3 Legendary Facts About Keith Richards

At 82, Keith Richards remains a kind of mythical figure of rock and roll. His hard-partying history with The Rolling Stones is well documented. Yet somehow the guitarist and his band continue to record and tour well into their seventh decade.

With The Rolling Stones, Richards, as part of Britain’s 1960s blues revival, helped define rock music while also raising the profile of Black American blues musicians, such as the band’s hero, Muddy Waters.

So to celebrate Keef, here are three facts about one of rock’s most durable legends.

He Wrote an Iconic Guitar Riff in His Sleep

Richards woke up one night with an idea for a riff. Still groggy from sleep, he reached for a cassette player and recorded the notes he heard in his head. When he woke up the next morning, he listened back. On the tape, he heard a snippet of what became one of rock history’s most recognizable guitar riffs, followed by nearly an hour of snoring. Thus, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was born in the middle of the night when the guitarist wasn’t even fully awake.

Open G Tuning and a 5-String Guitar

Speaking of great riffs, Richards often writes and plays on a guitar with only five strings, tuned to an open G chord. A standard guitar has six strings and is tuned, from low to high, E A D G B E. But Richards tunes his guitar, G D G B D, after removing the sixth string. You can hear this on Stones hits like “Honky Tonk Women”, “Brown Sugar”, and many others. For Richards, the tuning echoed his Delta blues heroes, who often used similar tunings to play with a slide.

A Drug Bust in Canada

In 1977, The Rolling Stones were recording in Toronto when Canadian police raided Richards’s hotel room and arrested him and his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, for possessing and allegedly (because of the amount) trafficking drugs. Between the arrest and the trial, Richards became sober. And his attorney offered this defense to the judge:

“I suggest to your Honour from the evidence that you’ve heard that Keith Richard [sic] is a man who, by the pressures of his emotional makeup and the cauldron of the work schedule and into which he’s thrown and the pressures of international acclaim, has become so racked that he turned to heroin to help him.”

The judge agreed and, during sentencing, said, “No incarceration or fine would be appropriate because of Mr. Richards’s continuing treatment for drug addiction and his long-term benefit to the community.”

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