On Keith Richards Giving Away the Simple Secrets
for Music and Writing
Here’s what Keith says —
One of the first lessons I learned with guitar playing was that none of these guys were actually playing straight chords. There’s a throw-in, a flick-back. Nothing’s ever a straight major. It’s an amalgamation, a mangling and a dangling and a tangling thing. There is no “properly”. There’s just how you feel about it. Feel your way around it. It’s a dirty world down here. Mostly I’ve found, playing instruments, that I actually wanted to be playing something that should be played by another instrument. I find myself trying to play horn lines all the time on the guitar. When I was learning how to do these songs, I learned there is often one note doing something that makes the whole thing work. It’s usually a suspended chord. It’s not a full chord, it’s a mixture of chords, which I love to use to this day. If you’re playing a straight chord, whatever comes next should have something else in it. If it’s an A chord, a hint of D. Or if it’s a song with a different feeling, if it’s an A chord, a hint of G should come in somewhere, which makes a 7th, which can then lead you on. Readers who wish to can skip Keef’s Guitar Workshop, but I’m passing on the simple secrets anyway...
That’s from page 120 of his co-written (with James Fox) autobiography, Life.
And it is one of the most honest, helpful and revelatory things I’ve ever read about making art of any sort.
Weirdly, I haven’t seen it quoted anywhere else. Or tattooed onto anyone’s forearm.
It’s a dirty world down here.
Which applies to sentences just as much as to chords.
It’s an amalgamation, a mangling and a dangling and a tangling thing.
What a gorgeous way of putting it.
Mostly I’ve found, playing instruments, that I actually wanted to be playing something that should be played by another instrument.
To me, this is an explanation of why, so often, what ends up as a novel starts out as a failure to be a different kind of thing — a short story, a tableaux, a play, a fugue.
Keith is talking about feel and theory being equally present and incorrect in one and the same live moment.
Groin and gradation.
Make of this what you will.
But just the idea of one scene or sentence having to contain an anticipatory trace of the next — that seems to me a structural gift.
Worth opening.
Love that!