I have some problems with my English.

When you englishmen refer to "turning the beat around" what do you exactly mean?

Of course I do feel embarassed to ask this after years of guitarplaying etc. etc. ... I mean, I am sure I should know but I am not sure ...

C

p.s. "turn the beat around" As used in the following article from Guitar Player, April 1983 good read, if you haven't already seen it. The finale is an all time classic!

Back in 1964 when Lennon and McCartney wanted to hold your hand, Jagger and Richards were walkin' the dog. Constantly compared to the Beatles and often to the Who, the Rolling Stones staked out their original turf with gritty music and a don't-mess-with-me stance. The Beatles disintegrated a dozen years ago, and the Who say they've unpacked their road cases for the last time. The Stones are in the studio, and they're not about to bid farewell to anyone.

Keith Richards stands in the eye of the hurricane. Around him swirls a rock and roll empire with 20 years history and mystery, success and excess, acclaim and controversy. He and his mates have been called many things by discerning critics and impassioned fans. One description recurs: The World's Greatest Rock And Roll Band.

In most respects the Stones have few peers, and in terms of sheer durability they have none, having somehow survived at or near the top of the rockpile for the last two-thirds of rock and roll's entire history. They've gone the distance and still pack a heavyweight punch: Their latest albums (Tattoo You and the live concert LP Still Life) are among their most vital works, and their most recent tour was astonishingly successful--four million fans applied for the New York tickets alone. (The recent film Let's Spend The Night Together documents the 1981-1982 tour of America and Europe.)

Some reasons for all this are apparent. First, Keith's confederates could hardly be more impressive: Mick Jagger, rock's most prominent singer; guitarist Ron Wood, already a star when he joined the group in 1975; plus a drummer Charlie Watts and bassist Bill Wyman, a powerhouse rhythm section revered the world over by fans and fellow musicians alike. Other strengths are equally obvious--the consistently fine Jagger/Richards compositions, the dynamic arrangements, the meticulous recording. Just as important is the way Keith Richards changes chords from G to C.

The band is built around a two-guitar sound, itself an extension of Richards' own uniqueness. He helped blur forever the line between lead and rhythm guitar, substituting a riffing technique in which melodic embellishments are grafted onto a vigorous rhythmic treatment of chords, partial chords, and low-register lines. He often employs a 5-string open tuning (with or without capo) that facilitates adding the melodic notes to a major chord--particularly the 4th, the 6th, and the 9th. Among many examples, "Brown Sugar" is a classic killer.

Keith's most obvious influence is Chuck Berry. The original "Carol" is a textbook of Berry's double-string licks and was covered on The Rolling Stones, the debut album. Keith has had a taste for Berry flavoring ever since. Perhaps his most highly stylized nod to the St. Louis rocker is his long solo in "Bitch," where Keith repeatedly turns the beat around, turns it inside out--weaving through the horns, sneaking up on the back-beat, making the style his own.

Chuck Berry adapted boogie-woogie piano techniques for the guitar's lower register, and this distinctive two-string rhythm pattern became another Stones staple. Richards made his mark on its development by sometimes slowing it down, piledriving the downbeat, and stoking up the tone to a grand raunch: a-ronk a-ronk a-ronk.

Richards' role in the group has been analyzed countless times. The consensus: Without Keith Richards there wouldn't be a Rolling Stones. Ron Wood explains, "In other bands they follow the drummer; the Stones follow Keith, and they always have." While some have even asserted that "Keith Richards is the Rolling Stones," the guitarist himself is the first to stress that any band member's indispensability is a two-way street: "The musicians are there to serve the band. All that matters is whether something furthers the overall sound."

This cardinal principle saturates over two dozen albums as well as the band's kinetic performance onstage. It spawned not only the musicians' unqualified commitment to the group sound, but also the band's distinctive mixing technique, in which the vocals--often loosely doubled rather than neatly harmonized--are nearly drowned in the storm of guitars, bass, and drums.

Keith's vision is rooted in a keen awareness of the power of the guitar--acoustic or electric--not only as a rhythm or solo instrument, but as a musical paintbrush capable of immense sonic canvases. He conceives a complex sound and knows how to get it. And yet to him a piece of music, like a real band, is a living, breathing creature existing apart from his conception of it. So while a particular project may be planned, Keith's sense of the music's own inherent magic keeps him flexible and spontaneous, adjusting as he goes.

On many contemporary recording sessions, musicians are put in compartments to minimize leakage (one instrument "leaking" into another's microphone), and the result is a compressed sound that fills every niche. Stones records are virtual opposites, roaring with heavy artillery but airy and spacious as well. While every sound counts, the spaces, the holes, are no less important. The band's raw materials may be the deceptively simple basics of rhythm and blues, but with the air crashing around like a cyclone, the effect is complex, even abstract. (The aural impressionism was once applied to a spoken introduction. The live concert LP Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out begins with two different announcements played back simultaneously at equal volume. The result is more than the sum of the parts--sort of a verbal metaphor for the Stones mix.)

