A Producer Stopped the Session After 3 Minutes — KEITH RICHARDS Put the Tape in His Pocket D
Keith Richards was 18 years old in 1961 when he walked into a recording demo session in London carrying a borrowed guitar and was told to stop after 3 minutes. The producer said the sound was wrong. The producer said the approach was wrong. The producer said the market wasn’t there for this kind of thing and suggested Keith Richards consider a different instrument.
Keith Richards walked out of that session with the cassette tape in his pocket, the 3 minutes they had recorded before telling him to stop. Tell us in the comments where in the world you’re watching from and subscribe if you haven’t already. What Keith Richards did with those three minutes changed the next 60 years of music.
This is how in the spring of 1961, the British music industry was organized around a set of assumptions about what audiences wanted that had been stable since the early 1950s and that were in 1961 in the very early stages of becoming catastrophically wrong. The assumptions were that popular music was primarily a vehicle for professional singers who had been trained in the conventional manner, that the guitar was a rhythm instrument rather than a lead instrument, and certainly not the primary expressive voice of a song, that American music was a source of influence to be absorbed and carefully adapted rather than replicated directly. and that the market for rock and roll, the specifically American form of it that had emerged from the Delta and the South Side of Chicago and the East Texas Studios and the New Orleans session rooms, was a teenage phenomenon that had crested somewhere around 1958 and would inevitably be succeeded by something more sophisticated and more
palatable to a broader demographic. These assumptions were held with considerable confidence by virtually everyone in the British music industry who had enough experience to be in a position to act on them. They were wrong. But in the spring of 1961, they were not yet wrong in a way that anyone without a very specific kind of ear could hear the wrongness of.
Keith Richards had those ears. Keith Richards had been listening to American blues and rock and roll records since he was 12 years old. had been listening with the specific quality of attention that comes not from casual enjoyment but from deliberate study from the sustained effort to understand what was happening in the music at the level below.
What could be consciously described at the level of structure and feel and the particular relationship between the guitar and the voice and the rhythm section that made this music different from the music that existed in the British charts in 1961. Keith Richards had been teaching himself to play from those records, which meant that what Keith Richards was developing was not the guitar technique that British music teachers in 1961 were teaching or endorsing, but the guitar technique that existed inside the recordings themselves. the approach of Chuck Barry and Muddy Waters and Little Walter and Jimmy Reid and the other musicians whose records Keith Richards had played hundreds of times in his bedroom in Dartford, wearing the grooves progressively thinner, playing the same passage over and over until his hands found the shapes that produced something approximating what he heard coming out of the speakers. This was not a technique that had a name in the British music pedagogy of 1961. It was barely a
technique. It was something closer to an obsession that had become a method. The demo session in question had been arranged through a contact of Keith Richards’s father, a man who knew someone who ran a small independent production company in a building near Soho. The production company was not a major label or an affiliate of a major label.
It was the kind of operation that existed in the margins of every music industry in every decade. small enough to take meetings with people who could not yet command the attention of larger organizations. Equipped enough to make recordings that were audible and accessible and connected enough to the broader industry to matter if the producer thought something was worth pushing to the people above him in the hierarchy.
These were the terms on which Keith Richards entered the building with the borrowed guitar. The producers’s name was Alan Watts. He was 41 years old and had been in the British music business since the mid 1940s. First as a session musician and then as a producer and ANR man for a succession of small labels.
In 16 years of professional involvement with music, Alan Watts had heard thousands of young musicians and had developed the specific, well-honed, high confidence ability to identify within the first few minutes of a session whether what he was hearing had commercial potential or did not. Alan Watts was seldom wrong about this.
The industry understood Alan Watts to be reliable in his assessments. Alan Watts understood himself to be reliable in his assessments. Keith Richards arrived with a borrowed acoustic guitar, a friend’s guitar that Keith Richards had rerung and retuned to open G on the way to the session because Open G was the tuning that produced the sounds Keith Richards was after.
And the session was happening and the tuning was going to be open G. Keith Richards plugged in through the small amplifier that Alan Watts had in the studio, checked the tuning on the G-string against itself, played an open chord to verify the level, and began to play. What Keith Richards played was not a demonstration of versatility or an attempt to show range.
Keith Richards played the way Keith Richards played in Open G with the rhythmic approach derived from the American records with the specific feel that had taken years of deliberate study to develop. And that was by 1961 fully Keith Richard’s own thing, even if its origins were entirely traceable to a specific set of recordings made in Memphis and Chicago and Detroit.
Alan Watts stopped the session after 3 minutes and 12 seconds. Alan Watts pressed the intercom button and said without particular unkindness but without warmth that what he was hearing did not fit the current market. The sound was too raw. The approach was too directly American, too clearly derived from blues and rock and roll records rather than processed through the British pop sensibility that the market recognized.
What audiences wanted in 1961 was something smoother, something more professional in the sense that professional meant to the British music industry at that specific moment, which was the sense of trained, polished, versatile, predictable. The guitar approach Keith Richards was using was interesting in its own way, Alan Watts allowed.
But interesting in its own way was not the same as commercially viable. And Alan Watts was not in the business of developing interesting in its own way unless it came attached to something that could sell. Alan Watts suggested that Keith Richards consider learning standard tuning. Alan Watts suggested that a career in music, if that was the goal, required flexibility.
Tell us in the comments where you’re watching from. And if you’re not subscribed yet, now is the right moment. Because Keith Richards left that room with the cassette tape in his jacket pocket and the question of what Keith Richards did with the threeminute recording that a professional with 16 years of industry experience had told him was commercially nonviable is the question that the next 60 years of music answers.
