Salvation Army Guitarist’s Hands Stopped Working in the Snow — KEITH RICHARDS Didn’t Walk Away D
It was a Sunday morning in December 1997 and the snow was coming down lightly on Kensington when Keith Richards heard a sound that stopped him mid-stride. A Salvation Army choir outside a church, brass instruments and voices in the cold morning air. And at the edge of the group, a man with a guitar he could barely play.
Hands frozen, fingers not responding the way fingers are supposed to respond, still trying. Keith Richards stood on the pavement and looked at the man. Keith Richards looked at the guitar. Keith Richards looked at the man’s hands. Before we get into what happened next, tell us in the comments where in the world you’re watching from and subscribe if you haven’t already.
Keith Richards stood on that pavement for 2 hours. This is the story of why. Keith Richards had been walking since 8:00 in the morning, not toward anything and not away from anything. This was the kind of walking Keith Richards did when something needed to settle in his mind and sitting still wasn’t helping it settle.
It was a practice Keith Richards had developed over many years and many cities and many different kinds of problems and it had proved reliable. The act of moving through streets without a destination seemed to do something to the way thoughts organize themselves, loosening what had been stuck and allowing things to arrive in their own order rather than the order that impatience wanted to impose on them.
The neighborhood was quiet in the way that London is quiet on Sunday mornings in December, which is different from the quiet of other times, a specific temporary stillness that belongs to the city before it has remembered its obligations with the additional quality of muffled sound that light snow brings to streets where buildings stand close to the pavements.
The footfall of Keith Richards boots on the stone pavement was soft and slightly absorbed. His breath was visible. He had been walking for 40 minutes when he turned a corner on a quiet street in Kensington and heard it. The choir was standing outside a stone church, 10 people in Salvation Army uniforms, dark navy jackets, peaked caps, the distinctive red trim on the collars and cuffs.
They had a tuba, a trombone, two cornets, and a woman with a tambourine who was also the section leader. Which she communicated through small movements of her free hand rather than through instruction. They were playing a hymn that Keith Richards recognized without being able to immediately name. The kind of melody so deeply embedded in the architecture of British winter that it arrived not as something heard for the first time, but as something remembered from a layer of experience below conscious recall.
The sound of 10 people playing brass instruments in cold morning air on a quiet street has a particular quality that indoor performance cannot replicate. The notes dissipate into the open sky rather than bouncing back from walls, which makes the sound seem both larger and more fragile simultaneously.
The choir had been at this corner every Sunday morning of Advent for 11 years. They had played in rain and in cold, and on one extraordinary morning in 1994, they had played through a brief hail storm, and the section leader had not once lowered the tambourine. Keith Richards stopped on the pavement and listened.
The choir had not noticed him. The street was otherwise empty. At the edge of the group, slightly apart from the brass section, was a man with an acoustic guitar. Keith Richards put him at 50-something. A broad, weathered face with deep lines at the corners of the eyes that spoke of years spent outdoors, and the particular posture of someone who has been standing in the cold for long enough that the cold has become the primary fact of their experience, and everything else is organized around it. The man was wearing his Salvation Army jacket and his peaked cap with the red trim. And he had the guitar, a battered acoustic, one of the tuning pegs replaced with a different metal, the body of the instrument worn smooth at the edge of the sound hole from decades of contact with shirt fabric across one shoulder. The man was trying to play along with the hymn. The man was blowing on the fingers of his right hand between phrases, then bringing the hand back to the strings and attempting the chord, then stopping when the fingers wouldn’t form the required shape, then blowing on
them again and trying once more. From where Keith Richards was standing, 10 m away on the pavement, Keith Richards could see the problem in its exact nature. The cold had taken the fine motor control from the man’s hands. The fingers could move in large motions. They could not make the small, independent movements that chord playing requires. The guitar was nearly silent.
The man kept trying. Keith Richards stood on the pavement for a full minute without moving. This was not indecision. Keith Richards was watching something specific and wanted to see it fully before doing anything else. What Keith Richards was watching was a person attempting music under conditions that had made music technically unavailable to them and continuing to attempt it not because the attempt was succeeding, but because the attempt was the thing, independent of outcome.
Keith Richards had spent five decades thinking about what music was and what made it necessary and what separated the people who played it from the people who had merely learned to play it and the distinction he had arrived at through recordings and stages and rehearsal rooms and late nights in basements and all the accumulated hours of 60 years was something close to this, that music was not the successful production of the correct sounds, but the unwillingness to stop reaching for them. The man at the edge of the Salvation Army choir on a Kensington pavement in December 1997 was demonstrating this distinction in its most unadorned form. The hands weren’t working. The music was still happening, not in the sounds coming from the guitar, which were intermittent and muffled and technically wrong in the man, in the fact that the man was still there, still on the step, still returning his hands to the strings after every failed attempt, Keith Richards crossed the pavement. Keith Richards
walked past the brass section, past the tuba player and the cornet players who did not break stride in their playing, to the man with the guitar at the edge of the group. The section leader with the tambourine watched Keith Richards approach without stopping the tambourine.
The man with the guitar had not yet seen Keith Richards coming. Keith Richards stopped in front of him. “Your hands are frozen.” Keith Richards said, not a question. The man looked at his hands. “Been out here since 7:00.” the man said. His name was James. “Warm them up.” Keith Richards said. “Both hands. Your pockets, 2 minutes.
” James looked at him for a moment, then at the guitar, then put both hands in his jacket pockets. The choir continued playing without pause. The tuba held its line steady and the cornets played above it and the trombone filled the middle. The snow came down lightly and without accumulation on the shoulders of the Salvation Army jackets and the peaked caps and the paving stones of the quiet Kensington street.
