(Credits: Far Out / Marcel Antonisse / Anefo)
Thu 8 January 2026 15:00, UK
Most guitarists all have that heartbreaking moment when they realise they will never be as cool as Keith Richards.
While the Rolling Stones have been around for over half a century, what Richards brought to the table was about so much more than making a bunch of cool riffs that got people excited. He was the consummate rock and roll star in many ways, but if you take the genre out of the equation, Keef felt that some of the greatest artists of his generation could leave any other frontman in the dust.
Because Richards was never focused on being the greatest musician in the world. He wanted to make sounds that people hadn’t heard before, but when he stumbled on the open-G tuning, he was interested in creating a vibe rather than rewriting Stravinsky. He wanted to make music that got people’s asses out of their seats whenever they played, and to this day, he still has that same love affair with his instrument, trying to find that one chord no one’s stumbled upon yet.
After all, that’s how his favourite artists always operated. No one was going to tell Robert Johnson how he should play his instrument, nor did anyone say that Chuck Berry should work on his technique. Any artist knows that the good stuff comes from what feels right in your gut half the time, but after jamming for hours on end, Richards also knew the song mattered above anything else.
Any guitarist could have tried shoehorning in a solo where it didn’t belong, but Richards likes to paint you a picture. He might only need three chords to do it, but when you listen to a song like ‘Happy’, all of the swagger anyone would ever need is already there from the minute he hits that first chord stab.
That kind of attitude is par for the course for rock and roll, but it’s also the norm for anyone who was born to break the rules a little bit. There had been plenty of artists who played by the book and tried their best to be the most sophisticated musicians that they could be, but Richards knew the best artists came from the heart of America, and something changed in him when he listened to what the true legends could do.
Those old blues players and country artists may as well have been dinosaurs for most modern players, but Richards was there to remind everyone that the true legends could school nearly any joker with an effects pedal today, saying, “I grew up with American folk music, jazz, blues. Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters: rock and roll’s got nothing on those guys.” Any artist can love the classics from their youth, but there’s a lot more truth to what Richards says than most people realise.
Cash and Waters might have been a part of the industry machine at the time, but they were also ones to play by their own rules. No one would have imagined getting a song on the radio like ‘I Got My Mojo Working’ or having the gall to flip off the camera and kick out all the lights of a venue whenever they played, but both Waters and Cash were the kind to not take shit from anyone. Even if someone else thought they had a superior vision, they could only be themselves whenever they got up on that stage.
So while it’s easy to look at that statement as Richards grumbling about things that were so much better back in his day, his heroes had the same spirit that most people are lacking in the modern age. It’s one thing to make all the right calls in the business, but the true rebels of music are the ones who see the rules and deliberately break them just to see what happens.
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