The musicians Keith Richards called “too perfect”
Part of the appeal of The Rolling Stones was their lack of polish. Originally a straightforward blues band, the Stones briefly attempted to be a pop group with songs like ‘Tell Me’ before purposefully styling themselves as a more ragged and dangerous version of The Beatles. Keith Richards became one of the first adopters of the fuzz pedal, using it on the band’s first cross-continental number one hit, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’.
Richards always took pride in the amount of noise he made on ‘Satisfaction’. “I was screaming for more distortion: ‘This riff’s really gotta really hang hard and long,’ and we burnt the amps up and turned the shit up, and it still wasn’t right,” Richards told Guitar Player in 1992. “And then Ian Stewart went around the corner to [a music store] and came around with a distortion box: ‘Try this.’”
After that, Richards remained on the hunt for musicians who shared his proud lack of formality. He gravitated toward Bob Dylan, whose voice was the opposite of a manicured tenor. Richards loved the rough edges that Dylan explored in his songs, but he had a harder time appreciating his longtime backing group, The Band.
“I saw them at the Dylan gig on the Isle of Wight, and I was disappointed,” Richards told Rolling Stone in 1969. “Dylan was beautiful, especially when he did the songs by himself. He has a unique rhythm which only seems to come off when he’s performing solo.”
The 1969 Isle of Wight Festival was Dylan’s first major gig in England since his 1966 motorcycle crash. Although they had already established themselves outside of Dylan’s shadow, The Band agreed to back Dylan up once again at the performance. Everyone from Eric Clapton to John Lennon and Paul McCartney attended the show to see Dylan return to the stage, but Richards was unmoved by The Band.
“The Band were just too strict,” he said. “They’ve been playing together for a long, long time, and what I couldn’t understand was their lack of spontaneity. They sounded note for note like their records. It was like they were just playing the records on stage and at a fairly low volume, with very clear sound. I personally like some distortion, especially if something starts happening on stage. But they just didn’t seem to come alive by themselves. I think that they’re essentially an accompanying band. When they were backing up Dylan, there was a couple of times when they did get off. But they were just a little too perfect for me.”
Check out ‘Up On Cripple Creek’ down below.
