Keith Richards
Musician Magazine, November 1997
Other than the fact that I was seated in an office with Keith Richards for a few hours one rainy Manhattan afternoon, there wasn’t anything remarkable about the circumstances of this particular meeting. So allow me to focus on the first time our paths crossed — a longer and unforgettable encounter.
For a week or so I’d been trying to set up a brief interview with Ivan Neville, to run as a sidebar to some article I was doing for Musician magazine. After a series of dead ends I was in the midst of figuring out how to work around its absence when the phone rang. I can’t remember his name but it was someone I’d been working up to try and make this happen. His message was simple.
“You free right now? Good. Ivan is ready to speak with you face to face in a couple of hours.”
“Great. Where is he?”
“He’s staying in Keith Richards’ house in Westchester County.”
Within minutes I was out the door and on my way to the 42nd Street subway stop for the quick hop to Grand Central Station. As instructed, I caught a northbound commuter train and got off at some bucolic stop. A limousine was waiting. We motored over to Keith’s place and through a handsome gate. Trees towered above the private road. We passed a tidy cottage.
“Keith’s dad lives there,” the publicist noted as we continued to the much roomier main house.
We rang the doorbell and Richards answered, smiling and beckoning us in. We went down some stairs to a guest bedroom, where Ivan slept. With a grand gesture, Richards flung open the curtains, flooding the room with light.
“The press is here!” he announced.
Keith theatrically jostled Ivan’s shoulder, then excused himself as Neville apologized and roused himself. We began the interview. After a few minutes Richards swept in again, pushing a cart. “Tea, anyone?” he inquired. He lifted the silver English kettle, poured out a couple of cups and withdrew once more.
When we were done, Ivan and I went upstairs, where Keith welcomed us into his kitchen. There the three of us talked informally for a while. When Ivan made his exit, my host suggested we head into his living room to chat some more. I remember clearly the cathedral ceiling, the fine woodwork, lots of books on built-in shelves. We sat next to each other on his couch. Before us, on a home theater screen, a women’s basketball game was underway. Speakers positioned around the room played his soundtrack of the moment — a selection of Sam Cooke’s hits.
I can’t recall what we said to each other, other than it was of course about music. We exchanged opinions about artists we both loved, beginning with Cooke. At one point he mentioned that he’d just purchased a Steinway upright piano and asked if I’d like to see it. We went back downstairs, where he led me to the instrument and played a couple of blues licks on it.
I nodded, then asked, “May I?” Magnanimously he stood aside. Being a pretty good piano player, I dashed off a fancier version of what he’d just done. Keith gave me this look — brows raised and eyes widened, mouth turned downward in mock disbelief. He tried a longer, more intricate figure. Once again, I saw him and raised him. He laughed, shook my hand and we headed back for another hour or so of music chat before the train schedule compelled me to leave. But we would meet again, on that rainy day, to talk about the new Stones album and whatever else came to mind. I had my opening line ready to spring.
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In the best sense of the word, Bridges to Babylon seems like a bold stride backwards.
[Laughs.] Exactly. That’s what I felt. Once again I have to say that when it comes to the energy on the record, it’s Charlie Watts. As a musician, Charlie keeps getting better and better. He’s such a joy. To me especially, the drummer is all-important. It’s the drummer who lets me play with the beat, carve it up. Of course, Charlie and I have had a lot of practice together. But even so, drummers like that are very few and far between. There’s Steve Jordan and a few other cats who aren’t so well known, drummers where you don’t have to keep time and you can play around the beat with total confidence. Most drummers either are metronomes or they think the drums are a solo instrument. The good ones are feel players.
How do you deal with drummers who don’t meet your standards?
I beat ’em up and walk out [laughs].
Charlie has done some albums of his own since Stripped, the last Stones release. How has that affected him?
Up until Charlie started to make his own records — and it’s been five or six years now — he never appeared in the control room. He’d do his thing and you’d get the best of it you could. But this year he’s been in the control room: “More hi-hat. Give it a swish on here.” I guess it comes from having to make your own records and be the kind of guy Charlie always avoided being: the guy where the buck stops.
