(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 29 March 2026 20:30, UK
When Keith Richards first picked up an electric guitar, my guess is that he wasn’t looking to be strumming away on simple cowboy chords for the rest of his life.
The rock and roll scene was all about making music that tapped into the more reptilian part of everyone’s brain, and there was a certain energy that was created whenever listening to Chuck Berry wail away on his hits, whenever he played. But even if Richards could play old-school rock and roll forever, only a few artists managed to give him the rush that he needed whenever working on some of his classics.
But when you look through a lot of the best songs that Richards ever played, all of them seemed to have that same kind of fire in them. ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ might not be the most complicated song of all time, but the only thing that matters whenever it comes on is Richards being able to play that riff and build off of what the rest of the band is doing. The music practically takes over in those moments, but that kind of magic only comes from someone that’s spent quality time with their instrument.
Richards wasn’t some fly-by-night journeyman, and everything he ever played with The Stones had to come from the heart well before he started performing it. Not all of their songs were necessarily the greatest tunes in the world when they first started cutting ballads for other artists, but there was a clear difference between writing songs for Marianne Faithfull and the surge of adrenaline that you felt when hearing ‘Satisfaction’ for the first time.
All of it was riff-based rock and roll, and while there were still fantastic melodies over the top, you could practically hum every single thing that Richards was doing. You can’t forget the opening chimes of ‘Gimme Shelter’ or the slow pulse of ‘Honky Tonk Women’ whenever they come on, but even though Berry helped found rock and roll when he first played rock, songs based on riffs always went back to the blues.
The Stones were practically aficionados of the blues before they even landed on their classic lineup, but Richards was willing to take the extra deep dive whenever he played. There was no point in trying to make something if it didn’t have the same expression that Robert Johnson or Buddy Guy had, but when looking through some of the biggest songs of his career, Richards felt that he owed a lot to what Muddy Waters had done for the blues when he first started.
Not many people were able to play three chords the way that he did, and whenever he talked about having his mojo working, Richards felt that no one else could match what Waters did when he first heard about him from Mick Jagger, saying, “I was going to mug the guy for the Chuck Berry because I wasn’t familiar with Muddy. We started talking, went ’round to his house, and he played me Muddy and I said, ‘Wow. Again.’ And about ten hours later, I was still going, ‘Okay, again.’ When I got to Muddy and heard ‘Still a Fool’ and ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’–that is the most powerful music I’ve ever heard. The most expressive.”
And while The Stones can try as hard as they can to ape their favourite artists on their albums, there’s a reason why Blue and Lonesome didn’t hit nearly as hard as their heroes. They were always going to approach those tunes from a different perspective, and when they started hashing out their classics, they were always going to come up short if they were trying tomatch what their heroes were doing.
But that’s only because the blues was never about trying to openly copy someone that came before. You can certainly take inspiration here and there, but if someone was looking for a great blues musician, they wanted to hear someone with their own take on life through every single lick they played, and for Richards, he was always much more at home when he was strumming away on those open-G chords.
ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE 