Guitar Tricks Insider December Issue | Page 34

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 34 GUITAR TRICKS INSIDER DIGITAL EDITION DECEMBER SPECIAL