When the Rolling Stones hit a creative and professional plateau in the late 1960s, they risked fading away into obscurity with the closing of the decade—that is, until a few fateful drug arrests and cassette tapes helped revitalize the band’s sound by way of Keith Richards’ boredom. (The old saying, ‘Idle hands are the devil’s playground,’ proves especially advantageous in rock ‘n’ roll.)
The artistic progress Richards made during this time would bolster the band through the rest of the decade and into their historically lengthy career that followed. And all it took was some unwanted downtime.
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Drug Arrests Have a Funny Way Of Disrupting Workflow
The Rolling Stones were well into the depths of their fame and stardom by the time they released their 1967 album, Between the Buttons. And with great notoriety comes great risk of law enforcement catching on to the more illicit corners of the rock ‘n’ roll world. Sure enough, the following month, the Redlands bust landed Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones under the heavy weight of the criminal justice system. Multiple drug charges meant the musicians were constantly spending time in courtrooms, jail cells, and lawyers’ offices—anywhere but the recording studio.
Unsurprisingly, the band’s conflicting schedules significantly hindered their creative workflow. Unable to meet at the studio at the same time for months on end, each musician started pursuing their own artistic endeavors in their little free time. “During that long recording lay-off after Between the Buttons, I got rather bored with what I was playing on guitar,” Richards admitted to Guitar Player in 1977. “Maybe because we weren’t working, and it was part of that frustration of stopping after all those years and suddenly having nothing to do. My playing sort of stopped along with me.”
All this time away from his band meant Richards had ample opportunity to listen to music just for the sake of listening. He focused on blues records from the 1920s and ‘30s and noticed a unique characteristic of most of the players’ guitars of that time: “strange tunings,” as Richards put it. So, the guitarist started experimenting with non-standard tunings himself, forming the groundwork for his soon-to-be signature open tuning.
Next, he had to find a way to capture it.
How Cassette Tapes Shaped The Rolling Stones Sound
With open tunings lighting a creative fire under Keith Richards’ bum following the release of Between the Buttons and amidst the band’s lengthy legal trouble, the guitarist started looking for ways to capture what he was playing. To mimic the grainy soundscape of the blues records he was studying at the time, Richards employed a Phillips compact cassette recorder, which was still relatively new technology at the time. In doing so, Richards explained in his memoir, Life, “I’d discovered a new sound I could get out of acoustic guitar.”
“Playing acoustic, you’d overload the Philips cassette player to the point of distortion so that when it played back, it was effectively an electric guitar. You were using the cassette player as a pickup and amplifier at the same time. We were forcing acoustic guitars through a cassette player, and what came out the other end was electric as hell.” This new technique led to Richards writing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Street Fighting Man” on acoustic guitar. When the time came to record them in the studio, “Both acoustics were put through a Phillips cassette recorder. Just jam the mic right in the guitar and play it back through an extension speaker.”
Just like that, the Rolling Stones’ creative and professional plateau started to give way to a new level of sound, style, and fame. With albums like Beggars Banquet from 1968 and Let It Bleed from 1969, the band was no longer at risk of being left behind in the 1960s. And indeed, it would appear that no decade is capable of holding back the Rolling Stones, even at the time of this writing in the 2020s.
Photo by Mark and Colleen Hayward/Redferns