Keith Richards

Keith Richards (born 18 December 1943 in Dartford, Kent, England), is an English guitarist and songwriter, best known for his work with The Rolling Stones. Richards has played guitar on releases by Max Romeo, Hubert Sumlin, Les Paul, Tom Waits, Bono and The Edge of U2, Nona Hendryx, John Phillips and Aretha Franklin. He was first known to the public as Keith Richard because Andrew Loog Oldham, the first manager of the Stones, removed the "s" to resemble the name of popstar Cliff Richard; Richards later restored the "s" to his surname. "The Human Riff" and "Keef Riffhard" are lasting epithets.

Early life

Keith Richards was born in Dartford, Kent, England at the Livingstone Hospital on December 18th 1943 during the Second World War, and lived there through German V-weapon attacks on the city. An only child, he was reportedly conceived so his mother Doris Richards could escape working on a wartime factory production line. Richards' father Bert was a factory laborer, who was slightly injured during World War II. Richards' paternal grandparents were socialists and civic leaders, and his maternal grandfather(Augustus Theodore Dupree) toured Britain as a jazz/big band musician. In interviews, Richards has often cited his maternal grandfather as a strong influence growing up. Roy Rogers, the singing American Western film star, impacted Richards' young life, the young boy dressing and playing a guitar to imitate him. As an adolescent, Richards took to dressing like a teddy boy.

His parents divorced around the time Richards was expelled from Sidcup Art College. He had previously attended Wilmington Grammar School for Boys. The divorce led to a long period of estrangement from his father, Bert Richards, which continued until 1982.

Musical career

With the Rolling Stones

Richards' musical career has been characterized by a reliance on collaboration and his long association with the Rolling Stones.

Richards derived much of his early style from Chuck Berry, whose guitar work remained a touchstone for Richards throughout his career. While The Rolling Stones were conceived as a rhythm and blues band, Richards was largely responsible for introducing the rock n' roll of Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry into the group's repertoire. With Stones founding member and guitarist Brian Jones, Richards developed a style of interwoven lead and rhythm part. Richards has cited his insistence that the two-guitar sound is the sound of the Stones as one of his chief contributions to the group. Jones was replaced by the virtuoso guitarist Mick Taylor (1969-1974), who contributed to some of the group's most well-regarded records, but Taylor's addition also led to a pronounced separation in the duties of lead and rhythm guitar. Taylor's replacement in 1975 was the more rhythmically-oriented Ron Wood. Richards said in "According to the Rolling Stones" that Wood is one the most sympathetic guitar player he has worked with, and that his years with Wood have been his most musically satisfying in the Stones.

Richards' guitar playing is noted for open tunings with syncopated and ringing I IV chording heard on "Start Me Up" and "Street Fighting Man." Richards has frequently used a five-string variant of the open G (GDGBD, which is unencumbered by a rumbling lower E). On some of the Stones' biggest hits, including "Honky Tonk Women," "Brown Sugar," and "Start Me Up", this tuning is prominent. He still uses standard tunings, but Richards has cited the adoption of open tunings as a turning point in his guitar playing.

Richards - who has over 1000 guitars, some of which he has not played but was simply given - is often associated with Fender Telecasters, though lately his favorite guitar seems to be an ebony Gibson ES-355. On "Satisfaction" Richards recorded the first hit featuring a guitar fuzz effect which has since become commonplace. Though in the 1970s and early 80s he used guitar effects frequently, since then he has rarely used effects. Richards considers the acoustic guitar as the basis for all his playing and many Stones hits including "Street Fighting Man", "Satisfaction", and "Brown Sugar" feature acoustic guitar parts.

Richards' backing vocals are on every Stones album and since 1978 Some Girls each Stones release has had a Richards lead vocal. He has also contributed occasional bass, keyboard, and slide guitar. Richards has always been active in record production for the Stones and for himself, often in tandem with Mick Jagger and outside producers.

Songwriting

Following the example of the Beatles' Lennon/McCartney - and spurred on by manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who saw little future for a band that covered R&B tunes and who was mindful of lucrative songwriting royalties. The Stones had a number of hits with Jagger/Richards-penned songs in 1964-65, but it was 1965's "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" that established the band, reaching #1 around the globe.

Throughout the 60s the Jagger/Richards partnership expanded beyond blues, R&B, and rock 'n roll, absorbing soul, folk, pop, country, psychedelia, and the social commentary that Bob Dylan made prominent on Top 40 radio. Their work in the 70s and beyond has incorporated elements of funk, disco, reggae, and punk. Since 1980 with "All About You", Richards has specialized in slow, torchy ballads that reveal his fondness for the songwriting of Hoagy Carmichael.

