Keith Richards

The guitarist on new Stones music, his songwriting process, and that time Chuck Berry threw him offstage

The guitarist on new Stones music and the uprising for black lives.

It’s late september, and Keith Richards is back at work after a six-month pause. He boasts that his temperature clocked in at 97.8 degrees when he arrived at a Manhattan studio to resume work on the next Rolling Stones album. “At the moment, I’m just overjoyed to be working,” he says. “There’s not a lot of work out there, you know?”

Earlier this year, the

Stones released “Living in a Ghost Town” from the sessions, and he and Mick Jagger have been writing remotely — Richards in the U.S. and Jagger in Europe. “We’re communicating from across the Atlantic and waiting for a vaccine,” Richards says, then jokes, “I have thousands of songs. I got enough to keep me busy.”

Another project that has occupied his time is a box set rerelease of Live at the Hollywood Palladium, recorded during a 1988 show with his solo band, the X-Pensive Winos. “The Winos have a special place in the heart of the old Keith,” he says. “At the time, I had no idea that album was actually recorded. I was so glad that suddenly, ‘Hey, we had that one.’ There’s a great band on it.”

You’re working on Stones music, and you’ll soon be meeting up with the Winos’ Steve Jordan as well. How are you challenging yourself musically these days?

I gave up challenging myself. This is a funny year, man. They haven’t made one like it before. So this is all improvisation and just figuring out.

What’s been the hardest part of quarantining?

There are no crowds. It’s a damn hassle for a band.

But hey, it’s young bands that are cut off from doing their gigs, the bambambam. It’s a hard pull, this one. Somehow, we got to get around it, because what we do is play music to people.

On Live at the Hollywood Palladium, you joke that you’ve been thrown off the Palladium stage before. Chuck Berry tossed you off that stage in 1972, though he later claimed he didn’t recognize you. Is that what you were referencing on the live album?

Yes, yes, yes. I’ve almost thrown Chuck off, too [ laughs]. Chuck and I had a real relationship. We ended up loving each other, but we had to show we really didn’t like each other, because . . . I don’t know why. I was so proud to work with that man.

You have always been a champion for black musicians and black artists.

They’re the reason I’m here.

What do you make of the Black Lives Matter protests around the world?

It’s about bloody time. In this country, things are coming to a head. That’s the way it is. You got to deal with it. It’s difficult for me to talk about it, because I am not an American. I live here, I am — in heart and soul — one of you, but I can’t interfere. I’m like Putin: I refuse to interfere in your electoral process.

Talk Is Cheap, which you released in 1988, was your first solo album. What were the biggest lessons that you took into it from working with Mick all those years?

A sense of relief, actually [ laughs]. No, it was just different. It’s fantastic to be in the Stones, but it’s also a monster. And I think around this time that I did this, and Mick did his . . . whatever he did, we just felt the need to sort of just work outside of the factory for a while, that we’d come back and then it would help the Stones. And it did. I guess we just needed to blow it off, man.

One of the bonus tracks on this reissue is “You Don’t Move Me,” which at the time seemed to be directed at Mick. What are the boundaries you have to respect to kind of keep the peace these days?

Oh, there are no boundaries. There’ll always be another screw-up. Don’t worry about it; it’s the Rolling Stones for Christ’s sake [ laughs]. The weirdest thing is that when I wrote “You Don’t Move Me,” actually it wasn’t about what everybody thinks it’s about. I won’t mention her name, all right?

Is there much new rock & roll that’s moving you lately?

There is no new rock & roll [ laughs]. It’s pointless. There’s great musicians and some great singers and stuff. Unfortunately, to me, in music, it’s been synthesized to death, and once you start synthesizing things, you’re not getting the real thing.

But I don’t want to go into a long discourse on what’s wrong with synthesizers and music these days, except to say they’re cheap and corny [ laughs].

Generally speaking, what rules do you live by?

As few as possible, my boy.

What about when writing songs?

When you’re writing songs, there are no fucking rules. In fact, you’re looking to break them. Writing songs is not about the lyrics on one side and music on another; it’s about the two coming together. And you can be a great poet and you might write some lovely music, but the art and the beauty of writing songs is to pull those two together, where they seem to love each other.

What makes a great riff?

It should be spontaneous. It just appears at your fingertips and is coming out of the instrument. And that is a great riff, totally unthought about, unstructured, no rules, no nothing. It’s just, one minute it ain’t there, and the next minute, there it is. [ Sings “Satisfaction” riff.]