COVER STORY
As the ‘60s turned the corner and Bob Dylan
and The Beatles led the way from Tin Pan
Alley fluff into something harder and heavier,
Richards and his lead singer collaborator
also needed to up the ante. “I’d say Lennon
definitely felt a strong urge not so much to
compete with Dylan,” Keith surmised, “but Bob
did spur him to realize he could dig deeper.
Mick and I felt that, too, although maybe we
didn’t feel it as strongly as John. The differences
between John and Paul were always greater
than between Mick and myself.” Keith cited
“Symphony for the Devil” as the Stones’ most
Dylanesque song. But his description revealed
how Richards influenced Jagger just as much
as Dylan did. “Mick wrote it almost as a Dylan
song; but it ended up a rock ‘n’ roll Samba.”
“Sympathy for the Devil,” was just one of
a number of songs the pair wrote, including
“Mother’s Little Helper,” “19th Nervous
Breakdown,” “Stray Cat Blues,” “Gimme
Shelter,” and “Street Fighting Man” that gave
the band a much darker reputation than their
immediate peers. To some extent Keith said this
was a media creation. “You use every available
tool in the kit. You get a general feel for what
people want to hear from you and when you’re
good at providing it and they like it–oh, you
want more? Here’s more. And I’d just come up
with a line or a song and lean on it, push it, go
for it. Nobody writes a song or makes a record
to put it in a back drawer.”
Eventually the songwriter returned to his
roots as a guitarist. “To me, songs come
out of being a musician. Playing. I cannot write
to poetry, rhymed couplets, and things like that.
I can write a song out of a chord sequence, a
riff, and eventually come up with lyrics to fit
onto it. But the other way around – no way. I
don’t write songs as a diary. None of them are
autobiographical, but in some sense they’re
a reaction to certain emotions. Some of the
happiest ditties I’ve written come out because
you’re feeling exactly the opposite and you write
“Sympathy for the Devil” by The Rolling Stones
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GUITAR TRICKS INSIDER
DIGITAL EDITION
DECEMBER SPECIAL