<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When <\/span>Guitar World<\/span><\/i> 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\u2019t about to say \u2018no\u2019.\u00a0 In his <\/span>Woodshed<\/span><\/i> column from <\/span>GW <\/span><\/i>Vol 47, NO. 5. (May 2026), he noted how many times Keef\u2019s name and\/or image appeared in articles from that issue alone:\u00a0 four.\u00a0 This doesn\u2019t include the two feature articles about Richards.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Bachman started off his discussion with <\/span>GW<\/span><\/i> about an interview with Richards and Ronnie Wood he had just seen on TV.\u00a0 Fanelli described his view of this cosmic collision of Keith Richards encounters:\u00a0 \u201dEditorially speaking, I\u2019ve always loved when weird little things like this happen.\u00a0 It\u2019s kinda like the far, far, far less annoying version of, like, when you\u2019re talking about buying a new refrigerator, and suddenly you\u2019re bombarded with online refrigerator ads.\u00a0 I do not love that.\u201d\u00a0 Multiple appearances of Richards in Fanelli\u2019s world reminds me of the introduction to <\/span>Chicken-man:\u00a0 \u201c<\/span><\/i>He\u2019s everywhere, he\u2019s everywhere!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The assignment was handed to <\/span>GW <\/span><\/i>writer Joel McGiver and his reaction was also predictable:\u00a0 \u201cOne drops everything when offered an out-of-the-blue interview with Keith Richards.\u201d\u00a0 He goes on to note, \u201cEven 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 <\/span>GW\u2019s<\/span><\/i> more naive questions, and generally behaving like the snaggle-toothed Captain Jack Sparrow caricature that all Rolling Stone fans recognize and appreciate.\u201d\u00a0 The \u2018Captain Jack\u2019 comment is in reference to Johnny Depp\u2019s adaptation of many of Keef\u2019s mannerisms into the character he played in the <\/span>Pirates of the Caribbean<\/span><\/i> movie franchise.\u00a0 Indeed, Richards himself made a cameo in the film playing Captain Jack\u2019s father.\u00a0 I should also mention that, instead of using a lot of space to insert our normal \u2018expletive deleted\u2019 in place of less than family friendly dialog, I will just leave out all those utterances.\u00a0 If you have heard Keith Richards speak during unedited interviews, you will no doubt know exactly where all of the \u2018expletive deleted\u2019 parts would go.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Why did Richards reach out to <\/span>Guitar World<\/span><\/i> at this time?\u00a0 Perhaps he found himself with an abundance of free time.\u00a0 When he phoned McGiver, he mentioned he was snowed in at his Connecticut home and enjoying time with his grandchildren as they really couldn\u2019t get out of the house.\u00a0 There was also the late 2025 announcement that the Rolling Stones would not be mounting a U.K. and European stadium tour in 2026.\u00a0 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\u00a0 a double take.\u00a0 At the time, Richards did not discount the Stones recording new music (and recent postings indicate they have).\u00a0 He did say arthritis and advancing age were the primary factors in not wanting to undergo the physical toll of touring.\u00a0 The tour had never been officially announced but was in discussion after their very lucrative 2024 tour behind their last studio album, <\/span>Hackney Diamonds.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/i>McGiver\u2019s first impressions were far from the \u2018mad, bad, and dangerous to know\u2019 label Richards carried fifty years ago.\u00a0 He described Keith as, \u201cA mellower character these days than the terrifying \u2018Glimmer Twin\u2019 persona of decades past.\u00a0 He\u2019s a well-spoken fellow:\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He\u2019s a committed lover of his instrument.\u201d\u00a0 One would think so as he admitted to owning \u2018some 3,000 guitars\u2019 of which he usually only tours with a small fraction:\u00a0 \u201cThe working [tour] number is about 15 guitars in the rack, for different sounds and whatever.\u00a0 But the other 2,900, I don\u2019t know, they\u2019re taken care of, though.\u00a0 I mean, this is a prime collection.\u00a0 It\u2019s not like I go around buying them or anything, a lot of these guitars have been given to me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A prime example of how things go in the guitar swapping universe is a vintage 1959 Les Paul known as the Keef Burst.\u00a0 Long considered the \u2018Holy Grail\u2019 of guitars by Gibson lovers, Richards modified his by mounting a Bigsby vibrato on it.\u00a0 Eventually, he sold it to Mick Taylor in 1967 before Mick became a Stone in 1969 (after the death of Brian Jones).\u00a0 The Keef Burst\u00a0 took an untraceable path after that before ending up in the hands of another Gibson \u2018Burst lover, Bernie Marsden.\u00a0 Marsden didn\u2019t keep it because he already had his favorite Les Paul, the Beast, and he later told <\/span>Guitarist<\/span><\/i> magazine, \u201cI let it go because it wasn\u2019t as good as the Beast.\u00a0 That was the Keith Richards one!\u00a0 It\u2019s not that it was bad.