I recently finished reading the Keith Richards biography, Life, which I largely enjoyed. It’s not a great book, huge gaps, not particularly well organized or written, and it suffers from a classic case of the unreliable narrator (this is Keith Richards, after all), but entertaining nonetheless. For me, born in 1961, the youngest of seven, those great Rolling Stones albums are woven into my earliest memories. My brothers had the original, gate-fold 3D cover of Satanic Majesty’s Last Request, the actual zipper cover for Sticky Fingers, and so on. I shared a bedroom wall with my brother, Neal, twelve years my senior, and I can vividly recall his two favorites seeping into my sleep: Dylan and the Stones, endlessly. I grew up listening to Keith and all these years later still find new things to appreciate.
The best outcome from reading Life was that it inspired me to pull out the old disks, and in particular, search out the rare songs when Keith sang lead. There aren’t that many, and I missed some of them, because I skipped much of their post-1983 output. But in doing so, bypassed some gems.
These past weeks I’m obsessed with Keith as a lead singer, on minor songs like “This Place Is Empty,” “The Worst,” “Slipping Away,” and “How Can I Stop,” not to mention classics like “Happy,” “Little T&A,” “Before They Make Me Run,” and my personal favorite, “You Got the Silver.” Despite its limitations, I respond to a quality in his voice, the looseness of his delivery, the bittersweet delicacy, the soul, the undeniable fact that it’s Keith in all his low-slung glory, guitar practically at his knees. It’s so uncommercial, such an American Idol fail. Say what you want about the man, the drugs and the stupidity, but he’s always been the genuine article, committed to the music. As much as it’s possible to say about any one man, you can say it about Keith Richards: He is rock and roll. Seriously, who else in the history of rock embodies the authentic spirit more than Keith? Nobody, that’s who.
So I made a mix of Rolling Stones tunes where Keith sang lead vocals, and added in a select few from his first solo disk, Talk Is Cheap. Keith’s second solo effort, Main Offender, also features some great songwriting, but to my ears it’s marred by a regrettable, monotonous, and headache-inducing drum sound. The mix:
1) “All About You,” Emotional Rescue (1980)
This is from around the time I began to lose interest in the Rolling Stones. Or more accurately, stopped expecting greatness from their new albums. Bands like the Clash and the Talking Heads, to name just two, sounded much more vital. The Stones’ time had passed, the incredible run from Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, to Exile on Main St, 1968-72, as good a run as any band ever had. However . . . there are gems on every disk. “All About You,” the album’s melancholy closing track, is certainly one of them. On the recording, that’s Bobby Keys on saxophone, Charlie Watts on drums. Reportedly Keith played everything else himself, bass, guitar, piano.
2) “The Worst,” Voodoo Lounge (1994)
Lyric: “Well I sai
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