One Track Mind: Keith Richards "Take It So Hard" (1988)

Did you care much for the eighties-version Rolling Stones? Neither did I. After Tattoo You, the World's Greatest Rock 'N' Roll Band was inconsistent, overly glossy and losing their world-renowned edge. By 1987, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were getting on each others nerves bad and couple that with two Jagger solo albums by that time (and touring behind the second one), the group seemed headed for breakup.

Richards' response to this predicament was the most logical one: assemble his own band, one he dubbed the X-pensive Winos, and record a solo album with it.

The resulting Talk Is Cheap, returned Richards' focus and found him for the first time in a long while playing what he wanted to play and not what the crowd expected to hear. Which means it isn't a period Stones album, and in a lot of spots, isn't the Stones at all, but is an expression of Keef's fondness for rockabilly, soul and even funk. Curiously, there's not a whole lot of blues in it explicitly, but it lurks in the background. After all, blues is half of Richards' makeup (the other half being booze).

Richards and his co-songwriter and producer put together a collection of songs that display all these loves of Richards in an honest, straightforward way. Talk Is Cheap is an island of rock and roll grit in a sea of shallow glitter of the time; the album sounds even better today than it did back then.

The track from that terrific record that comes first to my mind is a single lifted from it, "Take It So Hard." It starts with a hallmark Richards' rough-n-ready riff that signals that he was reclaiming his mojo. The loose but very attuned Winos jump in with a hard-driving groove and Richards sings the tune with all of Jagger's swagger sneering attitude, if not quite his flair. Moreover, there's enough ad-libs in it to tell you he's having fun. Waddy Watchel's guitar solo in the break is one invented a couple of decades earlier by the leader. Naturally, it fits a Keith Richards song perfectly.

So, yeah, we all might poke a little fun at Richards' expense, but none of his excesses diminish his place in rock and roll history. Because Keith Richards IS rock and roll. He may have done all his best work with the Stones but when he steps out of Jagger's shadow with a good song like "Take It So Hard," that statement becomes all the more obvious.




Purchase: Keith Richards - Talk Is Cheap


"One Track Mind" is a more-or-less weekly drool over a single song selected on a whim and a short thesis on why you should be drooling over it, too.