Studio Intern Told Chuck Berry “That Riff Is Too Simple” — KEITH RICHARDS Was Behind the Glass D
Keith Richards pressed the intercom button. That was all. Three words into the talkback from the control room at Electric Lady Studios in New York on a Tuesday afternoon in September 2016. Three words after the intern with the clipboard had leaned into the microphone and told Chuck Barry, 89 years old, the man who invented the language that Keith Richards had spent his entire life speaking, that the riff was too simple and maybe they should try something more developed.
Keith Richards had been sitting behind the glass for 40 minutes when he heard that sentence. Keith Richards pressed the button. Before we hear what Keith Richards said, tell us in the comments where in the world you’re watching from and subscribe if you haven’t already. The next 60 seconds of this story are worth staying for.
Electric Lady Studios had been on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village since 1970. Jimmyi Hendrickx had built it, spent three weeks playing in it, and died before the construction was fully complete. In the 56 years since, nearly every musician worth naming had recorded inside its rooms.
The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie. The list extended far enough that the studio’s booking history read less like a ledger and more like a census of the previous century’s musical imagination. The building itself carried that history in its walls and its corridors and the particular quality of silence it had on early Tuesday mornings before the sessions began.
On this particular Tuesday in September 2016, Studio A had been booked for a project that almost nobody outside a small circle knew was underway. Chuck Barry, 89 years old and the last surviving architect of the form that had shaped everything that came after it, was recording what would become his final album.
Keith Richards had been at the studio since 8:00 in the morning. Nobody had called to tell Keith Richards to come. Nobody had needed to. When Chuck Barry was recording Keith Richards showed up, it had been this way for decades, and neither of them had ever formally arranged it. Keith Richards sat in the control room behind the mixing console, a cup of coffee going cold beside him, and watched Chuck Barry through the glass in the live room on the other side.
To understand what was about to happen in Studio A that afternoon, you have to understand what Chuck Barry meant to Keith Richards, not what Chuck Barry meant to rock and roll. That is a different conversation well documented and not in dispute. what Chuck Barry meant specifically personally to a 12-year-old boy in Dartford, England in 1956, who heard a record on his mother’s player and understood in a way that arrived complete and without requiring any previous instruction that this was the thing he was going to spend his life doing. Keith Richards has described this moment many times in many interviews across many decades. The words change depending on how many years have accumulated between the moment and the telling, but the substance never changes. Chuck Barry was not an influence. Chuck Barry was the origin point. Everything that came after the Rolling Stones, the riffs, the 50 years of music that bore Keith Richards name
began in a bedroom in Dartford with a Chuck Barry record and a guitar that Keith Richards did not yet fully know how to play. Chuck Barry had changed the grammar of popular music. He had given the electric guitar a vocabulary it had not previously possessed, a set of moves and intervals and rhythmic relationships that spread out from his recordings in the mid-50s and shaped everything that any serious guitarist born after 1940 would eventually learn to do.
Keith Richards understood all of this not as music history but as lived personal experience. The specific afternoon in Dartford, the specific record, the specific moment of knowing, 89 years old now, Chuck Barry had come to New York to record an album he had been assembling in pieces for several years.
On this Tuesday in September, Chuck Barry had come to Electric Lady to lay down a guitar part he had been hearing in his head for 3 months. The intern’s name was Marcus Webb, 24 years old from Queens, eight months into a position at Electric Lady Studios that had begun unpaid and transitioned to a small stipend after the first three.
Marcus Webb was by every reasonable account good at his job. He was organized, attentive, quick to learn the mechanics of the studio, patching, routing, the labeling of session files, the logistics of setting up a live room for a particular configuration. He had a music production degree from a program that had given him solid technical foundations, a good ear for acoustic problems in a room, and the kind of commitment to the craft that showed up early and stayed late.
He had a genuine passion for the work, the kind that had kept him in a city that was extremely expensive for a stipend that was not. What Marcus Webb lacked, and this was not a moral failing, only a function of 24 years and eight months of experience in a particular room, was context.
