Keef on Guitars!

 Albert Watson -- Keith Richards in Car, New York City, 1988

 Keith Richards: In the ‘60s I knew some guys were obviously using other tunings, but we were just on the road so much, I had no time to experiment. Around 1967, I was starting to hang out with Taj Mahal and Gram Parsons, who are all students too. I mean, Taj, as beautiful as he is, is a student who basically approaches the blues from a white man’s angle. He’s got it all together, and always did have, but he’s very academic about it. He showed me a couple of things. And then Ry Cooder popped in, who had the tunings down. He had the open G. By then I was working on open E and open D tunings. I was trying to figure out Fred McDowell shit, Blind Willie McTell stuff. So in that year I started to get into that, and the Nashville tuning the country boys use—the high stringing [the bottom four strings restrung and tuned an octave higher than usual]—and all the other things you can do. When I was locked into regular, I thought, “The guitar is capable of more than this—or is it? Let’s find out.”

 Keith Richards on Keith Richards