(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Faysal Hassan)
Thu 15 May 2025 16:30, UK
For every seasoned musician, any friendship in the business can feel like more than being casual business partners. Anyone who has withstood the music industry for years on end could rightfully be considered immortal to some degree, so it’s nice to look at contemporaries like brothers in arms after a period of playing non-stop rock and roll. And while Keith Richards is more than happy to keep the riffs flowing in The Rolling Stones, he knew some of his friendships could be strained under the wrong circumstances.
Granted, Richards was always going to be a tough person to please in the world of rock and roll. He was always an avid fan of everything from rock to blues to country, but if he saw anything that was pandering or too flashy, it wasn’t that hard for him to express his disapproval, even when it was coming from people like Mick Jagger when working on their disco material like ‘Miss You’.
But when the band was first forming, the British R&B scene was already becoming the biggest thing in music. Everyone was following in the footsteps of what The Beatles and The Stones were doing, and Pete Townshend was convinced that he needed to dream even bigger than both bands when working on his material for The Who.
The power behind Richards’s snarling guitar was certainly great, but that was never enough for Townshend. He wanted to take the listener on a journey, and throughout records like Tommy and Quadrophenia, he made sure that he had told a completely different narrative from the standard blues rock that The Stones were doing at the time. It was easy for Richards to observe from afar, but the worst thing that Townshend could have done was run off with a member of his team.
Since the entire band behaved like a tight-knit unit, there was no room for error whenever Richards was playing. He had already suffered through the headache of having to deal with replacing guitar players like Brian Jones and Mick Taylor, but by the time that Townshend stripped him of one of his roadies, Alan Rogan, Richards was livid when he tried to talk to The Who’s mastermind afterwards.
By the time the dust had settled, Townshend and Richards were hardly on speaking terms, with Keef saying, “Last time I spoke to him, I called him a creep. I feel real bad about it. It was the middle of the [’82 European] tour, and he lent me [roadie] Alan Rogan, great guy, great guitar wizard, and halfway through the tour, he pulled him out, which is why I called him a creep. In Europe, I said, ‘You promised if I could have him, I could have him for my whole tour.’ ‘No, I didn’t.’ ‘Oh, you creep.’ Bang! Slam the phone down. That’s the last time I spoke to Pete. So I don’t know how he feels about me now.”
While there is always going to be those handful of dust-ups in rock history, it’s not like Townshend was going to forget the influence that Richards gave to him. After all, he had stolen his trademark windmill technique from Richards to begin with, so it was the least he could do to lend him one of his roadies to look after some of the guitars behind the scenes.
But let this be a lesson to anyone who tries to cross Richards in anything that he does. He has the soft, tender side when he wants to, but it’s not a mistake that he has a song in his back catalogue that says playing with him is like playing with fire.
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