Talk is Cheap, Settling Scores is even Cheaper

Few things are certain in this world. Air, water, the sun,my affection for Keith Richards, to name a few. 

While I have become too busy to keep up with my writing the way I wish I could, it would be borderline sacrilegious if I didn’t write about quite possibly my favorite subject, especially for such a holiday as his birthday. 

For his 80th birthday, I wrote about Keith Richards the cultural figure. Everything he has come to represent and how much of it is true, focusing on aspects of his career I feel is overlooked in how much people chose to sensationize someone who needs no such thing. Last year I dissected his songwriting within The Rolling Stones, one of the most beautiful and overlooked lyrical catalogs in the whole game. So what could I possibly focus on this year? Do I have more to say about Keith Richards? 

Of course I do. You know I do. 

This year I want to focus on his solo work, an output I find so delicious yet criminally underrated. 

To understand Keith’s solo career you must see all its false starts. Back in 1966, his name was falsely attributed to an orchestral album by Andrew Oldham, marking what could be considered his first solo album. I say it could be because he simply had nothing to do with the album past his name and likeness being plastered on the cover, but if we’re being technical we’ll pretend. Then you had his work with Ronnie Wood on his solo albums, works he got so involved in he was ditching Stones sessions and being offered lead vocals on someone else's solo album. He did guest work just like the rest of the Stones as well, on many reggae albums and often with a fair amount of hiding on his part.

Keith’s solo work really begins in the late 1980s, right on the cusp of what was about to be the breakup of The Rolling Stones. While every other member of the band had already released at least one solo album each, Keith dug his heels in the ground about going down with The Stones ship no matter what. He had always been instrumental to their sound, quite honestly whatever work he was interested in doing was what the band ended up doing, his inclinations were usually the driving force behind their experimentation. Anything people typically used solo albums for - experimentation, deviation of a typical sound, jam tracks - Keith already did with The Stones. He didn’t need an escape from what was essentially his band, until it came to prove something. 

In the mid-1980s, Mick Jagger began his efforts to be seen as a serious solo artist. He’s still on this journey today, unaware that it will never quite happen for him. He began to denounce The Stones in his press junkets, saying he wanted to put it in the past, that the band was a milestone around his neck. He wanted to do something new and different, you know? Create some of the cheesiest, most forgettable 80s slop the world has ever heard, completely devoid of any personality that could make it a worthy piece of art. Maybe I’m harsh, as I refuse to listen to a full album of his solo work, but from the stuff I’ve heard I fear I can’t be far off. It lacks anything that makes Mick Jagger interesting in any sort of way, no clever lyrics about human history, no off-kilter vocal performances, no earth-shatteringly great play-off of his backing musicians. It highlights everything wrong with Mick Jagger outside The Rolling Stones: he’s not quite good at anything, is he? 

He sure thought he was though, and for some unbeknownst reason to me so the 80s record-buying public. His debut solo album, She’s The Boss was a top 40 hit! For who? I urge anyone to name one song on that album. I imagine it only sold so well because people were intrigued about what Mick Jagger would do without The Rolling Stones, but still… who has ever thought about it twice past the man himself and maybe Jann Wenner in a wet dream. The point is - Mick’s solo work even doing moderately well was a bad sign for the group, as his big head was at risk of getting larger. While Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood had both released multiple solo albums by this point, it wasn’t enough to set them up to be major solo stars, Mick’s success did have the numbers for it. It left the band in an odd spot, Jagger talking all this time away to focus on what he deemed more important left them without a vital part of their infrastructure. It of course didn’t help Mick refused to tour in the late 80s, causing what Keith lovingly deems “World War III”. 

Anyone with any sort of care for The Rolling Stones knows about World War III, so I won’t really cover it here. All you have to know is that when Mick started to publicly denounce the Stones, Keith began the tirade he remains on today of never letting that man forget what made him famous. After near decades of refusing to release solo music, Keith was finally locked in a spot where it became his only choice if he wanted to release any music. The Stones were shut down and you cannot keep that man from music. Okay, with all that lead up out of the way I can FINALLY talk about the album. 

Talk is Cheap was released in October of 1988, and if I need to be honest, is one of my favorite eras of Keith’s career to talk about. 