Context in the sense of knowing what he was looking at when he looked at the 89year-old man on the stool in studio A. Marcus Webb knew the name. Marcus Webb could have told you if asked that Chuck Barry was historically important. What Marcus Webb did not yet know at the level that changes how a person stands in a room was what historically important actually meant when translated into the specific guitar part being played on the other side of that glass.
Chuck Barry had been playing the riff for approximately 12 minutes, working through small variations, adjusting the way the phrase turned at the end of the second bar, finding the exact weight of each note relative to the others. the Gibson ES335. Across his knee was the guitar Chuck Barry had been playing in one form or another since the instrument was introduced in 1958.
His hands on the neck were the hands of someone for whom the physical relationship between fingers and strings had been ongoing for 70 years, and the ease in them was not the ease of someone doing something effortlessly, but the ease of someone who had worked long enough that the effort was no longer visible.
The riff itself was three notes. This was intentional. Chuck Barry had always understood something about three note riffs that took other players considerably longer to learn. That the right three notes in the right sequence with the right space between them were not a limitation, but a complete idea, a fully formed statement that needed nothing added to it to be whole.
The riff had authority and motion and a quality of inevitability that made it feel when you heard it as though it had always existed. And Chuck Barry had simply been the person who located it. Keith Richards, behind the glass, heard this in the first two repetitions. Marcus Webb, clipboard in hand, had been listening since the third and had arrived at a different conclusion.
Marcus Webb leaned toward the talkback microphone. “That’s sounding good,” Marcus Webb said. really solid foundation. I’m just wondering, do you think we push it a bit further? Add some complexity, something with a little more development? A silence opened up in the live room.
Chuck Barry looked at the microphone above him. Chuck Barry did not respond immediately. Keith Richards had gone still in the control room. This was a specific kind of stillness. Not the stillness of someone who has not yet decided what to do, but the stillness of someone who has decided very quickly and is taking exactly the amount of time required before acting on that decision.
Keith Richards had heard the sentence come through da da backs yed speakers and had registered it with the complete unhurried attention of someone for whom the subject under discussion was not abstract. Keith Richards had looked at Chuck Barry through the glass at Kenroise. Bonnet Dine BI 89year-old man on the stool in studio A holding the Gibson looking at the talkback microphone with an expression that was patient and entirely unreadable.
Keith Richards had then looked at Marcus Webb who was holding his clipboard and waiting for a response with the attentive posture of someone who believes they have just made a reasonable professional suggestion. Keith Richards reached forward and pressed the intercom button on the console. Marcus Keith Richard said. Marcus Webb turned from the talkback microphone and looked at the control room glass.
Yeah, Marcus Webb said, “Come in here a moment,” Keith Richards said. Marcus Webb set the clipboard on the console ledge and opened the control room door. Keith Richards did not stand up from the console chair. Keith Richards looked at Marcus Webb when he entered and then looked through the glass toward the live room where Chuck Barry was sitting on the stool with the Gibson across his knee.
How long have you been working here? Keith Richards said 8 months. Marcus Webb said. Keith Richards nodded once. Do you know what that man is playing? Keith Richards said. Marcus Webb looked through the glass at Chuck Barry. It’s a guitar part for the track. Marcus Webb said three note riff kind of minimal, which is why I suggested.
Do you know what that riff is? Keith Richards said his voice was not raised. Nothing in Keith Richards’s manner had changed from what it had been for the previous 40 minutes, which was calm and unhurried and entirely without performance. It sounds like a blues rock foundation. Marcus Webb said, “Classic structure, which is why I thought more development could stop,” Keith Richards said.
Not unkindly, more the way you stop a sentence that is heading somewhere it does not need to go. Marcus Webb stopped. Keith Richards turned in the console chair to face Marcus Webb directly. That man, Keith Richards said, has been playing that riff for 60 years. Not a riff like it.
