Keith Richards: Back with a Band

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But while Keef rides above the world’s fray, life of late has dealt his bandmates a few hard knocks and nasty shocks. As work got underway on the Rolling Stones’ newest album, A Bigger Bang, guitarist Ronnie Wood was mired in the depths of drug dysfunctionality—a severe crack addiction, according to some rumors. And Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones’ mighty heartbeat since 1963, was diagnosed with throat cancer, undergoing surgery that was ultimately successful but put the drummer out of commission for a while.

“It was a reality check,” Richards says of potentially losing Wood and Watts. He gives a slightly uneasy laugh. “Mick [Jagger] and I eyeballed one another and said, ‘Jesus, no buffers. It’s just you and me, pal.’ Throughout the past year, I’ve felt that Mick and I were working more closely than we have in a long while. And I think it has something to do with what Charlie went through.”

Watts’ illness achieved what no amount of money, pleading or cajoling had been able to accomplish for years: Jagger and Richards finally put aside their long-standing squabbles and really started making music together again. As a result, A Bigger Bang is easily the best Rolling Stones album in a couple of decades: a classic cocktail of leering, three-chord rockers, epic ballads and lusty, low-slung blues.

Richards has always said that the Rolling Stones are Charlie’s band. Yet, at the dawn of the Sixties, before Watts or any other Stones arrived on the scene, there was Mick and Keef: two awkward teenagers holed up in suburban London bedrooms, dissecting American blues and R&B records like monks studying holy scripture, and taking their first tentative stabs at creating music. A Bigger Bang is shot through with reflections and echoes of the old Jagger/Richards magic.

“Mick’s on bass, harp, piano and guitar,” says Richards. “I’m on everything except the harp. It was a good feeling.” And while Watts and Wood were eventually able to rejoin the fold, along with key Stones supporting players Darryl Jones (bass) and Chuck Leavell (piano), A Bigger Bang remains a raw, back-to-basics rock and roll album: no horns, no violins, no Latin percussion sections or backup singers, just a coterie of core players dancing around the fire of tunes that rank among Jagger/Richards’ finest. Which is saying something, considering that the duo have written many of the most important rock songs of four decades: “Satisfaction,” “Jumping Jack Flash,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Beast of Burden” and “Start Me Up,” to name just a few. The new material also promises to energize the Stones’ marathon Bigger Bang tour, which will detonate in the wake of the album’s release.

Much of the Rolling Stones’ best music has been born in the crossfire hurricane of things falling apart: bandmates becoming comatose or going AWOL, police knocking at the door, someone’s girlfriend overdosing in the toilet—but the calm eye at the center of that storm has always been Keith Richards, stoned out of his brain yet mystically lucid, unsteady of gait yet unwavering on the path of true rock and roll. These days, the Keef myth is in danger of overshadowing the man and his music, particularly since Johnny Depp brilliantly appropriated those legendary lurching mannerisms in his portrayal of Captain Jack Sparrow in Disney’s hit film Pirates of the Caribbean.

RICHARDS Well, Johnny called me up before the movie came out, ’cause I think he was doing the PR for it. And he said, “Before you see it, you should know…okay, I admit it. I copied you.” He was in front of the game with me. I’ve known Johnny for a few years. Basically, he’s a friend of my son, Marlon, and I met him that way. He has a lovely guitar collection, by the way. He’s got stuff from the 17th, 18th century. First guitar or something. Amazing stuff. He’s a player.

RICHARDS No. We were kind of strapped for manpower, to tell the truth. Mick and I started putting this together last June. And at that same time we’d just gotten the news that Charlie was diagnosed with throat cancer. Mick and I were looking at each other going, “Well pal, this is it. Okay, you’re on drums and I’ll double on bass.” Thank God it didn’t come to that. But we did start off that way.

RICHARDS On no, he’s on all of them. But we started off working songs out with Mick on drums. And Mick’s a pretty good drummer, you know? He’s got a wicked backbeat, and luckily he doesn’t have a lot of flash, so he just sticks to the beat. We worked up the songs that way. Then Charlie came back and we were able to say, “Okay, Charlie, it goes like this.” And he came back like a ball of fire. Amazing. I guess he wanted to prove that he was still alive and kicking.

RICHARDS Oh no, he’s okay now. I think he fell in love with rehab. Ronnie…I’ve known him as stoned out of his brain as you can imagine a man can get. And I’ve known him straight sober. And quite honestly, there’s very little difference. Although I must say there’s a bit more focus on him now. Ronnie, unlike me, tends to overdo a thing. Me, I just do it. But right now he’s okay. I think
being straight will suit him...for a while.

RICHARDS Sometimes there’s just a general idea—just the phrase “Oh no, not you again.” We sleep on that and the next day slip each other bits of paper saying, “How about if it went this way?” It’s all a bit of a patchwork really. But eventually you start to get the threads of songs. You knock off a couple of chords and say, “That’s nice.” Then you see what happens next. I feel it doesn’t have much to do with me. I’m just being led by a series of notes and possibilities. I just hang on and see what happens.

