“Resting on your laurels”: The Rolling Stones tour Keith Richards hated
The touring lifestyle is usually the life-or-death decision for any seasoned musician. There are a lot of opportunities that can arise when onstage, and even if someone has been out of practice for years, the satisfaction that comes with tearing it up onstage like you did in your teens is something that’s never going to get old. Then again, Keith Richards knew his limits whenever The Rolling Stones got onstage, and he figured that some pieces of his legacy weren’t always meant to be shown in front of an audience all the time.
Granted, Richards has always been able to show up and deliver no matter what state he’s in. Whether it was the years lost to heroin addiction or going onstage as a form of therapy after his son passed away, Keef always felt at home whenever he had the lights on him, and playing with his friends was the greatest piece of medicine that he’s been given during his lifetime.
But that’s always when they were in service to the right kind of record. Richards may live and breathe The Stones in everything he does, but half the reason why he needed to work with other people and move on to a solo career came from the insistence for them to move on to other things. He knew that he wanted to play bluesy rock and roll for the rest of his life, and no amount of disco dancing was going to satisfy him.
Looking at the lead-up to their albums, it’s easy to figure out how Richards feels about the record. Although Mick Jagger has said that he was not enamoured with something like Exile on Main Street back in the day, hearing them return to their old stomping grounds with projects like Voodoo Lounge gave them one of their first great records in ages and served as a reminder that they could play nice with each other.
“After that, we needed to prove ourselves again.”
keith richards
Once any dinosaur rock act comes out of the woodwork, though, all the labels see are dollar signs. Despite the band already having a few shaky moments in the late 1990s on Bridges to Babylon, that didn’t stop their higher-ups from having them go out on a tour with all guns blazing for Forty Licks, which celebrated their time together as a group with a greatest hits tour. If Richards wasn’t happy with being asked to stand behind a record he didn’t like, he was never going to be the kind of person to play his greatest hits for the hell of it.
According to the guitarist, the Forty Licks tour was one of the reasons why he insisted on making new material to play, saying during the A Bigger Bang era, “The last tour, you might say, was basically resting on your laurels. It was like celebrating your wonderful career, your great success and all that – a hurdle to get over. After that, we needed to prove ourselves again. I don’t think we would be talking about the new tour if it was pure regurgitation.”
While the band certainly didn’t sound the same as they did when working on albums like Sticky Fingers or even Goats Head Soup, the fact that they had enough gas in the tank to deliver again was all they could have asked for. After all, Richards was known to be the consummate blues artist, and that always meant quoting one’s heart rather than having someone decide what to play for you.
And despite the band having a few iffy moments when making Hackney Diamonds later in their career, it’s nice to see that Richards never lost that hunger he had at the beginning of his career. Anyone can get tired of playing their tunes once in a while, but that comes with the territory whenever anyone gambles with fame. It’s one thing to get recognised like that once, but it’s another matter trying to keep it, and with every album, The Stones have always wanted to approach it like it’s the last one they’ll ever make.
