Keith Richards said it in front of seven people. He said it the way people say things they are completely certain of, without hesitation, without qualification, without looking around the room first. Nobody can play this riff. Nobody in this room, nobody in this country, nobody alive. The man sitting quietly at the back of the room set down his tea.
The man was George Harrison. What happened in the next 4 minutes became the most talked about moment in that studio’s history. Olympic Sound Studios on Barnes in Southwest London had been one of the most significant recording facilities in the world since the mid-1960s. The Rolling Stones had recorded there. The Beatles had recorded there.
Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Traffic, The Faces. The list of musicians who had worked in those rooms constituted something close to a complete history of British popular music in its most fertile decade. By 1971, Olympic Sound Studios had the specific atmosphere of a place that had witnessed enough extraordinary things to be unimpressed by the ordinary.
A place where the walls had absorbed so much music that the air itself seemed to carry the memory of it. Keith Richards was 37 years old in the autumn of 1971. The Rolling Stones had released Sticky Fingers in April of that year and were in the process of completing what would become Exile on Main Street, a double album that would take another eight months to finish and that would eventually be regarded as one of the greatest rock and roll records ever made.
Keith Richards was in a period of prolific creativity, writing with a speed and a confidence that came from being in full command of what he was doing, understanding the music he was making from the inside in a way that produced material faster than the recording process could contain it. Keith Richards had arrived at Olympic Sound Studios on the afternoon of October 19th, 1971 with a guitar riff that he had been developing for 3 days and had finalized that morning.
The riff was built on a specific tension between the root note and the flat and a seventh that gave it a momentum Keith Richards found irresistible. The kind of riff that did not resolve where it was supposed to resolve, that kept the listener suspended in the specific state of musical anticipation that the best rhythm guitar playing produced.
Keith Richards had played the riff for himself enough times to be certain of what it was. Keith Richards was certain that it was something nobody else had thought of. The people in the studio that afternoon were seven in number. Mick Jagger was there working on a vocal arrangement in the adjacent room, audible through the glass as a low and concentrated murmur.
Charlie Watts was seated at a small table eating a sandwich and reading a newspaper. Bill Wyman was reading a paperback book that nobody in the room could identify from the cover. Jimmy Miller, the Stones producer since 1967 and the man responsible for the specific sound that Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers had produced, was at the console with the relaxed alertness of a producer who has learned when to intervene in a creative process and when to let it run.
Andy Johns, the engineer, was beside him adjusting levels with the focused efficiency of someone who had been doing this in this room long enough to know what it needed before he was asked. A studio assistant named Robert Caswell was near the door, available and quiet. And at the back of the room, in a chair that was positioned slightly apart from the others, a man was drinking tea from a paper cup and had been present for approximately 40 minutes without having said very much to anyone. The man at the back was George Harrison. George Harrison was in London in October of 1971 for reasons that overlapped with the Rolling Stones schedule at Olympic in the casual way that the schedules of major musicians overlapped in London in that period. The city was small enough, the music scene concentrated enough, the social circles overlapping enough that being in the same room as someone you knew was not remarkable and did not require explanation. George Harrison and Keith Richards had known each other
since the early 1960s, since the specific years when both of their bands were building the careers that would define British popular music for decades. They knew each other the way musicians who have been in the same world for a decade know each other. Well enough to be easy in the same room, not so well that the ease required maintenance.
George Harrison had dropped into Olympic because Jimmy Miller was a mutual friend and because Keith Richards had mentioned in a recent conversation that he was working on something interesting and had not been more specific than that, which George Harrison had taken as an invitation to come and hear. George Harrison had arrived at approximately 2:00, said hello to the people he knew, accepted a cup of tea from Robert Caswell, and settled at the back of the room in the specific way that George Harrison settled into rooms where other people were working, attentively but without imposing attention, present but not demanding. George Harrison had been there for 40 minutes before Keith Richards played the riff. Keith Richards plugged in his guitar. Keith Richards played the riff. The riff lasted approximately 12 seconds. The riff established itself in the room the way certain musical ideas establish themselves, not by announcing itself but by making the room suddenly feel
different, by producing in the people who heard it the specific involuntary attention that genuine musical ideas produce. Charlie Watts, who had been eating his sandwich, stopped eating. Bill Wyman closed his book. Jimmy Miller leaned forward at the console. Andy Johns made a small sound that was not quite a word but conveyed something precise.
