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If you’re looking to be in a good band, your guitarists need to be the kind of people who can patiently screw around with tone adjustments and reverb knobs until everyone else has given up and gone home. It helps if you can stay up for days and days in a row. Both the devil and the good god are trapped in there, down in the protons and electrons, in the signals exchanged by the instrument and the amplifier, and how each responds to the slightest variations in the other. If you want something to feel like “Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown” (and I can hardly imagine a riff that sounds more like what it is supposed to be than that one), you had better know how to get that exact sound from your equipment, and that can only be done by very patient experimentation. But if you go looking for that sound, just remember, Keith is the one who made it first, and he was the one who first heard that this—just this and only this—was the tone for the guitar on that particular riff in this one song. He regularly creates unique tones, and then in some cases he doesn’t re-use them, because they are too identifiable. So there’s a vast range of tones he creates with the choices of amplifiers and knobs and guitars, even though there really is no recognizable set of tones we would usually identify with Keith’s work. He knew very well after he had used that fuzz pedal for “Satisfaction” that he couldn’t go there again. And for him, getting the tones was and remains an endless quest.

To be a rock guitarist in our day you have to go to school on the tones Keith made and learn how he used them. It’s Rock 101. The story in his autobiography about how he found the tone for the guitars on “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” is a keen piece of rock history. It had been a mystery. Anyone could play the actual licks (they are easy), but people couldn’t find a way to recreate those tones. So finally Keith revealed that there are no electric guitars on that recording. He played acoustic guitars into the condenser mic that was built-in on an early model Phillips cassette tape recorder, and to achieve a distortion in the tone, he played the guitars too close to the mic and too loud. He listened back to the cassette and said, in effect, “that’s it, that’s the sound.” He didn’t provide the further details in his book, but I assume he then hooked up the same mic to his four-track machine, and the result you have heard. Or maybe he just played the cassette sound into his four-track recorder. He has never been shy about losing generations in his recordings. Clean sound isn’t always the best sound.

You Make a Dead Man …

So let’s say the groove and the tone are jiving, but you’re not riffing yet. Mademoiselle Sound is giving you that look, but she isn’t there yet. The riff has another leg dangling and kicking, so you’ve got to get a hold on it. You still have to figure out what to play, and here is what we will call the “sig lick” (the signature lick is the full name). Get this right and she’ll squeal, if she’s going to squeal at all—I mean, who doesn’t like a great lick? A sig lick is an identifiable musical phrase that belongs exclusively to a single song, and which usually starts the song, and it makes the most of what the groove and the tone have brought together. It may be just a violin arpeggio (like “Ruby Tuesday”), or it may be a little melodic phrase (like “Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown”), or it may be a chord change (like “Start Me Up” or “Honky Tonk Women”). A song can have more than one sig. lick and it can also come later in the song, like the six ascending notes that precede the words “brown sugar.” Whatever it is, it’s supposed to tell you in a split second what song you’re hearing. It’s the culmination of pulling the lightning down. It uses the tone and the groove and it makes you lose yourself in both anticipation and memory. You die a little death in that moment, for sure. But it’s worth it.

No matter how many Stones songs you’ve heard,