Keith Richards Said Live On BBC No Keyboard Could Replace Guitar — Stevie Wonder Was Next Door D
Keith Richards told a live radio audience that no keyboard could ever replace what rhythm guitar did to a song. He said it clearly. He said it twice. In the green room 20 ft away, Stevie Wonder had been listening through the monitor speaker since the program began. When the segment ended and Keith Richards walked into the green room, Stevie Wonder was already at the piano.
Stevie Wonder said, “Sit down. I want to show you something.” What happened in the next 11 minutes has never been broadcast. The producer kept the tape. BBC Radio 1 on the afternoon of February 11th, 1975 was in the middle of a series of special programming that had been running since January.
Extended interviews with significant figures in British and American popular music conducted in a format that allowed more time and more depth than the standard program schedule permitted. The series had produced several memorable hours of radio and the afternoon of February 11th was expected to produce another.
Keith Richards was the guest. The interview had been scheduled for 90 minutes. The interview would last significantly longer than that. Keith Richards was 31 years old in February of 1975. The Rolling Stones had released its only rock and roll the previous October and were in the process of assembling the band and the logistics for the tour of the Americas, which would begin in June and which would run through North and South America across the summer.
Keith Richards was in London for the specific short window of time that the preparation of a major international tour creates. Busy enough to make every hour count for something, but free enough in the particular way that a musician is free in the weeks before the machine of a major tour begins to move.
When the decisions have been made and the execution has not yet started. Keith Richards had accepted the BBC radio invitation because Keith Richards liked talking about music and because BBC radio was the kind of institution that Keith Richards had a genuine relationship with, had grown up listening to it on a transistor radio in a bedroom in Dartford, had heard American music on it that had changed what Keith Richards understood music could be, had been interviewed on it at various points across 15 years of professional music making. BBC Radio was not a professional obligation for Keith Richards. BBC Radio was part of where Keith Richards came from. The interview was conducted by a broadcaster named Martin Clare, who had been working at Radio 1 since its founding in 1967 and who had interviewed most of the significant figures in British popular music across that 8-year period. Martin Clare was skilled at the specific art of the
long-form radio interview. At creating the conditions in which a musician would say more than they had planned to say, at finding the questions that opened rather than closed. Martin Clare had done his preparation for the Keith Richards interview with the thoroughness that the assignment required and Martin Clare had a list of subjects he intended to cover.
One of those subjects was the relationship between live instrumentation and the direction contemporary popular music was moving. By 1975, synthesizers and keyboards had become central to the sound of a significant portion of popular music and the question of what this development meant for traditional instruments, for guitar, for bass, for the specific role of rhythm in live performance was one of the defining conversations in the music industry at the time.
Martin Clare wanted Keith Richards’ perspective on this question because Keith Richards’ perspective on most things about music was worth hearing and because the question touched directly on what Keith Richards did and had been doing for 15 years. Martin Clare asked the question approximately 40 minutes into the interview.
Martin Clare asked it carefully, acknowledging the complexity of the subject and giving Keith Richards room to take it in a direction. Keith Richards took it in a specific direction. Keith Richards said that rhythm guitar was the foundation that everything else in rock and roll was built on, not as a romantic claim about tradition, but as a structural observation about how the music worked and why it worked the way it worked.
Keith Richards said that the specific quality of rhythm guitar, the physical relationship between the guitarist’s hand and the string, the way a chord landed with the weight of that physical contact, the human imprecision that produced feel rather than mechanical accuracy, was something that had never been replicated by any keyboard instrument.
Keith Richards said this once. Martin Clare asked a follow-up question. Keith Richards said it again, more specifically, “No keyboard player alive could do to a rock record what the right rhythm guitarist could do.” The feeling was different. The weight was different. The music was different. These were not interchangeable things.
In the green room, 20 ft from the interview studio, Stevie Wonder heard both statements through the monitor speaker that was mounted above the door. Stevie Wonder was 24 years old in February of 1975. Stevie Wonder had been blind since shortly after birth and had been playing piano since he was a child in Detroit, developing a relationship with keyboard instruments that was unlike the relationship most pianists developed because Stevie Wonder had not learned piano.
Stevie Wonder had learned to hear through piano, to understand the world through what keyboard instruments could say about it. By 1975, Stevie Wonder had released Innervisions in 1973 and Fulfillingness’ First Finale in 1974, both of which had won Grammy Awards for Album of the Year back to back, which had not happened since Frank Sinatra in the early years of the awards.
Stevie Wonder had recently completed the sessions for Songs in the Key of Life, which would be released the following year, and which is still regarded by many critics as one of the most significant records in the history of popular music, not least because of what Stevie Wonder did with keyboard instruments on it.
Stevie Wonder was at Broadcasting House on the afternoon of February 11th, 1975 for a separate recording appointment that had been scheduled for 4:00. Stevie Wonder had arrived at 3:15. Stevie Wonder had been shown to the green room to wait. The green room at Broadcasting House in 1975 contained a upright piano that had been there for a long time and that was used by musicians waiting for their recordings.
The piano was in reasonable tune. The green room also contained a monitor speaker that broadcast the live programming from the adjacent studios because musicians waiting for appointments sometimes wanted to hear what was happening in the building. Stevie Wonder had been in the green room since 3:15 and had been listening to Keith Richards interview since he arrived.
Stevie Wonder listened to Keith Richards say that no keyboard player alive could do to a rock record what the right rhythm guitarist could do. Stevie Wonder said nothing to the assistant who was sitting in the green room with him. Stevie Wonder continued to listen to the interview through the monitor speaker.
When the segment containing Keith Richards statements about rhythm guitar concluded and the interview moved to other subjects, Stevie Wonder stood up and walked to the upright piano and sat down on the bench. At 4:22 in the afternoon, Keith Richards finished his interview with Martin Clare and walked down the corridor to the green room.
Keith Richards was walking toward the green room because his coat was in it. Keith Richards opened the green room door. Stevie Wonder was at the piano. Stevie Wonder turned his head toward the sound of the door opening. The specific precise turn of someone who navigates entirely by sound and does it with the accuracy that people who can see find quietly extraordinary.
Stevie Wonder turned toward Keith Richards, though Stevie Wonder couldn’t see Keith Richards. Stevie Wonder said, “I heard what you said about keyboards.” Stevie Wonder said, “Sit down. I want to show you something.” Keith Richards has described the moment of entering the green room and hearing Stevie Wonder say “Sit down” in at least two private conversations that people who know Keith Richards have subsequently described in general terms.
Keith Richards has said that he understood immediately what was about to happen and sat down. Keith Richards has said that understanding what was about to happen and being prepared for what was about to happen were not the same thing. Keith Richards sat down on the small sofa against the wall.
The assistant who had been in the green room excused himself. Martin Clare, who had followed Keith Richards down the corridor out of professional habit, stopped in the doorway and did not come in. Stevie Wonder played for 11 minutes. What Stevie Wonder played in those 11 minutes was not a performance in the sense that Stevie Wonder’s concerts were performances, not something prepared in advance for an audience, not something designed to demonstrate a known capability.
What Stevie Wonder played was an argument made in real time, addressed directly to a specific person who had made a specific claim. Stevie Wonder played rhythm. Stevie Wonder played the specific rhythmic function that Keith Richards had described as belonging exclusively to the guitar, the weight, the feel, the physical contact with the instrument that produced the human quality that Keith Richards said no keyboard could replicate.
And Stevie Wonder played it on the piano in the green room at Broadcasting House on February 11th, 1975, with the specific force of someone who has been listening to a claim for 40 minutes and has formed a very clear view about whether the claim is accurate. Stevie Wonder played chord voicings that produced the specific percussive attack that Keith Richards had associated with rhythm guitar.
Stevie Wonder played rhythmic patterns that sat inside the beat the way Keith Richards had described rhythm guitar sitting inside the beat. Stevie Wonder played imprecision, the deliberate controlled imprecision that produces feel rather than mechanical accuracy, with the hands of a pianist who had been developing that specific capacity since he was a child.
Stevie Wonder played for 11 minutes without stopping, without speaking, without turning from the piano. Stevie Wonder played without self-consciousness and without performance, in the way that musicians play when they are making an argument rather than giving a recital. The way you play when the music is the answer to a specific question and you trust the music to give the answer without elaboration.
Martin Clare stood in the doorway and watched and did not say anything. Martin Clare was a broadcaster who had spent eight years developing the judgment to know when to be in a room and when to be outside it, when to ask a question and when to allow silence to do what silence does when something significant is happening. This was a time to stand in the doorway and watch and not say anything.
The assistant who had excused himself from the green room had gone no further than the corridor. The assistant stood in the corridor and listened through the closed door. The assistant said afterward, in a conversation with a Radio 1 colleague, that he had never heard a piano played the way Stevie Wonder played that piano in those 11 minutes and that he had stood in the corridor for the full duration because he had not been willing to move far enough away to stop hearing it. Keith Richards sat on the small sofa and listened. Keith Richards has been described by everyone who knows him well as a listener of exceptional quality, someone who brings to music the same specific attention that Keith Richards brought to everything that mattered to him. In the green room at Broadcasting House on the afternoon of February 11th, 1975, Keith Richards listened to Stevie Wonder play for 11 minutes and did not speak. When Stevie Wonder finished, the room was quiet for several seconds. Keith
Richards said four words. The four words were not an apology. The four words were not a retraction of what Keith Richards had said on air 40 minutes earlier. The four words were the specific response that Stevie Wonder’s 11 minutes had produced in a person who was listening seriously and who arrived at the end of 11 minutes at the only honest assessment the situation permitted.
The four words were what you said when you had made a claim with complete confidence and had then been shown by the right person at the right moment that the claim required revision. Stevie Wonder has described those four words in one private conversation that a mutual friend has characterized as the best thing anyone said to Stevie Wonder in 1975.
Stevie Wonder has not made that conversation public. Stevie Wonder has not named the four words. The mutual friend has said only that the four words were sufficient and that Stevie Wonder received them as sufficient and that the two men talked for another 30 minutes in the green room before Stevie Wonder went to his 4:00 recording appointment which ran late because Stevie Wonder arrived late because Stevie Wonder had been in a green room with Keith Richards.
Martin Clark kept the tape of the Keith Richards interview including the segment in which Keith Richards made the claim about keyboards and rhythm guitar. Martin Clark has never included that segment in any of the retrospective programs or compilation broadcasts he has assembled in the years since 1975. Martin Clark has been asked on several occasions by Radio 1 colleagues why the segment has never been aired.
It is the kind of material that would normally be considered valuable archive content, a significant musician making a significant and provocative claim about music on a live broadcast. Martin Clare has given the same answer each time. Martin Clare has said, “Because what happened afterward is more interesting than what was said, and what happened afterward isn’t on tape.
The tape ends at the end of the interview. What happened in the green room is not on the tape. Martin Clare knows what happened. Martin Clare was in the doorway. Keith Richards did not repeat that specific claim on any subsequent occasion. Keith Richards has talked about rhythm guitar in hundreds of interviews across the 50 years since February 1975, and Keith Richards has said many things about what rhythm guitar does and why it matters.
Keith Richards has not, in any of those interviews, said that no keyboard player alive could replicate what rhythm guitar brought to a rock record. Keith Richards said that once. Stevie Wonder was in the next room. The 11 minutes that followed were sufficient. Stevie Wonder has never mentioned the afternoon at Broadcasting House.
Stevie Wonder went to his 4:00 recording appointment, which was for a session connected to Songs in the Key of Life, and came out 2 hours later and went home. Songs in the Key of Life was released in September 1976 and was received as one of the most extraordinary and complete records ever made. It contains keyboard playing that does to its songs precisely what Keith Richards had said no keyboard player could do to a song.
Whether Keith Richards has listened to it at any point with that specific Tuesday afternoon in February 1975 in mind is not something anyone can determine from the outside. The tape that Martin Clare kept is in an archive. The 11 minutes are not on it. The four words are not on it. What is on it is Keith Richards saying clearly and twice that no keyboard player alive could replicate what rhythm guitar brought to a rock record.
What happened after that is in the memory of the three people who were in or at the door of a green room at Broadcasting House in London on a Tuesday afternoon in February of 1975. The tape ends. The story continues. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something with complete confidence and then been shown by exactly the right person at exactly the right moment that you needed to think again? Tell us about it in the comments below.
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