“I’ll take anybody’s idea”: Why Keith Richards feels fine about plagiarism
In an interview with Uncut promoting the reissue of his 1992 solo album Main Offender, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards was frank about his embrace of plagiarism. “…yeah, it’s the way I’m used to working. I’ll take anybody’s idea. You can call that collaboration, I call it thieving! Writing is a cut-throat business…”
Despite the Stones’ legal machine’s legal wrangling over The Verve’s use of ‘The Last Time’ on their 1997 hit ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’, Richards’ open declaration of creative appropriation affirms the old adage, “if you’re gonna steal, steal from the best”
The Rolling Stones’ very formation is born from mimicry and imitation. As The Fab Four rivals were playing rock ‘n roll covers in Liverpool’s The Cantern, similarly, the Stones cut their teeth playing Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley tracks, building a live repertoire of authentic rock ‘n’ roll and blues of the era. An erroneous yet major feature of Stones lore is the chance encounter of Richards and former primary school friend Mick Jagger at Dartford station in Kent, Richards spotting Jagger’s array of Muddy Waters vinyl under his arm. While this wasn’t the inception of the band as Platform 2’s blue plaque states (it was Brian Jones who founded the band), the seeds of The Glimmer Twins’ future legendary songwriting were sown there and then, sparked by a shared passion of the records of their teens.
While some have since accused Richards’ of hijacking Black music, it’s undeniable that he played those early covers with studious attention and soul. Listening to The Rolling Stones’ rendition of Slim Harpo’s ‘I’m A King Bee’ from their self-titled debut, you can scarcely believe it was performed by a guitarist from Dartford rather than Louisiana’s Baton Rouge. The same album’s cover of ‘Carol’ too captures everything exciting about Chuck Berry’s original, each fret lick wielded with Richards’ magic sense of effortlessness.
“As long as you turn the set on and put your finger in the air, if there’s any songs out there, they’ll come through you. It’s very easy to get hung up on just the simple mechanics and craft of songwriting rather than the more important thing that real master musicians like the whirling dervishes can tell us about: just letting it go through you and come out the other side” Richards exalted in 1983.
Adopting an almost spiritual slant on the songwriting process, Richards makes implicitly clear that the electric bolt of creative inspiration must pass through many channels, subsuming whatever art came before it like a passed-down cultural practice he alluded to.
Richards’ deep veneration of 1950s American popular music did sometimes collide with Jaggers’ ear to the ground for the developing trends across their sixty-plus years together, the singer pushing the band toward disco, funk and even reggae in the latter 1970s. Black and Blue‘s ‘Hot Stuff’ is as expert a slice of funk as anything from Bootsy Collins or Stevie Wonder, and their disco nod ‘Miss You’ is a classic of the genre. Even the polish of new wave coated their unfairly maligned Undercover, thrusting them to the fore briefly during MTV’s 1980s heyday.
Art’s never existed in a vacuum, and the creative process is littered with the impressions of artists that inspired putting pencil to paper, brush to easel, or picking up a ten quid Rosetti acoustic as Richards did aged 13. Plagiarism is an art, and as The Rolling Stones has shown, if handled well can create the stuff of legends.
