Keith Richards
Keith Richards
Keith Richardsis an English guitarist, singer, songwriter, best-selling memoirist, and founding member of the rock band The Rolling Stones. Rolling Stone Magazine credited Richards for "rock's greatest single body of riffs" on guitar and ranked him 4th on its list of 100 best guitarists. Fourteen songs that Richards wrote with the Rolling Stones' lead vocalist Mick Jagger are listed among Rolling Stone magazine's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time". The Stones are generally known for their guitar interplay of rhythm...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionGuitarist
Date of Birth18 December 1943
CityDartford, England
Other than its sense of rhythm, it's music by the tone-deaf for the tone-deaf.
About myself I have no great illusions. I know what I am. I know what I'm good at. I know what I ain't. I'm always hoping to surprise myself. But I do have a love of music and I do love to communicate it, and that's the best I can do, really. And I can raise a good family, too.
... I don't like to go into the studio with all the songs worked out and planned before hand ... you've got to give the band something to use its imagination on as well. That can make a very ordinary song come alive into something totally different ... the X-factor - so important in rock and roll - which is the feel..
I mean, give me a guitar, give me a piano, give me a broom and string, I wouldn't get bored anywhere.
To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence.
Some people think I'm a mythical genius, others think I'm a junkie madman.
A painter's got a canvas. The writer's got reams of empty paper. A musician has silence.
The thing about being a songwriter, once you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an observer. ... You're constantly on the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years: observing people, how they react to one another, which in a way makes you weirdly distant. ... It's a little of Peeping Tom, being a song-writer.
I don't wave a flag for anything. I'm a musician.
If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.
I've never had a problem with drugs. I've had problems with the police.
You get too close to it. You have to wait for the reaction,
I thought it was about time he owned up and stepped out of that closed shell. I knew he went through bad periods, even if he didn't want to write about it. I used to wrestle with that too. As a writer, you don't want to bore people with your own story. But you eventually realize that you're not the only one who is lonely or having problems.
I've never tried to achieve anything. I achieved everything I wanted to achieve by being in the Rolling Stones and making records.