‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ allows Keith Richards to “the tiger out!”
There are bound to be more than a few Rolling Stones songs that Keith Richards doesn’t ever want to play again.
He may have helped invent what the concept of a guitar riff sounded like, but when you’ve had countless tunes in the bank, there comes a point where even the fans can separate the diamonds on Exile On Main Street from the by-the-numbers tracks that turned up on Dirty Work. Every band has those kinds of peaks and valleys, but as long as there are those immortal riffs, Richards was going to be just fine playing onstage whenever The Stones put on a show.
Then again, a lot of what Richards did was continuing the tradition that he heard in some of his favourite musicians. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see some of the blues covers that The Stones made on their classic records, but for all of the worship that they gave Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, both Richards and Mick Jagger didn’t want to find themselves in a box for the rest of their career.
They wanted the chance to spread out, but Jagger’s version of experimenting looked a lot different from what Richards had in mind. The frontman was used to following trends and seeing what new magic they could find, but it’s not like Richards was exactly over the moon about making a turn towards disco. What he wrote needed to be earnest, which is why half of his experimental songs sound a lot closer to country.
His friendship with Gram Parsons opened his mind to what he could do with an acoustic guitar in his hand, and there are more than a few tunes that could break anyone’s heart if they weren’t careful, like ‘Far Away Eyes’ or ‘Wild Horses’. But there’s nothing that got him more excited than finding the right badass riff while they were jamming. Everyone hopes to catch those moments in real time, but for all the ‘Paint It Blacks’ and ‘Gimme Shelters’ that have earned a spot in history, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ is still the one song Richards couldn’t get enough of playing.
Other tunes might be a little bit more adventurous than this, but Richards felt like the initial riff is nearly impossible to screw up that much, saying, “For me, to play ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ onstage, it’s like, ‘Let me at ’em.’ It’s like, ‘Let the tiger out!’ And you still find, like, new ways of moving the riff around and it’s just got one of those great immediate bangs on it. You can’t go wrong once you’ve kicked it off. Then you just sort of hold onto its tail and he kind of takes you.”
For all of the great riffs they had been used to writing at the time, this tune was a lot more forward-looking than what they had been used to doing at the time. They had just discovered those open tunings that would become commonplace later, so when you go from the sinister fuzz box on ‘Satisfaction’ to this, you would have sworn the band had grown up ten years within a few months.
And compared to where they would go, this felt like the perfect middle ground between their early days and where they would be going later. There was still that infectious energy inherited from ‘Get Off My Cloud’ and ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’, but you can hear the genesis of where they would be going on tunes like ‘Street Fighting Man’ and ‘Start Me Up’ in the way that Richards attacks the riff.
The band were clearly shapeshifting in real time, and while they were still living in The Beatles’ shadow for a time, this was when all those comparisons didn’t seem to matter anymore. They were the bad boy version of those kids from Liverpool, but being rebellious didn’t mean they forgot how to write a great tune.