“Music isn’t about cleverness. … Music is about getting excited.”
Since he’s playing a lot with his own big band, he may be paying more attention to timbre.
Exactly. He’s learned a lot and become more confident in himself. He’d always felt that the knobs and the faders had nothing to do with him. He played his stuff, it sounded good on tape and he left you to do whatever you want with it while he faded into the shadows. But on the new album we’ve put the skin back on the front of the bass drum, which he hasn’t done in a long time.
I’ve realized it’s the room that counts. If you want a bass drum sound, you don’t shove a microphone inside the drum and put cushions around it. All you’ll get is a dull thud. The reason you have two skins on the bass drum is so you can capture the sound somewhere up in a corner of the room. So we were playing a lot with ambient recording on these tracks.
Charlie’s bass drum has always sounded pretty big to me.
Yeah, but on this one we didn’t have to fuck around afterwards.. We got the sound right before we started. A lot of successful engineers and producers now have never recorded a drum kit in their lives. You just can’t get a real drum sound by pushing a key with your finger [i.e., program a sequenced drum part]. You can get a good sketch but it don’t have air behind it. It doesn’t have muscle or fuel. It’ll just repeat itself. If you’re really clever, you’ll get it to change. But music isn’t about cleverness. It’s about feel. It’s the joy of playing together. It’s not a matter of sitting in a bunker, pushing buttons and saying, “I’ve made a record!” That’s not making music; that’s being a tape doctor.
Groove Weaving
Beyond how you and Charlie mesh is the question of how you and Ron Wood manage to stay out of each other’s way.
It’s what’s called the ancient art of weaving. I mean, sometimes it’s [Keith mimes a vicious struggle, complete with strangleholds and menacing snarls]. But it’s really a sympathetic relationship.
People should get rid of these ideas of lead guitar and rhythm guitar. These are kindergarten terms. You’re a guitar player. You may favor playing chords on the rhythm end; that might be your bag. But never think of it in terms of splitting it like “You’re this, I’m that.” A good band tries to fox people, so without anybody knowing it the rhythm end will take over the lead end and the other guy will automatically drop what he’s doing and pick up the other part. You’re not stuck with, “I play chords. He plays fiddly bits.” That’s the fun of it.
But how do you and Ron work out your parts so they complement each other?
Usually we start with everybody playing what they want to play. After two or three takes, it’s like, “We’ve got the moves down but we don’t need that move there. We’re all playing too bloody much. I’ll lay out here. What about if we play that part on an acoustic?”
“A couple of notes from a real piano or an acoustic guitar will open up a track, just like a flower.”
The amazing thing is that an acoustic instrument can add so much air to a track and suddenly connect with the cymbals. Where everything else is electric, there’s a concise dryness about a track when you put one acoustic instrument on. It just spreads the sound. A couple of notes from a real piano or an acoustic guitar will open up a track, just like a flower.
So once everybody learns the framework of the song, then you get to the point of saying, “Alright. We know it. It’s sounding pretty good. Now what about … dynamics [explosive laughter]?” Then you strip it back down and bring in what you can. Sometimes you leave it for a few days, you take it back to the hotel room and listen to it on cassette. Then you figure out what’s missing or what’s too much. Or you hear where an instrument can go: “We need some tremolo guitar here or maybe a little sax.” A lot of that goes on in these records, where a guitar plays maybe three chords in a whole song or just goes whangg before the bridge.
That happens on “Out of Control,” on the new album, where you bring in a Wurlitzer electric piano to hit precisely two single notes on the first beats of two bars.
Blondie Chaplin came up with that. We were taking five and listening to a playback in the studio. He was sort of playing along with it. Then [snaps fingers], “That’s the note we need there!” That’s what it takes. You’re not thinking about anything. Everybody is sitting around listening … but they’re also listening to what’s going on while they’re listening. That’s why, when people say “that’s an accident,” I say, “That’s not an accident. That’s innovation.” There’s two ways of looking at it: “I made a mistake,” or “No, I just went somewhere else.”
