Many an artist is a multi-instrumentalist but Keith Richards actively chose not to play one instrument when with The Rolling Stones. The veteran rocker confirmed his reasons for keeping away from the instrument, and it makes sense given his public image at the height of the band’s popularity. Richards would say it “never felt appropriate” to play the piano with the band but did hint at wanting to do so.
But he never found a chance to play it in the Mick Jagger-fronted group and sounds content to never use the instrument. With upcoming album Foreign Tongues it’s hardly the time for Richards to start jamming on the piano in the style of modern-day Bob Dylan, but it certainly seemed like The X-Pensive Winos frontman wanted to take a crack at it.
Despite never playing piano with the band, Richards is apparently a fairly solid pianist and has an appreciation for the classics that could have served him well had he been given the chance to use the instrument. It never came to be, though, and Richards would rock on through his decades with The Rolling Stones on electric guitar and sometimes vocal duties.
He told MOJO Magazine: “It never felt appropriate to do it. Can you imagine if I turned up to a Stones session – ‘I’m playing piano on this one, and it’s called Somewhere Over The Rainbow!’ I can hear the hooting of laughter in the air! But at the same time I love old standards, I love their construction.
“And I love playing piano, very badly; but the bits I can play, I can play well. Mozart or Elton John, no. There’s something about the piano when you’re a guitar player – maybe it’s just a physical thing, but the piano to me is like, “How simple! It’s all laid out on one strip…” I learned blues piano from [late ‘sixth Stone’] Ian Stewart – for whose band, I stress, I still proudly work.”
Richards would also cite an instrument as an essential learning experience for any budding guitarist. The veteran rocker and The Rolling Stones‘ staple instrumentalist suggested those wanting to become electric guitarists actually start with an acoustic guitar instead.
Not because there’d be competition with Richards’ riffs but because diving in at the deep end, playing like Chuck Berry, for instance, may put off those who cannot get to grips with the electric guitar immediately. Part of it also because guitarists can get a feel for the instrument better on an acoustic than electric, Richards claimed.
He explained: “I would say that the acoustic guitar is the most important thing for a guitar player to start with. Learn the feel and the touch of that string, and what it does against a fret. Learn that and then you can add the effects later on y’ know.
“If you want to be a guitar player, you have to have your grounding it’s like anywhere else. Being an astronaut doesn’t start in space, somebodies got to build a rocket.” Richards would comment in a separate interview that he had wanted to play with veteran musician Chuck Berry in his early years.
He said: “When I started, all I wanted to do was play like Chuck [Berry]. I thought if I could do that, I’d be the happiest man in the world. Then, when I found out I could do it, I thought, well maybe there is another aim in life.
“But when I started I’d dream of playing with Muddy Waters, but the only way I’d imagine it happening would be ‘if I make it to heaven—and he makes it there—then we can play together’.”
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