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Rolling Stones quotes: Keith Richards about ‘The Rolling Stones Part II’
The Rolling Stones had already survived enough drama by 1994 to fill several careers, yet Keith Richards wasn’t talking like a man looking back on a finished story. Quite the opposite. With Voodoo Lounge arriving after years of tension between Richards and Mick Jagger, the guitarist saw something surprisingly fresh taking shape. He described the band as almost becoming a “Rolling Stones II” which is a rather ambitious way of saying, “Maybe we haven’t broken this thing yet.” But that was Richards’ point: most bands hit a serious rock and never recover. The Stones had somehow climbed back over it, guitars first, and were ready to begin another chapter.
“Keeping a band together this long, it was bound to hit a rock patch somewhere. And when that happens to most bands, that’s usually it. The ship founders on that rock forever. The strength of the Stones is that they didn’t. We went through it all, Mick and I went through whatever we went through, and put it all back together. And now we’ve got it on a very interesting track again. To us, it’s like the Rolling Stones II. We’re almost like starting again, you know.”
By 1994,The Rolling Stones had already spent more than three decades doing what most bands struggle to manage for three albums: staying together. Yet somehow, they reached a point where even Keith Richards could talk about the band as if they were starting again. The release of Voodoo Lounge wasn’t merely another album added to an enormous catalog; it represented a reset after years of tension, change and uncertainty. With Mick Jagger and Richards finding their way back into a productive creative relationship, the Stones suddenly had something they hadn’t needed for years: a new beginning. They were older, certainly, but the music industry hadn’t exactly sent them a retirement card. Instead, they went back into the studio, made a fresh record and prepared to take that renewed energy around the world.
A New Beginning
Voodoo Loungebecame the musical centerpiece of this new chapter. Released in 1994, it marked the Stones’ first album without bassist Bill Wyman, whose departure had changed the band’s internal dynamic after more than three decades. Rather than treating that upheaval as a reason to retreat, the remaining members moved forward and brought in Darryl Jones, while producer Don Was helped shape a sound that felt contemporary without abandoning the band’s blues and rock foundations.
The album wasn’t simply an attempt to recreate the past. There were familiar ingredients—Keith Richards’ guitars, Mick Jagger’s vocals, blues influences and the loose chemistry that had always defined the band—but the Stones approached them with renewed purpose. After the uneven Steel Wheels era and the complicated relationship between Jagger and Richards during the late 1980s, Voodoo Lounge suggested that the creative partnership still had some mileage left.
Richards was particularly conscious of the band’s remarkable survival. The Stones had accumulated enough history to make most rock biographies look embarrassingly short, yet their chemistry continued to pull them back into the studio and onto the stage. Apparently, simply becoming one of the biggest bands in history wasn’t enough excuse to stop working.
The real test came on the road. The Voodoo Lounge tour transformed the album’s sense of renewal into a massive global production, with The Rolling Stones once again playing enormous venues to audiences that included longtime followers and younger fans discovering the band for the first time. The tour demonstrated that the Stones weren’t merely trading on nostalgia. They remained a formidable live act, capable of turning new material and old favorites into the kind of huge-scale performances that had become their trademark. The album gave them a reason to move forward; the tour proved they still had the energy to do it.
That is what makes 1994 such an interesting point in the band’s story. The Stones didn’t suddenly become young again, and they certainly didn’t pretend the previous three decades hadn’t happened. Instead, they did something more difficult: they accepted the changes, adjusted the lineup, repaired their creative momentum and started another chapter. For a band supposedly past its prime, that was a rather inconvenient development.
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