BEFORE: I'm done with the Rolling Stones, but not done with Keith & Mick - I'll deal with Keith now, Mick's probably going to pop up a few more times before Labor Day, assuming the IMDB listings are correct. Today, Keith Richards obviously carries over from "The Rolling Stones Havana Moon".
THE PLOT: A portrait of Keith Richards that takes us on a journey to discover the genesis of his sound as a songwriter, guitarist and performer.
AFTER: OK, so this one needs a little bit of a set-up. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are besties and bandmates, but there was a period in the 1980's that Keith refers to as "World War 3", when he and Mick were fighting for four or five years. Mick had released a couple of solo albums, and seemed to be doing all right without the Stones, and then Keith released his first solo album in 1987. He formed a backing band named the X-Pensive Winos, and many of the band members came from a group that backed up Chuck Berry for a concert documentary called "Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll" that Richards was involved in. (Put a pin here, it could become important tomorrow...)
The drummer in "Hail! Hail!" and in the X-Pensive Winos is Steve Jordan, whom I remember as the first drummer in the World's Most Dangerous Band on Dave Letterman's "Late Night" show back in his NBC days, from 1982-1986. (Jordan was replaced by Anton Figg, of course...) I always felt that the talk show band guys maybe have the best gig, they've got the day job which is probably just a few hours work each day, then they can play concerts or do session work at night, it's the best of both worlds. Anyway, Jordan fell in with Keith and the Winos, and they released three albums, the third one, "Crosseyed Heart", had a release date very close to the release date of this documentary, hmmm....
Now, I'm not familiar at all with Keith's solo work, but in this documentary we do get a feel for how he goes about composing a song such as "Robbed Blind". He tinkers on the guitar, he tinkers on the piano (yes, he plays piano) and he fools around on the bass - and he claims to be an even better bass player than a guitar player, but I don't see how that's possible. We don't really learn where the words come from, unfortunately that's a form of magic that can't really be explained. "They just sort of come to me..." Richards says. OK, fine, but from WHERE?
But we do know that Keith's third batch of solo songs came from weekly sessions with Jordan, the only songwriter other than Mick Jagger that he's collaborated with. It's a very exclusive club. Even though there's still a fair amount of mystery in that process, Richards also gives away some of the tricks used in making famous Stones songs, like "Sympathy for the Devil", which started out as a solo acoustic guitar number, akin to a Bob Dylan song, and then slowly got more complicated and "juiced up", by adding the piano track, then the maracas and then finally that samba beat. Archive footage of the Stones working in the studio on this song is exactly what I want to see - I wish I could see a whole feature of this, with various famous songs slowly taking shape. By the time all the Stones are standing around a microphone going "Woo Woo" in the later verses, it really started to sound like something.
Richards also tips the secret of the opening chords of "Street Fighting Man", where the guitar sounds all warbly and fuzzy, but it's just a regular acoustic guitar recorded by an amateur home cassette recorder, with a very shitty microphone, held so close to the guitar that the sound is overloading the mike, there's literally too much sound for the recorder's mike to handle, so that's why it shimmies and sounds so electronic, when it's not. Fascinating stuff.
But this is supposed to be about Keith's influences, because the title isn't just a bad pun about taking drugs or drinking alcohol. Who were the people that influenced the Stones? Chuck Berry, obviously, but also Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley to a lesser extent. There's footage of the Stones backing up Muddy Waters, who had fallen off the radar by the times the Stones were chart-toppers, and they tried to put the stoplight back on him, and other blues guys too - unlike Led Zeppelin, who would sing a Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf song, change a couple of words and not give the original artist any songwriting credit, then claim by default it was an original Zeppelin tune. Not cool. (Like how "Travelling Riverside Blues" became "The Lemon Song"...look it up.) The fact that Keith lists Mozart as an early influence is somewhat surprising.
I'm not a guitar guy, like I don't know a Gibson from a Fender, like Duane Allman thought everybody should. I only know what I hear on the record, still it's great to see a song come together - hell, it's great to see an artist create in any medium. But ultimately this ends up being more of a promo piece for Keith's album and other projects, and then a tour of places like the Grand Ol' Opry in Nashville and Muddy Waters' house in Chicago, rather than an in-depth look at the creative process. But I'll take it.
Also starring Tom Waits, Steve Jordan, Waddy Wachtel, Buddy Guy, Johnnie Johnson, Chuck Leavell (also carrying over from "The Rolling Stones Havana Moon"), Joey Spampinato, Pierre de Beauport, Patti Hansen, with archive footage of Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Ronnie Wood (all three also carrying over from "The Rolling Stones Havana Moon"), Chuck Berry (last seen in "The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir"), Brian Jones (last seen in "Crossfire Hurricane"), Bill Wyman (ditto), Nicky Hopkins, Chris Hillman, Bobby Keys (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"), Bernie Leadon, Little Richard (last seen in "Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child"), Muddy Waters (ditto), Gram Parsons, Elvis Presley (last seen in "How the Beatles Changed the World"), Gene Vincent, Howlin' Wolf, Tom Hanks (last seen in "The Post"), Jeffrey Hunter, Dean Martin (last seen in "Scared Stiff"), Marilyn Monroe (last seen in "The Prince and the Showgirl"), Paul Muni, John Wayne (last seen in "The Train Robbers").
RATING: 5 out of 10 unsold copies of Keith's autobiography "Life".
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