Keith Richards on the Blues – Collection of Quotes

What was it about Waters, and that generation of bluesmen, that fascinated him so much? Keith shakes his head.
“I don’t know. It just struck the chord in here somewhere. You heard it and all the breath left your body and you were…anything to be able to approach that. Wherever he is, I wanna be, you know? That solidness, that hint of knowing far more than you ought to know, and power. Just such maleness, y’know. You felt, ‘That’s a man.’ And he lived up to it personally. He was such a very gentle guy, and that’s a real man. It’s very strange in that way, nearly all those guys had a certain streak of self-assurance, just steadiness about them, about what they know and how they’re gonna do it. Nearly all of the blues guys, the old cats that I ever met, were also very humble, no side on ’em. Just straight up.”

Listen to John Lee Hooker. His is a very archaic form of playing. Most of the time it ignores chord changes. They’re suggested but not played. If he’s playing with somebody else, that player’s chord will change, but he stays, he doesn’t move. And it’s relentless. And the other, the most important thing apart from the great voice and that relentless guitar, was that foot stomp, a crawling king snake. He carried his own two-by-four wood block to amplify his stomps. Bo Diddley was another one who loved to do just that one elemental chord, everything on one chord, the only thing that moves is the vocal and the way you’re playing it. I really only learned more about this later on. Then there was the power in people’s voices, like Muddy, John Lee, Bo Diddley. It wasn’t loud, necessarily, it just came from way down deep. The whole body was involved; they weren’t just singing from the heart, they were singing from the guts. That always impressed me.

Our thing was playing Chicago blues; that was where we took everything that we knew, that was our kickoff point, Chicago. The way those artists were recorded – there were no rules. If you looked at the regular way of recording things, everything was recorded totally wrong. But what is wrong and what is right? What matters is what hits the ear. Chicago blues was so raw and raucous and energetic. If you tried to record it clean, forget about it. Nearly every Chicago blues record you hear is an enormous amount over the top, loading the sound on in layers of thickness. When you hear Little Walter’s records, he hits the first note on his harp and the band disappears until that note stops, because he’s overloading it. When you’re making records, you’re looking to distort things, basically. That’s the freedom recording gives you, to fuck around with the sound. And it’s not a matter of sheer force; it’s always a matter of experiment and playing around. Hey, this is a nice mike, but if we put it a little closer to the amp, and then take a smaller amp instead of the big one and shove the mike right in front of it, cover the mike with a towel, let’s see what we get. What you’re looking for is where the sounds just melt into one another and you’ve got that beat behind it, and the rest of it just has to squirm and roll its way through. If you have it all separated, it’s insipid. What you’re looking for is power and force, without volume–an inner power. A way to bring together what everybody in that room is doing and make one sound. So it’s not two guitars, piano, bass and drums, it’s one thing, it’s not five. You’re there to create one thing.

“I do tend to listen to what I tend to listen to. I still listen to a lot of Otis Redding and a lot of Mozart. I listen to a lot of country blues still. It still hits me as being the essence of things, somehow, and I can’t quite put my finger on it. Otherwise, new stuff…I know there are those of great talent out there. I don’t know why I’m not hearing it. To me, records are sounding synthesized. It’s all too manufactured for me at the moment. Even drum beats, where the guys do them on pianos.
I’m a very roots man. I don’t know who else has made 70 and still works, except me. I don’t know what age people were when they did things, that’s my problem. I don’t even know quite honestly how old I am. It goes on and on.”

“When we started the Rolling Stones, we were just little kids, right?”“We felt we had some of the licks down, but our aim was to turn other people on to Muddy Waters.”
Indeed, the band had formed after Richards bumped into Mick Jagger, who was carrying two albums: Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ at the Hops and The Best of Muddy Waters.
“When I got to hear Muddy Waters,” said Richards, “it all fell into place for me. He was the thing I was looking for, the thing that pulled it all in for me. When I heard him I realized the connection between all the music I’d heard. He made it all explainable. He was like a codebook. I was incredibly inspired by him as a musician.”