Keith Richards played it again. Keith Richards played it three more times, each time slightly differently, exploring the edges of what it could do. Keith Richards was talking as he played, explaining the harmonic logic of it to Jimmy Miller, describing the specific tension he was working with and why it worked the way it worked.
Keith Richards was 37 years old and had been playing guitar since he was 15 and had been playing at the level that produced Satisfaction and Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Gimme Shelter for the better part of a decade. And in October of 1971, in the middle of completing what would become his masterwork, Keith Richards was at the peak of understanding his own music.
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Keith Richards said, with the specific confidence of someone in full command of their creative powers, “Nobody is going to play this the way it needs to be played. It’s too inside. Nobody in this room, nobody in this country, probably. Nobody alive, maybe.” He said it without arrogance.
He said it as a technical assessment of a specific problem. The problem finding a guitarist who understood this particular tension between these particular notes in this particular way. Keith Richards was not claiming superiority. Keith Richards was describing a difficulty. At the back of the room, George Harrison set down his paper cup of tea. George Harrison stood up.
George Harrison walked to the guitar stand near the door and picked up the spare Telecaster that was leaning against it, a battered instrument with a well-worn neck that had been used in numerous Olympic sessions and that no one in the room would have described as a premium instrument.
George Harrison sat down on the nearest available chair, positioned the guitar in his lap and looked at Keith Richards. George Harrison said without preamble, “Play it again.” Keith Richards played it again. George Harrison listened once with his full attention. George Harrison’s attention, when George Harrison was listening to something musical, was a specific thing that the people who had witnessed it across his career described consistently an absolute quality of concentration, the concentration of someone who could hear more information in a piece of music than most people knew was there to hear. George Harrison listened to Keith Richards play the riff through one complete cycle. Then George Harrison played it back. George Harrison played it back note for note with the specific feel that Keith Richards had described as inside, the feel that Keith Richards had suggested nobody alive could replicate. George Harrison played it exactly. George Harrison played it once. Then
George Harrison played it three different ways that Keith Richards had not played it. The three variations were not random. Each one was a specific interpretation of the harmonic logic that Keith Richards had described to Jimmy Miller, three different answers to the same musical question, each answer illuminating something about the question that the previous answer had left in shadow.
George Harrison played them in sequence and without hesitation with the ease of someone for whom this level of musical thinking was habitual rather than exceptional. Keith Richards listened to all three. Keith Richards said nothing for a moment. Then Keith Richards said, “How did you do the second one?” George Harrison showed him.
What followed was not a competition and was not a lesson. What followed was a conversation, the specific conversation that happens between two musicians who are both thinking seriously about the same musical idea from different angles, who have each arrived at the idea through a different route and have each found different things along the way.
Keith Richards and George Harrison spent the next 40 minutes in that room at Olympic Sound Studios on Barnes High Street in London passing the question of the riff back and forth between them the way two people pass a physical object they are both examining. Each one adding something, each one finding something the other had missed.
They played the riff in its original form and in the three variations George Harrison had introduced. They played variations of the variations. Keith Richards found a fourth approach that built on something George Harrison had done in his second variation, and George Harrison listened to it and found a fifth approach that built on Keith Richards’ fourth.