That riff, the one you just suggested, needed more development. Keith Richards looked through the glass at Chuck Barry, who was sitting quietly on the stool and had not moved. I learned to play guitar because of that man, not because of someone who sounded like him, because of him. In 1956, I was 12 years old and I heard that guitar coming out of a record player in Dartford and I understood what my life was going to be.
Keith Richards paused for a half second. He did not get to simple by leaving things out. He got there by putting 60 years in. Marcus Webb stood in the control room and said nothing. Marcus Webb had made a suggestion he believed was professional and useful. And the man at the mixing console had taken it apart in four sentences in a way that Marcus Webb understood was not an argument but a correction. Sir, it bites you.
The kind that does not require a response because everything that needs to be said has already been said. Keith Richards turned back to the console. Keith Richards pressed the talk back button that connected to the live room. Chuck. Keith Richards said, “It’s exactly right.” In the live room, Chuck Barry looked toward the control room glass.
A small expression appeared. Not quite a smile. Something quieter and older than that. the expression of a man who has been told something he already knew by someone who also already knew it and understood why it mattered. Chuck Barry looked back down at the Gibson ES 335. Chuck Barry played the riff again, the same three notes in the same sequence with the same space between them.
Through the monitor speakers in the control room, the sound of it filled the space the way the right thing fills any room it belongs in. not loudly but completely. Marcus Webb went back to the live room and picked up his clipboard. Marcus Webb did not make any further suggestions that afternoon about the guitar parts Chuck Barry was playing.
The session continued for another 3 hours without interruption. Keith Richard sat at the console and listened and said very little else. The riff, the three note riff that Marcus Webb had suggested needed more complexity appears on the finished album. exactly as it was played that Tuesday in September, unchanged, unelaborated, precisely as Chuck Barry had heard it in his head for 3 months before he flew to New York to record it.
Chuck Barry completed what would become the album titled Chuck in the weeks and months that followed those September sessions. The album was his first in almost 40 years, and it carried in every track the specific quality of someone who has been playing for seven decades, and has arrived at a point where nothing is included that does not need to be there.
Keith Richards appears on two tracks, not prominently, not in any way that draws attention to itself, but there in the way that Keith Richards has always been there when Chuck Barry was playing. The album was completed with the help of Chuck Barry’s family after Chuck Barry died on March 18th, 2017 at the age of 90.
Keith Richards learned the news by phone. Keith Richards did not make a public statement immediately. Keith Richards went home and played guitar alone for several hours. This is not something Keith Richards described publicly. It was mentioned once briefly in a conversation with someone who knew him well and it has not been elaborated on since. It does not need to be.
Marcus Webb still works in music. Marcus Webb has not remained a studio intern. The years since that September have moved him into rooms with more responsibility and more authority and he has carried something from that Tuesday afternoon into all of them. Marcus Webb has spoken about that session only once in a private conversation with a colleague and the way he described it was not that Keith Richards had embarrassed him or been harsh with him or made a point of the correction in front of Chuck Barry had done none of those things. What Marcus Webb said was that Keith Richards had handed him something, a specific and permanent shift in how he understood what he was looking at when he walked into a room with a musician. Before that Tuesday, Marcus Webb walked into sessions asking one question. What
could be more? After that Tuesday, Marcus Webb began asking a different one. What is this person bringing in? And what did it cost them to get it this far? What did it take? How many years? How many rooms? how many repetitions of the thing at 4 in the morning when nobody was listening for it to arrive at exactly this simplicity.
Marcus Webb said that every session he has worked since that afternoon he asked that question first. He used to ask what could be more developed here. He asks now what is this person putting in front of me and what did it take for it to become this simple? Simple is the hardest thing there is to build. Chuck Barry knew that.
Keith Richards knew that, too. In a control room at Electric Lady Studios on a Tuesday afternoon in September 2016, Marcus Webb began to know it, too. If this story gave you something, the reminder that the hardest thing to build is simplicity. And the hardest person to recognize is the one who has already built it.
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This week’s lesson came in three notes. The right three notes in the right sequence with exactly the right space between