Tell us in the comments where you’re watching from and if you’re not subscribed yet, now is the right moment. Because what happened in the next 2 hours is not the kind of thing that announces itself before it happens. While James’ hands were in his pockets, Keith Richards reached out and took the guitar where it leaned against the stone wall of the church steps.
Keith Richards turned it over once and examined the neck. Keith Richards adjusted one of the tuning pegs, the replaced one, running slightly sharp. And then he and since Dan tuned the guitar the same way Keith Richards always tuned guitars, by ear and by feel, using the strings as references for each other, without a reference pitch from outside, the way he had been doing this since he was 15 years old.
The choir was still playing. Keith Richards sat on the second step of the church entrance, which put him below the level of the standing choir members and slightly out of their immediate sightline, and settled the guitar across one knee. Keith Richards played the same hymn the choir was playing, not the melody, the underlying chord structure supporting the brass and the voices from underneath, the way a rhythm guitar functions in a band, not the thing you hear first, but the thing that makes what you hear first possible. The woman with the tambourine heard it before anyone else did. She looked at the man sitting on the church steps. She kept playing. Two minutes later, James took his hands out of his pockets. James opened and closed his fingers twice, slowly. The stiffness was still present at the outer edges, but the core dexterity had returned, the way it returns when hands have been given warmth and rest, rather than being forced to work through the cold. Keith Richards held the guitar out to James. James sat on the step beside Keith
Richards and took the guitar. James played the next verse of the hymn. The fingers made the shapes this time, not perfectly and not with the fluency they would have had indoors at a reasonable temperature, but well enough that the chord was recognizable, the song was supported, the thing he had been trying to do for the past 40 minutes was now, modestly, happening.
James looked at his own left hand on the neck of the guitar with an expression that was not quite surprise, but was adjacent to it. The expression of a hand doing what it had been asked to do after a long period of not cooperating. James kept playing. Keith Richards stayed on the church steps.
Keith Richards stayed for the rest of the next hymn and the one after that and the one after that. Not playing, the guitar was James’s guitar, and James was playing it now with returning warmth and returning ability, and there was no other instrument available, and that was entirely as it should be. Keith Richards sat on the second step of the church entrance on a Sunday morning in December 1997 and listened to a Salvation Army choir play hymns on a quiet Kensington street in the light snow with the brass instruments and the tambourine and the guitar. And for those two hours, Keith Richards appeared to have no other place to be and no other thing to want. A few people passed on the pavement and looked at the choir and at the man on the steps and either did not recognize Keith Richards or recognized him and decided, as some people do when they encounter something that is already complete and does not require their participation, to simply let it be what it was and walk on. The
section leader with the tambourine knew who was on the steps. She gave no outward indication of this knowledge and kept the section moving through its program. Two of the brass players knew or strongly suspected and played somewhat better than their usual standard as a result. The specific phenomenon of musicians performing with heightened attention in the presence of someone they respect.
The snow came down lightly and with complete indifference to everyone present. James did not know who was sitting beside him, not for most of the two hours. James knew that a stranger had stopped on the pavement and walked over and helped him warm his hands and sat with him through the morning service without asking for anything or explaining himself or making the situation about anything other than the music.
This was for James already more than most Sunday mornings had offered in a long time. Toward the end of the second hour, when the choir had moved through its program and was approaching the final hymn, one of the cornet players leaned across to the tuba player and said something very quietly. The tuba player looked at the man on the church steps and the tuba player’s expression changed in the way that expressions change when information arrives that reconfigures everything around it simultaneously.
The cornet player looked at James. James looked at the man sitting beside him on the step. James looked at the rings on every finger of both hands catching the gray winter light. James looked at the dark overcoat and the rust bandana and the scuffed dark boots. James looked at the man’s face properly and directly for the first time because for the past 2 hours there had been no reason to look at the face, only at what the music was doing.
Something assembled itself in James’s expression over approximately 4 seconds, the same sequence of separate recognitions combining into a single one. James did not say anything for a long moment. Then James said, very quietly, “I know who you are.” Keith Richards looked at the street, which was still quiet and still receiving light snow at irregular intervals.
“You’ve been sitting on a church step in the snow for 2 hours,” Keith Richards said. “Don’t make it strange.” James did not make it strange. James played the final hymn. The choir sang. The brass instruments played their full parts. The snow came lightly on the peaked caps and the shoulders of the Salvation Army jackets and on the stone steps and on the bandana at Keith Richards collar and neither man on the steps paid the snow any attention.
James did not make it strange. James played the final hymn. The choir sang. The brass instruments played. The snow came down lightly on the quiet street and on the church and on the steps and on the two men sitting side by side on the second step, one with a guitar and one without, both listening to the same thing.
The choir packed up at half past 10:00. James stood and Keith Richards stood and James looked at his hands, both of them, front and back, the way you look at something you are checking on, and flexed the fingers. The warmth had held. Same time next Sunday? Keith Richards said. James laughed, a short, completely genuine laugh, the kind that comes from somewhere other than performance.
You’re welcome, too, James said. Keith Richards did not come back the following Sunday. Keith Richards was in a different country the following Sunday, and the Sunday after that. But James has described that December morning to the other choir members many times over the years since, and always in the same way.
Not as the morning a famous musician happened to sit on the church steps, which is how other people have told it, but as the morning someone stopped walking because of the music. A stranger heard something and stopped and stayed for 2 hours. That was the story, James has always said. The rest of it, who the stranger was, was something that happened to be true, but was not the point.
The point was the stopping. The point was the staying. The point was the 2 hours on the step in December in the snow, listening to the same thing James was playing, and not going anywhere until it was finished. If this story gave you something, the reminder that the most important moment in any performance is the decision to keep attempting it, even when nothing is cooperating, share it today with someone who needs to hear it.
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