I've always considered Keith the real driving force in the Stones, now that I'm aware of how important he was to the creation of songs for the band. There's an audio clip here of him crafting the melody of "Street Fighting Man" with his overlaid acoustic guitars and Charlie Watts drumming, where you can pretty much hear the fully-fledged song and Keith then casually says, "And Mick just came in to finish it off...", presumably with the lyric and good as Jagger's lyrics often were, there's no question that it's the riffs which really made the songs, at least in my opinion they did.
Richards is also the only Stone to make a really good solo album, if you listen to his "Talk Is Cheap" and "Main Offender" albums, plus he wrote a really good autobiography "Life" some years ago so far me, I'd rather catch a documentary on him than his old mate Mick.
This Netflix production, as the name suggests, talks to the man about his main musical influences, which in order appear to be the blues, rock and roll, country and reggae music so the film takes him to places like New York, Chicago, Nashville and Jamaica allowing the man to regale us with his love for each musical style as well as inserting some vintage clips not only of some of his own musical heroes like Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry, but also of him interacting with them too. There are some nice anecdotes about how modest Muddy was and how demanding Chuck was although one or two of his other tales appear a little on the tall side.
Of course, he had a new record out at the time called "Crosseyed Heart", so we get to see him playing with his solo band demoing tracks for the album and chatting informally with his band members. Debunking his caricatured image of the drunken stoner, just as he did in his book, I find a lot of what he says quite sage, especially at the end when he stresses the importance of his family to him. It was warming to hear him talk about reconciling with his twenty-years absent father who'd walked out on him and his mum before he became famous. Occasionally he rambles on a bit about the magic of music and it's obvious that he's the main man the way everybody around him seems to wait for him to stop speaking before laughing with him, plus the producer gets his infrequent collaborator Tom Waits to spout a lot of adulatory BS in Richards' name, but Keith definitely comes over as a decent, grounded guy, as evidenced by him stopping his chauffeured limo to sign autographs for his fans.
I'd have appreciated a bit more length and depth to this documentary but you suspect at ten times the length you'd still only be scratching the surface of the man.