With scattered exceptions, all Rolling Stones albums from 1966 onwards have consisted of songs credited to Jagger/Richards. The songs Jagger and Richards have written for The Rolling Stones are always credited to both regardless of how much collaboration there actually was. For his solo recordings, Richards always credits a songwriting partner, most often drummer and co-producer Steve Jordan.

Solo recordings

After Jagger vetoed a Stones tour to support their just-released album Dirty Work, Richards formed Keith Richards and the X-pensive Winos in 1988 (first named Organized Crime). The Winos also included Steve Jordan who played drums on Dirty Work, and Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll!, a documentary of Chuck Berry's the 60th birthday concert in which Richards acted as host and musical director. The forming of the Winos was recognition that the Rolling Stones might not record or tour for some time. Richards, who had released a solo single "Run Rudolph Run" and toured with The New Barbarians in 1979, had resisted a sustained venture outside of the Stones as potentially detrimental to the Stones. Consequently his solo recordings are fewer than those of Jagger, Charlie Watts, and even Ronnie Wood.

Besides Steve Jordan, the X-pensive Winos featured, Sarah Dash, Waddy Wachtel, Ivan Neville, and Bernie Worrell. Their first release Talk is Cheap produced no Top 40 hits, though it went gold and has remained a consistent seller. It spawned a brief U.S. tour - one of only two that Richards has done as a solo artist. The first tour is documented on the Virgin release Live at the Hollywood Palladium, December 15, 1988. In 1992 Main Offender was released, and the Winos toured again through North and South America as well as Europe. Richards' solo career required him to be a frontman for the first time, and the Hollywood Palladium concert video shows a more active stage persona than the Richards seen in the documentary of the Stones' 1969 American tour, Gimme Shelter. After Jagger and Richards set aside their differences, the subsequent Stones release 1989 Steel Wheels contained material Richards had started with the Winos, such as "Almost Hear You Sigh". Richards - citing his commitments and those of other Winos as obstacles to a reunion - has not released any solo albums since the Stones reactivated in 1994.

Recordings with other artists

Richards' appearances with other artists and groups became more frequent later in his career and were almost non-existent during the sixties. His contributions include the 2001 release of John Phillips' solo recording Pay, Pack & Follow, recorded between 1973 through 1979, which Richards helped produce and on which he played guitar on all tracks. Richards also dueted with country legend George Jones on the Bradley Barn Sessions, singing ("Say it's not You") as an homage to Gram Parsons, and on a Hank Williams tribute album Timeless ("You Win Again"). He has also appeared as a guest on veteran blues guitarist Hubert Sumlin's About Them Shoes, singing lead vocal on "Still A Fool". In the early 1990s Richards played with and produced a recording of Jamaican Rastafarians, The Wingless Angels, releasing the collaboration on his own label, Mindless Records.

Rare and unreleased recordings

The Stones recently released Rarities 1971-2003 (2006), which includes sixteen rare and limited released recordings. Richards has termed the released output of the Stones as the "tip of the iceberg." Many unreleased songs and studio jams including their BBC recordings from the early 60s are among the most widely bootleged recordings in rock and roll history. Many bootlegs feature Richards singing Tammy Wynette's "Apartment Number 9", and Sam Cooke's "Let's Go Steady Again". Since unreleased recordings most often appear as post-career or as posthumous releases, trading of these bootlegs is common on peer-to-peer sharing programs such as Limewire and Soulseek.

Public image and private life

To the general public, Richards is better known for his drug-related outlaw image than for his songwriting contributions. Richards and the Stones cultivated a decadent and counter-culture aesthetic during the 1960s and 70s, and Richards' frank admission that he used narcotics often made him a poster-boy for teens and adults who sought refuge in — as Keith sings in "Before They Make Me Run" — "booze and pills and powders." In a famous 1971 Rolling Stone magazine interview, he discussed his drug use. Ten years later, in another Rolling Stone interview, he expressed little regret about the heroin addiction that almost destroyed his life and music career. To this day, Richards wears a bracelet that resembles a pair of handcuffs as a reminder that he never wants to be arrested again. He also wears a Totenkopf ring portraying a human skull without a jaw, a gift from a friend and New York jeweller; he has said publicly that it represents the fact that "beauty is only skin deep."^*

Two famous arrests came ten years apart, the first in 1967 with Jagger and friends at Redlands, Richards' Sussex estate, which placed him in custody and trial before the court of public opinion and Her Majesty. The Times editorial Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel? helped to get the conviction quashed after two days of imprisonment. The case also began a succession of drug arrests for Richards that continued until the late 70s.

