The guitar riff Keith Richards would pick if he could play only one

Led by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for the past six decades, The Rolling Stones have released 31 studio albums featuring countless iconic songs, which made them one of the best-selling bands of all time.

Richards created some of the most memorable and influential guitar riffs in history and had the chance to perform them thousands of times throughout his career. Yet he is not tired of playing most of them at all. In fact, he once revealed which guitar riff he would choose if he were allowed to play only one for the rest of his life.

The guitar riff Keith Richards would pick if he could play only one

Keith Richards’ choice was “Flash”, which is the way he usually refers to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, one of their biggest hits. “These crucial, wonderful riffs that just came, I don’t know where from. I’m blessed with them and I can never get to the bottom of them. When you get a riff like ‘Flash’ you get a great feeling of elation, a wicked glee. Of course, then comes the other thing of persuading people that it is as great as you actually know it is. You have to go through the pooh-pooh. ‘Flash’ is basically ‘Satisfaction’ in reverse. Nearly all of these riffs are closely related.”

“But if someone said, ‘You can play only one of your riffs ever again,’ I’d say, ‘OK, give me ‘Flash.’ I love ‘Satisfaction’ dearly and everything, but those chords are pretty much a de rigueur course as far as songwriting goes. But “Flash” is particularly interesting. “It’s allllll right now.’ It’s almost Arabic or very old, archaic, classical. The chord setups you could only hear in Gregorian chants or something like that.”

He continued:

“And it’s that weird mixture of your actual Rock and Roll. At the same time this weird echo of very, very ancient music that you don’t even know. It’s much older than I am, and that’s unbelievable! It’s like a recall of something. I don’t know where it came from,” Keith Richards said in his biography “Life”.

As Keith Richards has said over the years, song ideas just come into his head. They flow naturally and he channels them into his guitar. He already explained that the guitar parts seem to come from somewhere he still doesn’t know and cannot explain.

The song was released by The Stones almost 60 years ago, in 1968. But to this day still is a song Keith looks forward to playing. “But that song has got a lovely spirit on it and it’s a joy to play… for all of its limitations… in the musical sense, the wonderful rhythmic possibilities still keep you interested. The thing is, with a good song I find, you ask, ‘Hey, do you look forward to playing it the 500th time?’ (laughs) And if you do, then it’s a good song.” Richards said in an interview with Uncut in 2025.

How Keith Richards’ gardener inspired “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”

The lyrics to a song can be inspired by anything a songwriter experiences and curiously Keith Richards and Mick Jagger got the idea for “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” from Richards’ former gardener, Jack Dyer. In the late 1960s, the musicians were at Keith’s house in the south of England, where they had been up all night writing. It was raining heavily when the first rays of sunlight began to appear and Dyer arrived for work wearing rubber boots.

“‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ comes from this guy, Jack Dyer, who was my gardener – an old English yokel. Mick (Jagger) and I were in my house down in the south of England. We’d been up all night; the sky was just beginning to go gray. It was pissing down raining – if I remember rightly. Mick and I were sitting there, and suddenly Mick starts up. Because he hears these great footsteps, these great rubber boots – slosh, slosh, slosh – going by the window.”

He continued:

“He said, ‘What’s that?’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s Jack. That’s jumpin’ Jack.’ We had my guitar in open tuning, and I started to fool around with that. [singing] ‘Jumpin’ Jack…’ and Mick says, ‘Flash. He’d just woken up. Suddenly we had this wonderful alliterative phrase. So he woke up and we knocked it together,” Keith Richards said.

Besides Mick and Keith, at the time the band also had Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and Brian Jones. Rocky Dijon played the maracas, Ian Stewart recorded the piano and Jimmy Miller the backing vocals. It became a number one hit in the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and more. In the United States the track peaked at number 3 on the Hot 100 chart.

Keith said that playing that song live is like releasing “a tiger” into the audience

Although The Rolling Stones have a huge number of incredible songs to choose to play live, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” is actually the one the band played the most during their career. According to Setlist FM, they performed that track live more than 1200 times, leaving behind “Honky Tonky Women”, “Tumbling Dice”, “Brown Sugar” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”.

In the interview with Uncut in 2025, Keith compared playing that track with releasing “a tiger”. “For me, to play ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ onstage, it’s like, ‘Let me at ’em.’ It’s like, ‘Let the tiger out!’ And you still find, like, new ways of moving the riff around and it’s just got one of those great immediate bangs on it. You can’t go wrong once you’ve kicked it off. Then you just sort of hold onto its tail and he kind of takes you,” he said.

18 years after the song was released, Keith produced Aretha Franklin‘s version of the song. But first he made a deal with her, saying he would only play in the song if she played the piano, because he always thought she also was an incredible pianist. Curiously, besides Keith, Ronnie Wood also played the guitar and Steve Jordan, who replaced Charlie Watts in the Stones after his death, played the drums on that cover.