RICHARDS That’s hard to say. Mick came up with the basic song but I came up with the chimes [sings descending major chorus melody]. But I’d say that one’s more Mick than me, absolutely. You can tell. The ones I laid on him were “Rough Justice,” “Infamy,” and “The Place Is Empty.” So it’s kind of half and half. Mick comes in far more prepared than I do. I like to come in with the bare bones of an idea and see how it builds. Mick prefers to come in pretty much knowing how it’s supposed to go…or thinking he knows. Ha! Mick’s like that. He has to wake up in the morning knowing that he’s got to do something. Me, I just wanna wake up.

RICHARDS Yes, it is. Thanks. I’ve actually been enjoying playing guitar very much. I kind of stopped playing awhile after the last tour. I did a few sessions with Willie Nelson and a couple of other tracks here and there. But sometimes after a tour you say, “Jesus, I’ve played enough. I can’t think of another note.” So you kind of lay back. But that’s always a good thing, because when I do pick up the guitar again, after a few weeks or months, it’s always like, “Oh, yeah! Hello, pal, I missed you.”It’s always a pleasure to re-meet.

RICHARDS Mick came up with that. He started to play it one day on acoustic guitar and I started thinking, “prison songs...” We were just casting ideas about. To me, it’s a classic sort of Muddy Waters thing, or even earlier. And as we were getting it going, I went, “Jesus Christ, we could have cut this at Chess [Records], baby.” You are what you listen to, in a way, and I never stopped listening to the blues. Even if I go off on other tangents, there’s always that basic diet, thank God.

RICHARDS That’s a good ’un. It does change as you grow up. It’s a ludicrous idea for a 17- or 18-year-old white kid from London to go around saying he’s a blues player, which is what I used to do. You have to go through a bit of life, I think, in order to play the blues for real. That’s why most blues players are not that young; you gotta be able to have a few stories to tell, ’cause it’s a very strict format, the blues. It’s 12 bars and three chords. You can throw in a few extra ones, but it’s so amazingly malleable as a form of music that you could never learn it all. There are so many different ways you can angle it. It’s almost like passing along information. It’s fascinating—there’s so much music out there. You can go classical and jazz and I love all that, too, but I’m still finding out how to work my way through those 12 bars.

RICHARDS Yeah, I was in pretty early. It was [Stones pianist/tour manager] Ian Stewart that got me into it. I never thought of playing piano at first. My attitude was “I’m the guitar player and that’s it.” But sometimes I’d catch Ian Stewart playing some really beautiful blues piano all by himself. One day I just said to him, “Hey Stu, show me how to do that. I gotta know.” And I went on from there. I enjoy the piano because at least it’s all laid out in front of you. With the guitar, you gotta keep peering around the neck. You don’t have to wear the piano either. And you can sit down. There’s room for an ashtray and a drink. A civilized instrument.

RICHARDS In actual fact, surprisingly enough, that was the first one [1964’s The Rolling Stones, released in the U.S. as England’s Newest Hit Makers]. We only had about one or two singles out before we made it, so we were making that as an album from day one. Probably because of the Beatles, albums were just becoming the potential medium of choice at that time. Singles were always like gasping for air, ’cause you needed a new one every eight weeks. “Satisfaction” goes to Number One all over the world, and the very moment you’re saying “Let’s have a drink on that,” there’s a knock on the door: “Where’s the follow-up?” It was a good school for songwriting, but I’m quite glad that it eventually became less of an important thing to have a hit single every few weeks and your life depended on it. We got to nurture a few albums. We got to overnurture a few actually. “How long did that take to make?” “Two years. I can’t actually tell you where the time went, but...”

RICHARDS You can make a record anywhere now. The studio isn’t so important. In fact, we don’t use studios. We just find a good room that’s handy for everyone to get to. Most of this album was done at Mick’s house in France. The machinery was inside the room with us. The producer, Don Was, and the engineer—they were in the room with us. So you get rid of that glass barrier between the studio and control room, which can be enormous at times. I know from all those years of working in huge studios. You do your thing in the studio, then you go into the control room for a playback and you’re on another planet. They’re not gettin’ it in
there! So it’s much better to do it with the recorders actually in the room, and you can do that these days. The equipment is smaller. You can separate things easier without having to put big booths around them. We just played in a small room for most of this album. No doubt for a symphonic orchestra, there’s something to be said for a big studio. But I’ve found with rock and roll that you’re always playing on someone else’s turf. They’ve never built a room for it yet. You have to beg and borrow: Can I use your football stadium? Can I use your auditorium?

RICHARDS It can, yeah. Mick sometimes goes into “a mode,” and you’re like, “Is that you? Are you trying to be somebody else?” Sometimes you have to figure that out. Yes, it is manneristic at times, but other times he’s so fucking loose and cool, like on “Rough Justice.” And his harp playing blew me away all year. He’s Louis Armstrong on that. Also his guitar playing is a lot better. He did a lot of rhythm guitar on this album. There’s a lot of three-guitar stuff there—Ronnie, Mick and me. That’s been interesting. Mick is a lot more proficient on guitar now. If he wants to play, I say, “Play!” I’d never be the guy to say, “Stop it. Forget about it.”

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