However, there was a more ominous, serious and life-changing arrest in February 1977 at Toronto's Harbour Castle Hotel (Keith Richards/Archive 1#Regina v. Richards 49 C.C.C. (2d) (1980)). Registered at the hotel under the pseudonym "Redlands", Richards was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (or Mounties) for heroin and cocaine possession (he had two ounces of each at the time of his arrest), and was charged with importing narcotics, an offence with a minimum sentence of seven years imprisonment according to the Criminal Code of Canada.

For the next three years, he lived under threat of criminal sanction as he sought medical treatment in the U.S. for heroin addiction. During this period, The Rolling Stones released their biggest-selling album (eight million copies) Some Girls, which included their last North American number-one pop chart single, "Miss You". After the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld Richards' original sentence — a benefit concert for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, played over two nights at the marijuana smoke filled Oshawa Civic Auditorium— Keith emerged healthy and in love with a young New York model.

Patti Hansen was a top fashion model when they met at Studio 54. In a 2000 Vogue magazine interview, Hansen, who later co-starred with Rick Springfield in the 1984 film Hard to Hold, said she asked Richards for a bottle of Champagne. They have been together as couple since, and married on 18 December, 1983, Richards's 40th birthday. They have two daughters, Theodora Richards and Alexandra, who have followed their mother into modeling.

Richards has never distanced himself from the mother of his first three children, Anita Pallenberg, and often refers to having two wives, although he never officially married Pallenberg; the former girlfriend of Brian Jones, and an actress in Performance and Barbarella. Together they have a son, Marlon Richards, and another daughter, Angela (nee Dandelion). Their third child, a boy named after Keith's close friend Tara Browne, died several weeks after being born in 1976.

Recent news

On April 27, 2006, Richards, while vacationing in Fiji suffered a head injury. There has been no confirmation how this injury happened, but it was speculated Richards fell from a coconut tree or had a jetski accident. On May 22, official press releases by the Rolling Stones confirmed that Richards had returned to his home in Connecticut. The Rolling Stones announced a revised tour schedule on June 2nd, which included an announcement about two canceled shows and several postponed shows in Europe. Included in the announcement was a brief statement from Richards apologizing for "falling off his perch". Unofficial news reports stated that the band will tour in North America in the fall of 2006, and in Europe in 2007, where some of the postponed dates will be rescheduled.

Richards is scheduled to make a cameo appearance as the father of Captain Jack Sparrow (played by Johnny Depp) in Pirates of the Caribbean 3, according to reports. Depp has stated that he based Sparrow's mannerisms on Richards.

Chronology of recent events

Richards was initially treated in Suva (the capital of Fiji) then airlifted to a private hospital in Auckland, New Zealand on May 3 The The New Zealand Herald and Reuters reported on May 8 that Richards underwent brain surgery to relieve a blood clot on the brain. The operation normally involves drilling a hole through the skull to drain the clot. Richards' representatives said his operation "was a complete success", although necessary to relieve headaches the musician was still complaining of since the original accident.

On May 11, Richards was officially discharged from Ascot Hospital in Auckland. A statement was released to the press where Richards publically thanked the hospital and its employees for their treatment.

On May 13, The New Zealand Herald published an online article summarizing the two weeks of conflicting news reports about Richards' accident and condition. On the 16th, press reports coming out of London quoted Richards' son Marlon Richards that his father had been given the 'all-clear' to fly. Marlon told Britain's Daily Mirror that his father was back to full health, but could not say anything more.

Solo records

Talk is Cheap (3 October 1988) UK #37; US #24
Live at the Hollywood Palladium, December 15, 1988 (10 December 1991)
Main Offender (19 October 1992) UK #45; US #99

Notable contributions

American Made World Played Les Paul & Friends (2005) "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl"
True Love Toots and The Maytals (2004) "Careless Ethiopeans"
About Them Shoes Hubert Sumlin (2004) "Still A Fool"
Pay, Pack & Follow (Recorded 1973–1979, released 2001) John Phillips – Album co-producer
Timeless: Tribute to Hank Williams (2001) – "You Win Again"
Wingless Angels (1993) – Album producer
Bradley Barn Sessions (1993) George Jones – Duet on "Say It Isn't You"
Johnnie B. Bad (1991) Johnnie Johnson - Lead vocal and co-producer on "Key to the Highway".
Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll (1987) Soundtrack of Chuck Berry concert film.

(Image Entertainment DVD added material release called Hail, Hail June 2006.)

Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986) Soundtrack (on film) – Producer on Aretha Franklin's version of the title song
Sun City, Artists United Against Apartheid (1985) – Performed and co-wrote "Silver and Gold" with Bono and The Edge of U2

External links

The Official Keith Richards website (Requires Flash)
NY Rock, Mr. Rock & Roll (1996)
Oldkr.co.uk, the net's biggest Keith Richards resource
Rolling Stones KEITH RICHARDS KEITH RICHARDS Rolling Stones

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