The two 1950s albums that brought Mick Jagger and Keith Richards together
For a band like The Rolling Stones to still be active after over 60 years together, with the two principal songwriters remaining as important as ever, is a remarkable feat that demonstrates an unparalleled connection between the people at its core.
Of course, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards haven’t always had the greatest relationship, and bust-ups between the two caused the band to go through lengthy periods of inactivity while they went away, satisfied separate creative urges, and recovered from addiction and personal struggles. They’ve returned from all of these hiatuses invigorated and with an urge to continue their legacy, and the fact that there’s new music from them on the horizon suggests that this isn’t dwindling any time soon.
But just how do two minds manage to come together in this fashion in the first place? Most bands meet in environments where one is able to witness the other playing music already, with the other expressing an interest in a potential collaboration, but the most important early meeting between Jagger and Richards was far more a case of ‘it was simply meant to be’.
It’s nothing if not fortuitous that they managed to find each other, but even as teenagers, knowing that you’ve met the person with whom you’ll form an unbreakable creative partnership would be hard to comprehend, even if you were so easily swept up by the excitement at the prospect of taking over the world together.
The duo had known each other since attending the same school in Dartford during the 1950s, but both were doing their own thing and weren’t ever working alongside each other in a musical capacity at the time.
It wasn’t until 1961 that a chance encounter at the local train station led Richards to want to speak to Jagger, and they suddenly realised that they had everything in common that would eventually go on to fuel their creative partnership for so many years. In a 2023 interview with NPR, Richards said that instinct took over on that day that they both happened to be in the same place, and that they immediately acknowledged there was something there to be explored.
“We got into the same carriage together, and I looked at what he was carrying, which was two albums: One was The Best of Muddy Waters, and the other was Rockin’ at the Hops by Chuck Berry,” Richards recalled of this fateful day, “I had never seen anybody possessing such treasures in my life, because these were, you know, Chess Records out of Chicago.”
Richards went on to explain how being born during the Second World War, where little was happening creatively, and the music business didn’t exist in the same way as it would a decade later, the discovery of rock and roll was intensely exciting for them, and that finding someone else who was interested in the same music was a good enough reason to want to connect. “It was real,” he added, “It was the stuff. You felt that you were listening to something that is deeper than most people were listening to. And the blues is about as deep as you can get.”
It’s as lucky as you can get in terms of being able to find that spark that makes a partnership work, and this mutual acknowledgement of a shared interest would eventually go on to shape the future of music. Things may be different these days, but if you ever see someone carrying your favourite records out in public, maybe you shouldn’t be so afraid to make yourself known to them and see where that connection could take you.
