experience for the band, which was hard to keep track of. When a band suddenly finds themselves skyrocketing to fame like The Rolling Stones did, from so high up, the world becomes unrecognisable, and so it took someone from before they were famous to remind them how far they had come.
While talking about the time he first knew they’d made it, despite not being in that early iteration of the band, Keith Richards was just as inspired by Muddy Waters as they were. He knew things were going well when he found himself in Waters’s company, the man who had initially inspired him suddenly an equal.
“We were in Mississippi. We’d been playing this music, and it had all been very respectful, but then we were actually there sniffing it,” the Rolling Stones guitarist said, “You want to be a blues player, the next minute you fucking well are, and you’re stuck right amongst them, and there’s Muddy Waters standing next to you.”
Richards concluded by talking about the surreal experience of bumping into one of his heroes, “It happens so fast that you really can’t register all of the impressions that are coming at you. It comes later on, the flashbacks because it’s all so much. It’s one thing to play a Muddy Waters song. It’s another thing to play with him.”
