Keith Richards

The band releases, One More Shot, from the album, GRRR!. Richards:

It was probably the quickest Rolling Stones recording session I can remember, ever. We cut two tracks in three days. It was incredibly professional. I had One More Shot ready, Mick had Doom and Gloom ready to go, so, boom, let’s cut ’em.

The band releases, You Got Me Rocking, from the album, Voodoo Lounge. Richards:

I wrote it on piano. It’s sort of like a Little Richard thing. And then when I took it to guitar I really got interested in it. Because before that I was really doing a parody of something like rock and roll piano music. But then it sort of went Celtic on me. Some of these strange drone notes. And it sort of took on another life. And then Charlie got into it with this little go-go beat – this great tom tom bit – and I’m a sucker for that, man. You give me that, especially with Charlie Watts playing it. It was a heavy-duty jungle thing.

The band releases their song, Mixed Emotions, from the album, Steel Wheels. Richards:

I think we cut that in Montserrat, an island that no longer exists. That smoldering heap of volcanic eruptions. And we were the last guys to cut there. That was the last record anybody cut there. It’s what happens when you work with The Stones. They got a hurricane and then it erupted. It was a pretty island once. With Mixed Emotions I think I had the music and I went to Mick and said, bring your bit to it. Because it’s a two-way street a lot of the time. I mean there was a time when Mick and I used to write face-to-face all the time. But we were on the road then. Now we can bring ideas to each other and sometimes it’s strange – we hadn’t seen each other for maybe 5 or 6 months and we get together and funny enough, we’d each have written a piece of music that actually fits together even though we haven’t been in communication with each other.

The band releases their song, Harlem Shuffle, from the album, Dirty Work. Richards:

I’ve been trying to get Harlem Shuffle on an album, without actually telling Mick, for 5 or 6 years. I thought that was a natural number for him to sing – it was made for him. I’ve been giving him cassettes with Harlem Shuffle stuffed in the middle somewhere for a long time, but I never got any real response. One night we were in the studio and Woody and I started plunking away at it. We were amazed at how simple the song was – about 2 chords. The band was just warming up on it, jamming, when Mick walked in and started singing. We realized, YEAH. And we did it in 2 takes. So it paid off eventually, though it cost me a fortune in cassettes.

The band releases, Start Me Up, from, Tattoo You. Richards:

The story here is the miracle that we ever found that track. I was convinced – and I think Mick was – that it was definitely a Reggae song. And we did it in 38 takes – ‘Start me up. Yeah, man, cool. You know, you know, Jah Rastafari.’ And it didn’t make it. And somewhere in the middle of a break, just to break the tension, Charlie and I hit the rock and roll version. And right after that we went straight back to Reggae. And we forgot totally about this one little burst in the middle, until about five years later when somebody sifted all the way through these Reggae takes. After doing about 70 takes of Start Me Up he found that one in the middle. It was just buried in there. Suddenly I had it. Nobody remembered cutting it. But we leapt on it again. We did a few overdubs on it, and it was like a gift, you know? One of the great luxuries of The Stones is we have an enormous, great big can of stuff. I mean what anybody hears is just the tip of an iceberg, you know. And down there is vaults of stuff. But you have to have the patience and the time to actually sift through it

The band releases, Happy, from the album, Exile On Main St. Richards:

That’s a strange song, because if you play it you actually become happy, even in the worst of circumstances. It has a little magical bounce about it. I wrote it one afternoon when we were cutting Exile on Main St. in France and the studio was in my basement. And Bobby Keys was with me and they got this lick going. So we went down and I recorded it with just guitar and Bobby Keys on baritone saxophone. While we were doing that, Jimmy Miller, who was our producer at the time, came in. And he was a very good drummer as well. So we said, well let’s put down a dub, we’ll just sort of sketch it out and play it later. But it’s another one of those things that ended up being on the record. It was just one of those moments that you get that are very happy. And I can play it now and it gives you a lift. I don’t know why except for maybe the word.

The band releases, Wild Horses, from the album, Sticky Fingers. Richards:

Wild Horses almost wrote itself. It was really a lot to do with, once again, f-cking around with the tunings. I found these chords, especially doing it on a twelve-string to start with, which gave the song this character and sound. There’s a certain forlornness that can come out of a twelve-string. I started off, I think, on a regular six-string open E, and it sounded very nice, but sometimes you just get these ideas. What if I open tuned a twelve-string? All it meant was translate what Mississippi Fred McDowell was doing – twelve-string slide – into five-string mode, which meant a ten-string guitar.

The band releases their song, Honky Tonk Women, from, Let It Bleed. Richards:

Honky Tonk Women started in Brazil. Mick and I, Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg who was pregnant with my son at the time. Which didn’t stop us going off to the Mato Grasso and living on this ranch. It’s all cowboys. It’s all horses and spurs. And Mick and I were sitting on the porch of this ranch house and I started to play, basically fooling around with an old Hank Williams idea. ‘Cause we really thought we were like real cowboys. Honky tonk women. And we were sitting in the middle of nowhere with all these horses, in a place where if you flush the john all these black frogs would fly out. It was great. The chicks loved it. Anyway, it started out a real country honk put on, a hokey thing. And then couple of months later we were writing songs and recording. And somehow by some metamorphosis it suddenly went into this little swampy, black thing, a Blues thing. Really, I can’t give you a credible reason of how it turned around from that to that. Except there’s not really a lot of difference between white Country music and black Country music. It’s just a matter of nuance and style. I think it has to do with the fact that we were playing a lot around with open tunings at the time. So we were trying songs out just to see if they could be played in open tuning. And that one just sunk in.

The band releases, Paint It Black, from, Aftermath. Richards:

We were in Fiji for about 3 days. They make sitars and all sorts of Indian stuff. Sitars are made out of watermelons or pumpkins or something smashed so they go hard. They’re very brittle and you have to be careful how you handle them. We had the sitars, we thought we’d try them out in the studio. To get the right sound on Paint It Black we found the sitar fitted perfectly. We tried a guitar but you can’t bend it enough.