Everything that Keith Richards ever did needed to come from the heart first before anything else.
Although many people would have happily called him one of the greatest guitarists of all time simply because of his rhythm playing, he was more interested in pushing himself a little bit more and finding the lost chord that no one had stumbled upon yet. But while a lot of the greatest Rolling Stones albums are full of those twists and turns, even Keef had to wonder whether some albums were worth trying to recapture again.
If there’s one thing that Richards valued above anything else, it was being able to be proud of the songs he was working on. Not everything that The Stones did was necessarily on the same level as ‘Satisfaction’, but he would have rather tried to make more experiments like ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knockin” than trying to go through records like Dirty Work that were practically doomed to fail right out of the gate.
But that push and pull between him and Mick Jagger is one of the reasons why The Stones worked so well. John Lennon and Paul McCartney had the same rapport when they were working on their songs, but if Macca was the one interested in making silly love songs, Jagger was the one constantly looking out for the next new trend and trying to find a way to capitalise on it, whether that was disco or whatever the hell he was doing when singing ‘Dancing in the Street’ with David Bowie.
For stars, that’s certainly a good way to go about it, but Richards didn’t sign up to be a rock star. He wanted to be a musician, and listening to many of the albums where he takes the reins, it was clear that everything needed to sound different. He had that perfect blend of blues, rock and roll, and country in his arsenal whenever he wrote a tune, and while he did get the chance to go back to that sound on records like Voodoo Lounge, he did remember getting too much of a pull from Jagger behind the scenes.
The frontman didn’t want to feel like they were repeating themselves, but for Richards, any song that got near the level of Exile On Main St was alright in his book, saying, “Mick’s biggest fear at the time, as he kept on telling the press, was to be pigeonholed, as he put it, to Exile on Main St. Why did Mick fear Exile? Because it was too good! That’s why. Whenever I heard, ‘Oh, we don’t want to go back and recreate Exile’, I thought, I wish you fucking could, pal.”
In all fairness, both of them are a little bit right and a little bit wrong. To his credit, Jagger was on the money about not wanting to be pigeonholed in a sense, but when you take a few too many steps in the wrong direction, there comes a point where people start to wonder whether you were the rock and roll giant that you said you were. But Richards’s assessment of Exile isn’t inaccurate, either.
Their massive double album experience is still one of the greatest pieces of their catalogue, and even if not every song works as a singular entity, tunes like ‘Tumbling Dice’ and Richards’s vocal feature ‘Happy’ are still among their finest tunes. Voodoo Lounge does manage to have a little bit of that shimmer, but for how much they were arguing about it, the record feels like a far safer version of what their magnum opus was.
No one may have been asking them to delve that deep all over again, but the beauty behind a record like Exile was that it was never trying to sound like an absolute masterpiece. It was the sound of the greatest artists of their time coming together to make a couple of tunes, and somewhere along the way, they managed to make the kind of record that most people would have killed for.
