FTV: Keef at 82

 

     When Guitar World Editor-in-Chief Damian Fanelli got an email inquiring if his magazine would be interested in doing an interview with legendary Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, he wasn’t about to say ‘no’.  In his Woodshed column from GW Vol 47, NO. 5. (May 2026), he noted how many times Keef’s name and/or image appeared in articles from that issue alone:  four.  This doesn’t include the two feature articles about Richards.  In fact, Fanelli had just finished interviewing Randy Bachman of the Guess Who (for an upcoming issue) and even that fell in with the Keef theme.  Bachman started off his discussion with GW about an interview with Richards and Ronnie Wood he had just seen on TV.  Fanelli described his view of this cosmic collision of Keith Richards encounters:  ”Editorially speaking, I’ve always loved when weird little things like this happen.  It’s kinda like the far, far, far less annoying version of, like, when you’re talking about buying a new refrigerator, and suddenly you’re bombarded with online refrigerator ads.  I do not love that.”  Multiple appearances of Richards in Fanelli’s world reminds me of the introduction to Chicken-man:  “He’s everywhere, he’s everywhere!”

     The assignment was handed to GW writer Joel McGiver and his reaction was also predictable:  “One drops everything when offered an out-of-the-blue interview with Keith Richards.”  He goes on to note, “Even at 82 years old, Ketih Richards is in devilish form, prone to laughing hysterically at his own jokes, dropping clusters of F-bombs, mocking some of GW’s more naive questions, and generally behaving like the snaggle-toothed Captain Jack Sparrow caricature that all Rolling Stone fans recognize and appreciate.”  The ‘Captain Jack’ comment is in reference to Johnny Depp’s adaptation of many of Keef’s mannerisms into the character he played in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise.  Indeed, Richards himself made a cameo in the film playing Captain Jack’s father.  I should also mention that, instead of using a lot of space to insert our normal ‘expletive deleted’ in place of less than family friendly dialog, I will just leave out all those utterances.  If you have heard Keith Richards speak during unedited interviews, you will no doubt know exactly where all of the ‘expletive deleted’ parts would go.

     Why did Richards reach out to Guitar World at this time?  Perhaps he found himself with an abundance of free time.  When he phoned McGiver, he mentioned he was snowed in at his Connecticut home and enjoying time with his grandchildren as they really couldn’t get out of the house.  There was also the late 2025 announcement that the Rolling Stones would not be mounting a U.K. and European stadium tour in 2026.  Keef has always been one to grouse when the Stones were not on the road, so having him be the one to call for these cancellations caused everyone to do  a double take.  At the time, Richards did not discount the Stones recording new music (and recent postings indicate they have).  He did say arthritis and advancing age were the primary factors in not wanting to undergo the physical toll of touring.  The tour had never been officially announced but was in discussion after their very lucrative 2024 tour behind their last studio album, Hackney Diamonds.

     McGiver’s first impressions were far from the ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’ label Richards carried fifty years ago.  He described Keith as, “A mellower character these days than the terrifying ‘Glimmer Twin’ persona of decades past.  He’s a well-spoken fellow:  you can still hear traces of the suburban London accent that he shares with his fellow Stone Mick Jagger as he talks enthusiastically and at length about all things guitar.  He’s a committed lover of his instrument.”  One would think so as he admitted to owning ‘some 3,000 guitars’ of which he usually only tours with a small fraction:  “The working [tour] number is about 15 guitars in the rack, for different sounds and whatever.  But the other 2,900, I don’t know, they’re taken care of, though.  I mean, this is a prime collection.  It’s not like I go around buying them or anything, a lot of these guitars have been given to me.”

