Today's Rock & Roll Funnies are dedicated to
KEEF RICHARDS on his (gasp!) Birthday!
From the dw.com site:
"From boy soprano to rock hell-raiser, Keith Richards singlehandedly sums up the sex, drugs and rock and roll ethos. He cuts an iconic figure with his mane of unkempt hair and impossibly lined face. He's been a key figure in the music business for more than half a century and is one half of one of rock's most successful writing partnerships. Rolling Stone magazine credits him for creating rock's greatest single body of riffs.
Richards has sung backing vocals on all the Stones' albums and occasionally takes on lead vocal duties during live shows. But he is best known as a guitarist. Richards himself modestly described his job as "oiling the machinery." But former bandmate Bill Wyman said of him that while most musicians follow the drummer, "there was no way of not following his lead."
While he has co-penned many Stones classics, and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1993, Richards himself has stated that playing has always been a more satisfying creative expression than songwriting.
Eschewing flashy virtuosity, his guitar-playing focuses instead on solid chords and rhythms. Despite taking to the stage over the years with iconic guitars like the Fender Stratocaster and Gibson Les Paul, Richards regards the acoustic guitar as the basis for playing and has laid down guitar tracks for several Stones songs with the instrument. The tracks are then re-amped through a speaker during studio production."
From thegaurdian.com:
"It's very difficult to say - when did I identify the blues as a particular form of music? My mum was playing me jazz - a lot of Billie Holiday, Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan. I mean, it's not your country blues but, as I went on, I realised that I was brought up on a broad basis of blues music without even knowing it, so, in a way, I'm a result of what my mum played. I had a natural affinity for it, I think, so it wasn't like a conscious thing or anything like that. You know, I didn't think in terms of black or white then. You didn't know whether Chuck Berry was black or white - it was not a concern. It was just what came in the ears and, my, what it did to you. And then I slowly realized that what these cats were doing was closely related to what I'd grown up listening to. You know, it was more stripped down, it was more rural. And then I went into this thing of finding out - where did he get it from? And without actually being able to call up Chuck Berry - I was 15 - and say, 'Hey, Chuck, where do you get that from?', you went through record labels and found out that Muddy Waters had been the guy to introduce Chuck Berry to Chess Records - then there's a connection. Then I got into Muddy Waters and then, before I knew it, that leads you immediately to Robert Johnson."
From wsj.com site:
"Whether the Rolling Stones are recording or not, Richards says that his songwriter’s brain is always engaged. 'Writing songs, you don’t get a minute off, not even to sleep,' he says. 'You wake up in the middle of the night with a couple of notes in your head, and you’ve got to get out of bed and figure it out. It’s like being incontinent—either you’ve got to take a pee, or you’ve got to lay this little line down. 'So you get up, go to the piano or the guitar and hope it sticks. I don’t record shit. If I don’t remember it, it’s no good. I’ll wait for the wife or one of the daughters and see if they start to sing it without knowing it.'"
From the thisdayinmusic.com site:
Keith Richards – The World’s Most Elegantly Wasted Human Being!
1. The Fort Harrison Hotel (known at the time as the Jack Tar Harrison Hotel) where Keith Richards rolled out of bed with the idea for the riff for I Can't Get No Satisfaction was bought by the Church of Scientology in 1975 and now frequently hosts religious retreats.
2. In his autobiography, Keith said he once cleared a hotel room of unwanted guests by getting a gun out and firing it through the floor.
3. In 1976 when Keith Richards arrived two and a half hours late for a UK court appearance, on drug and driving charges, he blamed his late arrival on the fact that his trousers had not been returned from the cleaners on time.
4. In his Life autobiography, Richards reckons that on average, he slept only two nights a week for many years of the Stones’ glory years. 'This means that I have been conscious for at least three lifetimes,' he calculated.
5. On the night of the infamous 1967 Redlands drug bust, Keith was so far gone on LSD that when the police arrived at his Sussex country mansion, he mistook them for uniformed dwarves, welcoming them in with open arms.
6. Keith Richards recorded the rough version of the riff for (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction in a hotel room. He ran through it once before falling asleep. He said when he listened back to it in the morning; there was about two minutes of acoustic guitar before you could hear him drop the pick and 'then me snoring for the next forty minutes'.
7. Perirehaedulus richardsi is a species of prehistoric trilobite named after Keith Richards.
8. Keith once nearly burned down the Playboy Mansion. At a party in the 1970s, he and sax player Bobby Keys accidentally set fire to a bathroom.
9. Keith coined a name for his preferred tipple. According to the man himself, “Whiskey wasn’t agreeing with me anymore. The old body couldn’t take it. Brandy is a killer, and wine is best with food, so somehow I settled on this.” His recipe is 2 oz. premium vodka. 1 oz. of orange soda and plenty of ice. Keith calls it Nuclear Waste.
10. Nellcôte, which was leased during the summer of 1971 by Keith Richards, and used for recording sessions for their Exile on Main St. album, had previously served as the headquarters of the local Gestapo during the Nazi occupation of France in the early 1940s.
MIND SMOKE RELEASES FOR THE HOLIDAYS!
JOHNNY PIERRE'S HOLIDAY JAMBOREE (album)
BANDCAMP
MIND SMOKE RECODS
VARIOUS ARTISTS: MIND SMOKE HOLIDAY SAMPLER 2022 (album)
APPLE MUSIC
MIND SMOKE RECORDS
HAIKUM MONDAY - EVERY HEART COMES HOME FOR CHRISTMAS (single)
APPLE MUSIC
MIND SMOKE RECORDS
JOHNNY PIERRE - SANTA'S MAGIC SLEIGH (single)
APPLE MUSIC
MIND SMOKE RECORDS
