The one guitarist Keith Richards admitted was out of his league: “Nuances and chords”
Keith Richards is a riff master. He might not have the noodling prowess of a pure soloist, but what Richards brought on guitar would not only become the basis for your favourite Rolling Stones but also the reason the 1960s hummed with the buoyancy of a new movement the way it did.
Some of the best Rolling Stones are usually based on a jam. There might be one great musical idea courtesy of Keith Richards or Mick Jagger, but the heart and soul usually come when the rest of the group are riffing on the idea and get the chance to spread out, whether that was Charlie Watts adding his spice to everything or Bill Wyman putting a bass fill into the mix. All great groups usually have room to jam, but Richards said that there was nothing that he could improve upon when listening to Robert Johnson.
While The Stones have always had a musical stew of influences that they draw from, the blues has always been the constant. There may be traces of country music laced throughout their presentation or the occasional punk-adjacent song, but the music of people like Muddy Waters and BB King is what turned them onto music in the first place, which is evident in half of Richards’ lead guitar vocabulary.
But whereas it’s easy to parse out what Waters and King were doing when you look at technique, Johnson seemed to be a man possessed when he recorded his tunes. There are only a handful of tapes that capture his best moments, but listening to songs like ‘Me and the Devil Blues’, he was expelling demons that came out of his soul, almost like he was playing directly from the heart that no one since Jimi Hendrix has been able to recapture.
Richards admitted that he wasn’t even going to try to match what Johnson could do when they recorded ‘Love in Vain’, saying, “We were sitting in the studio, saying, Let’s do ‘Love in Vain’ by Robert Johnson. Then I’m trying to figure out some nuances and chords, and I start to play it in a totally different fashion. Everybody joins in and goes. Yeah, and suddenly, you’ve got your own stamp on it. I certainly wasn’t going to be able to top Robert Johnson’s guitar playing.”
Over the years, Richards has happily lain at the feet of some of the best players. Famously, he thinks Elvis Presley’s six-string man, Scotty Moore, is his ultimate guitar hero, but to admit that he couldn’t match another artist was a step he rarely took. He was happy to pay homage, however, to perhaps the ultimate voice in the world of blues.
Since there was no way of trying to capture that spirit again, Richards taking the song in a country direction was probably the best bet they could have hoped for. Gram Parsons had already been hanging around with him then, so having a twang behind any tune probably couldn’t hurt.
Johnson was never known as the cowboy-hat-wearing type, but his song about a love lost actually translates surprisingly well to the country format. There are still some bluesy tropes laced throughout everything, but hearing about a man following his lover to the train station only to be left on his ass is feasibly something that could happen in a Merle Haggard tune just as well.
But it was only a matter of time before Richards started making his own broken-hearted country songs. There had been pieces of acoustic material on ‘Wild Horses’, but there’s no doubting the roots of tunes like ‘Dead Flowers’ or ‘Coming Down Again’, with some of them even managing to fit into the Johnny Cash mould.
Because, really, The Stones were influenced by all types of American music, and there was no sense in limiting their style to just one. And if there was a guitar god like Johnson to look up to, why not try to recontextualise his songs for the next generation? That way, it’s still spreading the gospel of the blues.
