ABUSE AND MISUSE
There are musicians who look after their instruments and gear with great care, nervous of even the slightest ding or blemish. And then there are those who are willing to chop and change and knock their stuff about just to see what happens. It’s the latter that we’re interested in here, the musicians whose use, misuse and abuse of their gear helped change the course of popular music.
POOR SOUND? NO, INSPIRED SOUND
By the late 1960s, Keith Richards was regularly using a portable Philips cassette recorder to capture song ideas while he was out and about in dressing rooms, hotels and anywhere else inspiration might strike. He began to savour the sound that this relatively crude tool lent to his demos, especially those made with the acoustic he strummed in order to remember chord sequences, melodies and ideas that might otherwise go missing.
As the recording sessions began for the Rolling Stones’ next album, which would become 1968’s , Richards suggested to producer Jimmy Miller that the band might transfer one of his rough Philips demos to the recorder at London’s Olympic Studios. The crunchy, jangly tones of his acoustics went on to form the remarkable backbone of , one of