And this is how musical conversations between genuinely serious musicians work when they are working at the level of musicians who understand what they are doing from the inside. Each answer produces a new question. Each question produces a better answer, and the thing that was being examined at the beginning of the conversation is not the same thing that’s being examined 40 minutes later because the conversation has taken it somewhere neither musician had seen from where they started. Jimmy Miller sat at the console and watched. Jimmy Miller was a producer of exceptional musical intelligence who had spent four years working closely with the Rolling Stones and who had developed a specific ability to recognize the moment when something significant was happening in a room and to not interfere with it. Jimmy Miller did not press record. Jimmy Miller understood that the conversation in the room was not a recording session and that pressing record would change what it was. Jimmy Miller watched Keith Richards and
George Harrison talk about a guitar riff for 40 minutes and understood that he was witnessing something that would inform what he heard in recording sessions for the rest of his career. Charlie Watts, who had finished his sandwich by the time George Harrison played the riff back the first time, watched with the specific still attention that Charlie Watts brought to musical things that were worth watching.
Charlie Watts was not a man who expressed enthusiasm in ways that could be mistaken for performance. When Charlie Watts paid attention to something, the attention itself was the expression. For 40 minutes, Charlie Watts paid complete attention to Keith Richards and George Harrison. He did not eat anything. He did not read anything.
He did not speak. He watched. Charlie Watts said afterward in a conversation with Bill Wyman that Wyman described in later years as one of the most thoughtful things he had heard Charlie Watts say that the 40 minutes had been one of the most purely musical experiences he had witnessed in a decade of professional music making.
Charlie Watts said that watching Keith Richards and George Harrison play the same riff was like watching two people who spoke the same language discover that they had been using it to say entirely different things. And then discover that those different things placed together produced something neither of them had been saying alone.
After the 40 minutes, George Harrison put down the Telecaster and picked up his tea and found it was cold. George Harrison said he needed to get back to his own session across town. George Harrison shook hands with Keith Richards and said goodbye to Jimmy Miller and the others and left. The room was quiet for a moment after he left.
Keith Richards looked at the guitar in his hands. Keith Richards looked at Jimmy Miller. Keith Richards said, “Nobody alive.” I said, “Jimmy Miller said, ‘I know. I heard.'” Keith Richards has described the afternoon in October 1971 in subsequent private conversations with people who have known him across the decades since, not often and not in any way that has been made formally public, but in the way that significant musical experiences get described when the right person asks.
Keith Richards describes it always in the same terms. What it taught him about the difference between writing something and understanding it. Keith Richards has said that writing a riff means finding the thing. It’s the idea that it’s specific tension between these notes at this rhythm at this tempo that produces this particular effect.
Understanding the thing means knowing where the thing can go from there, what it can become, what it contains that you have not yet extracted. Keith Richards wrote the riff in three days and discovered its actual boundaries in 40 minutes because George Harrison was in the room, and George Harrison showed him that the boundaries he had identified were not the actual ones.
Three places the riff could go that Keith Richards had not seen. By the time George Harrison left, the thing Keith Richards had written was larger than what Keith Richards had written. George Harrison did not make any public statement about the afternoon at Olympic. George Harrison was not known for publicizing his interactions with other musicians in ways that might be taken as competitive or comparative, and this was not an interaction that needed publicizing.
George Harrison was at Olympic on a Tuesday afternoon in October because a friend was working on something interesting, and George Harrison was in London and had time and was interested. George Harrison drank his tea, listened for 40 minutes, stood up, played a riff back the way nobody alive could play it, spent 40 more minutes talking about where the riff could go, left his cold tea on the chair, and went back to his own session across town.
The conversation is in the memory of everyone who was in that room that Tuesday afternoon in October 1971. Jimmy Miller carried it for the rest of his career. The specific memory of watching two musicians of that level find each other in a room and take something further than either of them could take it alone.
Charlie Watts carried it for the rest of his life, describing it in that one conversation with Bill Wyman, and not needing to describe it again because once was sufficient for something to complete. Keith Richards carries it still. “Nobody alive,” Keith Richards had said on a Tuesday afternoon at Olympic Sound Studios in October of 1971.
George Harrison had set down his tea and picked up a Telecaster and demonstrated without haste and without comment that the category of nobody alive required at least one significant exception. The exception was sitting at the back of the room drinking tea the whole time. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below.
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