Keith Richards Said John Lennon Used to Play Guitar Like a ‘Silly Sod’
Keith Richards met John Lennon in the early 1960s when both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were rising to fame. They both rose to considerable success, and they were friends, despite rumors of a feud between their two bands. Early in their careers, Richards explained that he offered Lennon advice on how to be a better musician. He shared what Lennon was doing wrong.
Keith Richards gave John Lennon advice at how to play guitar
Richards and Lennon were both accomplished musicians, but Richards revealed that Lennon originally had an unusual method of playing guitar.
“I liked John a lot,” Richards wrote in his memoir Life. “He was a silly sod in many ways. I used to criticize him for wearing his guitar too high. They used to wear them up by their chests, which really constricts your movement. It’s like being handcuffed. ‘Got your f***ing guitar under your f***ing chin, for Christ’s sake. It ain’t a violin.’ I think they thought it was a cool thing. Gerry & the Pacemakers, all of the Liverpool bands did it.”
Richards advised him to get a longer guitar strap, and Lennon listened.
“We used to f*** around like that: ‘Try a longer strap, John. The longer the strap, the better you play.’ I remember him nodding and taking it in,” Richards wrote. “Next time I saw them the guitar straps were a little lower. I’d say, no wonder you don’t swing, you know? No wonder you can only rock, no wonder you can’t roll.”
Keith Richards and John Lennon once went on a road trip together
In the years after giving this advice, Richards and Lennon’s relationship grew closer. They had a unique bonding experience in the form of an “acid-fueled road trip” that Lennon could barely remember.
“It took in, I thought, Torquay and Lyme Regis over what seemed like a two- or three-day period with a chauffeur,” Richards wrote. “Johnny and I were so out there that sometimes years later, in New York, he would ask, ‘What happened on that trip?'”
A chauffeur drove them around the countryside. They visited Lennon’s wife, Cynthia, went to a restaurant that refused to serve them, and drove around for several lost hours.
“There follow therefore some missing hours, because we didn’t get back to John’s house until after dark. There were palm trees, so it looks as if we sat on the Torquay palm-lined esplanade for a great many hours, engrossed in a little world of our own. We got home, and so everyone was happy. It was one of those cases of John wanting to do more drugs than me.”
The Rolling Stones guitarist said he felt stunned when he heard The Beatle had died
Richards and Lennon remained friends for years. The Rolling Stones guitarist said he felt devastated by Lennon’s death in 1980.
“I was downtown on Fifth Avenue in New York,” he told The Guardian in 2000. “The first bit of news I got, I thought: ‘He’ll make it. It’s just a flesh wound.’ And then, later on, the news really came. He wasn’t just a mate of mine, he was a mate of everybody’s, really. He was a funny guy. And you realize that you’re stunned. You really don’t believe it. And you think, ‘God, why can’t I do anything about it?’ I got well drunk on it. And I had another one for John.”
