Happy birthday KEEF

It’s Keith Richards’ birthday.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: If you are feeling introverted, if you are feeling lonely for conversation and human contact, read Keith Richards’ spectacular autobiography in public. People will come up to you when they see what you’re reading and have to talk about it. I read it when I was having a prolonged and almost hallucinatory manic episode in Memphis, where I alternately felt like I was in a transcendent state of pure truth OR like I was a ghost … I went for days without speaking to anyone. Shit got spooky. I went to the Peabody Hotel, sat at the bar in the gorgeous lobby, and drank a couple of Bloody Marys. I was alone but I just needed to be surrounded by people. It made me feel like I wasn’t a ghost. I took out Richards’ book and fell into its mesmerizing pages. Richards is an engaging writer, and so knowledgeable about music he helps you understand how he does what he does, how the great guitarists did what they did … It’s very nuts-and-bolts, his memoir, while also moving from nuts-and-bolts into meaning and connection: how certain chords affect us, how certain musicians changed the game. So I was lost to the world. And my Bloody Mary was delicious. Suddenly, a guy down the bar struck up a conversation with me. He noticed the book I was reading. He hadn’t read it but he was a huge Stones fan. We ended up talking for 45 minutes.

I realized I still knew how to talk to people. It happened again at a diner in Memphis, during the same period, where I was having breakfast. The 20something waitress also had to talk to me about it. She had just read it. Her boyfriend gave it to her for Christmas. So. Take this tip, go forth, and have interesting conversations with strangers!

An interesting side note: the audio version of the book was read by three different men, one of which is a pal of mine, Joe Hurley. I met Joe Hurley at a Bloomsday celebration, the one I go to every year. I had one of my most memorable New York experiences that particular day. The planets aligned. Joe Hurley was the maestro conductor of our impromptu sing-along. I was like, “MY PEOPLE. I HAVE FOUND YOU.” We have intersected occasionally over the years. He was a performer at the Losers Lounge tribute to Queen at the Bowery Ballroom – such an unforgettable night. Every year, Hurley hosts an Irish Rock Revue on St. Patrick’s Day, which I’ve gone to a couple of times. Anyway, when news hit of Richards’ audiobook, and I saw Joe Hurley’s name in the mix, I couldn’t believe it but it also made so much sense!

My brother Brendan wrote quite a bit about the Stones in his music essays, which I posted here on my site, so I thought I’d share links to some of them. Brendan is such a good writer, and I just couldn’t deal with the fact that these essays were hidden on a defunct blog. I wanted to resurrect them.

On The Beggars Banquet.

Beatles vs. The Stones

Teensy Jagger (seeing the Stones at Dodger Stadium)

Check out this awesome clip, of Jerry Lee Lewis and Richards performing “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” in 1983. It starts off pretty conventional, albeit awesome, these two giants performing with a mutual respect for one another.

But then … something happens. The mood changes. Something electric sparks. The group coalesces. The shit ignites. Maybe it’s when Jerry Lee commands, “Play it, Keith!” Something is unleashed. A wildness, a crazy, a connection, the performance catapults to the next level. The level where magic exists. Where a performance expands into something else – an experience, pure expression. And they both feel it. It’s exhilarating!

So now, onto some excerpts from his memoir, Life. His writings on his discovery of rock ‘n roll, via Radio Luxembourg, are electrifying. He loved all the voices he heard – Little Richard, Chuck Berry – and then, of course, there was you-know-who.

I think the first record I bought was Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally”. Fantastic record, even to this day. 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. Suddenly I was getting overwhelmed: Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, Fats. Radio Luxembourg was notoriously difficult to keep on station. I had a little aerial and walked round the room, holding the radio up to my ear and twisting the aerial. Trying to keep it down because I’d wake Mum and Dad up. If I could get the signal right, I could take the radio under the blankets on the bed and keep the aerial outside and twist it there. I’m supposed to be asleep; I’m supposed to be going to school in the morning. Loads of ads for James Walker, the jewelers “in every high street,” and the Irish sweepstakes, with which Radio Lux had some deal. The signal was perfect for the ads, “and now we have Fats Domino, ‘Blueberry Hill,'” and shit, then it would fade.

Then, “Since my baby left me” – it was just the sound. It was the last trigger. That was the first rock and roll I heard. It was a totally different way of delivering a song, a totally different sound, stripped down, burnt, no bullshit, no violins and ladies’ choruses and schmaltz, totally different. It was bare, right to the roots that you had a feeling were there but hadn’t yet heard. I’ve got to take my hat off to Elvis for that. The silence is your canvas, that’s your frame, that’s what you work on; don’t try and deafen it out. That’s what “Heartbreak Hotel” did to me. It was the first time I’d heard something so stark. Then I had to go back to what this cat had done before. Luckily I caught his name. The Radio Luxembourg signal came back in. “That was Elvis Presley, with ‘Heartbreak Hotel.'” Shit!