One of the first lessons I learned with guitar playing was that none of these guys were actually playing straight chords. There’s a throw-in, a flick-back. Nothing’s ever a straight major. It’s an amalgamation, a mangling and a dangling and a tangling thing. There is no “properly.” There’s just how you feel about it. Feel your way around it. It’s a dirty world down here. Mostly I’ve found, playing instruments, that I actually want to be playing something that should be played by another instrument. I find myself trying to play horn lines all the time on the guitar. When I was learning how to do these songs, I learned there is often one note doing something that makes the whole thing work. It’s usually a suspended chord. It’s not a full chord, it’s a mixture of chords, which I love to use to this day. If you’re playing a straight chord, whatever comes next should have something else in it. If it’s an A chord, a hint of D. Or if it’s a song with a different feeling, if it’s an A chord, a hint of G should come in somewhere, which makes a 7th, which then can lead you on. Readers who wish to can skip Keef’s Guitar Workshop, but I’m passing on the simple secrets anyway, which led to the open chord riffs of later years–the “Jack Flash” and “Gimme Shelter” ones.
There are some people looking to play guitar. There’s other people looking for a sound. I was looking for a sound when Brian and I were rehearsing in Edith Grove. Something easily done by three or four guys and you wouldn’t be missing any instruments or sound on it. You had a wall of it, in your face. I just followed the bosses. A lot of those blues players of the mid-’50s, Albert King and B.B. King, were single-note players. T-Bone Walker was one of the first to use the double- string thing–to use two strings instead of one, and Chuck got a lot out of T-Bone. Musically impossible, but it works.

We didn’t think we were ever going to do anything much except turn other people on to Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed. We had no intention of being anything ourselves. The idea of making a record seemed to be totally out of the picture. Our job at that time was idealistic. We were unpaid promoters for Chicago blues. It was terribly shining shields and everything like that. And monastic, intense study, for me at least. Everything from when you woke up to when you went to sleep was dedicated to learning, listening and trying to find some money–a division of labor. The ideal thing was, right, we’ve got enough to live on, a few bob in case of emergencies, and on top of that, beautiful, these girls come round, three or four of them, Lee Mohamed and her mates, and clear up for us, cook for us and just hang about. What the hell they saw in us at that time, I don’t know.
We didn’t have any other interests in the world except how to keep the electricity going and how to nick a few things out of the supermarket for food. Women were really third on that list. Electricity, food and then, hey, you got lucky. We needed to work together, we needed to rehearse, we needed to listen to music, we needed to do what we wanted to do. It was a mania. Benedictines had nothing on us. Anybody that strayed from the nest to get laid, or try to get laid, was a traitor. You were supposed to spend all your waking hours studying Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson. That was your gig. Every other moment taken away from it was a sin. It was that kind of atmosphere, that kind of attitude that we lived with.

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Corporate journalists have license to use their huge platforms to malign, expose and destroy anyone they want. Your moral duty: sit in respectful silence and never object.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/your-top-priority-is-the-emotional?s=r

When Hillary Clinton’s divine entitlement to the U.S. presidency began to look imperiled in 2016 — first due to the irreverent and unkempt (but surprisingly formidable) Democratic Party primary challenge from Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist Senator from Vermont — her campaign and its media allies invented and unveiled a deeply moving morality tale. A faceless horde of unnamed, uncredentialed, unmannered, violent, abusive and deeply misogynistic online Sanders supporters — dubbed with the gender-emphasizing name “Bernie Bros” even though many were women — were berating, insulting and brutalizing Hillary, her top campaign surrogates (U.S. Senators, former cabinet members, corporate executives), and especially pro-Hillary corporate journalists with a vast artillery of traumatizing words and violent tweets.

This storyline — and especially the way it cleverly inverted the David v. Goliath framework of the 2016 campaign so that it was now Hillary and her band of monied and Ivy-League-educated political and media elites who were the real victims — was irresistible to Harvard-and-Yale-trained journalists at NBC, CNN, The New York Times and Washington Post op-ed pages who really believe they are the truly marginalized peoples. This narrative scheme enabled them — the most powerful and influential media and political elites in the world, with access to the most potent platforms and megaphones — to somehow credibly lay claim to that most valued of all currencies in American political life: victimhood.

