Keith Richards

Keith Richards (born 18 December 1943) is an English guitarist, songwriter, singer, record producer, and a founding member of The Rolling Stones. As a guitarist, Richards is mostly known for his innovative rhythm playing. In 2003 Richards was ranked 10th on Rolling Stone magazine's "Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".According to britishhitsongwriters.com he is the twenty fifth most successful songwriter in U.K. singles chart history based on weeks that his compositions have spent on the chart.

With songwriting partner and Rolling Stones lead vocalist Mick Jagger, Richards has written and recorded hundreds of songs, fourteen of which Rolling Stone magazine lists among the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time".

Early life

Keith Richards, the only child of Bert Richards and Doris Dupree Richards, was born in Dartford, Kent. He is of Welsh and French Huguenot ancestry. His father was a factory labourer who was slightly injured during World War II.

Richards's paternal grandparents were socialists and civic leaders. His maternal grandfather (Augustus Theodore Dupree), who toured Britain in a jazz big band called Gus Dupree and his Boys, was an early influence on Richards's musical ambitions and got him interested in playing guitar.

Richards's mother introduced him to the music of Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and bought him his first guitar — a Rosetti acoustic — for seven pounds. His father was less encouraging: "Every time the poor guy came in at night," Richards says, "he'd find me sitting at the top of the stairs with my guitar, playing and banging on the wall for percussion. He was great about it really. He'd only mutter, 'Stop that bloody noise.'" Richards's first guitar hero was Scotty Moore.

Richards attended Wentworth Primary School, as did Mick Jagger; the two knew each other as schoolboys, and lived in the same neighbourhood until Richards's family moved to another section of Dartford in 1954.From 1955 to 1959 Richards attended Dartford Technical School (now named Wilmington Grammar School), where choirmaster Jake Clair noticed his singing voice and recruited him into the school choir. As one of a trio of boy sopranos Richards sang (among other performances) at Westminster Abbey in front of Queen Elizabeth II - an experience that he has called his "first taste of show biz."

In 1959, Richards was expelled from Dartford Technical School for truancy, and the headmaster suggested he would be more at home at the art college in the neighboring town of Sidcup. At Sidcup Art College Richards devoted his time to playing guitar after he heard American blues artists like Little Walter and Big Bill Broonzy. He swapped a pile of records for his first electric guitar, a hollow-body Höfner cutaway. Fellow Sidcup student and future musical colleague Dick Taylor recalls, "There was a lot of music being played at Sidcup, and we'd go into the empty classrooms and fool around with our guitars. ... Even in those days Keith could play most of [Chuck Berry's] solos." Taylor also remembers Richards experimenting with various drugs at Sidcup: "In order to stay up late with our music and still get to Sidcup in the morning, Keith and I were on a pretty steady diet of pep pills, which not only kept us awake but gave us a lift. We took all kinds of things - pills that girls took for menstruation; inhalers like Nostrilene, and other stuff. Opposite the college there was this little park with an aviary that had a cockatoo in it. Cocky the Cockatoo we used to call it. Keith used to feed it pep pills and make it stagger around on its perch. If ever we were feeling bored we'd go and give another upper to Cocky."

One morning in 1961, on the train journey from Dartford to Sidcup, Richards happened to get into the same carriage as Mick Jagger, who was then a student at the London School of Economics.They recognized each other and began talking about the LPs Jagger had with him -- blues and rhythm & blues albums he had acquired by mail-order from America. Richards was surprised and impressed that Jagger not only shared his enthusiasm for Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, but also that he owned such LPs which were extremely rare in Britain at the time. The two discovered that they had a mutual friend in Dick Taylor, with whom Jagger was singing in an amateur band called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. Jagger invited Richards to a rehearsal and soon after Richards also joined the line-up. The group disbanded after Jagger, Richards, and Taylor met Brian Jones and Ian Stewart, with whom they went on to form The Rolling Stones (Taylor left the band in November 1962 to return to art school).

By mid-1962 Richards had left Sidcup Art College in favour of pursuing his fledgling musical career and moved into a London flat with Jagger and Jones. His parents divorced about the same time. Richards maintained close ties with his mother, who was very supportive of his musical activities, but he became estranged from his father and didn't resume contact with him until 1982.

In 1963 Richards dropped the "s" from his name and used the professional name "Keith Richard", which Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham considered more suitable as a show business name.

