It’s hard for any artist to keep their songs entertaining over time. Even the greatest tunes wear out their welcome after a while, and even though someone like Paul McCartney has been playing a song like ‘Hey Jude’ nearly every day of his life since his solo tours began, there has to come a point when all of those ‘na-na-nas’ start sounding like white noise after a while. But in the case of Keith Richards, he has always been a firm believer of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ when it comes to his greatest guitar licks.
There are plenty of riffs in his arsenal that deserve to be up there as all-time classics like ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, but once he discovered that signature open-G tuning, what was the point of going anywhere else? He had unlocked an entirely new way of looking at the guitar, and he wasn’t going to rest until he explored every part of the fretboard in this new tuning.
Every time someone tunes their guitar to Richards’s tuning, they are forever condemned to sound like him, but it also limits options a little bit. There are bound to be a few moments where someone stumbles upon a new chord, but since the majority of Richards’s riffs are structured around those suspended riffs, it’s not like he’s trying to reinvent the wheel every time he plays along to ‘Brown Sugar’ or ‘Start Me Up’. Most artists structure their tunes, but Richards has been proud to wing it on occasion.
But even on some of The Stones’ classic runs in the 1970s, there were albums like Black and Blue that fell through the cracks. The album itself does have its fair share of highlights on it, like the riff to ‘Crazy Mama’ or the country twang of ‘Memory Motel’, but ‘Fool to Cry’ was the first time that even Richards seemed to become too desensitised to his own music.
While much has been made of the amount of times that Richards has done something nefarious on his off hours or found himself in the papers, he wasn’t safe from making a song sound dull, saying, “I fell asleep on stage in the middle of playing ‘Fool To Cry’. It is a very boring song, and I was pretty out of it. I was on one of those volume pedals, and I just stayed on it – but it got so loud that I had to wake up.”
It’s easier to forgive a song that’s piano-driven for Richards to phone it in, but the track itself is far from the most energetic performance or anything. For a band that wrote beautiful ballads, this is far slower than songs like ‘Angie’ or ‘Wild Horses’, almost sounding like a lullaby in some areas, given how tenderly Mick Jagger is singing most of the vocals.
Then again, Richards’s dosing off during a show would have probably been the least of his problems during his lifetime. He was living the bluesy lifestyle of excess a bit too much, and even with the alleged blood transfusion that gave him a clean bill of health, there’s only so much that the body can take at one time before it starts to feel drowsy, even with that adrenaline rush that comes with performing live.
But who are we kidding here? Richards is practically a rock and roll zombie in every sense of the word, so if he managed to fall asleep once or twice, it was only a matter of time before he sprang back up again. Because if there’s anything that he’s known for more than his guitar playing, it’s his flirtation with immortality.