\u00a0 I already had one and I got offered double the money I\u2019d paid for the Keith \u2018Burst in 1974.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know it would become a million dollar guitar (it commanded a six-figure price tag on the vintage market when Marsden was still alive).\u00a0 One can only imagine what Keef\u2019s entire collection would bring in at auction these days.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Then there is the Keith Richards 1960 ES-335 Collector\u2019s Edition that the Gibson custom shop in Nashville recently put on the market.\u00a0 The original, which he used in 1971-72 to record <\/span>Sticky Fingers<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Exile on Main Street<\/span><\/i>, has been on every Stones tour since 1997.\u00a0 This guitar was 3-D scanned so the signature models would be accurate down to the Nth degree.\u00a0 As one of Keef\u2019s favorite guitars, the hand built replicas command a hefty price on their own.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The former will set you back $29,999 and the latter \u2018only\u2019 $19,999.\u00a0 One can only guess how high the price will go once they hit the collector market.\u00a0 Asked how many of the signature ES-335s Gibson gave him, Keith answered, \u201cOh look, I have plenty of guitars already.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Ever since he wrote one of the most identifiable guitar riffs of all time, people naturally pegged Richards as a lead guitar player.\u00a0 When he wrote <\/span>Satisfaction<\/span><\/i>, he actually heard the iconic riff as a horn part.\u00a0 He told <\/span>GW <\/span><\/i>that of all the covers that have been done of the song, he says, \u201cThe way Otis Redding ended up doing it is probably closer to my original conception for the song.\u00a0 It\u2019s an obvious horn riff.\u00a0 And when this new Fuzz Tone pedal arrived in the studio from the local dealership or something (a Maestro FZ-1), I said, \u2018This is good.\u00a0 It\u2019s got a bit of sustain, so I can use it to sketch out the horn line.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Sure, Jimi Hendrix, Billy Gibbons, and Stevie Ray Vaughn play both lead and rhythm at the same time, but they aren\u2019t the norm.\u00a0 Behind most great lead players, one will find a talented rhythm guitar player.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0McGiver got right to the topic of playing rhythm guitar when he asked where Keith got his ability to \u2018hang back behind the beat\u2019.\u00a0 Keef told him, \u201cIt\u2019s actually nothing you can put into words, because it\u2019s just the way I feel the rhythm.\u00a0 I always say that I can only do this because I\u2019ve been blessed with the best drummers in the world.\u00a0 I have the luxury of knowing that the guy knows what he\u2019s doing, you know?\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Chuck Berry was another player who brought \u2018feel\u2019 and \u2018groove\u2019 into his playing.\u00a0 Chuck told Keith, \u201cI was just playing with the right guys, [bassist] Willie Dixon and [pianist] Johnnie Johnson.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cAnd that,\u201d Keith explained, \u201cis the way I feel about the way I play – lucky to play with the right guys.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Working with guitarists like Brain Jones, Mick Taylor, and (most recently) Ronnie Wood in the Stones provide more examples of \u2018playing with the right guys\u2019:\u00a0 \u201cYou\u2019d meet the right guys and automatically they knew that \u2018You take over here.\u00a0 I\u2019ll come in underneath,\u2019 and there was a beautiful little ballet going on.\u00a0 That\u2019s amazing, and that\u2019s what makes it worth doing, you know – this interconnection between musicians.\u201d\u00a0 It is almost like telepathy between players and Richards says, \u201cOnce it\u2019s there, you don\u2019t talk about it amongst yourselves.\u00a0 It\u2019s an unspoken reliance upon each other, which is a beautiful thing.\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In particular, he noted Berry was ornery to work with, but a loveable guy.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When McGiver got to the \u2018naive line of questioning\u2019 he mentioned earlier, he inquired what Richards\u2019 favorite song was:\u00a0 \u201cWhat, just one?\u00a0 Oh man, you\u2019re sticking me to the wall.\u00a0 You\u2019re killing me here,\u201d before he offered up, \u201cYeah, I gotta go with Robert Johnson\u2019s <\/span>Come Into My Kitchen<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 It\u2019s all there – originality, everything.\u00a0 It\u2019s fantastic.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cAnd if you could only play one guitar for the rest of your life, which would it be?\u201d McGiver asked.\u00a0 \u201cWhoa\u2026you\u2019re a firing squad, ain\u2019t ya?\u201d Keef quipped.\u00a0 \u201cI have a little black Gibson looking at me right now. A 1936 acoustic, broken, battered.\u00a0 I\u2019d keep that one with me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Even at this point of his life and career, Keith said he is still learning things as a guitar player:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWho isn\u2019t?