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Keith Richards Net Worth

What Is Keith Richards Worth?

Keith Richards's Net Worth is $340 million

1955-1959

Richards attended Wentworth Primary School with Mick Jagger and was his neighbour until 1954, when the family moved. From 1955 to 1959 he attended Dartford Technical High School for Boys. Recruited by Dartford Tech’s choirmaster, R. W. “Jake” Clare, Richards sang in a trio of boy sopranos at, among other occasions, Westminster Abbey for Queen Elizabeth II.

In 1959 Richards was expelled from Dartford Tech for truancy and transferred to Sidcup Art College, where he met Dick Taylor. At Sidcup he was diverted from his studies proper and devoted more time to playing guitar with other students in the boys’ room. At this point Richards had learned most of Chuck Berry’s solos.

Richards met Jagger on a train as Jagger was heading for classes at the London School of Economics.The mail-order rhythm & blues albums from Chess Records by Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters that Jagger was carrying revealed a mutual interest  and led to a renewal of their friendship. Along with mutual friend Dick Taylor, Jagger was singing in an amateur band: Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, which Richards soon joined. The Blues Boys folded when Brian Jones, after sharing thoughts on their joint interest in the blues music, invited Mick and Keith to the Bricklayers Arms pub, where they then met Ian Stewart.

1962-1968

By mid-1962 Richards had left Sidcup Art College to devote himself to music and moved into a London flat with Jagger and Jones. His parents divorced about the same time, resulting in his staying close to his mother and remaining estranged from his father until 1982.[3]:327–328

After the Rolling Stones signed to Decca Records in 1963 their band manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, dropped the s from Richards’ surname believing that “Keith Richard”, in his words, “looked more pop”. In the late 1970s Richards re-established the s in his surname.

 

Chris Spedding calls Richards’ guitar playing “direct, incisive and unpretentious”. Richards says he is focused on chords and rhythms while avoiding flamboyant and competitive virtuosity by not trying to be the “fastest gun in the west.  Richards prefers teaming with at least one other guitarist and has almost never toured without one. Chuck Berry has been an inspiration for Richards, and with Jagger, he introduced Berry’s songs to the Rolling Stones’ early repertoire. In the late 1960s Jones’ declining contributions led Richards to record all guitar parts on many tracks, including slide guitar. Jones’ replacement Mick Taylor played guitar with the Rolling Stones from 1969 to 1974. Taylor’s virtuosity on lead guitar led to a pronounced separation between lead and rhythm guitar roles, most notably onstage.  In 1975 Taylor was replaced by Wood, whose arrival marked a return to a guitar interplay Richards called “the ancient art of weaving,” which he and Jones had gleaned from the Chicago Blues artists.

A break in touring during 1967-1968 allowed Richards to focus on open tunings. Richards primarily used open tunings for fingered chording developing a distinctive style of syncopated and ringing I-IV chording heard on “Street Fighting Man” and “Start Me Up”.]Richards’ favoured — but not exclusively used — open tuning is a five-string open G tuning: GDGBD. This tuning removes the low sixth string, which would normally be tuned to D in a six string G tuning, as the root note is on the 5th string, and the lower note just “gets in the way” of Richards’ own playing, as well as the bass player’s. Several of his Telecasters are tuned this way (see the “Guitars” section below). This tuning is prominent on Rolling Stones’ recordings including “Honky Tonk Women”, “Brown Sugar” and “Start Me Up”. Richards has stated that banjo tuning was the inspiration for this tuning.

Richards regards acoustic guitar as the basis for his playing, believing that the limitations of electric guitar would cause him to “lose that touch” if he stopped playing an acoustic. Richards plays acoustic guitar on many Rolling Stones’ tracks, including “Play with Fire”, “Brown Sugar” and “Angie”. All guitars on the studio versions of “Street Fighting Man” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” feature acoustic guitars overloaded to a cassette recorder, then reamped through a loudspeaker in the studio.

1978-1987

Richards has released few solo recordings. His first solo single released in 1978 was versions of Chuck Berry’s “Run Rudolph Run” and Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come”. In 1987, after Jagger pursued a solo recording and touring career, Richards formed the “X-pensive Winos” with co-songwriter and co-producer Steve Jordan, whom Richards assembled for his Chuck Berry documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Additional members of the X-pensive Winos included guitarist Waddy Wachtel, saxophonist Bobby Keys, keyboardist Ivan Neville and Charley Drayton on bass. The first Winos’ record, Talk Is Cheap, also featured Bernie Worrell, Bootsy Collins and Maceo Parker. Since its release, Talk Is Cheap has gone gold and has sold consistently. Its release was followed by the first of the two US tours Richards has done as a solo artist. Live at the Hollywood Palladium, 15 December 1988 documents the first of these tours.

1990-2000

In 1992 the Winos’ second studio record Main Offender was released, and was also followed by a tour. Although the Winos featured on both albums, they were credited to Richards as a solo artist. In the 1990s and 2000s Richards continued to contribute to a wide range of musical projects as a guest artist. A few of the notable sessions he has done include guitar and vocals on Johnnie Johnson’s 1991 release Johnnie B. Bad, which he also co-produced; and lead vocals and guitar on “Oh Lord, Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me” on the 1992 Charles Mingus tribute album Weird Nightmare. He duetted with country legend George Jones on “Say It’s Not You” on the Bradley Barn Sessions (1994); a second duet from the same sessions – “Burn Your Playhouse Down” – appeared on Jones’ 2008 release Burn Your Playhouse Down – The Unreleased Duets. He partnered with Levon Helm on “Deuce and a Quarter” for Scotty Moore’s album All the King’s Men (1997).

2005-2007

His guitar and lead vocals are featured on the Hank Williams tribute album Timeless (2001) and on veteran blues guitarist Hubert Sumlin’s album About Them Shoes (2005). Richards also added guitar and vocals to Toots & the Maytals’ recording of “Careless Ethiopians” for their 2004 album True Love which won the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album. Additionally, in December of 2007 Richards released a download-only Christmas-single via iTunes of “Run Rudolph Run”; and the B-side was a 2003 recorded version of the famous reggae song “Pressure Drop” featuring Toots Hibbert singing with Richards backed by original Maytals band members Jackie Jackson and Paul Douglas.

Keith Richards Biography

Born 18 December 1943) is an English guitarist, singer, songwriter, best-selling memoirist and founding member of the rock band The Rolling Stones. Rolling Stone Magazine credited Richards for “rock’s greatest single body of riffs” on guitar and ranked him 4th on its list of 100 best guitarists. Fourteen songs that Richards wrote with the Rolling Stones’ lead vocalist Mick Jagger are listed among Rolling Stone magazine’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”. The Stones are generally known for their guitar interplay of rhythm and lead (“weaving”) between Richards and Brian Jones, Mick Taylor and Ronnie Wood over the years. In spite of this, Richards plays the only guitar tracks on some of their most famous songs including “Paint It Black”, “Ruby Tuesday”, “Sympathy for the Devil”, “Gimme Shelter”, and “Angie”

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