There’s something so defiant about it all, even in his 40s rock and roll oozed from each facet of the albums rollout and release. It didn’t feel tacky like so many rock stars did in the 1980s, and it didn’t feel like he was trying hard to get a hit out of any of it. The imagery for the album focusing closely on what made his persona pop out even after all these years: the album cover a stark portrait of the man looking down the barrel of a camera, cigarette in one hand and the other draped on his shoulder. The composition makes you look at the left hand first, his wedding band right in eye sight as the infamous skull ring looms in the back, the reality and legend in one simple image. Even down to the album title looking like ripped newspaper along the corner, playing into the knowledge that the tabloids have run his public persona more than he ever has. It’s so fucking cool. 

His interviews for the album consisted of him talking openly about why he was even doing it: he was hurt by Mick going solo and decided to get even. Each interview is a fascinating look into him as a person, for maybe the first time he wasn’t faking anything for the press. He didn’t hide that he was upset with how he was being treated, he ushered in conversations about why these things happened, how he wouldn’t have ever done it if he wasn’t pushed away from what he viewed as his safe space. The way he talks, and honestly always has, showcases such a delicate portrait of a man who's always been just a touch too sensitive for the world he entered, too hopeless and idealistic for his own good. 

The songs reflect this ideal too. Many of the songs focus on a sweetness that had become obsolete in the Stones' music. Make No Mistake is one of his most beautiful ballads, No words can convey your lips melting into mine is one of his all-timer romantic lines to me, whereas How I Wish carries one of his saddest sets of lyrics to such an upbeat melody. If I could kiss you, caress you now and again, just to thrill you I’d do life over again. Take It So Hard is the fan favorite of the track list, I personally find it to just be okay compared to so much of phenomenal work on the album. I’ve always found his ballads to be better than his more straight-forward rock songs, they feel less like they are filling a quota of what people expect of Big-Scary Rock Star Keith Richards and more like what the artist underneath it all really wants to be making. 

To me the centerpiece of the album, and maybe his whole solo career, will always be You Don’t Move Me, what one could call his diss track to one Mick Jagger. I think calling it a diss track does a disservice to the song, while yes it does take some incredibly funny digs at Mick, it’s more about how Keith feels because of that. It isn’t so much a ‘you did wrong’ song as it is a ‘look what your actions have done’. Towards the end, he sings No matter how you flip that dime, on our side is time. It takes its low blows, but where it really sets itself apart is the moments where it becomes unflinching in its take downs: One face so seamy, the other don’t see me or How are you going to keep your wealth, can’t even defend yourself are lines that let us into this scorn. Keith’s writing has always been less about being the flashiest or the best, but about how he is able to convey the emotions he does. It’s never a simple explanation, but a grand gesture to showcase each step. Think Wild Horses: he didn’t just say he loved his newborn, he wrote that wild horses could never drag him away. His lyrics are always about so much more than they initially set out to be, never falling for the trappings of what would make it the most popular song. 

The album didn’t really take-off. It didn’t chart top 40 or even really make a dent to people outside of the Stones circle, but its impact was felt for the band. It didn’t capture the general public, but its success with fans showcased that maybe the most important thing about The Stones wasn’t what so many thought for so long. The stories of excess and depravity fueled their legend and Mick Jagger became one of the most famous names of the 20th century, but The Rolling Stones heart and soul came from one Keith Richards. He could sell out any theater, full to the brim with people not there to see what he could without the Stones but to see HIM, as an artist in his own individual right. It’s quite possibly the biggest, most authentic fuck you to Mick Jagger that it could’ve been. Chart success and hit songs meant nothing if people couldn’t connect to the figure in front of them, and who is the most respected character in rock and roll? The man with a thousand imitators who will never once capture what has made him last so long as the coolest motherfucker of all time. 

Talk is Cheap might have come about for petty reasons, but it proved something about Keith Richards that any person ever really focusing on him could see: that his integrity could make anyone feel small. Everything about the creation of Talk is Cheap and its rollout was authentically Keith, not concerned about how it may be viewed just existing in its own honest way. It proved that Keith didn’t need the Stones as much as it may have seemed, but that they needed him. I mean, I always knew this, but it’s important that other people figured it out too. I was going to talk about his other two solo albums, but I think I’ll close this one out here, leaving my dissection of Main Offender for a later date. It deserves its own post, as does Crosseyed Heart.

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This post is a tad messy, and if I need be honest, not something I'm even entirely happy posting. I'll probably go back in a few months and spruce it up, add photos and videos, direct quotes of what I'm referencing. I just really wanted to post something today, for a person so important to my writing and the joy I get from it.

Maybe when I come back to this and actually edit it, I'll even add my ruminations on the rest of his solo catalog too. No promises as to when, just soon. Hope you all can forgive the messiness of this all and I look forward to writing again in the new year!