Let's get this out of the way first: No, Keith Richards did not go to Switzerland to get his blood changed out, like you'd change the oil in your car.
This myth is finally laid to rest in Richards' intelligent and well-written memoirs Life, out this year. The story came from an off-hand smart-ass remark he made to a reporter as he was boarding a plane. He took a lot of strange cures and went cold turkey numerous times, but nothing got him off junk until he finally decided he'd had enough.
The story of the band's early years, the personal stuff about who was shtupping who, the situation with Brian Jones and the stuff about the drugs is all in there, but to me it's the music that matters and Life delivers on that topic as well. The Stones' influences, their songwriting process and how they achieved their signature sound are all revealed in Keith's book. Some of it I'd read elsewhere but it's always best straight from the source.
The thing to keep in mind is that the Rolling Stones were a guitar band, a blues-based guitar band. Here's Keith :
Mick and Keith got reacquainted on a train when Keith noticed that Mick had some blues records that he had ordered direct from Chess in Chicago. Records like that were unobtainable in English record stores. A lot of bands in England were doing some faux-hillbilly stuff called skiffle but there was a hard-core blues scene as well. And they were purists. I had been listening to Muddy Waters' electric Chicago blues for years before I even knew that he played delta-style acoustic. Keith recounts a Muddy Waters show in England where Muddy did the first set acoustic and then came out plugged-in for the second. He was booed by the purists. It was exactly the same as when the folk purists booed Dylan at Newport and Pete Seeger went looking for an axe to cut the power cable. You can see the same thing in the movie Don't Look Back, about Dylan's first London shows. The thing is, to a player, Chuck Berry's rock and roll music is blues, a shuffle in I-IV-V. Keith didn't see the distinction.
The Stones covered a lot of Chuck Berry stuff but Keef's favorite player is Robert Johnson, who he compares to Bach. It's a valid comparison. Playing Love in Vain solo takes about the same guitar skills as Bach's Cello Prelude No.1. Here's Keith taking a stab at Johnson's 32-20 Blues:
Richards explain the band's song writing process too. Their manager, seeing that Lennon and McCartney were writing their own songs, really did lock Mick and Keith up in the kitchen until they wrote something. The first substantial check they ever got was for writing As Tears Go By for Marianne Faithful. The first song they ever felt confident giving to the band was The Last Time. Some songs were written independently. Keith wrote Wild Horses for his son as he was leaving on tour. But, mostly, it went like this: Keith would come up with the guitar lick and a first line with a suggested melody. It was Mick's job to flesh out the lyrics. For example, for Honky Tonk Women, Keith gave him the chords and "I met a fucking bitch in somewhere city" and Mick did the rest. You can hear that process in the recording of All Down the Line below. It was made in '68 but didn't appear on record until Exile ... in '72. The guitar is acoustic and Mick still doesn't have the lyrics down.
What I most wanted to learn about was the "classic period", that time between Jumpin' Jack Flash in '68 and Exile on Main Street. What accounts for that sound, that classic, grungy quintessential Stones sound. Keith says it's all down to the tuning, the open G. He learned it from Ry Cooder, who is still bitter, by the way, and thinks he should have gotten song writing credit for Honky Tonk Women. As Keith explains it, the open G tuning had mostly been used by slide players. His innovation was to finger chords in it. He called it his "five-string", because he took the bottom string off, and it was the basis for that classic sound. The tuning is G-D-G-B-D. There's only three notes in it, so you get all kinds of cool harmonies and drone sounds. All the best stuff is played in that tuning and that's why cover bands have trouble reproducing the sound. You just can't do it in concert tuning. Richards says that once Waddy Wachtell , touring with Linda Robstadt, visited him in London. Waddy saw the Strat with five strings and asked: "What's that". Says Keith: "That's my thing, my sound". He explained it and Waddy said: "No wonder I can't make my Stones covers sound right".
Well, there's my final diary for DK3. I hope you enjoyed it and remember, if you don't like the Rolling Stones, you don't like Rock & Roll.