Keith Richards has been in the rock 'n' roll business long enough to recognize hype.
On the phone recently from a recording studio in New York, the 76-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist recalled the formation of a side project, the X-Pensive Winos, as a "pivotal moment" in his half-century-and-then-some career. Then he interrupted himself, chuckling in his signature pirate-like rasp.
"Hmm, pivotal? I'm not so sure," he said. "But it was an important part of the development of ... whatever."
Richards has had time this year to ponder his journey while at home in Connecticut, where he rode out much of quarantine — "just ducking and diving, you know?" — with his wife, Patti Hansen, and their two adult daughters.
"It's sort of interesting in that it ain't happened to nobody before in the history of this planet," he said of the COVID-19 pandemic. "Weren't we the lucky ones?"
Yet he's been thinking about the Winos in particular ahead of the deluxe Nov. 13 reissue of "Live at the Hollywood Palladium," an oft-bootlegged concert set recorded in 1988. The Winos came together during what Richards has referred to as World War III in the Stones: the period between 1986's "Dirty Work" and 1989's "Steel Wheels" when Richards and Mick Jagger were famously fighting over the band's direction.
Miffed that Jagger decided to make a solo album instead of touring behind "Dirty Work," Richards cut his own solo record, "Talk Is Cheap," then hit the road with the Winos, which convened a wrecking crew of top-notch players: drummer Steve Jordan, guitarist Waddy Wachtel, bassist Charley Drayton, keyboardist Ivan Neville, singer Sarah Dash and saxophonist Bobby Keys.
"Live at the Hollywood Palladium" captures the next-to-last gig of a brief U.S. tour and features impeccably ragged renditions of every song from "Talk Is Cheap" — including "You Don't Move Me," widely understood as a Jagger diss track — along with assorted Stones tunes such as "Happy" and "Before They Make Me Run."
As Richards acknowledges, the music won't make you forget about the Rolling Stones. Yet it does reveal the guitarist expanding his vocabulary with heavy grooves from funk and R&B; one highlight from the live album is a slow-and-low "Make No Mistake" that showcases sultry duet vocals by Dash, known for her work with Patti LaBelle.
"The last thing we wanted the Winos to sound like was a Stones cover band," Jordan said in a separate phone call. And in an era when rock tours were super-sizing with ever flashier production tricks, "Hollywood Palladium" documents a sweaty night that was "just about the playing," as the drummer put it.
"No trampolines, no laser lights," he said.
This year the Stones were forced to call off just such a high-tech outing due to the pandemic. But after releasing a new single, the lockdown-minded "Living in a Ghost Town," in April, the band has been slowly ramping up remote work on a new studio album, its first of original songs since "A Bigger Bang" in 2005. Richards, who's been writing in New York with Jordan and producer Don Was, said it's been "a bit of a relief to just do what you do."
"I was expecting to be on the road," he said. "You get all geared up for that, then — nope. So it's like energy transference."
