Philip Marsh had been running the London Academy of Contemporary Music for 11 years. Philip Marsh had strong views about self-taught guitarists, the bad habits, the ceiling they always hit when instinct ran out. On October 14th, 2004, Philip Marsh was explaining this to his 18 students when the man in the back row said quietly, “That’s not entirely true.” Philip Marsh stopped.
Philip Marsh said, “If you disagree, come up here and demonstrate.” The man set down his coffee and stood up. Philip Marsh did not know who he was. His 18 students did not know, either. They found out 3 minutes later. The man was Keith Richards. He had come to visit a friend. The friend hadn’t shown up. Keith Richards had stayed anyway.
The London Academy of Contemporary Music in 2004 occupied the third and fourth floors of a building on Denmark Street, the street that had been the center of British popular music publishing since the 1950s, and that had absorbed across five decades the specific history of the music that had come from it and gone out into the world and changed things.
Denmark Street in 2004 was not what it had been in the 1960s, when every other doorway led to a publisher or a studio or a shop where musicians gathered to play and be heard and occasionally to be discovered, but Denmark Street still had music in it. The London Academy of Contemporary Music was part of what Denmark Street still had.
Philip Marsh had founded the Academy in 1993 with the specific conviction of a man who had spent 15 years teaching guitar privately and had concluded that the approach most guitar students received was inadequate, too focused on classical technique, not focused enough on the contemporary music those students actually wanted to play.
Philip Marsh wanted to build an institution that took popular music seriously as a discipline and taught it with the rigor that serious disciplines required. Philip Marsh had done this. By 2004, the Academy had 18 full-time instructors, several hundred students, and a reputation in the London music education community as one of the more demanding and more serious institutions of its kind.
Philip Marsh also had strong views about self-taught guitarists. These views had developed across 15 years of private teaching and 11 years of running the Academy across hundreds of encounters with students who had arrived with genuine ability and deeply ingrained incorrect habits. Philip Marsh had seen the pattern enough times to consider it a rule.
Self-taught guitarists could reach a certain level and then they hit a ceiling. Getting past the ceiling required formal knowledge, theory, technique, the systematic understanding of what you were doing and why it worked. Philip Marsh taught this understanding to his students because Philip Marsh considered it useful information, a warning about the limits of a certain approach to learning.
Philip Marsh was not wrong about the pattern in the general case. Philip Marsh was wrong about the rule being universal. Keith Richards was in London on the afternoon of October 14th, 2004. For reasons unrelated to the London Academy of Contemporary Music, Keith Richards was on Denmark Street because Denmark Street was the kind of street Keith Richards walked when he had time in London, a sanctuary street that had music in its history and in its walls.
Keith Richards had been walking Denmark Street since the early 1960s. Keith Richards walked it occasionally the way a person revisits a place that was important to them at a formative time. Keith Richards also had a friend who taught at the London Academy of Contemporary Music. The friend was a guitarist named Simon Doyle who had known Keith Richards for 20 years through the specific overlapping circles of the London music world, the sessions and the studios and the late evenings in the kind of rooms where musicians ended up talking to each other past midnight about the music they loved. Simon Doyle had mentioned in a recent conversation that he was teaching an advanced session on rhythm guitar technique that Thursday afternoon and that Keith Richards was welcome to sit in if he was ever in the area and had time to spare. Keith Richards had been in the area. Keith Richards had time to spare. Keith Richards had gone to the academy. Simon Doyle was not there.
Simon Doyle had called in that morning with a family situation that required his immediate attention and that could not be deferred until after the session. Simon Doyle had arranged a substitute instructor to cover the class, had sent a message to the academy and had not sent a message to Keith Richards because Simon Doyle was managing a family situation and had not thought to do so.
The substitute instructor was not Simon Doyle. The substitute instructor was Philip Marsh, the academy’s director, who occasionally covered sessions himself when the substitute situation was not resolved by other means and who had no particular reason to know that Simon Doyle had invited a guest for that specific Thursday afternoon.
The receptionist at the front desk of the academy had directed Keith Richards to room seven on the third floor where Simon Doyle’s session was scheduled. Keith Richards had gone to room seven, room seven on the third floor of the London Academy of Contemporary Music on October 14th, 2004 contained 18 students with guitars, a studio amplifier at the front of the room, a whiteboard with chord diagrams in three colors, and Philip Marsh, who was in the middle of setting up for the session.
