It’s hard to classify Keith Richards‘ playing as simply “rock and roll guitar”. Even though he has been designated to the rhythmic side of things for years, Richards has been able to carve out his own spot as a legend purely on the strength of the riffs, constantly switching up his style and using different tunings to get whatever he wants. While Richards has been able to make the most out of a handful of chords, he admitted that fellow rhythm guitarist John Lennon had a silly side to his playing.
Granted, it’s not like someone was going to say that The Beatles were the answer to Tchaikovsky. Although every member of the Fab Four was brilliant at coming up with incredible melodies for their songs, there’s a good chance that any of them would have said something smug if they were told to play an augmented ninth chord or switch the song into compound time.
Out of all the band members, Lennon usually was the most inarticulate when it came to his musical voice. Although he could make brilliant use of a guitar and his voice, Lennon was often known to give rudimentary instructions to producer George Martin when discussing what he wanted, either asking to sound like he was coming from the moon or needing his voice to sound like The Dalai Lama.
Outside of playing straight chords, Lennon could still play the odd technical guitar part here and there. Even though he stuck to his usual foundational banjo-adjacent chords inherited from his mother, a song like ‘All My Loving’ takes a certain amount of endurance for any guitar play, having to quickly change the shape of every chord in time with the rest of the song.
Although Richards loved Lennon’s playing, he thought that his style was far too stiff for rock and roll, recalling in the book Life, “He was a silly sod in many ways. I used to criticise him for wearing his guitar too high. They used to wear them up by their chests, which really constricts your movement. It’s like being handcuffed. ‘Got your f***ing guitar under your f***ing chin, for Christ’s sake. It ain’t a violin.’”
While Lennon may have tried to wear his guitar a bit lower throughout the band’s touring years, fans wouldn’t see it for too long. After their massive tour worldwide in 1966, The Beatles decided that life on the road and being screamed at by fans wasn’t for them anymore, electing to become a studio-only act for the rest of their career.
If you look at what Lennon was up to in his post-Beatles career, it seemed like he took Richards’s advice to heart at least a little bit. When looking at the various gigs he played in New York City in the 1970s, Lennon would be seen wearing his guitar a bit lower than usual, feeling much more comfortable without having to hold onto his instrument for dear life.
Regardless of where he decided to hold it, his playing never suffered for it, either. Throughout his work on his solo material up until his final release, Double Fantasy, Lennon still had that signature pulse that everyone could recognise from Beatles hits, keeping a solid groove just like Richards did with The Stones. The position of the guitar may have struck Richards as strange, but it didn’t matter so long as the music sounded great.
