“They haven’t improved since”: The two artists Keith Richards thought perfected the guitar
The number one goal that any artist should strive for is to inspire those who come after them. As much as people like the idea of the roaring applause of the thousands of people bouncing whenever they launch into a riff, nothing beats that feeling when you start hearing the pieces of yourself in the new kids on the block. It might be a subtle nod to one of your classic songs, but for an artist as omnipresent as Keith Richards, he’s bound to find his licks in almost every single rock and roll band since the 1960s.
While Richards was by no means the inventor of the rock and roll guitar riff, he certainly knew he was to play the right notes whenever the time called for it. He was never someone who wrote well on assignment, and despite being a professional songwriter for the first few years of his career with Mick Jagger, the best songs that he would ever write came in the moments when he would have a tune fall out of him when he was absent-mindedly strumming chords.
And when he decided to go outside the realm of normal guitar playing, his riffs in open-G tuning opened up a new world for guitarists. Everyone had been used to the signature Chuck Berry licks that everyone copied, but there is a certain kind of magic that happens whenever using those open-G shapes that are always going to end up sounding like The Stones, no matter how many effects are put on it.
But there’s more to guitars than the art of playing riffs. There’s a certain scientific process of getting the best albums of all time to sound the way they do, and that involved many people experimenting with what guitars were capable of in the 1960s, like Richards getting his signature fuzz box to make ‘Satisfaction’ sound nastier or Eric Clapton getting his “woman tone” on Cream’s first albums.
After all, the guitar is a relatively new instrument compared to the violin or the French horn, and it would take more than fuzz boxes to make something scream. Richards was already present to see people like Jimi Hendrix reshape what the guitar was supposed to be, but he still figured that no one could touch what Leo Fender and Les Paul did when they started making their first signature models.
For someone who has played more than his fair share of both brands, Richards knew there were hardly any artists that came close to what Fender and Paul did, saying, “It’s kind of weird, but they haven’t really improved the electric guitar since Les Paul and Leo Fender put their touch to it. Everything else is trying to sound like them, with maybe a few more extras.”
Even if people aren’t playing those signature models, they’re still going to be carrying a piece of guitar history passed down from Fender and Paul. Eddie Van Halen was never satisfied with playing either guitar, but by combining the neck and the body from both of them, his ‘Frankenstein’ creation was a great mixture of both versions of rock guitar, only with a more bellowing tone.
So while music has to change every few years to stay fresh, Richards knew some pieces were never going to go out of style. Both Fender and Paul made the guitar classic, and whenever the instrument sees a resurgence in the years that follow, it’s usually going to be someone playing from a guitar that either guitarist made.