     A prime example of how things go in the guitar swapping universe is a vintage 1959 Les Paul known as the Keef Burst.  Long considered the ‘Holy Grail’ of guitars by Gibson lovers, Richards modified his by mounting a Bigsby vibrato on it.  Eventually, he sold it to Mick Taylor in 1967 before Mick became a Stone in 1969 (after the death of Brian Jones).  The Keef Burst  took an untraceable path after that before ending up in the hands of another Gibson ‘Burst lover, Bernie Marsden.  Marsden didn’t keep it because he already had his favorite Les Paul, the Beast, and he later told Guitarist magazine, “I let it go because it wasn’t as good as the Beast.  That was the Keith Richards one!  It’s not that it was bad.  I already had one and I got offered double the money I’d paid for the Keith ‘Burst in 1974.  I didn’t know it would become a million dollar guitar (it commanded a six-figure price tag on the vintage market when Marsden was still alive).  One can only imagine what Keef’s entire collection would bring in at auction these days.

     Then there is the Keith Richards 1960 ES-335 Collector’s Edition that the Gibson custom shop in Nashville recently put on the market.  The original, which he used in 1971-72 to record Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street, has been on every Stones tour since 1997.  This guitar was 3-D scanned so the signature models would be accurate down to the Nth degree.  As one of Keef’s favorite guitars, the hand built replicas command a hefty price on their own.  Only 150 were made, 50 of which are signed on the F-hole label and headstock with the other 100 only signed on the label.  The former will set you back $29,999 and the latter ‘only’ $19,999.  One can only guess how high the price will go once they hit the collector market.  Asked how many of the signature ES-335s Gibson gave him, Keith answered, “Oh look, I have plenty of guitars already.”

     Ever since he wrote one of the most identifiable guitar riffs of all time, people naturally pegged Richards as a lead guitar player.  When he wrote Satisfaction, he actually heard the iconic riff as a horn part.  He told GW that of all the covers that have been done of the song, he says, “The way Otis Redding ended up doing it is probably closer to my original conception for the song.  It’s an obvious horn riff.  And when this new Fuzz Tone pedal arrived in the studio from the local dealership or something (a Maestro FZ-1), I said, ‘This is good.  It’s got a bit of sustain, so I can use it to sketch out the horn line.’”  The real magic that Keith Richards brings to the party both as a songwriter and performer is found in his uncanny ability to play rhythm guitar.  Sure, Jimi Hendrix, Billy Gibbons, and Stevie Ray Vaughn play both lead and rhythm at the same time, but they aren’t the norm.  Behind most great lead players, one will find a talented rhythm guitar player.

     McGiver got right to the topic of playing rhythm guitar when he asked where Keith got his ability to ‘hang back behind the beat’.  Keef told him, “It’s actually nothing you can put into words, because it’s just the way I feel the rhythm.  I always say that I can only do this because I’ve been blessed with the best drummers in the world.  I have the luxury of knowing that the guy knows what he’s doing, you know?”  He pointed out that before guys like Bill Haley and Little Richard made “rock’n’roll” a thing, big bands from the thirties and forties were doing the same things with their rhythm sections.  Chuck Berry was another player who brought ‘feel’ and ‘groove’ into his playing.  Chuck told Keith, “I was just playing with the right guys, [bassist] Willie Dixon and [pianist] Johnnie Johnson.”  “And that,” Keith explained, “is the way I feel about the way I play – lucky to play with the right guys.”

     Working with guitarists like Brain Jones, Mick Taylor, and (most recently) Ronnie Wood in the Stones provide more examples of ‘playing with the right guys’:  “You’d meet the right guys and automatically they knew that ‘You take over here.  I’ll come in underneath,’ and there was a beautiful little ballet going on.  That’s amazing, and that’s what makes it worth doing, you know – this interconnection between musicians.”  It is almost like telepathy between players and Richards says, “Once it’s there, you don’t talk about it amongst yourselves.  It’s an unspoken reliance upon each other, which is a beautiful thing.”  He finds this same feeling when he has been able to play with guys he has listened to all his life like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Scotty Moore.  In particular, he noted Berry was ornery to work with, but a loveable guy.