Musical career

Guitar playing

Richards's guitar playing shows his fascination with chords, his love of rhythm guitar, and his assumed role of catalyst to spur the band while he is, in his words, "oiling the machinery." He conspicuously avoids attempts at virtuosity, which he calls "the fastest-gun-in-the-west sort of thing." Chuck Berry has been a constant inspiration for Richards throughout his career. His first band Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys played many Berry numbers, and Jagger and Richards were largely responsible for bringing Berry and Bo Diddley covers into The Rolling Stones' early repertoire. Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters records were another early source of inspiration, and the basis for the style of interwoven lead and rhythm guitar that Richards developed with Brian Jones. Jones' replacement guitarist Mick Taylor worked with The Rolling Stones from 1969 to 1974. Though Richards enjoyed and worked well with him, Taylor's virtuosity at lead guitar led to a pronounced separation between lead and rhythm guitar roles, notably onstage. In 1975 Taylor was replaced by Ronnie Wood, marking a return to the style of guitar interplay that he and Richards call "the ancient art of weaving". Richards has said the years with Wood have been his most musically satisfying period in the Rolling Stones.

During the 1967/68 break in the Rolling Stones' touring, Richards began experimenting with open tunings. These tunings were most commonly used for slide guitar, but Richards explored their use in rhythm playing, developing an innovative and distinctive style of syncopated and ringing I-IV chording that can be heard on "Street Fighting Man" and "Start Me Up". He particularly favours a five-string variant of open G tuning (borrowed from Don Everly of the Everly Brothers), using GDGBD unencumbered by a low 6th string; several of his Telecasters are tuned this way, and this tuning is prominent on numerous Rolling Stones tracks, including "Honky Tonk Women," "Brown Sugar" and "Start Me Up".Richards uses standard 6-string tuning as well, but his experimentations in open tunings have coloured how he plays in standard tuning.[citation needed] In the late 1960s, Brian Jones's declining interest in guitar left Richards to record all of the guitar parts on many tracks, including slide guitar, which had been Jones's speciality in the band's early years.

Richards — who owns over 1000 guitars, some of which he has not played but was simply given[citation needed] — is often associated with the Fender Telecaster, particularly with two 1950s Telecasters outfitted with Gibson PAF humbucker pickups in the neck position. Also notable was the 1959 Bigsby-equipped sunburst Les Paul that he acquired in 1964, which was the first "star owned" Les Paul in Britain. Since 1997 a Bigsby-equipped ebony Gibson ES-355 has served as one of his main stage guitars. Even though Richards has used many different guitar models, in a 1986 Guitar World interview he joked that no matter what model he plays, "give me five minutes and I'll make 'em all sound the same."

In 1965 Richards used a Gibson Maestro fuzzbox to achieve the distinctive tone of his riff on "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"; the success of the resulting single boosted the sales of the device to the extent that all available stock had sold out by the end of 1965. In the 1970s and early 1980s Richards frequently used guitar effects such as a wah-wah pedal, a phaser and a Leslie speaker, but he mainly relies on combining "the right amp with the right guitar" to achieve the sound he wants.

Richards considers acoustic guitar to be the basis for his playing, and has said: "Every guitar player should play acoustic at home. No matter what else you do, if you don't keep up your acoustic work, you're never going to get the full potential out of an electric, because you lose that touch."Richards's acoustic guitar is featured on tracks throughout the Rolling Stones' career, including hits like "Not Fade Away", "Brown Sugar", "Beast of Burden" and "Almost Hear You Sigh". All the guitars on the studio version of "Street Fighting Man" are Richards on acoustic, distorted by overloading a small cassette recorder microphone, a technique also used on "Jumping Jack Flash".

Vocals

Richards's backing vocals appear on every Rolling Stones album; and on most albums since Between the Buttons (1967), he has sung lead or co-lead on at least one track (see list below). Richards views the vocal training he got in his choirboy days as part of his professional arsenal, and has said of his own singing: "It's not the most beautiful voice in the world anymore, but the Queen liked it, when it was at its best ... It's not been my job, singing, but to me, if you're gonna write songs, you've got to know how to sing."

On stage, Richards began taking a regular lead-vocal turn in 1972, singing "Happy" (from the album Exile on Main Street). "Happy" has become viewed as one of Richards's signature songs, featured on most Rolling Stones tours ever since, as well as on both of Richards's solo tours. From 1972 to 1982, Richards routinely took one lead-vocal turn during Rolling Stones concerts; since 1989 he has normally sung lead on two numbers per show. Each of the band's studio albums since Dirty Work (1986) have also featured Richards's lead vocals on at least two tracks. During concerts on the two final legs (autumn 2006 and summer 2007) of The Rolling Stones' Bigger Bang Tour, Richards set his guitar aside to sing his 1969 ballad "You Got the Silver" without self-accompaniment. Prior to that he had occasionally switched from guitar to keyboards in concert, but these concerts were the first time since his choirboy days that Richards appeared on stage armed with only his voice.

