I don’t know why I am thinking about Keith Richards today, but I am. I guess he is one of those famous musicians I would actually enjoy sitting and talking with (and unfortunately, B.B. King is dead). I have long had this kind of fantasy of running into a celebrity after being bumped up to first class on a flight. Nobody in particular, and nothing to talk about in particular, but just a friendly chat. It’s a little pathetic, I know, but somehow this feels validating for me.

With Mr. Richards it would be cool to talk books with him. I’ll bet he has a lot to say. This is one aspect of musicians’ lives that fascinates me the most: what are their intellectual interests, and how have those interests informed their lives as artists. This is what fascinates me the most about Sun Ra and Fela - both were intellectuals in their own right, talking to and with their audiences about the ideas they encounter. Sun Ra went as far as to call himself primarily a teacher, and only secondarily a musician, while Fela apparently would lay out a bunch of books on a table at the Afrika Shrine and lend them to audience members who engaged him in discussion before and after his performances. This is the kind of stuff that really sparks my interest in musicians - the background information that feeds the art.

I have a feeling that Mr. Richards - I don’t know him so I will not call him Keith - would be one of those musicians for whom self-education is important to their development as an artist. And by self-education I am not meaning to imply that musicians in general do not pursue formal education. Fela got a degree in music education from I-forget-which-university in London, and Sun Ra completed part of a degree at Alabama A & M. But especially with those two musicians their real learning seems to have taken place on their own. Sun Ra was a public library junkie who dealt with chronic sleeplessness by reading anything he could get his hands on related to his interests in spirituality, history, and music. Fela probably read less, but was a big proponent of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. I have a photo somewhere of Fela reading to an audience during one of his yabis performances.

The funny thing about my interest in Keith Richards, though, is that I am only a lukewarm fan of the Rolling Stones. I feel like their music has had some highs, a lot of lows, and yet they are still written and talked about as being one of the “greatest bands” of rock and roll. Rock and roll, to me, shouldn’t be about celebrity. One of the things I admire most about Mr. Richards is not his celebrity, but rather his musicality. The guy still swings when he plays guitar. I wish more rock and roll would pick up on that kind of syncopation. Most pop and rock music these days is very metronomic. I don’t know if that has to do with people recording to click tracks or what - I suspect that’s the case. It is a struggle for many musicians to find the right rhythmic feel when playing along with a metronome.

I understand the need for click tracks, especially when working with other musicians doing overdubs. But one of the things I love about Miles Davis’s 1950s recordings, for instance, is the fact that you can hear subtle tempo changes over the course of a tune. That kind of temporal and rhythmic flexibility is missing from most music these days.