With this power matrix in place, what mattered was no longer the pain and anger of people whose towns had their industries stripped by the Clintons’ NAFTA robbery, or who worked at low-wage jobs with no benefits due to the 2008 financial crisis caused by Clintonite finance geniuses, or who were drowning in student debt with no job prospects after that crisis, or who suffered from PTSD, drug and alcohol addiction and shabby to no health care after fighting in the Clintons’ wars. Now, such ordinary people were not the victims but the perpetrators. Their anger toward elites was not valid or righteous but dangerous, abusive and toxic. The real victims were multi-millionaire hosts of MSNBC programs and U.S. Senators and New York Times columnists who were abused and brutalized by those people’s angry tweets for the crime of supporting a pioneer and avatar for marginalized people: the Wellesley-and-Yale-Law-graduate, former First Lady, Senator from New York, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The genius of the Bernie Bro rhetorical scheme was two-fold. First, it prioritized and centered elite discomfort over the far more important and real anger and deprivation of ordinary people. Secondly, and even better from the perspective of elite interests, it implicitly imposed a ban on any meaningful critiques of powerful political and media elites by insisting that the online abuse and resultant trauma they endured was the fault of those who criticized them. According to this elite-protecting script, this crisis of online abuse and trauma did not materialize out of nowhere. It was triggered by, and was the fault of, anyone who voiced criticism of those elites. By speaking ill of these media and political figures, such critics were “targeting” them and signaling that they should be attacked.

Thus, the only way to be a responsible and respectful member of society was to refrain from criticizing Hillary and her media allies. As I wrote in January, 2016 when the “Bernie Bro” manipulation was first unleashed as the Democratic primary voting cycle began:

The concoction of the “Bernie Bro” narrative by pro-Clinton journalists has been a potent political tactic — and a journalistic disgrace. It’s intended to imply two equally false claims: (1) a refusal to march enthusiastically behind the Wall Street-enriched, multiple-war-advocating, despot-embracing Hillary Clinton is explainable not by ideology or political conviction, but largely if not exclusively by sexism: demonstrated by the fact that men, not women, support Sanders (his supporters are “bros”); and (2) Sanders supporters are uniquely abusive and misogynistic in their online behavior. Needless to say, a crucial tactical prong of this innuendo is that any attempt to refute it is itself proof of insensitivity to sexism if not sexism itself (as the accusatory reactions to this article will instantly illustrate)….

But truth doesn’t matter here — at all. Instead, the goal is to inherently delegitimize all critics of Hillary Clinton by accusing them of, or at least associating them with, sexism, thus distracting attention away from Clinton’s policy views, funding, and political history and directing it toward the online behavior of anonymous, random, isolated people on the internet claiming to be Sanders supporters. It’s an effective weapon when wielded by Clinton operatives.

Thanks in part to Sanders himself — who repeatedly gave fuel to this storyline by apologizing for his supporters’ supposedly unique misconduct and chiding them for bad behavior, rather than mocking the inherently moronic idea that Sanders supporters were somehow uniquely abusive in their online conduct — this spectacle was a smashing success.

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The only reason an extended military conflict in Ukraine is possible is because it has been instigated and perpetuated by the United States. Without the endless and growing torrent of weapons and other supplies, 

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1510064917524758532.html

Andy Mok, Center for China and Globalization

The U.S. is engaging Russia in three wars. Let me discuss them in increasing order of importance and the likely repercussions on the U.S.-led global order. 

2/ The first is the military war taking place on the ground in Ukraine. Then there is the propaganda war taking place at Western media outlets like CNN and on social media platforms like Twitter. 

3/ Finally, and most significantly, there is the economic war which may accelerate the destruction of the US-led power structure that has dominated the world since the end of World War II. 

4/ The only reason an extended military conflict in Ukraine is possible is because it has been instigated and perpetuated by the United States. Without the endless and growing torrent of weapons and other supplies, 

5/ such as Stingers, Javelin missiles, Switchblade drones and the years-long surreptitious military training and likely intelligence support provided by the U.S. and its enablers in Europe, even an abbreviated military conflict in Ukraine would be unlikely. 

6/ Instead, there is widespread destruction, loss of life and growing refugee crisis that are directly and inescapably caused by U.S. intervention. But as tragic as this is, the military war is the least significant from a geopolitical perspective. 

7/ Concurrent with the military war is the propaganda war. Led by CNN and other corporate media stenographers for the U.S. government, there are two angles of attack. 

