When working on his initial riffs, Richards stumbled upon becoming a rhythm guitar genius almost by accident. Despite writing one of the greatest riffs of all time with ‘Satisfaction’, Richards tried mimicking the sounds of R&B horns before settling on the massive sound of guitar fuzz.
As the band started to move beyond their traditional British Invasion sound, Richards began toying with his usual guitar tone, favouring an open tuning for most of his arrangements. Tuning his guitar to an open chord, the most identifiable licks of The Stones’ classic period revolve around Richards’s new approach to guitar, including the massive sound of ‘Start Me Up’ or ‘Brown Sugar’.
As he looks back on his material, Richards singled out ‘Gimme Shelter’ as a song that he struggles to get down, telling Rolling Stone, “Once you get into it, it’s fine, but I’m never sure if I’m the right volume. I’m always a bit anxious about. That beginning is so eerie, sometimes in a stadium, you start to hear echoes”.
Featuring on Let It Bleed, the song will always be remembered as the death rattle of the sixties. A decade that was so free and peace-loving, a decade which championed creativity and thinking outside the box, was coming to an end. This track captured that sadness and the danger that had been hiding behind the thick smoke of cheap hash and patchouli.
Since the song’s studio version is soaked in reverb, Richards dials in just the right amount of effects to get the psychedelic bed that Mick Jagger uses for his vocal. When it’s done correctly, though, the Stones paint a picture of slipping deep into the underworld, as Jagger intones about needing to find shelter from a storm before it swallows him up.
While one Stones classic might take time to get right for Richards, he also singled out ‘Honky Tonk Women’ as a challenge occasionally, explaining, “’Honky Tonk Women’ can be a bastard to play, man. When it’s right, it’s really right. There’s something about the starkness of the beginning you have to have down, and the tempo has to be just right. It’s a challenge, but I love it”.
Coming from the usual 12-bar style, the tune’s arrangement is outside The Stones’ normal wheelhouse. Starting with the stark sound of Charlie Watts’s drums, most of the tune has to rely on Richards’ opening guitar licks to establish the song’s tempo, lest everything else fall apart. About the track, Richards said: “‘Honky Tonk Women’ started in Brazil. Mick and I, Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg who was pregnant with my son at the time. Which didn’t stop us going off to the Mato Grasso and living on this ranch. It’s all cowboys. It’s all horses and spurs. And Mick and I were sitting on the porch of this ranch house and I started to play, basically fooling around with an old Hank Williams idea. ‘Cause we really thought we were like real cowboys. Honky tonk women.”
He continued: “We were sitting in the middle of nowhere with all these horses, in a place where if you flush the john, all these black frogs would fly out. It was great. The chicks loved it. Anyway, it started out a real country honk put on, a hokey thing. And then a couple of months later we were writing songs and recording. And somehow by some metamorphosis it suddenly went into this little swampy, black thing, a blues thing.”
Even though Richards considers both of these songs a challenge to play, each of them provides an excellent example of what made The Rolling Stones so singular as a rock and roll outfit. Whereas most blues acts from the ‘60s would have settled with a standard blues joint, Richards had a back catalogue based on trying to discover that one lost chord hidden inside his record collection. It might not be easy to harness, but when you get close, the songs become classics.