Salt of the Earth: Keith Richards at 80
Why the unkillable Rolling Stones guitarist still endures
Born this day in 1943 in Dartford, Kent, England, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards celebrates his 80th birthday with a new Stones LP and an upcoming 2024 tour, the band flying nearly as high as it did 60 years ago.
One can be forgiven for believing that something supernatural has taken place as Richards enters a new decade after years of enjoying an openly hedonistic and admittedly self-destructive rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. Aside from the lengthy career he’s enjoyed as the Stones’ rhythm guitarist, vocalist, and songwriting partner with band frontman Mick Jagger, Richards has found enormous success as a solo artist, producer, and session musician.
Richards received his first guitar as a child from his grandfather, Gus Dupree, a musician who had toured England with his own jazz band. Although his father disparaged Richards’ efforts, Dupree encouraged young Keith’s playing and he taught himself the instrument by listening to records by artists like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong before he discovered rock ‘n’ roll and began learning songs by Elvis Presley (whose guitarist, Scotty Moore, was Richards’ first idol) and, later, Chuck Berry.
Jagger was a childhood friend of Richards, attending Wentworth Primary School together before their families both moved. Richards later attended Dartford Technical High School, where he sang in the choir before being expelled for truancy; he transferred to Sidcup Art College in London, where he met future Pretty Things guitarist Dick Taylor. As legend has it, Keith ran into Mick on a train platform when Jagger was on his way to classes at the London School of Economics. After not having seen each other in several years, their friendship was rekindled via common admiration for the Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters albums that Jagger was carrying with him..
Jagger was involved in the band Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys with Taylor, and Richards soon joined them. Fate brought guitarist Brian Jones and keyboardist Ian Stewart into the Jagger/Richards orbit and, with a shared interest in American blues music, the Rolling Stones were formed with Richards and Jones on guitar, Taylor on bass and drummer Tony Chapman with the band name chosen by Jones and inspired by Waters’ “Rollin’ Stone Blues.” Taylor soon left the band to form the Pretty Things, and Chapman recommended bassist Bill Wyman as his replacement. The Stones later recruited drummer Charlie Watts from veteran British bluesman Alexis Korner’s band and the world-beating Stones line-up was formed.
VIDEO: The Rolling Stones “Get Off Of My Cloud”
For decades, the Rolling Stones set the standard for rock music with a string of hit singles written by Jagger and Richards (“Get Off My Cloud,” “Paint It Black,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Brown Sugar,” etc.) as well as through groundbreaking and influential albums like Aftermath, Beggars’ Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers,Exile On Main Street and Some Girls among others. The secret to the Stones sound was the band’s unique interweaving of lead and rhythm guitars, with Richards’ fretwork the foundation of every performance no matter who the lead player might be (Brian Jones, Mick Taylor, or Ron Wood). Almost 60 years after releasing their debut album, the Stones hit number one on the U.K. charts and number three in the U.S. with their 2023 album Hackney Diamonds.
Richards released his first solo record in the form of a 1978 single, a rowdy cover of the Chuck Berry song “Run Rudolph Run,” but he wouldn’t record his first solo LP until a decade later, after a split with Jagger, releasing 1988’s Talk Is Cheap. Co-produced by drummer Steve Jordan (now a member of the Stones), Richards was backed on Talk Is Cheap by the X-Pensive Winos, which included guitarist Waddy Wachtel and keyboardist Ivan Neville. The album’s success (Top 30 in the U.S. and Top 40 in the U.K.) arguably re-focused Jagger back on the Stones from his own stuttering solo efforts, the singer reuniting with Richards and recording the Top 10 “comeback” album Steel Wheels. Richards followed up his solo debut with 1992’s Main Offender, a solid set recorded with much the same X-Pensive Winos line-up but destined to be buried beneath the chart-crushing success of grunge and the “Seattle sound.”
The guitarist wouldn’t record his third solo album for 23 years, but 2015’s Crosseyed Heart, recorded again with the X-Pensive Winos, was an unqualified success, hitting number 11 on the U.S. chart and number seven in the U.K. and yielding a minor hit single with the song “Trouble.” During the interim, Richards released Live At the Hollywood Palladium in 1991, the concert LP recorded during a brief American tour in support of Talk Is Cheap in late 1988. Strangely, although the live album failed to chart in either the U.S. or the U.K. it proved to be a modest success in Germany and Austria. A 2019 reissue of Talk Is Cheap, expanded with six unreleased bonus tracks enjoyed modest U.K. chart success while a 2022 reissue of Main Offender was expanded with an unreleased 1992 London performance by the X-Pensive Winos.
Prior to launching his solo career in earnest, Richards was an integral member of fellow Stones’ guitarist Ron Wood’s late ‘70s band the Barbarians (a/k/a The New Barbarians), formed primarily to promote Wood’s 1979 solo album Gimme Some Neck. With Wood taking the microphone and leading a band that featured Richards, bassist Stanley Clarke, former Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan, drummer, Zigaboo Modeliste of the Meters, and saxophonist (and frequent Stones collaborator) Bobby Keys, the New Barbarians opened for Led Zeppelin at the 1979 Knebworth Festival in the U.K. The band underwent a whirlwind North American tour with two concerts in Canada and eighteen in the U.S. performing Wood’s solo material alongside several Stones songs and various classic blues and rock tunes.
The New Barbarians never recorded an album together, but several shows surfaced as live bootlegs under titles like Barbed Wire Tour and Rebel Yell. In 2006, Wood released a two-CD/three-LP set of an often-bootlegged 1979 show as Buried Alive: Live In Maryland, featuring Richards singing on five songs, on his own Wooden Records label. Over the years, Richards has brought his six-string skills and unique sound to dozens of albums as a session player, the guitarist contributing to recordings by artists as diverse as blues legend John Lee Hooker, Tom Wait, country crooner George Jones, Peter Wolf, and his idol Scotty Moore as well as several of Ron Wood’s solo albums. Richards has also worked as a producer on albums and singles by artists like reggae legend Peter Tosh, New Orleans R&B great Aaron Neville, pianist Johnnie Johnson, the almighty Aretha Franklin, Marianne Faithful, and John Phillips, to name but a few.
Richards published his best-selling autobiography, Life, in 2010 and followed it up with a children’s book inspired by his grandfather entitled Gus & Me. Inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1989 and the U.K. Music Hall of Fame in 2004, Richards was also inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1993. The guitarist was honored in early 2023 when a pair of bronze statues of Richards and Jagger in performance stance, were unveiled in their Dartford hometown.
During a backstage conversation with Deep Purple’s Roger Glover after a show a few years ago, the topic changed from blues music to the Rolling Stones.
Glover said that the band was horrible in the beginning, but they went away for a few months and, when they returned to a thriving early ‘60s British rock scene, they quickly rose to the top of the pack. Glover wasn’t certain that they didn’t make some sort of deal with the devil in the manner of Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, but the band’s longevity is remarkable not only for their enduring popularity but for their seemingly-endless creative relevance as well.
As the Rolling Stones continue rocking ‘round the globe in their seventh decade, we wish a happy 80th birthday to Keith Richards, an artist who is not only a rock ‘n’ roll legend but a bona fide cultural icon.
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