found a new place to dwell

------------------- [excerpt -- Life, Keith Richards' autobiography]-------------- 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 his name.  The Radio Luxembourg signal came back in.  "That was Elvis Presley, with 'Heeartbreak Hotel.'"  Shit!

Around, 1959, when I was fifteen, Doris bought me my first guitar.  I was already playing, when I could get one, but you can only tinker when you haven't got one of your own.  It was a Rosetti.  And it was about ten quid. 

Doris didn't have the credit to buy it on hire purchase, so she got someone else to do it, and he defaulted on the payment -- big kerfuffle. 

It was a huge amount of money for her and Bert.  But Gus must have had something to do with it too.  It was a gut-string job.  I started where every good guitar player should start -- down there on acoustic, on gut strings.  You can get to wire later on.  Anyway, I couldn't afford an electric.  But I found just playing that Spanish, an old workman, and starting from there, it gave me something to build on. 

And then you got to steel strings and then finally, wow!  Electricity!  I mean, probably if I had been born a few years later, I would have leapt on the electric guitar.  But if you want to get to the top, you've got to start at the bottom, same with anything.

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{Life, by Keith Richards with James Fox.  Copyright 2010.  Back Bay / Little Brown.}

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