“That motherfucker play”: The singer Keith Richards said invented heavy metal
Every single rockstar who came up with Keith Richards usually has a strained relationship with the term ‘heavy metal’.
There are fantastic bands to come out of the genre, and there are even more guitarists who are able to take the instrument to places Richards had never thought of, but the human riff machine was never that concerned with what the likes of Black Sabbath had been doing. Sure, they were a bit scary and unsettling for their time, but Richards wasn’t going to be intimidated by people who hadn’t taken the real musical plunge the same way that he did when The Stones were just starting out.
Because, really, Richards was going through every single piece of musical history long before the Led Zeppelins of the world had come along. He had been a student of rock and roll ever since he started listening to people like Chuck Berry, and when he found that Mick Jagger was into the same kind of music that he was, it didn’t take them long to start working together once Brian Jones chose them to come on board with his blues rock outfit.
But it took them a while before they were able to incorporate their own tunes into the mix. Any music nerd like them would have wanted to play their favourite songs live for the rest of their lives, but when The Beatles started making original tunes, the expectation for everyone else, Richards was going to twist blues in a much different direction. ‘Satisfaction’ is still a bluesy song when you break it down, but that riff that kicks everything off was a lot more feral than anything that was coming out of Berry’s amplifier.
The more the band got into listening to their heroes, though, the more they seemed to mature into a modern version of bluesmen. They were more than willing to follow the lead of what people like Robert Johnson and Mississippi Fred McDowell had done on their records, and half of their charm was being able to see the raw history of their music every time they kicked off one of their tunes.
Most of the proto-metal bands were doing the same thing, but Richards saw a clear difference between what Led Zeppelin was doing compared to someone like John Lee Hooker was doing. Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck had been massively influenced by Hooker when they first got started, but no amount of distortion and frenetic playing was ever going to replace the kind of mojo that Hooker had whenever Richards saw him.
Others could try to sound dangerous, but in terms of heavy metal’s beginnings, Richards figured that Hooker was all anyone ever needed, saying, “If you want heavy metal, listen to John Lee Hooker, listen to that motherfucker play. That’s heavy metal. That’s armour!” And when looking up footage from that time, it’s a lot easier to hear what Richards is talking about when you actually see it in context.
Hooker didn’t have the massive Marshall stacks behind him or make demented riffs the same way that Tony Iommi did, but you can hear the real pain in the way that he plays guitar. All great blues were about trying to capture that melancholy feeling that everyone goes through in life, so being able to play this ferociously could only come from someone who had a lot of real heartache deep inside them before they even touched the instrument.
So while any metal guitarists can try their best to follow in the footsteps of their heroes, Richards already has his answer for what constitutes a great metal guitarist. Most people could spend time trying to nail down the exact definition of heaviness, but that unspoken feeling comes from the heart more than the mind.