8/ The first attack claims Russia’s military operation in Ukraine is an unprovoked attack that is failing. The second attack vector is that U.S. and its Western European enablers are indivisibly allied against Russia, and world stands with these so-called defenders of freedom. 

9/ However, neither is true. Regarding the first line of attack, George Kennan, Henry Kissinger and John Mearsheimer have all warned against crossing Russian redlines in Ukraine. 

10/ But these warnings have been either inadvertently or deliberately ignored. Also, some military analysts have compared the Russian action favorably with the Nazi blitzkrieg, which is hailed as an example of a rapid and successful military offensive. 

11/ Regarding the second vector of attack, what is ignored or downplayed are the number of countries that do not support U.S.-led sanctions against Russia. 

12/ These countries include not only China but India, Iran and several other geopolitically significant nations. Indeed, from the nations of OPEC to South Asia, Africa and even Latin America, Russia has many more friends than Western media is letting on. 

13/ And this leads me to the third war, the economic one, which I believe will be most significant. The sanctions imposed on Russia are unprecedented and are meant to shock and awe the country’s President Vladimir Putin into submission. 

14/ However, they are not working as intended and have set forces in motion that may accelerate the destruction of American primacy in the global order. 

15/ As such, it brings to mind something then-U.S. President Barack Obama is alleged to have said about Joe Biden, “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to eff things up.” Specifically, freezing Russian central bank assets have shown the world 

16/ that not only is the U.S. an unreliable political actor that can engage in 180-degree policy shifts driven by the four-year presidential election cycle but that its stewardship of the global financial system is not only suspect but now demonstrably untrustworthy. 

17/ Russia’s demand for payment in rubles for its energy may only be the beginning of the flight away from the dollar. The loss of dollar hegemony will be both catastrophic for the U.S. and a cause for celebration in much of the rest of the world. 

18/ Europe imported 5.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from Russia in 2021. Disruption of these supplies and even significant prices increases will be disastrous for Europe, especially as the year progresses and cold weather returns. 

19/ And this may be the seismic fault line that shatters unity of U.S.-led coalition against Russia in irrevocable ways.

Specifically, Germany may publicly debate whether its economic fortunes are better aligned with Russia rather than under the boot of American “leadership.” 

20/ Again, the U.S.-led sanctions have unleashed forces that may ultimately undermine U.S. interests far more than its instigation of the conflict in Ukraine was intended to solve. 

21/ In summary, it is not at all clear Russia is losing these three wars. In fact, there are signs this latest US-instigated conflict may be another strategic defeat like Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. But Ukrainian conflict may be one with far longer lasting damage to US.

End 

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Could we be returning to an age of hardship? Real material hardship, I mean, not the kind of hardship that people delight to imagine themselves suffering from in order to give significance to their otherwise humdrum lives. For years, my financial adviser has been telling me that my old age is secure, but I never really believed him. The value of assets can melt away like snow in sunshine, and in certain cases assets can even become liabilities. War, inflation, economic depression, confiscatory taxes: There is no such thing as economic security. 

https://www.takimag.com/article/a-new-age-of-hardship/

Never has the contrast between the scale of world events and my own little personal concerns been so great. While millions flee bombardment, and the world economy faces implosion, with all the hardship that such an implosion will inevitably bring in its wake, I do my exercises, twice a day for twenty minutes, to avoid the muscular stiffness and joint pains that a certain minor illness from which I have begun to suffer would otherwise cause. Furthermore, I anxiously taste the fish soup that I have just made to test whether it has enough salt (God forbid it should have too much, that would be an irrecoverable disaster). My life is composed of such pettinesses. 

Of course, it wouldn’t help anyone very much if I desisted from my daily round. The bombardments and the fleeing would go on regardless. I learned, or taught myself, this lesson in personal insignificance early in my life when I was a horrible little child. I was told that I should eat up the food on my plate because there were hungry children in Africa. How, I asked, would it help them if I ate up? The potato left on my plate divided between the hungry children, even if it could be delivered to them, which seemed to be doubtful, would assuage their hunger not at all. 

I realized only decades later that I was told to eat up not to help the children in Africa, but because I should not take the food on my plate for granted. It is difficult for people who have never known shortage to imagine it. But this was not explained to me at the time, and so I was pleased with my own smart reply. 

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