Other instruments

Richards has played bass on about two dozen Rolling Stones studio recordings, from "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?" (1966) through "Infamy" (2005). One unusual instance was when he and Bill Wyman joined forces to play the bowed double bass on "Ruby Tuesday" (1967) — Wyman did the fingerboard work while Richards manned the bow. The rest of Richards's bass-playing contributions have been on tracks including "Jumpin' Jack Flash" (1968), "Sympathy for the Devil" (1968), "Live With Me" (1969), "Before They Make Me Run" (1978), "Sleep Tonight" (1986) and "Brand New Car" (1994). He has also played bass on stage on a couple of occasions: with The Dirty Mac in 1968 (see "Recordings with other artists", below) and on "Sympathy for the Devil" at a Rolling Stones concert at Madison Square Garden in June 1975.

Richards's keyboard playing has also been featured on several Rolling Stones tracks, including "She Smiled Sweetly" (1967), "Memory Motel" (1976), "All About You" (1980), "Thru and Thru" (1994) and "This Place Is Empty" (2005), among others. He sometimes composes on piano — "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?" and "Let's Spend the Night Together" are two early examples; and he's said of his keyboard playing: "Maybe I'm a little more accomplished now — to me it's just a way of getting out of always using one instrument to write." Richards played keyboards on stage at two 1974 concerts with Ronnie Wood, and on The New Barbarians' tour in 1979; and 1977 and 1981 studio sessions featuring his piano and vocals have been well documented, though never officially released.

Richards has also contributed percussion to a few Rolling Stones tracks, including the floor tom on "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and bicycle spokes on "Continental Drift" (1989).

Songwriting

Richards and Jagger collaborated on songs in 1963, following the nearby example of the Beatles' Lennon/McCartney and the encouragement of Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who saw little future for a cover band. The earliest Jagger/Richards collaborations were recorded by other artists, including Gene Pitney, whose rendition of "That Girl Belongs to Yesterday" was their first top-ten single in the UK. Richards recalls: "We were writing these terrible pop songs that were becoming Top 10 hits. ... They had nothing to do with us, except we wrote 'em."

The Rolling Stones' first top-ten hit with a Jagger/Richards original was "The Last Time" (1965); "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" (also 1965) was their first international #1 recording. (Richards has stated that the "Satisfaction" riff came to him in his sleep; he woke up just long enough to record it on a cassette player by his bed.) Since Aftermath (1966) most Rolling Stones albums have consisted mainly of Jagger/Richards originals. Their songs reflect the influence of blues, R&B, rock & roll, pop, soul, gospel and country, as well as forays into psychedelia and Dylanesque social commentary. Their work in the 1970s and beyond has incorporated elements of funk, disco, reggae and punk. Richards has also written and recorded slow torchy ballads, such as "All About You" (1980).

In his solo career, Richards has often shared co-writing credits with drummer and co-producer Steve Jordan. Richards has said: "I've always thought songs written by two people are better than those written by one. You get another angle on it."

Richards has frequently stated that he feels less like a creator than a conduit when writing songs: "I don't have that God aspect about it. I prefer to think of myself as an antenna. There's only one song, and Adam and Eve wrote it; the rest is a variation on a theme."

Richards was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1993.

Record production

Richards has been active as a record producer since the 1960s. He was credited as producer and musical director on the 1966 album Today's Pop Symphony, one of manager Andrew Loog Oldham's side projects, although there are doubts about how much Richards was actually involved with it. On the Rolling Stones' 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request the entire band was credited as producer, but since 1974, Richards and Mick Jagger have frequently co-produced Rolling Stones and other artists' records under the joint name "The Glimmer Twins", often in collaboration with other producers.

Since the 1980s Richards has chalked up numerous production and co-production credits on projects with other artists including Aretha Franklin, Johnnie Johnson and Ronnie Spector, as well as on his own albums with the X-Pensive Winos (see below). In the 1990s Richards co-produced and added guitar and vocals to a recording of nyabinghi Rastafarian chanting and drumming entitled Wingless Angels, released on Richards's own record label, Mindless Records, in 1997.

Solo recordings

Generally resisting sustained ventures outside of The Rolling Stones, Richards has released few solo recordings. In 1978 he released his first solo single: renditions of Chuck Berry's "Run Rudolph Run" and Jimmy Cliff's "The Harder They Come". In 1987, after Jagger had put The Rolling Stones on hold in order to promote his solo albums, Richards formed the X-pensive Winos with new co-writer Steve Jordan, who had drummed on some tracks on Dirty Work and in the band Richards assembled for the documentary Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll (see below).

Besides Steve Jordan, the X-pensive Winos included Sarah Dash, Waddy Wachtel, Bobby Keys, Ivan Neville and Charley Drayton. Their first album, Talk Is Cheap (which also featured session musicians Bernie Worrell, Bootsy Collins and Maceo Parker), went gold and has remained a consistent seller. It spawned a brief US tour - one of only two that Richards has done as a solo artist. The first tour is documented on the Virgin release Live at the Hollywood Palladium, December 15, 1988. In 1992 Main Offender was released, and following a "warm-up concert" in Buenos Aires, the X-Pensive Winos (including a new member, backing vocalist Babi Floyd) toured Europe and North America.
(from Wikipedia)