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Keith Richards music biography continued...

was born December 18, 1943, on the outskirts of London, England. With the encouragement of his grandfather, Richards took up music young age, a passion he shared with Mick Jagger, a fellow student in primary school. Some years later, Richards renewed his friendship with Jagger and joined Mick's blues band, which would later evolve into the Rolling Stones. Initially a blues and R&B cover band, the Stones branched out into original material penned by Jagger and Richards. The duo took some time and practice to develop their songwriting abilities, but by 1965 they had evolved into true professionals. "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" made them superstars in the United States as well as the U.K., containing one of rock's all-time great guitar riffs, which Richards played into a tape recorder in the middle of the night and couldn't recall recording when he woke up the next morning. At the center of The Stones, Richards went on to a legendary career, recording and performing for the next four decades.
Richards' edgy guitar work and songwriting prowess set the Stones apart, while offstage he lived up to the band's bad-boy image: hard partying and indestructible. (Critics said that his increasingly lined and weather-beaten face made him the anti-Dick Clark.) Hit Rolling Stones songs included "Jumpin' Jack Flash," "Honky-Tonk Woman," " "Miss You," "Start Me Up" and countless others. Richards was always fiercely loyal to the Rolling Stones and, in contrast to Jagger, never wanted to make a solo record. A mid-eighties feud that erupted between the pair was very public, fueled by such Richards's rhetoric as, "To me, twenty-five years of integrity went down the drain [when Jagger released a solo album.}" He drove that point home further in the song "You Don't Move Me," off his own first solo record, the critically acclaimed Talk Is Cheap, released in 1988. However, Richards and Jagger mended fences and got back together again as The Stones recorded and performed to sold-out, record-setting crowds in every tour. Richards will most likely go the way of the great bluesmen he admires so much, who continued to play the music they loved until the day they died. For us, that's a lucky thing.