Music Keith Richards picks his favourite Rolling Stones riff
“I’m the riff master,” wrote Keith Richards in his autobiography Life. It’s a line that jumps out of the book like a slap around the chops because, frankly, it can be easy to lose sight of his guitar work when he’s regaling tales of such utter madness you simply can’t fathom the fact that technical proficiency could be part of the same whirlwind.
But the Londoner has been rattling off riffs since time immemorial now, and part of the reason he’s survived so long as a celebrated musician his because that decadence never made him lose sight of the basics. Deep down, Richards is just an old-school blues man. He keeps it simple and lets atmosphere and individuality do the rest. This has made him one of the most heard and respected musicians of all time.
But of all the riffs he has conjured, which does he like the best? Well, in Life, he asks himself that same question. “I’m blessed with them and I can never get to the bottom of them,” he says. “When you get a riff like ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ you get a great feeling of elation, a wicked glee. ‘Flash’ is basically ‘Satisfaction’ in reverse. Nearly all of these riffs are closely related. But if someone said ‘You can play only one of your riffs ever again,’ I’d say ‘OK, give me ‘Flash.’”
Moreover, he barely knows how he arrived at it. “These crucial, wonderful riffs that just came, I don’t know where from,” wherever they came from keep ’em coming,“ he says.
It’s a particularly Keef-esque way of re-framing the thoughts of songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, who once said, “And then it happened, that queer sensation that this melody was bigger than me. Maybe I hadn’t written it all. The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters in the studio. I wanted to shout back at it, ‘maybe I didn’t write you, but I found you’.”
When it comes to ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, this is especially true, with Richards explaining that the riff “just floats there, baby.” But it certainly stings like a butterfly, too. The electric fizz was simply spawned by idly strumming a guitar in open tuning one morning after Mick Jagger had slept over at Richards’ pad, and they awoke to the clumping boots of the guitarist’s gardener, Jumpin’ Jack.
The serendipitous way that this all came about typifies Richards as a musician. While some might think the fact that his favourite riff wasn’t borne from great heartache or the need to put the world to rights is a token of shallowness, he’d instantly refute this by explaining how it typifies the buzz he gets from simply strumming away on his instrument. The adrenalised final result is proof of the catharsis of creativity.