How did you write the new material for Bridges to Babylon?
Mick and I got started at Dangerous Music, this great little demo room in Greenwich Village, early last November. Then we went to London and used tiny demo studios there too. There’s an amazing number of them around. Sometimes you find yourself in a big studio with all this high-tech shit and you can’t get it to sound right. It’s an indefinable thing, not necessarily equipment, that makes a studio good.
After all these years, is it getting harder to come up with fresh ideas?
It’s easier. I don’t force them now. I used to, but I realized a long time ago that you don’t write songs, you receive them. I’ll start off by sitting down and playing anything. I’ll attempt a bit of Mozart at the piano, or I’ll play a bit of Otis Redding or some Buddy Holly stuff. Within twenty minutes or half an hour, there’s something else coming, and I’m following that, playing around with it. Some days it don’t come, so I’ll just carry on with the Otis Redding songbook [laughs]. It’s a matter of recognition: [Keith ducks an imaginary hand grenade] “Incoming!” All you’ve got to do is formulate it a little and transmit it.
“You hit a chord and you can think either ‘that’s wrong’ or ‘that’s interesting.’”
People are too serious about writing. The writer’s block theory is crap. That’s only because you think you write your own songs in the first place. You think you’re God and you create this masterpiece. No, you just receive and transmit. That way, you don’t get this idea of, “What am I going to write?” A lot of it is accidents: You hit a chord and you can think either “that’s wrong” or “that’s interesting.”
You worked with a number of producers on Babylon: Don Was, the Dust Brothers …
Actually, I just worked with Don on the stuff that I wrote. Sonny Saber did some stuff with Mick; he’s on “Anybody Seen My Baby?” Mick did work with the Dust Brothers on one track, “Juiced.” That was a culture clash there, not a happy marriage at all. I don’t want to knock the Dust Brothers but it was really the wrong choice. Mick and I cut the first go on that song, he gave it to the Dust Brothers … and it just got worse and worse. It was the first track out and it still ain’t finished. Luckily I saved the original take.
You also worked with Babyface but none of that stuff turned up on the album.
Babyface did a nice job on “Already Over Me,” although Mick remixed that because he didn’t get along with Babyface. Somewhere down the line there was some sort of schism between them. So I spoke with Don, who was the overseer of what went down, and I said, “Let’s see what’s the difference between what I’ve gotten together and what Mick’s gotten together.” Mick sits over the synthesizers with headphones on, which I consider a prison. This is like, “Are you wearing those things because you don’t want to be interfered with? Or are you just jerking off?”
“The synthesizer worries me. Nobody should have ever let ’em out.”
See, the synthesizer worries me. Nobody should have ever let ’em out. It should be in the back room for guys to write arrangements and songs on … and never make a record with. They sound so plastic and inarticulate and superficial — no dynamics, no air, no breath. It’s an imitation of an instrument.
Yes, but here is some synth on this album.
Well, I’m not against using it as a taste here and there. But to construct things around a synthesizer is the antithesis of what the Stones are all about.
With all the history your band has made, do you ever feel like you’re competing with your own legacy as you work on new music?
I’m not competing with anything, I’m enhancing or adding to it. Sometimes I’ll hear “Ruby Tuesday” or something on the radio and it still hangs cool for me. You realized as you go along that you’ve got to be careful what you listen to. I don’t listen to music from a business point of view. I know there are loads of good young musicians out there. I figure they’re at the same state we were in when we started, which was, “How the hell do you break in here?” Nobody gets a fair shake. The market has such a stranglehold. Everybody’s like [Keith grabs a nearby issue of Billboard and starts flipping through the pages] “That chart, that chart, that chart, that chart.” It used to be that you’d share the shit out and if you liked it, you got it.
Now you’ve got to angle it, all to please these people. It’s sickening to try and put music into a pigeonhole. Probably every musician is trying to get out of a pigeonhole. But you find yourself in a business where people who know nothing try to put it into a bag: “That’s AOR. That’s something else. The only way you’re going to get this thing played is on this or that kind of radio station.