\u00a0 That\u2019s the beauty of the thing.\u00a0 My teacher [the guitar] never stops teaching.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been at it for years now and he still knows more than me.\u201d\u00a0 Asked if he is still inspired to write songs, he told McGiver, \u201cOh, God, long may they come.\u00a0 They come out of nowhere.\u00a0 They come out of babies\u2019 mouths, they come out of a car crash:\u00a0 you never know.\u00a0 Everything\u2019s a song.<\/span><\/p>\n Anger and frustration help [inspire songs] for a while, but you\u2019ll never make a living at it [that way].\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0One of the things that baffled young guitarists trying to figure out Stones songs was something that Richards started fooling around with early on.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He says, \u201cYou have to reconfigure everything and you realize you\u2019ve restricted yourself to five strings and three open notes, you know.\u00a0 You have to learn to play the chords.\u00a0 I figured it out.\u00a0 It\u2019s still fascinating,\u00a0 I\u2019m still rambling around in there, looking for stuff.\u201d\u00a0 Playing with feel gives him his own perspective about the abundance of shredders who inhabited the Sunset Strip in the 1980s:\u00a0 \u201cI laughed my head off!\u00a0 Like \u2018Oh my God, what have we spawned?\u2019\u00a0 Yeah, they were some good pickers but one guy soloing means nothing to me.\u00a0 You have got to have something to solo over, but that [shredding] never appealed to me.\u00a0 They had a hit record here and there, but that\u2019s pop music.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Keith 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.\u00a0 This coincided with his first explorations into playing a Fender Telecaster.\u00a0 While it was common for slide players to use open tunings, Richards decided he wanted to look at it for rhythm guitar.\u00a0 {*Note the G-D-G-B-D tuning shown above – he removed the low E string which made his \u2018Micawber\u2019 Tele a five string guitar.} \u201cOf all the guitars, the Telecaster really lent itself well to a dry, rhythm, five-string drone thing.\u00a0 In a way, that tuning kept me developing as a guitar player,\u201d he told <\/span>GW.\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>We should also explain that many guitar players identify some of their guitars by name.\u00a0 Billy Gibbons has \u2018Pearly Gates\u2019, Peter Green had \u2018Greenie\u2019 (a Les Paul now owned by Metallica\u2019s Kirk Hammett), and Bernie Marsden\u2019s previously mentioned \u2018The Beast\u2019.\u00a0 Richards\u2019 \u2018Micawber\u2019 name came from Charles Dickens\u2019 <\/span>David Copperfield.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Sometimes guitars can live a long and happy life while others have a shorter shelf life.\u00a0 During the <\/span>Let It Bleed<\/span><\/i> sessions, Keith borrowed a Maton Supreme Electric 777 while tracking <\/span>Gimmee Shelter.\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>As he told <\/span>Guitar World, <\/span><\/i>\u201cAt the very last note of the take, the whole neck fell off.\u00a0 You can hear it on the original track.\u00a0 That guitar had just that one little quality for that specific thing.\u00a0 In a way, it was quite poetic that it died at the end of the track.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0How about the guitarist\u2019s shelf life?\u00a0 The early rock \u2018n\u2019 roll lifestyle didn\u2019t kill him though some marvel that he survived at all.\u00a0 Keef has had his share of health problems but always seems to bounce back.\u00a0 Today, the biggest thing bothering him is arthritis and the swelled knuckles that have made him adjust how he plays.\u00a0 Asked what makes him happy these days, and what his goals are, he told McGiver with a laugh, \u201cWell, breathing.\u00a0 No, this winter my grandkids have been around.\u00a0 They\u2019re all ones and twos and threes;\u00a0 it’s fascinating to watch.\u00a0 I\u2019m starting to get the hang of it, you know.\u00a0 Over this winter, they\u2019ve been my inspiration. Goals?\u00a0 To make it to next winter.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0 Okay – here is the horn line turned guitar riff that made Keef very rich – film from one of their earliest recorded live shows in<\/p>\n Ireland in 1965.\u00a0 Adrenaline flowing a bit?\u00a0 The speed they are playing makes me think it is!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When 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\u2019t about to say \u2018no\u2019.\u00a0 In his Woodshed column from GW Vol 47, NO. 5. (May 2026), he noted how many times Keef\u2019s name and\/or image […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11,8,6,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bands-musicians","category-education","category-from-the-vaults","category-new-music","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3841"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3844,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3841\/revisions\/3844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}