One day in May 2019, I was helping my teacher from LACC, Los Angeles City College, Dr. Marc Blake with his yard, and I thought about all the funny meme's that are written about one Mr. Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones and wondered, "Has anyone ever wrote a song like that?" When I realized no one had, I thought I'd better be the one to write it, and wrote it there. I came up with the chorus, "Nothing can kill, Keith Richards..." first. A couple weeks went by, and the rest of it came to me all at once. Then since I was still in Dr. Blake's Electronic Music Pro Tools Class, I started working on the demo. Instinctively I knew it had to be a punk rock song, and I based the basic idea off the cover of the song Helpless by Diamond Head from Metallica off the Garage Days Re-Revisited album. The drumbeat Lars Ulrich used powered the writing of this song, but since I meant it to celebrate the comedy of Keith's continued existence any way he wants, I wrote in the key of G major, that fast, and based the lyrics off of how successful and tough he is, and thus, there is the song.
Then when the demo was done, a very strange miracle happened. I once had a friend, who's not a friend anymore because he threw me out of his place and punched me in the face, who got to wait on Keith via room service in a hotel he was in. He loved the song, and told Keith about it, so Keith wrote me a note that said "Matt, let me hear it! Keith Richards" so with this friend's help, I went to kinko's, and typed Keith a letter, and then burned a copy of the demo, and he handed it to him. After that, the next day, Keith wrote me back a thank you note that said "Dear Matty O', thanks for the record! It's not often you hear a song about yourself!! Stay Safe, Keith Richards"
A month later while visiting my mom, I called Keith's manager, Jane Rose, and asked her a lot of questions. She said Keith got a big laugh out of it, and that it was a good track! She also said however that the band would not be playing the song, and I would not get to play the song for Keith live, but a miracle can only go so far. I was happy to hear what I heard, and I'm still very proud of it!
The finished version is now being produced by one Jeff Moleski, who produced 30 songs for The Smashing Pumpkins, as well as 5 songs off my debut album Gullible's Travels. He is mixing it down to 2 inch tape, through a Neve VR 72 board, and through many vintage tube pre amps and compressors. He played drums on it and had a friend of his ad bass guitar, and somehow has re amped the software guitar tracks through his killer tube amps, and it should and will sound a lot better!
There were 2 mistakes on the demo that Keith heard. The first and most glaring, was that I quoted a snippet of the Rolling Stones song Brown Sugar, in the first of the 2 guitar solos. Keith did not write Brown Sugar, Mick
I am really looking forward to the finished version! I will have to get the cd burner of this computer fixed so I can burn Keith a cd, and since the miracle of it being handed to him won't happen again ever, I will have to mail that to Miss Jane Rose, in only hopes that she will hand that to him, and he will play it. I have no idea what else if anything will happen, but I did post the letter to 3 Keith Richards fan pages on Facebook, and it has been liked about 300 times, so I hope this will create some sort of buzz, and launch the song viral. Who knows? You never know, is what they say in Hollywood. We'll see. That is the story of The Rolling Stone, for now.
This has been recording artist Matty O', stay tuned!
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