     When McGiver got to the ‘naive line of questioning’ he mentioned earlier, he inquired what Richards’ favorite song was:  “What, just one?  Oh man, you’re sticking me to the wall.  You’re killing me here,” before he offered up, “Yeah, I gotta go with Robert Johnson’s Come Into My Kitchen.  It’s all there – originality, everything.  It’s fantastic.”  “And if you could only play one guitar for the rest of your life, which would it be?” McGiver asked.  “Whoa…you’re a firing squad, ain’t ya?” Keef quipped.  “I have a little black Gibson looking at me right now. A 1936 acoustic, broken, battered.  I’d keep that one with me.”

     Even at this point of his life and career, Keith said he is still learning things as a guitar player:

“Who isn’t?  That’s the beauty of the thing.  My teacher [the guitar] never stops teaching.  I’ve been at it for years now and he still knows more than me.”  Asked if he is still inspired to write songs, he told McGiver, “Oh, God, long may they come.  They come out of nowhere.  They come out of babies’ mouths, they come out of a car crash:  you never know.  Everything’s a song.

Anger and frustration help [inspire songs] for a while, but you’ll never make a living at it [that way].”

     One of the things that baffled young guitarists trying to figure out Stones songs was something that Richards started fooling around with early on.  Open tuning, where the standard E-A-D-G-B-E string tuning is replaced with an open chord like G-D-G-B-D*, gave him a whole new palette of sounds to work with.  He says, “You have to reconfigure everything and you realize you’ve restricted yourself to five strings and three open notes, you know.  You have to learn to play the chords.  I figured it out.  It’s still fascinating,  I’m still rambling around in there, looking for stuff.”  Playing with feel gives him his own perspective about the abundance of shredders who inhabited the Sunset Strip in the 1980s:  “I laughed my head off!  Like ‘Oh my God, what have we spawned?’  Yeah, they were some good pickers but one guy soloing means nothing to me.  You have got to have something to solo over, but that [shredding] never appealed to me.  They had a hit record here and there, but that’s pop music.”  

     Keith said he began experimenting with open tunings around 1967 when he had some time off and was looking for something to fill his idle time.  This coincided with his first explorations into playing a Fender Telecaster.  While it was common for slide players to use open tunings, Richards decided he wanted to look at it for rhythm guitar.  {*Note the G-D-G-B-D tuning shown above – he removed the low E string which made his ‘Micawber’ Tele a five string guitar.} “Of all the guitars, the Telecaster really lent itself well to a dry, rhythm, five-string drone thing.  In a way, that tuning kept me developing as a guitar player,” he told GW.  We should also explain that many guitar players identify some of their guitars by name.  Billy Gibbons has ‘Pearly Gates’, Peter Green had ‘Greenie’ (a Les Paul now owned by Metallica’s Kirk Hammett), and Bernie Marsden’s previously mentioned ‘The Beast’.  Richards’ ‘Micawber’ name came from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.

     Sometimes guitars can live a long and happy life while others have a shorter shelf life.  During the Let It Bleed sessions, Keith borrowed a Maton Supreme Electric 777 while tracking Gimmee Shelter.  As he told Guitar World, “At the very last note of the take, the whole neck fell off.  You can hear it on the original track.  That guitar had just that one little quality for that specific thing.  In a way, it was quite poetic that it died at the end of the track.”

     How about the guitarist’s shelf life?  The early rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle didn’t kill him though some marvel that he survived at all.  Keef has had his share of health problems but always seems to bounce back.  Today, the biggest thing bothering him is arthritis and the swelled knuckles that have made him adjust how he plays.  Asked what makes him happy these days, and what his goals are, he told McGiver with a laugh, “Well, breathing.  No, this winter my grandkids have been around.  They’re all ones and twos and threes;  it’s fascinating to watch.  I’m starting to get the hang of it, you know.  Over this winter, they’ve been my inspiration. Goals?  To make it to next winter.” 

 

Top Piece Video:  Okay – here is the horn line turned guitar riff that made Keef very rich – film from one of their earliest recorded live shows in

Ireland in 1965.  Adrenaline flowing a bit?  The speed they are playing makes me think it is!