Even when things are bad and discouraging, the Rolling Stones make me really happy.
--------------------- [excerpt from Life, by Keith Richards with James Fox. Back Bay Books. Little, Brown and Company. New York | Boston | London. Copyright 2010 by Mindless Records, LLC.] -------------------- I've learned everything I know off of records. Being able to replay something immediately without all that terrible stricture of written music, the prison of those bars, those five lines.
Being able to hear recorded music freed up loads of musicians that couldn't necessarily afford to learn to read or write music, like me.
Before 1900, you've got Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, the cancan. With recording, it was emancipation for the people. As long as you or somebody around you could afford a machine, suddenly you could hear music made by people, not set-up rigs and symphony orchestras. You could actually listen to what people were saying, almost off the cuff. Some of it can be a load of rubbish, but some of it was really good. It was the emancipation of music.
Otherwise you'd have had to go to a concert hall, and how many people could afford that? It surely can't be any coincidence that jazz and blues started to take over the world the minute recording started, within a few years, just like that.
The blues is universal, which is why it's still around.
Just the expression and the feel of it came in because of recording. It was like opening the audio curtains. And available, and cheap. It's not just locked into one community here and one community there and the twain shall never meet. And of course that breeds another totally different kind of musician, in a generation. I don't need this paper. I'm going to play it straight from the heart to the fingers. Nobody has to turn the pages.
Everything was available in Sidcup--it reflected that incredible explosion of music, of music as style, of love of Americana. I would raid the public library for books about America. There were people who liked folk music, modern jazz, trad jazz, people who liked bluesy stuff, so you're hearing prototype soul.
All those influences were there. And there were the seminal sounds--the tablets of stone, heard for the first time. There was Muddy. There was Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightnin'," Lightnin' Hopkins. And there was a record called Rhythm & Blues Vol. I. It had Buddy Guy on it doing "First Time I Met the Blues"; it had a Little Walter track.
I didn't know Chuck Berry was black for two years after I first heard his music, and this obviously long before I saw the film that drove a thousand musicians--Jazz on a Summer's Day, in which he played "Sweet Little Sixteen."
And for ages I didn't know Jerry Lee Lewis was white. You didn't see their pictures if they had something in the top ten in America. The only faces I knew were Elvis, Buddy Holly and Fats Domino. It was hardly important. It was the sound that was important.
And when I first heard "Heartbreak Hotel," it wasn't that I suddenly wanted to be Elvis Presley. I had no idea who he was at the time It was just the sound, the use of a different way of recording. The recording, as I discovered, of that visionary Sam Phillips of Sun Records.
The use of echo. No extraneous additions. You felt you were in the room with them, that you were just listening to exactly what went down in the studio, no frills no nothing, no pastry. That was hugely influential for me.
the cover of the Rolling Stones' first album in the U.K., in 1964. L to R: Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, Mick Jagger
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