Keith Richards - Talk is Cheap

So I finally get to a Stones related post!  You may have thought I was full of it when I said I was a Stones fan and got this far without talking about one of their records, but I'm going to start here, just outside The Rolling Stones, but also kind of right at the heart of the band.  I'm also going to add a new label, Audiophile Alert because there are some records that people just wouldn't expect to sound as phenomenal as they do. I won't put a Steely Dan album in that category, because everyone knows they sound great, even if you don't like the music, but a record like this one can just slip by and never quite get its due.

So in 1988 I was pretty hard into my fascination with The Stones, which had started about 1982.  I was working in a printing factory and by this time I was probably solidly on third shift, putting covers on books on a machine that confounded damn near everybody but just seemed to make sense to me.  The guy I spent most of my night next to ran the part of the machine that put labels on books, and we talked music non stop all night, until lunch, when we listened to music and burned one at lunch, then we'd come back in and talk music until morning when it was time to go home.  There was no Internet per se back then, so The Stones' Dirty Work album wasn't as despised as the Internet makes it out to be.  It wasn't great, but it wasn't awful (and I still say that).  So Keith Richards' first solo album was something I was looking forward to, partly because I knew Keith would blow away Mick's She's the Boss album, and partly because I knew Keith wouldn't have those shitty sounding drums that were on Dirty Work on his solo album.

There used to be a store called Maximum Compact that I bought cd's at back then.  It had a selection only beat out by My Generation, but when it came to Rock, they were the same.  I went in the day this album came out and bought it, and the distro guy had just walked out the door after dropping off a big stack of Keith Richards promo posters for this.  I managed to get one when I bought the album, and the owner said he was gonna give them away to anyone that bought the album until the guy came back and picked them up. It's really cool, and I still have it.  I took it home and made a cassette of it on my first listen to take into work that night.  I loved it.  I mean, I really loved it - like a Stones album kind of love.

Keith's backing band was the cream of the crop of American studio guys.  Steve Jordan helped write the songs, and Waddy Wachtel picked up all the right parts when Keith tries to play with no hands.  These guys sounded like they recorded the record live, and they sounded like they'd done this together forever.  The music has Keith's timeless style, in that it sounds like it could have been written and recorded today, or forty years ago.  The songs are among Keith's best of his later career and he sings much better than I think people expected.  The song that was supposedly a slap to Mick's face is You Don't Move Me, and if it is, it's not terribly cruel, it's more like he's disappointed in his friend (I mean, Mick foisted Primitive Cool on the world, so Keith could have been a real dick).  The rest of it is really just a bunch of loose, fun Keefchords with lyrics about girls and relationships for the most part.  I Could Have Stood You Up certainly doesn't break any new ground, but in 1988 no one could pull off a 50's rocker like Keith.

I suppose one of the only things I don't like about this is that Mick might have been able to really come up with some magic vocals on a few of these songs, like Take it So Hard, which coulda been a contender in the Stones' canon, and it's great here, but maybe with The Stones' touch it would have been even more.  Then again, without The Stones being in the state of disarray they were in, maybe these songs never would have happened.  The album ends really nicely, with a terrific ballad, Locked Away, which seems to be the kind of song Keith seems suited to sing in his dotage.  But after the mellowness of that song fades, the guitar rumbles, the snare drum strainer shakes under the power and then the drums and bass kick in on It Means a Lot and Keith leaves with a forceful statement.

It Means a Lot is one of those Keith songs that begs to be cranked up, pump your fist to and just get your ass rockin'.  Did I say Locked Away sounded like a good way for Keith to spend his dotage?  Well, it's pretty apparent he's nowhere near that on this album.  In fact, he's rocking as hard as ever, with a monster, big, fat riff that when Waddy Wachtel got to play it washed away all his memories of getting a softie on for Linda Ronstadt (who this blog loves, by the way), Stevie Nicks and James Taylor.  Here, the whole band just gets to rip it up on a loose, riff based groove that just kills it.

So if I'm talking about this cd, what's the Audiophile Alert for?  You've got to hear this on vinyl.  You can hear the snare drum strainer vibrating when the drums aren't being played, you can really close your eyes and "see" the soundstage in a way that just doesn't happen on the cd.  Songs like Struggle and Whip it Up just jump off the record and it's really something.  I talked to someone about a year or two after I had owned this on cd, and they were telling me it was one of the records they were taking with them to audition a new pair of speakers with.  I told them they could borrow my cd, and they said, "I've got the cd, but the record is a big improvement."  I was kind of a slow convert to the cd anyway, but I'm no Luddite and I want to have the best sound for my favorite guitar player ever, so I started scouring the bins.  It took a long time, but I found one that looked like it had been opened and played maybe once.  It was probably in the 90's by the time I found it.

Had I found this in 1988, I may have almost skipped the entire cd era.  Yeah, it's THAT GOOD.  The wax is flat and super quiet and the soundstage is spectacular.  Maybe it's because Keith is such a veteran of the analog days, and maybe it's because the vinyl companies were trying to come up with what they may have perceived as one of the last of an era, and they made sure to do everything right.  Whatever it was, if you find a nice copy of this on vinyl, I wholeheartedly recommend grabbing it.  The music is great and the sound is spectacular!