Keith Richards (born 18 December 1943) is an English musician, singer and songwriter, and one of the original members of the English rock band the Rolling Stones. Rolling Stone magazine credited Richards for “rock’s greatest single body of riffs” on guitar and ranked him 4th on its list of 100 best guitarists. Fourteen songs that Richards wrote with the Rolling Stones’ lead vocalist Mick Jagger are listed among Rolling Stone magazine’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”. (More from Wikipedia)
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Guitarist and songwriter Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones wrote of the Elvis Presley classic in his 2010 memoir, Life: “Good records just get better with age. But the one that really turned me on, like an explosion one night, listening to Radio Luxembourg on my little radio when I was supposed to be in bed and asleep, was ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. That was the stunner. I’d never heard it before, or anything like it. I’d never heard of Elvis before. It was almost as if I’d been waiting for it to happen. When I woke up the next day I was a different guy.”
It is well known that Keith Richards heavily borrowed his guitar style from Chuck Berry. Richards told Best of Guitar Player in a 1992 interview: “Chuck was my man. He was the one who made me say ‘I want to play guitar!’ . . . Suddenly I knew what I wanted to do.”
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Keith Richards once said of Buddy Holly that he had “an influence on everybody”. Richards heard Buddy perform “Not Fade Away” in concert; as only their third single, the Rolling Stones hit #3 on the UK charts with “Not Fade Away” (performed in the Bo Diddley style that was the genesis of the song in the first place) – and that song is my very favorite Rolling Stones cover song.
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“La Bamba” has been covered numerous times over the years; another Hispanic star, Trini Lopez had a 1966 hit with a more mellow version of the song, while Freddy Fender got on the charts with a Tex-Mex treatment. Folk artists like the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez and Harry Belafonte (among others) have also recorded the song. In one of their early sessions together, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards played “La Bamba” in 1961; ironically, they were both 17 years old, the same age as Ritchie Valens when he perished on the airplane crash. The tape of this rare recording brought $81,000.
Much of the overheated rhetoric about J. Reuben Silverbird is about his name changes; even the minor switch from Ruben to Reuben is mentioned. Using stage names is hardly limited to rock musicians – the very term itself shows that its origin is in the theatre. You needn’t go any further than the drummer for the Beatles to find one: Ringo Starr (born Richard Starkey). Guitarist and songwriter Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones used the name Keith Richard for many years. The John Birch Society called Stones frontman Mick Jagger “Mick Jaeggert” back in the 1970’s; a Google search brought up only two websites using this name – one French and one Hungarian – so this is probably not for real.
(August 2013)
In 1962, Dick Taylor was in a band called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Brian Jones was recruiting members for his own band, and these three joined up along with Ian Stewart. Jones came up with the name Rollin’ Stones for the band; they went through several drummers before Charlie Watts joined the line-up.
Big Midnight also has released only one album, Everything for the First Time, which came out on Alive Records in 2003. Allmusic immediately notes in their review by Brian O’Neill, “Actually, there is nothing here that you will be hearing for the first time” and continues: “Everything for the First Time could have as easily came out in 1973 as it did in 2003. Call ’em ‘the Rolling Stooges’ and the band will have to plead guilty, as Big Midnight combines the nihilism of Iggy Pop (‘Love for Sin’ could have been a [David] Bowie or [Lou] Reed side written specifically with Ig in mind) with the bloozey, boozy swagger of Keith Richards’ crew.”
(June 2014)
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The first performance by what was then called the Rollin’ Stones – named after the landmark blues song “Rollin’ Stone” by Muddy Waters – took place on July 12, 1962 at the Marquee Club in London. The line-up at that time was Mick Jagger (lead vocals, harmonica), Keith Richards (guitar), Brian Jones (guitar, harmonica), Ian Stewart (piano), Dick Taylor (bass) and Mick Avory (drums – Avory himself recalls that it was actually Tony Chapman). Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had known each other as children and were reacquainted by Dick Taylor, who was a mutual friend. Bill Wyman replaced Dick Taylor on bass in December 1962; Taylor then became one of the founding members of the Pretty Things, a band that is as long-lived and (in some circles) as beloved as the Stones, though with a significantly lower profile. When Charlie Watts joined the band on drums in January 1963, and with Ian Stewart removed from the official band membership (also in 1963), the classic line-up of the Rolling Stones was born.
(January 2015/2)
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I discussed last month that the opening riff from “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” came to Keith Richards in a dream. “Yesterday” has a similar origin; Paul McCartney had the entire melody in his head after a dream (probably sometime in 1964), and he rushed to the piano to play the tune before it faded from memory. This worried him considerably, as he wondered whether his “dream” was actually someone else’s song; but after checking with several people, Paul was convinced that it was an original work. There were no lyrics initially; the working title of the song was “Scrambled Eggs”, with these opening lines: “Scrambled eggs / Oh, my baby how I love your legs”.
(June 2015)
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The following year, as I wrote a couple of months back, Keith Richards ran his classic opening riffs for the Rolling Stones’ monster hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” through a fuzzbox, thus adding this to the rock repertoire.
(July 2015)
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