This passage reminds me of George Harrison’s answer to the question: “What are your musical roots?” He said he had no musical roots. The only “root” he could think of was being a kid and hearing “Heartbreak Hotel” through an open window. Think about that for a second.

Here’s a great interview excerpt where Richards talks more about Elvis, and what it was like when he first hit. “The world went from black and white to technicolor.”

My favorite quote from that interview – and it’s mind-blowing the more you think about it – is when he says, “The beautiful thing about Elvis is that he sort of turned everybody into everybody.”

That’s why he was controversial. That’s why he’s still controversial. His unifying force is something humans resist. Richards is so eloquent on these things. He has the history of 20th century music – particularly 20th century American music – in his DNA.

Another excerpt, and I’ve used this quite a bit in my writing, and it’s also helped clarify my thinking about – and HEARING – the early rock ‘n roll legends, even back to Robert Johnson and Lead Belly, because you can hear it there too. You can REALLY hear it in Johnny Cash, his early days. Richards put it into words like nobody else has. He writes about “the rhythm of the tracks”:

There’s something primordial in the way we react to pulses without even knowing it. We exist on a rhythm of seventy-two beats a minute. The train, apart from getting them from the Delta to Detroit, became very important to blues players because of the rhythm of the machine, the rhythm of the tracks, and then when you cross onto another track, the beat moves. It echoes something in the human body. So then when you have machinery involved, like trains, and drones, all of that is still built in as music inside us. The human body will feel rhythms even when there’s not one. Listen to “Mystery Train” by Elvis Presley. One of the great rock-and-roll tracks of all time, not a drum on it. It’s just a suggestion, because the body will provide the rhythm. Rhythm really only has to be suggested. Doesn’t have to be pronounced. This is where they got it wrong with “this rock” and “that rock”. It’s got nothing to do with rock. It’s to do with roll.

I swear, I hear things differently because of that passage.

Another excerpt, and this is crucial: this is about Scotty Moore, Elvis’ now-legendary guitarist, on all those Sun recordings at the beginning. So teenage Keith Richards is listening to these Elvis songs float out of the radio – and Elvis himself was such a mesmerizing figure – but Richards tuned in to what Scotty was doing back there, how crucial Scotty was to Elvis’ sound. (He talks about it in that interview clip above, too). But here, in the book, he goes deep into Scotty Moore:

That Elvis LP had all the Sun stuff, with a couple of RCA jobs on it too. It was everything from “That’s All Right,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, “Milk Cow Blues Boogie.” I mean, for a guitar player, or a budding guitar player, heaven. But on the other hand, what the hell’s going on there? I might not have wanted to be Elvis, but I wasn’t so sure about Scotty Moore. Scotty Moore was my icon. He was Elvis’s guitar player on all the Sun Records stuff. He’s on “Mystery Train”, he’s on “Baby Let’s Play House”. Now I know the man, I’ve played with him. I know the band. But back then, just being able to get through “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”, that was the epitome of guitar playing. And then “Mystery Train” and “Money Honey”. I’d have died and gone to heaven just to play like that.” How the hell was that done? That’s the stuff I first brought to the johns at Sidcup, playing a borrowed f-hole archtop Höfner. That was before the music led me back into the roots of Elvis and Buddy – back to the blues.

To this day there’s a Scotty Moore lick I still can’t get down and he won’t tell me. Forty-nine years it’s eluded me. He claims he can’t remember the one I’m talking about. It’s not that he won’t show me; he says, “I don’t know which one you mean.” It’s on “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.” I think it’s in E major. He has a rundown when it hits the 5 chord, the B down to the A down to the E, which is like a yodeling sort of thing, which I’ve never been quite able to figure. It’s also on “Baby Let’s Play House.” When you get to “But don’t you be nobody’s fool / Now baby, come back, baby …” and right at that last line, the lick is in there. It’s probably some simple trick. But it goes too fast, and also there’s a bunch of notes involved: which finger moves and which one doesn’t? I’ve never heard anybody else pull it off. Creedence Clearwater got a version of this song down, but when it comes to that move, no. And Scotty’s a sly dog. He’s very dry. “Hey, youngster, you’ve got time to figure it out.” Every time I see him, it’s “Learnt that lick yet?”

“I’d have died and gone to heaven just to play like that.”

Keith Richards is a giant. He is revered. You can instantly recognize his sound as a guitarist. He is at the top of the top of all the lists. But look at that quote. The humility in it. You can’t be humble and be a rock star. You have to have an ego the size of Jupiter to even stand on a stage as big as the ones the Rolling Stones inhabited. It’s part of the game. But within that egotism can also be humility, and awareness of all who came before you, of everyone who inspired you to help you step onto that massive stage. Nobody successful gets there by themselves and on their own steam. They are inspired, pushed, by people who came before. Keith Richards has ghosts all around him, ghosts inside of him, and every time he plays … it’s a kind of tribute. A tribute to everyone who got inside his soul with their sound, to everyone who showed him the way.