Rough edges on doubled guitars may be as important as seamless overlaps. An "extra" guitar part--mixed far in the distance to work on subconscious levels--may be as essential as obvious elements. As co-producer (credited or uncredited) on virtually every record, Keith Richards has proved to be both a master of the bold stroke and a subtle colorist, evoking not only the thunder and lightning but also a sky to put it in. For the Rolling Stones, atmosphere is everything.

For many the sound and fury of the band is a transcendental experience. Although the musicians are gifted, the songs excellent, and the recordings finely tuned, the effect is not so much that of hearing sophisticated technicians processed through state-of-the-art technology. It's more like hearing the world's greatest garage band in the world's biggest garage.

Reflecting Richards' image as a menacing bad hombre, several of the band's classic tracks begin with the hint of danger or the clang of alarm--the drums of doom heralding the "Street Fighting Man," the haunted stirrings of "Gimme Shelter," or in "Sympathy For The Devil" voodoo percussion that charges the opening line with a dark intrigue: "Please allow me to introduce myself." Anyone who has heard these songs may not be surprised to learn that on December 18, 1943, when Keith Richards was born, the night sky over the hospital was filled with sirens and anti-aircraft gunfire.

At about the age of five Keith had a conversation with another tyke who lived on the same block in Dartford, 15 miles outside of London. He told Mick Jagger that he wanted to be like Roy Rogers and play guitar.

An only child, Keith hated the discipline of school, had frequent troubles with authorities, and considered a formal education generally irrelevant. In 1956, he heard his first Elvis Presley record and received his first guitar. He preferred to let his talents develop on their own, unencumbered by a teacher's interference. Shortly after enrolling in art school, he met up again with Mick Jagger. Sharing an affection for American bluesmen such as Jimmy Reed and Howlin' Wolf, the two teenagers began jamming.

Keith and Mick met blues fanatic and multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, and together they formed the band that Brian named the Rolling Stones, after the title of a Muddy Waters song. Wyman had joined by the winter of 1962, Watts in early '63. Needing a manager, the group hired Andrew Oldham; Like Jagger and Richards he was 19. Decca records signed the band and a couple of months before the Beatles scored their first #1 hit, "She Loves You," the Rolling Stones released their first single, Chuck Berry's "Come On," which promptly disappeared.

After gradually building a British Following over the next year, the band recorded "Not Fade Away," a Buddy Holly hit that Keith had reworked from the ground up. While the original was a jerky hillbilly bopper, the Stones' version was dark and frantic, an early mark of the mannish boy. "Time Is On My Side," which made it to the American charts, was spiked with something rarely heard in the Top 10: electric blues guitar. Early evidence of the Stones' panoramic sound appeared in "It's All Over Now" (particularly in the fade-out), and again in the first Jagger/Richards composition which Keith was fully satisfied, "The Last Time."

The Stones continued to break new guitar ground. Their first #1 single, 1965's "Satisfaction," featured one of the catchiest guitar hooks of the decade (and helped popularize the fuzztone), while the following year's "19th Nervous Breakdown" kicked off with an early example of the melodic riffing technique. Hits followed in rapid succession. A year after 1967's Their Satanic Majesties' Request, a rare departure from the Stones' R&B roots, they returned with a vengeance to the territory previously carved out in "Under My Thumb" and "Let's Spend The Night Together." The new album was Beggars Banquet. As Barbara Charone wrote in Keith Richards: Life As A Rolling Stone [Doubleday/ Dolphin]: "If Beggars Banquet belonged to anyone, it was clearly a showcase for Richards' guitar virtuosity."

For Keith, 1968's "Jumpin' Jack Flash" marked a creative surge of still greater intensity. When Brian Jones' role diminished due to a long list of problems with drugs, the law, and fellow band members, Keith began to take over more and more of the musical duties. He was introduced to Gram Parsons, a member of the Byrds and later founder of the seminal country-rock group the Flying Burrito Brothers. Gram became a close friend and profoundly influenced the Stones by teaching Keith many country songs and a variety of guitar tunings.

Brian Jones had still another liability, a drug conviction that prevented him from touring. His contributions decreased steadily, and in the summer of 1969 he was fired. The replacement was a 20-year-old Mick Taylor, a veteran of John Mayall's bands and a highly skilled blues-rock soloist who brought a new dimension to the Stones. Taylor quit the band on friendly terms after recording on over half a dozen albums, and on December 19, 1975 he was replaced by Ron Wood, a veteran of Jeff Beck's group and the Small Faces. The Stones' lineup has remained intact since then.

