The entire modern language of rock and roll was practically perfected when Keith Richards first picked up a guitar.
He would have gladly said that he learned everything he knew from people like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, but there’s something about the menace throughout all of The Rolling Stones’ greatest riffs that almost can’t be taught by listening to records. It only comes when someone absorbs everything they heard, but Richards felt that some stars shone a lot brighter than most people remembered back in the day.
But when you hear what Richards was doing on the guitar, it doesn’t really sound anywhere close to what Berry or even the blues legends were doing back in the day. He was creating his own way of playing guitar whenever he tuned to open-G, and while a lot of the shapes weren’t exactly the hardest things for any guitarist to master, it all came from him fiddling around with different strings until he got the precise kind of chime that he wanted out of his guitar.
Then again, not every rock fan was looking to be a guitarist when they first heard of the genre. Richards had idolised everything that Berry had done, but when Elvis Presley was first introduced to the world with that massive hairdo and booming voice, kids knew exactly what they wanted to be when they grew up. But there was a lot less to Presley than what a lot of people may have realised when he was singing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and ‘Love Me Tender’.
For one thing, Presley wasn’t one to write his own material, and even when working on some of his greatest tunes, it’s hard to really give him a ton of credit when he was taking some of the vocal inflexions from the original recordings of those songs. He still kicked major ass up and down the stage and gave the audience more than their fair share of songs to remember, but Richards related more to what people like Buddy Holly were doing.
Which is strange considering Holly was the last person likely to become a rock and roll star. A kid with curly hair and massive glasses wasn’t exactly people’s definition of one of the single coolest musicians in the world, but Holly’s biggest draw was being able to write his own music. ‘Words of Love’ and ‘That’ll Be The Day’ were everything to people like Richards, and while The Stones and The Beatles loved Holly, Richards felt that Presley was being given a run for his money.
Compared to Presley shaking his ass, Richards felt that Holly was every bit the star that ‘The King’ was in England, saying, “Mick had been singing with some rock and roll bands, doing Buddy Holly… He was in England as solid as Elvis. Everything that came out was a record smash No. 1. By about ’58, it was either Elvis or him. It was split into two camps. The Elvis fans were the heavy leather boys, and the Holly ones all somehow looked like Buddy Holly.”
But no matter which side you landed on, Richards was more interested in the music more than anything else. Mick Jagger was certainly the Presley-like figure with his endless energy onstage and dance moves, but judging by the fact that one of their first singles was a cover of Buddy Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’, it’s not like they were shy about wearing their influences on their sleeves.
At this point, the Stones were still a bar band that were playing mostly blues covers, but if they were to take any lesson from Holly, it was about how important it was to play your own material. That was a lost art for many people, and it was up to people like Jagger and Richards to bring their own sense of danger into rock and roll than trying to copy every other band that came before them.
