Life (2010) by Keith Richards

Author:Keith Richards
Format: epub
Published: 2010-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

Dickinson was a beautiful piano player. Probably at the time I did take him for a country player, just because he was a southern guy. I found out later he was far more wide-ranging. Playing with guys like that was a break because you got stuck in this ‘star’ thing, and there were all these musicians you’d heard about and wanted to play with but you never got the chance to. So working with Dickinson, and just getting the feel, really, of the South, and the way we were automatically accepted down south, was wonderful. They’d say, you’re from London? How the hell do you play like that?

Jim Dickinson, who was the only other musician there apart from the Rolling Stones and Ian Stewart, was perplexed when on the third day we started running through ‘Wild Horses’ and Ian Stewart took a backseat. ‘Wild Horses’ started in a B-minor chord, and Stu didn’t play minor chords, ‘fucking Chinese music.’ That’s how Dickinson got the gig of playing on the track.

‘Wild Horses’ almost wrote itself. It was really a lot to do with, once again, fucking around with the tunings. I found these chords, especially doing it on a twelve-string to start with, which gave the song this character and sound. There’s a certain forlornness that can come out of a twelve-string. I started off, I think, on a regular six-string open E, and it sounded very nice, but sometimes you just get these ideas. What if I open tuned a twelve-string? All it meant was translate what Mississippi Fred McDowell was doing – twelve-string slide – into five-string mode, which meant a ten-string guitar. I now have a couple custom built for that. It was one of those magical moments when things come together. It’s like ‘Satisfaction.’ You just dream it, and suddenly it’s all in your hands. Once you’ve got the vision in your mind of wild horses, I mean, what’s the next phrase you’re going to use? It’s got to be ‘couldn’t drag me away.’ That’s one of the great things about songwriting; it’s not an intellectual experience. One might have to apply the brain here and there, but basically it’s capturing moments. Jim Dickinson, bless him – he died August 15, 2009, while I was writing this book – will say later on what ‘Wild Horses’ was ‘about.’ I’m not sure. I never thought about songwriting as writing a diary, although sometimes in retrospect you realize that some of it is like that.

What is it that makes you want to write songs? In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you’re playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people. To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart.

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