The singer Keith Richards wishes he never met: “One of the few disappointments in my life”
Anyone who has ever played rock and roll has been channelling Keith Richards, whether they know it or not.
Although the man has practically been a walking zombie to everyone for the last 20 years, Richards is still the epitome of what a rock star is supposed to look like, whether it’s the swashbuckling fashion that he has taken up in later life or the cocksure attitude that he has whenever he picks up a guitar. Most of us can only hope to look as effortlessly cool as he did when every Stones song is counted off, but Richards also learned that not every musician is as laid-back as he is.
Then again, Richards might be one of the only rock stars who manages to live up to every single standard that you could think of. Paul McCartney is already one of the golden examples of a living legend whenever he appears onscreen, but there’s no doubt that Richards is the exact same person every time the cameras are turned off. He simply lives and breathes rock and roll most of the time, and that comes from his desire to always listen to the classics that got him into music in the first place.
He had already connected with Mick Jagger when he saw him carrying records on a railway platform in London, and going through his record collection, there was always space for the blues. Everyone from Muddy Waters to Robert Johnson were musical prophets in his mind half the time, and when listening to his version of ‘Love in Vain’, you could tell that he also had a healthy respect for every country great that he worked with, whether that was jamming with George Jones to strumming away with Gram Parsons back in the day.
But even if The Stones could go down a lot of different roads, Richards was always going to come back to those initial rock and rollers that set his world on fire. Everyone was transfixed with the way that Elvis Presley shook his ass back in the day, and Little Richard is still the gold standard for what a wild man singer is supposed to sound like, but the entire reason Richards is still standing onstage today is because of Chuck Berry.
There’s no real set answer for when rock and roll began, but Berry will forever be known as the true godfather of the genre. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ may have predated the likes of ‘Johnny B Goode’ and ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, but there was something about the energy and the way that he played guitar that resonated with every kid who was born to piss off their parents by playing their music too loud.
Richards considered Berry to be on a different level to everyone else, but he was also more than a little bit disappointed when he started working with him, saying, “I don’t know if Little Richard was more important to me than Chuck Berry. Chuck has always been my man. Except that now I know the man and I wish I didn’t. In a way, this is one of the few disappointments in my life. I gotta say, Chuck, you asshole.”
Granted, if you ended up getting punched in the face by one of your heroes, chances are you would be more than a little pissed off yourself. Richards may have been one of the biggest fanboys of Berry when he got started, but his reputation for being more than a little bit of a hardass and having a few nefarious habits offstage didn’t exactly make him look like the greatest person in the world.
Then again, Richards was always better at separating the art from the artist every single time he performed. Sure, Berry might not have been the friendliest guy to hang around with, but that didn’t mean that Richards had to stop feeling that same sense of excitement every single time he kicked into ‘Johnny B Goode’ .