It's been observed that the Rolling Stones have managed to fulfill anyone's fantasy of what rock stars should be, without sacrificing ragged edges. But Keith Richards' whole career hints that the raw spontaneity is the very lifeblood of the myth. One certainty--his sidekicks and tens of millions of fans owe much to the clarity of his purpose and his orchestrations of the apocalyptic garage sound. As Peter Goddard said in The Rolling Stones: The Last Tour [Beaufort Books]: "The Stones are famous because of Mick Jagger--they're a band because of Keith Richards."

What they call the world's greatest rock and roll band is a high-performance locomotive of unexcelled durability. Up in the engine, much of the machinery runs on Keith Richards' intuition. In the world outside, the Stones and their clan have long been portrayed as exaggerating rock and roll's every outrage onto some surreal plane. (Just one example: Ordinary rockers are denounced by the local pastor; one of Jagger's girlfriends was denounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury.) Keith Richards' life is especially well suited to mythmaking and distortion, at times suggesting one long run-in with authorities interrupted by creative bursts and worldwide adulation. Tagged "the consummate Stone" by Rolling Stone magazine, he stays up for days at a time; in some photos he bears a disquieting resemblance to one of his pieces of skull jewelry. The 20 years have seen dark events--the deaths of Brian Jones and Gram Parsons, Keith's bout with heroin, endless arrests, and murder at the Altamont concert near San Francisco. Not long after his widely publicized 1977 drug trial he sang: "I'm gonna walk, before they make me run."

Claims that the gaunt guitarist is some sort of last word in decadence have filled many pages. It's open to question whether they add up to reveal more about the real Keith Richards than the first ten seconds of "Start Me Up" or the quote by a friend of Gram Parsons in Barbara Charone's book that Keith is "always the last to bed and the first up in the morning playing guitar." Many an interviewer has been startled to discover that behind the quintessential midnight rambler there is an articulate gentleman with an acute sense of artistic direction, a sharp wit, and feelings towards his kids not unlike those of any other family man. In terms of the utter loyalty to the band in which he has spent more than half his life, the man who has been accused of everything up to and including collusion with Satan is, of all things, as pure as a lily.

Up in the hotel room (classic Keith Richards--part Versailles Palace, part blues dive) Keith's dad Bert is smoking a pipe, and his son Marlon--who could dial room service before he could read--is drawing. A cassette bag is crammed with rockabilly, early Dylan, reggae, unmixed Stones, the raunchiest R&B, and more. An old Everly Brothers hit is playing, and delighted Keith Richards identifies a distinctive lead guitar lick: "Chet Atkins!" An hour later, Keith is in the corner playing piano like Ray Charles and singing ballads to himself in a voice cracked with emotion. He plays a wistful "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" and than launches into some Jerry Lee Lewis, his foot bashing the floor in tempo. Ron Wood blows in and warmly embraces his partner in guitar. In minutes the two old friends are plugged in, guitars barely in tune, jamming on a medium-tempo 12-bar blues in A. Keith leans over to the black Fender Deluxe Reverb and twists the volume knob from 2 to 6. Ron Wood grins and rips into solo. The real Keith Richards goes a-ronk a-ronk a-ronk.

Keith's strokes are on and off vs. the beat. He should take it as a compliment (I'm sure he does too). Many players does it, but not as effective as our man.

A prime example of turing the beat around can be heard in the opening bars of "Start Me Up" and in the middle of the guitar solo of "Bitch" as mentioned above . The primary accent in most rock songs is on the 2 and 4 but Keith has away of playing on those accents, behind and in front of them all within one song, which really makes his rhythm guitar really swing. Part of his magic as a player! Thnaks for the excerpt by the way Liddas. I was packing up for a move last weekend and came across the very magazine you mention. Hard to believe that it was 22 years ago when I bought it!

Thank you all! I'm relieved: there was no big secret behind. Now, when I try to explain in english what is special about keith's playing I have the words!

By the way, I had that number of GP as well, but can't find it any more.

C

.. and go back to Thelonious Monk: the greatest genius of rhythmic displacement and much admired by Keith.

----------------------------
"Music is the frozen tapioca in the ice chest of history."

"Shit!... No shit, awright!"

In Bitch Charlie turns the beat around, not Keith. Instead of the 2 and 4 he starts to play the 1 and 3. Actualy, Keith likes to play his rythm just before the 2 and 4 (so, slightly off-beat instead of on the beat), but Charlie is the one who turns it around. He does this alot especially on the 1981 tour, and he normally corrects himself again by playing a four-on-the floor bassdrum and skipping some snare's. SMU indeed is an excellent example.

Mathijs

Guess who leads on is mutual. "I follow the guitar player" (Charlie Watts)