The writer who gave Keith Richards “the highlight of his life”
When Keith Richards first joined The Rolling Stones, becoming one of the most historic rock and roll figures wasn’t his first thought.
The idea of a couple of London kids coming together and making a couple of blues covers wasn’t the worst idea in the world in the early 1960s, but after he and Mick Jagger hit upon their songwriting partnership, they had something that felt much more important than your average rock song. They were creating classics, and it took a long time before the real heavy hitters began giving them the credit that they deserved in their prime.
If you look at how the band presented themselves to the world, it wasn’t hard for them to be considered a second-rate version of The Beatles. They were just starting to write their own songs when the British invasion started, and since John Lennon and Paul McCartney were behind writing a handful of their tunes, connecting the dots between them being their proteges wasn’t an extreme leap in logic by any stretch.
But Richards had a much more diverse catalogue to choose from when he wrote his tunes. Blues was always the starting point for all of his tunes half the time, but there was a lot more to explore when he heard the kind of tunes that were coming out of America. Country music opened new doors for him, but approaching songwriting as a job meant going back to the Tin Pan Alley school of songwriting.
These songwriters were the ones cranking out some of the greatest pop songs as if it were an office job, and a lot of their best work came from them having fun. Carole King was only looking to create a handful of catchy melodies and see if she could get them to as many people as possible, but there weren’t many songwriters who affected Richards as deeply as Hoagy Carmichael did.
So many people had found comfort in listening to those old tunes when they were kids, and even George Harrison remembered being transfixed by what Carmichael was doing when he developed his jazz chords. But even if Richards didn’t need to learn a single augmented chord, you could have knocked him down with a feather when he was told that Carmichael liked his tunes.
Half of the biggest names in the pre-rock and roll days would have wanted nothing to do with this new movement, but Richards was speechless when he got compliments from Carmichael, saying, “Bobby Keys and I recorded an old Hoagy Carmichael tune once. Then, about a year later, I was in Barbados, and there was a phone call. It was Hoagy Carmichael, 86 years old, 6 months before he died. He’d somehow heard a tape [of us] and called me up to tell me how much he liked it. Things like that are the highlights of my life.”
Half of the greatest artists of all time only hope to make this kind of impact, but for Richards, this was like getting a musical knighthood in many respects. The biggest names in blues were all about developing one’s own musical vocabulary, but if tunes like ‘Wild Horses’ were gaining the attention of major artists, they were practically a reminder that Richards had picked the right profession to be in after all these years.
There are so many people who could have been in rock and roll for the money or the attention, but Carmichael’s approval is what people are always striving for when they write a great song. It’s never easy sitting there with a blank canvas, but if Richards kept following his heart, he was going to make the record that could blow away even the sharpest musical minds.