Keith Richards did not say much in response to Alan Watts’s assessment. Keith Richards thanked Alan Watts for his time. Keith Richards asked whether he could keep the cassette tape from the session. Alan Watts said yes because the tape was a demo and the demo was Keith Richards [sighs] because this Alan Watts was not going to need it.
The decision had been made and the tape was not something that fit into the filing system of an operation like his. Keith Richards took the tape and put it in his jacket pocket and walked out of the building onto the street. The street was ordinary. The afternoon was ordinary. Keith Richards had walked into the building an hour earlier with a borrowed guitar and a tape of music he wanted to make.
And he was walking out of the building with the same tape and the same guitar and the assessment of someone with 16 years of professional experience that the tape and the music on it were not what the market currently wanted. Keith Richards walked to the underground station with the tape in his pocket.
Keith Richards took the cassette tape to the bedsit in Edith Grove in Chelsea where Mick Jagger and Brian Jones were living in the specific poverty of young musicians in London in 1961. The kind of poverty that involves not having reliable heat in winter and pooling whatever money existed for food and being behind on the rent in a way that had moved past emergency into something that was simply a permanent fact of the situation.
a background condition like the damp in the walls. It was also in the way that this kind of poverty often is for people who are building something a form of total freedom. When there is nothing to lose, there is also nothing to protect. And when there is nothing to protect, there is nothing to compromise.
Keith Richards played the tape on the small realtore recorder that Brian Jones had acquired from somewhere and maintained against all evidence of the household’s financial situation because it was the thing in this bedsit in Chelsea that mattered most. The three of them listened to the 3 minutes and 12 seconds that Alan Watts had stopped.
Brian Jones said nothing for a moment. MC Jagger said nothing for a moment. Then Mc Jagger reached over and pressed rewind. They listened to it again. The recording was raw. The recording was directly derived from American blues and rock and roll rather than filtered through the British pop sensibility.
The recording was exactly what Keith Richards had intended it to be and exactly what Alan Watts had identified it as, not what the current market wanted. The three of them talked for several hours. What they talked about in various forms and with the specific argumentative intensity of three people who are each both equally invested in the outcome and equally uncertain of what the right answer is was the question of whether the market was correct about what it wanted.
Whether the music that Alan Watts had stopped after 3 minutes was wrong or whether the market’s current framework for evaluating what was right was wrong. whether the raw American derived sound that did not fit the British pop sensibility of 1961 was a commercial liability or something that had a value that the current market framework could not yet measure because the framework had not yet encountered what it would need to encounter to understand that its measurements were incomplete.
Whether Alan Watts’s assessment was correct about the current market or correct about the market that was about to exist. whether the market that was about to exist was the relevant market or the market that currently existed was the relevant market. They decided it was a value. They decided this not as a calculated artistic position but as the only honest response available to people in a cold bedsit listening to a tape who could not afford practically temperamentally in every available sense to pretend that what they were hearing was less than what it was. What they were hearing was the thing. What the tape contained was the thing. Whether the thing was what the market of 1961 wanted was a real and answerable question, but it was a different question from whether the thing was the thing. And the second question had a clear answer. And the first question had an answer that was still being determined by forces that none of them controlled. They decided to pursue the
thing and let the market find it or not. They had the tape. They had the borrowed guitar. They had the open G tuning that Alan Watts had suggested Keith Richards reconsider. They did not reconsider it. The Rolling Stones played their first show in the summer of 1962. The first show was to a room of several dozen people at the Marquee Club on a Monday night.
The Monday night residency grew. The word spread in the specific way that word spreads among young musicians in the same city who are all listening to the same records and all trying to figure out what to do with what they are hearing. The first single came out in June 1963. The second single reached the top five. The third single reached number one.
By 1965, the Stones had played to audiences numbering in the hundreds of thousands across two continents and Satisfaction recorded in May 1965 in a hotel room in Clearwater, Florida on a basic cassette recorder that Keith Richards kept by the bed using a guitar tuned to OpenG with the sound that Alan Watts had identified four years earlier as too raw and too American and commercially nonviable.
Satisfaction had become by that summer the most recognizable guitar riff in the world. Satisfaction was raw. Satisfaction was directly derived from American blues and rock and roll. Satisfaction was exactly what the market wanted once the market had had four years of the Rolling Stones to understand what wanting something like that felt like and what it meant when something that felt like that was absent.
Alan Watts has not been extensively documented in the histories of this period. His professional assessment of Keith Richards’s commercial prospects was by every measurable standard wrong. The open G tuning that Alan Watts suggested Keith Richards reconsider remains 60 years later. The tuning that defines the Rolling Stones sound.
The rawness he identified as a liability is what has made the recordings last. If this story gave you something, the reminder that the tape in your pocket after someone tells you to stop is sometimes the most important thing you will ever be handed and that what you do with it after you leave the room is the whole question.
Share it today with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe to this channel if you haven’t already and tell us in the comments where in the world you’re watching from and what in this story you’re still thinking about. Every week, another story from a life that started with 3 minutes and 12 seconds on a tape that a professional with 16 years of experience told Keith Richards was not commercially viable.
The tape still exists. The assessment does not. Keith Kier walked out of that building on a spring afternoon in London in 1961 and took the underground home to Dartford with the tape in his pocket. The tape went with Keith Richards to Edith Grove. The tape was played to Mick Jagger and Brian Jones.
The tape was listened to and listened to again, and the decision was made clearly that it was the thing. It was unquestionably the thing. And what comes from deciding that the thing is the thing, regardless of what someone with more experience and considerably more professional certainty tells you about the current market, is 60 years of music that the market discovered it had always Haunted.