Philip Marsh registered the arrival of a middle-aged man in a dark jacket with rings on his fingers and a takeaway coffee cup with the brief peripheral attention of someone who has things to arrange and returns immediately to arranging them. Keith Richards found a chair at the back of the room and sat down and waited to see what would happen.
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Philip Marsh began the session. The session was focused on rhythm guitar technique, specifically on the relationship between chord voicing and rhythmic feel, and on the technical habits that Philip Marsh considered essential for consistent and reliable rhythm playing. Philip Marsh was a capable instructor. Marsh communicated clearly and demonstrated competently.
Keith Richards listened from the back row with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things that were genuinely interesting to him. The difficulty began approximately 15 minutes into the session when Philip Marsh made a statement about self-taught guitarists that Keith Richards had been hearing versions of for 40 years and that Keith Richards considered in the specific version Philip Marsh expressed it not quite right.
Philip Marsh had been explaining the importance of formal chord theory to rhythm playing, the understanding of why certain voicings worked in certain contexts and why understanding that why was essential to consistent performance. Philip Marsh said, “This is why self-taught guitarists always plateau. They develop instinctive approaches that work up to a point, but without the theoretical foundation, they cannot adapt beyond what they have already learned through trial and error.
The habits they develop in the absence of formal instruction are not just inefficient. They are limiting. They create a ceiling. Every self-taught guitarist I have encountered has hit that ceiling.” A student near the front raised her hand. “What about guitarists who never formally studied but had very long careers at the highest level?” Philip Marsh gave the answer Philip Marsh always gave to this question, the answer about natural talent compensating for technical deficiency, about the ceiling that even very talented self-taught players eventually encountered, about the difference between surviving on instinct and understanding what you were doing well enough to teach it to someone else. Keith Richards said from the back row quietly, “That’s not entirely true.” Philip Marsh stopped talking. Philip Marsh turned and looked at the man in the back row. Philip Marsh had not registered him particularly on arrival. Philip Marsh now registered a
middle-aged man in a dark jacket with rings on his fingers and a cup of coffee on the desk in front of him. The man did not have a guitar. The man did not appear to be a student. Philip Marsh said, “I’m sorry.” Keith Richards said, “The ceiling. Not every self-taught guitarist hits it.
Some of them develop something through the self-teaching that formal instruction might have prevented.” Philip Marsh looked at the man with the controlled expression of an educator managing a disruption. Philip Marsh said, “Do you have a background in music education?” Keith Richards said, “No formal background, no.
” Philip Marsh said, “Formal study in guitar technique?” Keith Richards said, “None.” Philip Marsh nodded slowly. He turned to the class and back to the man in the back row. He said, “Then, with respect, the view you’re expressing is exactly the view I’d expect from someone without formal training.
It feels true from the inside. From the outside, from the perspective of someone who has taught this for years and seen the pattern consistently, the ceiling is real. Every self-taught guitarist encounters it without exception.” He paused. Then Philip Marsh said what Philip Marsh would spend years wishing he had not said.
Philip Marsh said, “If you have a different view, you’re welcome to come up here and demonstrate it. Show the class what 40 years of self-teaching without formal instruction produces.” Keith Richards looked at the 18 students. Several of them were watching the exchange with the specific attention of young musicians who can tell when something instructive is happening even before they know what the instruction will be.
Keith Richards set down his coffee. Keith Richards stood up and walked to the front of the room. Philip Marsh handed him the studio guitar, a well-maintained acoustic, with the expression of a man who expects to have made his point within the next 60 seconds. Keith Richards took the guitar and adjusted it briefly.
Keith Richards looked at Philip Marsh and said, “Before I play anything, can I ask you something?” Philip Marsh said, “Go ahead.” Keith Richards said, “You said every self-taught guitarist hits the ceiling without exception. How many self-taught guitarists have you taught?” Philip Marsh considered, “Hundreds over the years.” Keith Richards nodded.
He said, “I’ve been playing since 1958. Self-taught from the beginning. American blues records in a bedroom in Dartford. No instructor, no formal theory, no classical foundation, just the records and the guitar and working out what the records were doing and trying to do it myself.” He paused. Then Keith Richards played.
