<\/p>\n
Led by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for the past six decades, The Rolling Stones<\/a> have released 31 studio albums featuring countless iconic songs, which made them one of the best-selling bands of all time.<\/p>\n Richards created some of the most memorable and influential guitar riffs in history and had the chance to perform them thousands of times throughout his career. Yet he is not tired of playing most of them at all. In fact, he once revealed which guitar riff he would choose if he were allowed to play only one for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n The guitar riff Keith Richards would pick if he could play only one<\/p>\n Keith Richards\u2019 choice was \u201cFlash\u201d, which is the way he usually refers to \u201cJumpin\u2019 Jack Flash\u201d, one of their biggest hits. \u201cThese crucial, wonderful riffs that just came, I don\u2019t know where from. I\u2019m blessed with them and I can never get to the bottom of them. When you get a riff like \u2018Flash\u2019 you get a great feeling of elation, a wicked glee. Of course, then comes the other thing of persuading people that it is as great as you actually know it is. You have to go through the pooh-pooh. \u2018Flash\u2019 is basically \u2018Satisfaction\u2019 in reverse. Nearly all of these riffs are closely related.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut if someone said, \u2018You can play only one of your riffs ever again,\u2019 I\u2019d say, \u2018OK, give me \u2018Flash.\u2019 I love \u2018Satisfaction\u2019 dearly and everything, but those chords are pretty much a de rigueur course as far as songwriting goes. But \u201cFlash\u201d is particularly interesting. \u201cIt\u2019s allllll right now.\u2019 It\u2019s almost Arabic or very old, archaic, classical. The chord setups you could only hear in Gregorian chants or something like that.\u201d<\/p>\n He continued:<\/p>\n \u201cAnd it\u2019s that weird mixture of your actual Rock and Roll. At the same time this weird echo of very, very ancient music that you don\u2019t even know. It\u2019s much older than I am, and that\u2019s unbelievable! It\u2019s like a recall of something. I don\u2019t know where it came from,\u201d Keith Richards said in his biography \u201cLife\u201d.<\/p>\n As Keith Richards has said over the years, song ideas just come into his head. They flow naturally and he channels them into his guitar. He already explained that the guitar parts seem to come from somewhere he still doesn\u2019t know and cannot explain.<\/p>\n The song was released by The Stones almost 60 years ago, in 1968. But to this day still is a song Keith looks forward to playing. \u201cBut that song has got a lovely spirit on it and it\u2019s a joy to play\u2026 for all of its limitations\u2026 in the musical sense, the wonderful rhythmic possibilities still keep you interested. The thing is, with a good song I find, you ask, \u2018Hey, do you look forward to playing it the 500th time?\u2019 (laughs) And if you do, then it\u2019s a good song.\u201d Richards said in an interview with Uncut<\/a> in 2025.<\/p>\n How Keith Richards\u2019 gardener inspired \u201cJumpin\u2019 Jack Flash\u201d<\/p>\n The lyrics to a song can be inspired by anything a songwriter experiences and curiously Keith Richards and Mick Jagger<\/a> got the idea for \u201cJumpin\u2019 Jack Flash\u201d from Richards\u2019 former gardener, Jack Dyer. In the late 1960s, the musicians were at Keith\u2019s house in the south of England, where they had been up all night writing. It was raining heavily when the first rays of sunlight began to appear and Dyer arrived for work wearing rubber boots.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Jumpin\u2019 Jack Flash\u2019 comes from this guy, Jack Dyer, who was my gardener \u2013 an old English yokel. Mick (Jagger) and I were in my house down in the south of England. We\u2019d been up all night; the sky was just beginning to go gray. It was pissing down raining \u2013 if I remember rightly. Mick and I were sitting there, and suddenly Mick starts up. Because he hears these great footsteps, these great rubber boots \u2013 slosh, slosh, slosh \u2013 going by the window.\u201d<\/p>\n He continued:<\/p>\n \u201cHe said, \u2018What\u2019s that?\u2019 And I said, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s Jack. That\u2019s jumpin\u2019 Jack.\u2019 We had my guitar in open tuning, and I started to fool around with that. [singing] \u2018Jumpin\u2019 Jack\u2026\u2019 and Mick says, \u2018Flash. He\u2019d just woken up. Suddenly we had this wonderful alliterative phrase. So he woke up and we knocked it together,\u201d Keith Richards said.<\/p>\n Besides Mick and Keith, at the time the band also had Charlie Watts<\/a>, Bill Wyman<\/a> and Brian Jones. Rocky Dijon played the maracas, Ian Stewart recorded the piano and Jimmy Miller the backing vocals. It became a number one hit in the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and more. In the United States the track peaked at number 3 on the Hot 100 chart.<\/p>\n Keith said that playing that song live is like releasing \u201ca tiger\u201d into the audience<\/p>\n Although The Rolling Stones have a huge number of incredible songs to choose to play live, \u201cJumpin\u2019 Jack Flash\u201d is actually the one the band played the most during their career. According to Setlist FM<\/a>, they performed that track live more than 1200 times, leaving behind \u201cHonky Tonky Women\u201d, \u201cTumbling Dice\u201d, \u201cBrown Sugar\u201d and \u201c(I Can\u2019t Get No) Satisfaction\u201d.<\/p>\n In the interview with Uncut<\/a> in 2025, Keith compared playing that track with releasing \u201ca tiger\u201d. \u201cFor me, to play \u2018Jumpin\u2019 Jack Flash\u2019 onstage, it\u2019s like, \u2018Let me at \u2019em.\u2019 It\u2019s like, \u2018Let the tiger out!\u2019 And you still find, like, new ways of moving the riff around and it\u2019s just got one of those great immediate bangs on it. You can\u2019t go wrong once you\u2019ve kicked it off. Then you just sort of hold onto its tail and he kind of takes you,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n 18 years after the song was released, Keith produced Aretha Franklin<\/a>\u2018s version of the song. But first he made a deal with her, saying he would only play in the song if she played the piano, because he always thought she also was an incredible pianist. Curiously, besides Keith, Ronnie Wood<\/a> also played the guitar and Steve Jordan, who replaced Charlie Watts in the Stones after his death, played the drums on that cover.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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