What does it sound like?:
I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of seeing Keith Richards’ ugly mug staring out at me from the newsstands. Keith is now a ruined parody of the beautiful man we once knew. He’s an old, wrinkled geezer going through the motions. He’s a shadow and an illusion of something that used to be glorious. He represents a part of ourselves that we just can’t bear to let go.
In the absence of anything else to write about (and until the next 60s survivor releases some new product) the popular media has willingly rolled over and granted Keith the front cover of every magazine in the land, along with acres of news print and fawning interviews stretching to the distant horizon.
I haven’t read any of them, but I already know what they will say. There will be endless references to his once prodigious drug use (couched in the most romantic terms, naturally), his arthritic hands will be remarked upon more than once and the word “cats” will be dropped into almost every sentence. There’ll be sly, cheeky digs at Mick and the writer won’t be able to resist mentioning Keith’s endless smoking and “raspy laugh”. Those in the national press will even employ tired, threadbare clichés years past their use-by date, such as the terminally naff even when coined “the world’s most elegantly wasted human being” and so on.
So, Keith has a new album out. Apparently It’s only his third solo release and comes after a gap of many years since the last one. This much we know, but what about Crosseyed Heart? Well it starts off well enough with the title track, a generic eight bar blues featuring Keith on solo acoustic. It’s nicely played, but it’s really just an exact rewrite of Come On In My Kitchen with new words. There are no prizes for guessing who claims the writing credit though. “That’s all I got” Keith laughs as the track ends and he may well be right.
From here it’s a familiar story. The band (including Waddy Wachtel, Larry Campbell and Steve Jordan) locks into a series of expensive-sounding, rock solid grooves, each featuring the bare bones of a song, the merest hint of a melody and with each one almost indistinguishable from the last. Keith’s singing, which once was characterful and engaging on the likes of Happy and Before They Make Me Run has long since lost its appeal and now doesn’t hold the attention over a full album.
Things look up greatly for the Leadbelly song Goodnight Irene. This rock waltz is probably the best track on the album and Keith delivers the vocal with conviction.
Substantial Damage moves along nicely in a kind of Can’t You Hear Me Knocking kind of way, while Blues In The Morning delivers some fierce guitar.
Otherwise, as the man himself said at the end of the first track, “That’s all I got”.
What does it all *mean*?
Keith’s entire life – his very existence – is now a marketable commodity. He’s become an industry in the same way that movie stars like Marilyn Monroe once were. Except Keith is a survivor and it’s time to make as much hay as possible while the sun shines.
Why do you think we’re seeing all these lavishly expensive archive releases appearing? Material which for decades we were forbidden to hear except on scratchy bootlegs is now cluttering up the racks of CD stores across the land. Even the most mundane re-issue comes packaged in multiple versions with the most expensive of them running into three figures. As the last of the 60s rock gods wobble off into the sunset, (with absolutely no sign of anyone coming up to replace them) so we become more obsessed with owning a piece of their every move and utterance, until at some not too distant point around 2020 all of them will be dead, ga-ga or retired (delete where applicable).
Goes well with…
Talk Is Cheap, Main Offender
Release Date:
Might suit people who like…
The Rolling Stones, nostalgia
“expensive sounding grooves”
ha ha
To match Keith’s expensive-looking teeth
Well, I think it’s my fault.
I was 20 in 1989, and the records I bought were by the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys. Then a friend of mine taped me his Bob Dylan albums and I listened to them. Then I got into Frank Zappa. I spent the 90s listening to music made in the 60s and 70s. It’s people like me that are the reason that the 60s folk still get away with it.
Great review by the way.
Don’t be too hard on yourself Hawkie, better to listen to Bob Dylan than the Thompson Twins and Bananarama.
Well that’s true. You could argue that I made the right choice for myself. But was it people like me buying CDs of Sticky Fingers and Pet Sounds that made it difficult for new bands to find space on the CD racks? Or were the new bands just not as interesting?
The cream will always rise to the top, talent will out and other clichés. That’s not allowing for reality TV, mind you. Simon Cowell seems able to convince the kids to buy any old shite.
…which reminds me….we’ve seen & heard more from Ginger Baker in the last few years than in the previous few decades….
I did think someone might come up with that FS and was careful to use a lower case “c”
Upper or lower case – who cares? Still provoked the thought, old bean…..
He manages to convince them to buy any old shite for the same reason, crumbly old Keith still retains credibility. It’s called marketing and I’m fucking sick of it.
Hey. I dig the Stones, daddy-o, but all their solo releases – 3,768 at last count – are a waste of time. Kind of opposite to the Beatles, really, who made a bunch of insanely over-rated and mostly lightweight little albums as a group, but really started to show promise as solo artists.
I hear you talking. Ringo’s Stop And Smell The Roses is virtually glues to the Dansette round our house
glued, rather
Talk is Cheap is superb. Haven’t heard this one yet
For all his bravado and swagger he comes across as a little insecure with the silly laughs at the end of every sentence.
Keith cuts a ridiculous, overblown figure these days and the situation is made worse as almost everyone brown noses to him during interviews
He’s the epitome of a self-parody. Can I say that I didn’t much care for his book? All this tripe about ‘gypsies’, ‘troubadours’, ‘old ladies’ and ‘outlaws’. Yeah, right.
I’ve seen the promo film for this release (on Netflix IIRC) and all I can add is that he’s got a fabulous gaff in Connecticut. Not bad for a gypsy, outlaw troubadour.
It’s a real shame that it’s only now that the media abase themselves in front of these busted flushes and that they had such a sniffy attitude to them in the ’60s when they may have had something to say or worth recording on film.
In the book Keith confesses that he “always carries a blade”. Yeah, right.
Wilkinson Sword. To shave his bunions.
I won’t bother getting Keith’s latest wheezy finger picking record mainly because I’ve never heard a decent solo record from any current member of any rock’n’roll band in the past 40 years, They are mostly vanity projects with sub optimal material, designed to rake in the cash or give the artist a lame excuse to mount a tour round the town halls with his less successful or musically under employed mates. Or both.
Your broader point about late 60 somethings releasing out takes, umpteen studio cuts of classic albums, old interviews, instrumentals, and any other career detritus lying around in tapes and boxes, is spot on. I’ll make an exception with Dylan because his Bootleg series has thrown up some wonderful examples of the man’s prodigious, though sometimes very raw, talent.
But you only have to read Classic Rock magazine to see how this nostalgia racket plays out. Expanding waistlines are crammed into tight trousers and shuffled onto stages to trot out that “hit album” from 1973 or 1985 or whenever. While purist old rockers like me go along for a pint and laugh, knowing full well that it will mostly be an evening of mediocrity and long lost bygone days: “Our new CD is available free at the back of the hall, help yourself lads”.
Can’t argue with any of that