What Keith Richards played in the next 20 minutes was not a performance. Keith Richards was not performing for the room in the way that a performer performs. Keith Richards was demonstrating, showing the 18 students and Philip Marsh what 46 years of self-taught guitar playing look like from the inside.
Keith Richards showed chord voicings that no formal instruction would have produced because no formal instruction was thinking about what those voicings were trying to do. Keith Richards showed rhythmic approaches that had developed from listening to American blues musicians and trying to replicate what they were doing and failing and finding something in the failure that was worth keeping.
Keith Richards showed the students how the so-called bad habits, the thumb over the neck, the unconventional chord shapes, the rhythmic feel that came from playing against the beat rather than on it, were not habits that had limited him, but habits that had produced something that conventional technique would not have found.
Philip Marsh stood at the side of the room and watched. A student in the front row was the first one to say it. The student had a notebook on his desk with a Rolling Stones logo on the cover. The student looked at the man playing guitar at the front of the room and looked at the notebook and looked at the man again. The student said, “You’re Keith Richards.
” The room understood simultaneously. The specific quality of silence that followed was the silence of 18 people revising their understanding of the previous 20 minutes, revising it completely from the beginning in real time. Keith Richards looked at Philip Marsh. Keith Richards said, “You said self-taught guitarists hit a ceiling without exception.
I’ve been playing for 46 years. I don’t feel the ceiling yet.” He said it without hostility. He said it with the tone of someone making a factual correction. Philip Marsh sat down in the instructor’s chair. Philip Marsh looked at his students. Philip Marsh said, “I need a moment.” What followed was a conversation between Keith Richards and the 18 students that Philip Marsh later described as the most educational hour he had witnessed in 11 years of running his academy.
Keith Richards talked about how he had learned what the process of self-teaching actually was, what you found when you had no instructor to tell you the correct approach and had to develop your own relationship with the instrument, what the so-called bad habits actually produced when you followed them long enough to find out where they led.
Keith Richards talked about Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters and the specific things Keith Richards had heard on those early records that he had spent years trying to understand well enough to reproduce and what he had found in the attempt. Philip Marsh listened. Philip Marsh had spent 11 years running an institution built on the premise that formal instruction produced better musicians than self-teaching.
Philip Marsh sat in his own classroom and listened to Keith Richards talk about self-teaching and found that the premise required revision, not replacement, but revision. Formal instruction produced certain things. Self-teaching produced certain other things. The ceiling Philip Marsh had described was real for some self-taught guitarists.
It was not universal. The room contained a proof of that. After Keith Richards left, Philip Marsh stood in front of his 18 students for a long moment. The students did not speak. The students appeared to understand that Philip Marsh needed the moment and were willing to give it to him.
Philip Marsh looked at the whiteboard with the chord diagrams in three colors. Philip Marsh looked at the 18 guitars. Then Philip Marsh looked at his students and said, “I told you that self-taught guitarists always hit a ceiling. I was wrong about always. I was wrong about every self-taught guitarist I have encountered.
I should have said most and I should have said in my experience and I should have said I believe and I should have left room for the exceptions I had not yet encountered. Today, I encountered one.” Philip Marsh paused. He said, “I also told you that the habits self-taught guitarists develop are limiting. Today, you saw 46 years of self-taught habits.
I will leave you to draw your own conclusions about whether those habits were limiting.” Philip Marsh revised his curriculum in the weeks that followed. Philip Marsh did not stop teaching formal technique. Formal technique was real and valuable and his students needed it. But Philip Marsh added something to the curriculum that had not been there before.
Philip Marsh began teaching his students about the things that self-teaching could produce that formal instruction sometimes prevented the unexpected voicings, the idiosyncratic rhythmic feel, the sound that came from following a wrong approach long enough to find out it was right. Philip Marsh began teaching his students that the ceiling he had described was a tendency, not a law.
And that understanding the difference between a tendency and a law was itself an essential form of musical education. Keith Richards has never mentioned the afternoon on Denmark Street in any public context. Keith Richards visited a friend, found the friend absent, sat down in a room, disagreed with something he heard, was challenged to demonstrate the disagreement, and demonstrated it.
Keith Richards then left. From Keith Richards’ perspective, this was an afternoon in London that produced an unexpected conversation. From Philip Marsh’s perspective, it was the afternoon that changed how Philip Marsh taught guitar for the next 20 years and counting. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below.
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