But where would radio stations be without music? I don’t understand. They rule the fuckin’ roost; that’s what sickens me. “You like that kind of music, therefore this is your station.” I ain’t gonna listen to nothin’ else? I’m only gonna listen to what they shoved down my throat? Everything’s a pigeonhole, right? Even years, as if everything changes from New Year’s Eve 1969 to 1970.
At least you don’t have to worry about that.
Right, but I’m very aware of it and it makes me uneasy about the state of business and how much music we’re missing. I mean, I’ve had enough of bloody rap [Keith does a sneering imitation of rap over a knee-slapped beat.] I mean, “Mary had a little lamb, her fleece is white as fuckin’ snow.” What’s the attraction in that? This is kindergarten shit. It’s like karaoke. Obviously, the attraction is there, until they all shoot each other — and they’re doing a good job of it. If you want to hear good rap, you should listen to early Jamaican dub, which is some really interesting stuff. At least they didn’t keep it to just one meter.
““Miss You” was calculated to be a damn good disco record — and it was.”
Well, you guys have been criticized for exploiting contemporary influences, including disco and Carlos Santana, a bit too gratuitously.
Some of that is probably a good criticism. A lot of it is an accident because that’s just what’s happening at the time and you just soak things up, although “Miss You” was calculated to be a damn good disco record — and it was. “Under Cover of the Night,” “Emotional Rescue,” these are all Mick’s calculations about the market. They’re not the best records we’ve ever made.
See, Mick listens to too much bad shit. He listens to what’s happening. He really is one of the best instinctive singers and players I’ve ever worked with. But when he calculates, I have a problem.
There are things on Babylon that do remind me of other artists without seeming like a calculated imitation.
That’s another thing. There are lots of motifs in there. “Out of Control” has that bass riff from “Papa Was as Rolling Stone.”
Right. That seemed like kind of a sly joke to me.
Yeah, but hey, if anybody can do that, it’s us [laughs]. Mick played the harmonica solo on that one. He’s getting better, man. He was playing harp with B.B. King and he got the nod from B.B.
“The important thing is not just the playing, it’s knowing the guy you’re playing with.”
You’ve learned more about how bands work for the long haul than probably anybody else alive. What can you pass along to younger players about how to bring their bands to their fullest potential?
Argue as much as possible. You’re in a commando group, a killer league. You don’t want to be aggressive or try to rule the roost. But say what you think.The important thing is not just the playing, it’s knowing the guy you’re playing with. If you’re just joining in and you don’t know the band, try to. And don’t be polite. If you are, you’ll just get a consensus music that’s pretty bland. If you tread on somebody’s toes you can always say “sorry,” but maybe you’ll spark something. If it means temporarily annoying somebody to know what it is you’ve gotta here and it ain’t right yet, say so. Music is about getting excited.
It’s a mix of tact and candor …
… and knowing when to sit back and learn. If you’re playing with cats who are in another league above you, and you’re happy that the guys have just allowed you to play with them, don’t try and flash. Just sit back and learn. If you’re a virtuoso [Keith imitates a guitarist playing fast licks], it’s like, “That’s amazing. Now, what else can you do? Can you play with the other guys?” But if it’s a bunch of guys who have known each other for a while and you want to thrash things out, then just kick the shit out of it. Music is a people thing … unless you’re doing jingles.
What about recording your rehearsals?
That’s very helpful, mostly in finding out where you went wrong. If you’ve got a four- or five-piece band and everybody takes a cassette back from the day’s work, you’re gonna go either “I did really great there” or “I shouldn’t have done that.” When you come back together again, don’t tell the other cat what he did wrong, because if he doesn’t know it, he’ll never get it and he’ll only resent you. Just learn what you did wrong or what you could have done better and something productive will come out of it.
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FANTASTIC interview, thanks for sharing it. I loved the highlighted quotes, especially the one about the flower. 🤘😎🤘
A lot of wisdom in that interview. I loved all the descriptions of Keith's pantomimes.