from delanceyplace.com (http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?llr=yo7g7qbab&v=001EXWmPNxFGZvuicqMNZSpcGYOsqYbT381q_XQsfelBIr6zjLQJSJb-gw4jNAiN647f5SD7sphmYUxUqygxNTB0WEPJWya45EcJ2ckyVOtSzryFC2r3VCGkn2mZaellaAi9b3rZJocKH8IWEz1PAoM-A%3D%3D):
In today's encore selection -- The Rolling Stones'
Keith Richards on writing songs. For Richards, writing songs causes you
to distance yourself, to become more of an observer -- a bit of a
Peeping Tom:
"One hit requires another, very quickly, or you fast
start to lose altitude. At that time you were expected to churn them
out. 'Satisfaction' is suddenly number one all over the world, and Mick
and I are looking at each other, saying, 'This is nice.' Then bang bang bang
at the door, 'Where's the follow-up? We need it in four weeks.' And we
were on the road doing two shows a day. You needed a new single every
two months; you had to have another one all ready to shoot. And you
needed a new sound. If we'd come along with another fuzz riff after
'Satisfaction,' we'd have been dead in the water, repeating with the law
of diminishing returns. Many a band has faltered and foundered on that
rock. 'Get Off of My Cloud' was a reaction to the record companies'
demands for more --
leave me alone -- and it was an attack from another
direction. And it flew as well.
"So we're the song factory. We
start to think like songwriters, and once you get that habit, it stays
with you all your life. It motors along in your subconscious, in the way
you listen. Our songs were taking on some kind of edge in the lyrics,
or at least they were beginning to sound like the image projected onto
us. Cynical, nasty, skeptical, rude. We seemed to be ahead in this
respect at the time. There was trouble in America; all these young
American kids, they were being drafted to Vietnam. Which is why you have
'Satisfaction' in Apocalypse Now. Because the nutters took us
with them. The lyrics and the mood of the songs fitted with the kids'
disenchantment with the grown-up world of America, and for a while we
seemed to be the only provider, the soundtrack for the rumbling of
rebellion, touching on those social nerves. I wouldn't say we were the
first, but a lot of that mood had an English idiom, through our songs,
despite their being highly American influenced. We were taking the piss
in the old English tradition. ...
"And because you've been
playing every day, sometimes two or three shows a day, ideas are
flowing. One thing feeds the other. You might be having a swim or
screwing the old lady, but somewhere in the back of the mind, you're
thinking about this chord sequence or something related to a song. No
matter what the hell's going on. You might be getting shot at, and
you'll still be 'Oh! That's the bridge!' And there's nothing you can do;
you don't realize it's happening. It's totally subconscious,
unconscious or whatever. The radar is on whether you know it or not. You
cannot switch it off. You hear this piece of conversation from across
the room, 'I just can't stand you anymore'... That's a song. It just
flows in. And also the other thing about being a songwriter, when you
realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an
observer, you start to distance yourself. You're constantly on the
alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years, observing
people, how they react to one another. Which, in a way, makes you
weirdly distant. You shouldn't really be doing it. It's a little of
Peeping Tom to be a songwriter. You start looking round, and
everything's a subject for a song. The banal phrase, which is the one
that makes it. And you say, I can't believe nobody hooked up on that one
before! Luckily there are more phrases than songwriters, just about."
Author: Keith Richards with James Fox
Title: Life
Publisher: Little Brown & Company
Date: Copyright 2010 by Mindless Records, LLC
Pages: 179-183
No comments:
Post a Comment