Released 1988
Big Enough
Take It So Hard
Struggle
I Could Have Stood You Up
Make No Mistake
You Don't Move Me
How I Wish
Rockawhile
Whip It Up
Locked Away
It Means A Lot
Richards's first solo album is a masterpiece of underachievement. He does nothing more or less than what he's always done on Stones records, slicing and dicing classic blues and Berryesque motifs into junkyard-dog guitar growls, singing in a shaky tortured-tonsil yelp that makes Jagger sound like Metropolitan Opera material. Half of the songs are really just licks and skeletal chord changes cribbed from the Rolling Stones' riff manual and jammed into sing-along shape... Admittedly short on ambition, the album – written and produced by Richards and drummer Steve Jordan – is deliciously long on grooves like the lazily swinging Rockawhile and the overtly Stonesy Whip It Up... A little ambition would have gone a long way, though... (David Fricke, Rolling Stone)
Time changes everything, don't it? It's 2013, and Talk Is Cheap is twenty-five years old.
Put it in perspective. 25 years before Talk Is Cheap, 1963: early that year, Charlie and Bill joined the Stones. By the end of the year they had released their first two, nearly-forgotten (and forgettable) singles. Perspective.
What did Talk Is Cheap bode? A revitalized Stones? A new, post-Stones career for Keith that would eclipse ol' Mick artistically and commercially?
In the end, what was it? "An all-too-simple pleasure, great grooves in search of a vital purpose," Rolling Stone called it, "loosely arranged, casually executed and at times downright sloppy [it] wouldn't even pass muster as a demo." Admit it - you were hoping for Exile On Main Street - Part Two. You know you were.
Keef solo turned out to be a footnote. I have good memories of his two tour stops in the Bay Area in `88 and `92. But it's been 21 years since we've heard from the Winos (perspective: in 1992 Sticky Fingers was 21 year old).
But the cool thing is that, 25 years on, Talk Is Cheap still sounds pretty good. And, despite, or perhaps because of, its bare-bones simplicity and minimal songwriting, its more consistent as an album than anything his main career band has done around it or for many years prior. I was listening to it at the office yesterday. I ended up slapping it into the car CD player for the ride home. Whomping funk bass that kicks off "Big Enough." The bump`n'grind, slashed chords of "Take It So Hard,"the relentless drive of "Struggle," "Could Have Stood You Up"'s joyful boogie-woogie swagger, "Make No Mistake"'s Al Green choked horns, the Willie Mitchell groove, the way Sarah Dash's smooth, sultry voice blends with Keef's ragged, cracked croak ("your lips ... melting into mine..." the Stones were/are often dirty, but it took Keef to come up with real adult eros) (throughout the album, he eschews Mick's usual adolescent horn-dogginess for more mature shades of lust and longing), "You Don't Move Me" ominous, relentless hypnotic acoustic guitar strum as he shames his enemy (Mick or whoever it may be): "you better kill the light/you're giving us all a fright". The lyrics are all dashed-off catchphrases, simple rhymes hung on the riffs like clothes to dry. The words become beats, licks. "How I Wish" is rock-solid Cali pop/rock. "Locked Away" a fine Cajun-spiced ballad. It all comes down with "It Means A Lot", all grind and rattling, broken-bottle chords, rumbling along with that air of finality that all good album-closers have.
Listening to it today, I find Talk Is Cheap a first-rate album of rootsy, groove-oriented music, made by a master; the best aspects of it come off as almost effortless - its the sound of guys who knew exactly what they want to do, and exactly how to do it. It's dark, sexy, you can dance to it, good driving or fucking music. Not too shabby for a footnote.
