The Rolling Stones were always about keeping things simple whenever they came out with their new songs. Rock and roll is never meant to be the most complicated thing in the world, and as long as Keith Richards had a decent riff to use for a song, it wasn’t that hard for him and Mick Jagger to throw lines back and forth until they had the makings of a hit record.
However, whereas The Beatles embraced some of the new technologies coming out in the 1960s, Richards was always a bit more resistant to straying away from the formula.
That’s not to say he was ever afraid to go in different directions. Despite The Stones getting called Beatles copycats for going in different directions, hearing albums like Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesties Request are great detours in their career that saw them working in new avenues. That was all well and good, but it always went south when people started messing with how they heard music.
After all, Richards was born in the days when all anyone had were their 45s and vinyl records to listen to. It wasn’t the most convoluted way of listening to music, but the modern age of music has many different outlets for people to work with. It’s easy for someone to buy vinyl if they want to, but it’s no big deal now when people can stream whatever they want at the touch of a button.
Anyone from Richards’ generation would have to roll with the times every now and again, but the invention of stereo was a big turning point for the rest of the music world. Everyone had been used to hearing a song out of one speaker, and now that they had another speaker to create a different stereo image, it could get more than a little bit disorienting hearing bands in a different light.
It may have been a great new tool for bands to work with, but Richards would have gladly forgotten the whole thing if he could, saying, “I don’t want to listen to a 1952 Muddy Waters record in stereo. It’s not what was intended when the record was made. Just because it now has stereo stamped on it, it doesn’t make it alright. I mean, I remember with The Stones when this new big deal called ‘stereo’ came along halfway through the ’60s, and all we did was put mono out of both speakers! There was no way you could make stereo out of our records!”
While the rise of new technology like AI music has made stereo look quaint by comparison, Richards’ problems have more to do with how he sees his music. The Stones were always meant to be a gritty rock and roll band that had to be heard live, so if the sound gets divided across different speakers, it would have probably sounded like music that was put together in a lab rather than something you’d want to pay money to see.
Even The Stones’ friends weren’t all that fond of it, either. George Harrison famously said that he hated the sound of The Beatles’ songs when they switched over to stereo, and when the Fab Four’s entire catalogue got the stereo remix treatment in 2009, the idea of dividing the aural image right down the middle mutilated most of their songs, to the point where you’d be hearing John Lennon’s gritty guitar on ‘Revolution’ blaring in only one ear.
Modern technology may have helped remedy some of those musical kinks, but Richards’ argument will always be valid. Everything about The Rolling Stones’ music was already perfect, so why the hell would anyone go through the trouble of trying to fix something that wasn’t even broken?