News The two metal bands Keith Richards called “jokes”
Somewhere across the vast history of rock and roll, there came the point where Keith Richards stopped caring about what people thought of his musical taste. While there’s a case to be made that he never cared what people thought initially, Keef was known not to mince words when he thought something was garbage and when a tune wasn’t coming together in the studio. While Richards could be ruthless when it came to some of his contemporaries, both Black Sabbath and Metallica were practically comedic in their execution of songs.
When looking at Richards’s approach to song-crafting, it’s not exactly the most complex melodic foundation in the world. Becoming known as one of the primary songwriters of the British Invasion, most of Richards’s best work was indebted to the blues, using Mick Jagger as his mouthpiece to make amazing songs of rebellion like ‘Satisfaction’.
While blues served him well throughout his career, Black Sabbath took the songs about how a woman did them wrong to a different level. Compared to the usual sounds of down-and-out blues jams, guitarist Tony Iommi hit on something much more primaeval when he introduced the tritone to his riffs, making for an ominous tone that no one else could touch.
Together with Ozzy Osbourne, many of the band’s greatest songs came from them working out demonic-sounding riffs, each of which would have an impact on Metallica. As James Hetfield listened to Sabbath, he would take the rudiments of Iommi’s riffs and marry them together with punk-rock intensity, eventually becoming one of the greatest forces in music in the 1980s.
By the time Sabbath and Metallica were being given their credentials as rock gods, Richards didn’t think that they were anything too special. Compared to the dirty music that Richards was listening to at the time, he felt that most of the music coming out of metal was incompetent to the point of parody.
When discussing both bands, Richards admitted to never understanding the appeal of the next generation of rock musicians, telling Guitar World, “It sounds like a dull thud to me. For most bands, getting the syncopation is beyond them. It’s endless thudding away, with no bounce, no lift, no syncopation. Millions are in love with Metallica and Black Sabbath. I just thought they were great jokes”.
Then again, Richards was looking at it from a completely different perspective. Having been taught the ropes of the genre from blues legends like Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson, most of Richards’s upbringing focused on songs that were indebted to the blues as a foundation rather than just a flavour of the tune.
While both Sabbath and Metallica have referenced the blues scale countless times in their music, their take on the blues has launched a different musical vocabulary. Rather than talking about the same I-IV-V chord progressions, metal was focused on pushing towards something that sounded genuinely evil rather than making something people could sing along to.
And as much as Richards may not want to admit it, there’s a good chance both bands are doing today is taken directly from what he had started in the early 1960s. The Rolling Stones guitarist may have a bone to pick with metal music, but he may have been the unintended forefather of the genre without even knowing it.
