“I’m not impressed”: The guitarist Keith Richards picked over Van Halen
Compared to every other rock and roll guitar player, Keith Richards seemed to come from a different world whenever he played.
Sure, his style may have been copied by anyone who wanted to know what good rock and roll was supposed to sound like, but when you’re listening to his guitar next to someone like George Harrison, there was a bit more grit and grime to what he was doing. But even if he was one of the few artists who could manage to work off of someone like Tom Waits, Richards couldn’t deny that when a guitarist was making something absolutely beautiful.
Then again, the definition of “beautiful” guitar playing has changed more than a few times over the years. Everyone from Jeff Beck to Jimi Hendrix has found ways to make the guitar speak as no one else could, but there was no one who seemed to matter more than Eddie Van Halen when he started making his tapping licks in the late 1970s. This was a new breed of guitar hero, but Richards wasn’t about to change his whole style.
If anything, there were a lot of solos that Eddie was playing that seemed to come from listening to the greatest blues players before his time. He was a die-hard Eric Clapton fan during his Cream days, but when Richards was listening to Eddie’s guitar, it felt more like a bunch of noise to him whenever he heard him. It was still beautifully done, but someone like Andres Segovia was miles ahead of what everyone else was doing.
It’s a little hard to compare some of the greatest rock and roll players to one of the best classical musicians of all time, but there’s no real contest when putting both of them against each other. Segovia was making the kind of pieces that made you wonder if he had four hands to play every song, and even if he didn’t need to tap his way into people’s hearts, there’s hardly a bum note in any of his pieces.
Richards wasn’t going to be anywhere near that good in The Stones, but he could at least appreciate that kind of playing a little more than Van Halen, saying, “I don’t remember a thing about Van Halen in those days. I appreciated the work later on and everything, but I’m not a virtuoso soloist. I’m not impressed by that kind of guitar playing. You want to listen to a guitar player, listen to [Andrés] Segovia, for Christ’s sake. The rock players, they’re good, and they’ve all got their little thing going. But it’s never been my bag.”
But that’s not to say that Eddie doesn’t have his place in rock and roll history. He did still a musical arms race of sorts when everyone started to see who could play faster but when looking through his own body of work, the pieces that he made were always a lot more musical than everyone else, like when he managed to turn his guitar into a church organ on ‘Cathedral’ or the small musical army on ‘Mean Street’.
And Richards seemed to be the same way when pumping out his riffs. He would prefer to listen to someone with a bit more technique and dexterity than him, but when looking through some of the greatest songs that he ever performed, there’s a lot more grease in his rhythm playing that’s there to remind everyone that he was the same guy that could perform a song like ‘Wild Horses’ and also work with Tom Waits.
Segovia was always going to be out of the reach of nearly every rock and roll guitarist, but that didn’t mean that they were lesser players because of it. If anything, that gave everyone a benchmark to look towards, and even if Richards never quite got there, he was more than happy to keep searching for a new chord that would get him that much closer to making a guitar masterpiece.
