![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/keith_richards_book_cover_life_08-102-386x600.jpg\" "\\"keith_richards_book_cover_life_08-102\\"")
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Yeah, we’re the late show on this.\u00a0 But a couple weeks ago we finally finished Keith Richards’<\/strong> immensely entertaining and illuminating memoir, “Life.” <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n The following were amongst our favorite passages (emphasis added):<\/p>\n Richards on touring<\/strong>:<\/p>\n “The grind is the traveling, the hotel food, whatever.\u00a0 It’s a hard drill sometimes. But once I the stage, all of that miraculously goes away. Thee grind is never the stage performance.\u00a0 I can play the same song again and again, year after year.\u00a0 When Jumping Jack Flash comes up again it’s never a repetition, always a variation.\u00a0 Always.\u00a0 I would never play a song again once I thought it was dead.\u00a0 We couldn’t just churn it out.\u00a0 The real release is getting on stage.\u00a0 Once we’re up there doing it, it’s sheer fun and joy.<\/strong> Some long-distance stamina, of course, is needed. And the only way I can sustain the impetus over the long course we do is by feeding off the energy that we get back from the audience. That’s my fuel.\u00a0 All I’ve got is this burning energy, especially when I’ve got a guitar in my hands.\u00a0 I get an incredible raging glee when they get out of their seats.<\/strong> Yeah, come one, let it go.\u00a0 Give me some energy and I’ll give you back double. It’s almost like some enormous dynamo or generator.\u00a0 It’s indescribable.\u00a0 I start to rely on it; I use their energy to keep myself going.\u00a0 If the place was empty, I wouldn’t be able to do it.\u00a0 Mick does about ten miles.\u00a0 I do about five miles with a guitar around my neck, every show.\u00a0 We couldn’t do that without their energy, we just wouldn’t even dream of it.\u00a0 And they make us want to give our best. <\/strong> We’ll go for things that we don’t have to.\u00a0 It happens every night we go on.\u00a0 One minute we’re just hanging with the guys and oh, what’s the first song?…, and suddenly we’re up there. It’s not that it’s a surprise, because that’s the whole reason to be there. But my whole physical being goes up a couple of notches.\u00a0 “Ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones.”\u00a0 I’ve heard that for forty-odd years, but the minute I’m out there and hit that first note, whatever it is, it’s like was driving a Datsun and suddenly it’s a Ferrari.\u00a0 At that first chord I play, I can hear the way Charlie’s going to hit into it and the way Darryl’s going to play into that.\u00a0 It’s like sitting on top of a rocket<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n Richards on the negative effects of “improved” recording technology<\/strong>:<\/p>\n “Very soon after Exile, so much technology came in that even the smartest engineer in the world didn’t know what was really going on.\u00a0 How come I could get a drum sound back in Denmark Street with one microphone, and now with fifteen microphones I get a drum sound that’s like someone shitting on a tin roof?<\/strong> Everybody got carried away with technology and slowly they’re swimming back. In classical music, they’re rerecording everything they rerecorded digitally in the ’80s and ’90s because it just doesn’t come up to scratch.\u00a0 I always felt that I was actually fighting technology, that it was no help at all.\u00a0 And that’s why it would take so long to do things.\u00a0 [Producer] Fraboni has been though all of that, that notion that if you didn’t have fifteen microphones on a drum kit, you didn’t know what you were doing.\u00a0 Then the bass player would be battened off, so they were all in their little pigeonholes and cubicles.\u00a0 And you’re playing this enormous room and not using any of it.\u00a0 This idea of separation is the total antithesis of rock and roll, which is a bunch of guys in a room making a sound and just capturing it.\u00a0 It’s the sound they make together, not separated.\u00a0 This mythical bullshit about stereo and high tech and Dolby, it’s just totally against the whole grain of what music should be.<\/strong><\/p>\n Nobody had the balls to dismantle it.\u00a0 And I started to think, what was it that turned me on to doing this?\u00a0 It was these guys that made records in one room with three microphones.\u00a0 They weren’t recording every little snitch of the drums or bass.\u00a0 They were recording the room.\u00a0 You can’t get these indefinable things by stripping it apart.\u00a0 The enthusiasm, the spirit, the soul, whatever you want to call it, where’s the microphone for that? <\/strong>The records could have been a lot better in the ’80s if we’d cottoned on to that earlier and not been led by the nose of technology.”<\/p>\n Richards on Tom Waits<\/strong>:<\/p>\n “Tom Waits was an early collaborator…He’s a one-off lovely guy and one the most original writers.”<\/p>\n Tom Waits on the first time he met and played with Richards<\/strong>:<\/p>\n “We were doing Rain Dogs….\u00a0 He played on three songs on that record:\u00a0 “Union Square,” we sang on “Blind Love” together, and on “Big Black Mariah” he played a great rhythm part.\u00a0 It really lifted the record up for me. I didn’t care how it sold at all.\u00a0 As far as I was concerned it had already sold.”<\/p>\n Tom Waits on the Wingless Angels recording <\/strong>(recorded in part outside live in Jamaica):<\/p>\n “One of my favorite things that he did is Wingless Angels<\/em>.\u00a0 That completely slayed me.\u00a0 Because the first thing you hear is the crickets, and you realize you’re outside.\u00a0 And his contribution to capturing the sounds on that record just feels a lot like Keith.\u00a0 Maybe more like Keith than I had contact with when we got together.\u00a0 He’s like a common laborer in a lot of ways.\u00a0 He’s like a swabby.\u00a0 Like a sailor.\u00a0 I found some things they say about music that seemed to apply to Keith. You know, in the old days they said that the sound of the guitar could cure gout and epilepsy, sciatica and migraines. I think that nowadays there seems to be a deficit of wonder.\u00a0 And Keith seems to still wonder about this stuff.\u00a0 He will stop and hold his guitar up and just stare at it for a while.\u00a0 Just be rather mystified by it.\u00a0 Like all the great things in the world, women and religion and the sky … you wonder about it, and you don’t stop wondering about it.<\/strong>“<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yeah, we’re the late show on this.\u00a0 But a couple weeks ago we finally finished Keith Richards’ immensely entertaining and illuminating memoir, “Life.” The following were amongst our favorite passages (emphasis added): Richards on touring: “The grind is the traveling, the hotel food, whatever.\u00a0 It’s a hard drill sometimes. But once I the stage, all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-music"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6834\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}