Georgia Satellites
Q&A with The Georgia Satellites’ Rick Richards (hear them Friday at Mint Event Center!)
“My honey my baby, don’t put my love upon no shelf.
“She said don’t hand me no lines and keep your hands to yourself.”
FRANKLIN, Ky. (Monday, Oct. 21, 2024) — The Georgia Satellites bring their rock and roll, infused with southern rock, Friday to The Mint Event Center at The Mint Gaming Hall Kentucky Downs. The band is best identified with its enduring hit Keep Your Hands To Yourself,which 37 years later remains a popular and cheeky anthem about, well, keeping your hands to yourself. The song skyrocketed to No. 2 on Billboard Hot 100, kept from the top only by Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer”.
Dan Baird, who wrote Keep Your Hands to Yourself, founded the Georgia Satellites with Rick Richards. Baird left the band in 1990. Richards, lead guitarist and vocalist, is the last original member. The current lineup with drummer Todd Johnston, vocalist and rhythm guitarist Fred McNeal and bassist Bruce Smith have been together since 2013.
Jennie Rees, director of publicity for Kentucky Downs and The Mint Gaming properties, interviewed Richards for her latest Q&A with The Mint Event Center performers.
How has your persona, your music changed — or not — through 40 years of performing and with musician changes?
We’re still playing all the hits and stuff, pretty substantial set list. As far as the style of the music and the ferocity of it, it really hasn’t changed much at all. It’s the kind of rock and roll that we’ve always done.
How would you describe your music today as far as genre? And what would you have called it when you were launched?
We’re just a rock and roll band. We were British-influenced, Stones, Beatles, Kinks, all that stuff we all grew up on. But we also got influenced by some American bands like some of the southern bands and some of the country guys. We used to do a lot more country stuff than we do now. We kind of bastardize it and turn it into something else it wasn’t supposed to be. But it’s fun.
So what’s the difference between southern rock and country rock?
Hmm. Southern rock is more blues-based. Country rock is derived from like the original country guys, the great guys: Haggard and Jones. Waylon and Willie and all those guys. That’s the big difference. When the Allman Brothers came out, I guess they were the first bonafide southern rock band, and they of course were blues-based.
Listening to your music, there’s quite a variety. Hippy Hippy Shake sounds like something maybe out of the early 60s or the 50s, and Let It Rock sounds like you should be launching into playing the theme for Sunday Night Football.
Yeah, right! The Hippy Hippy Shake was a song by a guy named Chan Romero. It was cut by The Swinging Blue Jeans in the early 60s. The Beatles actually did that in their live act. That’s where we got that from. Of course it’s from the movie Cocktail, in which Tom Cruise does his juggling of the liquor bottles and all that, and that song is in the background (Georgia Satellites did the soundtrack). Let It Rock is like Chuck Berry stuff. We grew up on Chuck Berry. Yeah, Sunday Night Football would have been a nice check.
Rock and Roll Globe in a 2022 article upon the release of your live album from 1988 in Cleveland called The Georgia Satellites “southern rock’s most unsung act.”
Um-hum. Well, I think that speaks for itself. I’d like to be more sung. But there are a lot of great unsung bands out there, and I’m proud to be part of that.
NPR in 2020 called you a “southern rock band lost to the MTV era.”
That’s kind of misnomer. We did some of the first MTV live deals. We did New Year’s Eve. Of course that went away quite quickly after MTV changed. Yeah, it did affect a lot of music in our genre.
Because it was less about music than what NPR called “clever outfits?”
Clever outfits and not so much guitar-oriented as it was. Then it became a non-musical entity.
There was a VHS video of the band, quoting one of the members — not you — who said, “Where else can a 40-year-old man act like a raving 17-year-old spoiled brat but in the music business?”
That’s exactly right. You can definitely have arrested development in this business. In fact, it’s encouraged that you remain an immature idiot.
NPR had a series it titled One-Hit Wonders, and Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis in it said of Keep Your Hands To Yourself: “You know, if you want to tell some Martian or something ‘Hey, this is what rock and roll is!’ you could do far worse than play Keep Your Hands to Yourself for them.
“I think there are ‘one-hit wonders’ — which has a kind of dismissive tone to it — and then there were great bands that had one hit,” DeCurtis said. “And I would put The Satellites in that category.”
Yeah. Well, as I say, better to be a One Hit than a no hit. That hit carried us a long way. It went quite up the charts pretty well. I’d have liked to have more, and had things worked out in certain areas of our career we could have maintained that, had more hits. It just wasn’t in the cards.
What keeps you all going? This is part of your fifth decade now.
It’s kind of in our DNA. What else can we do? Sit around? Yeah, we have to get out there and do it. I still find it gratifying. And of course, you’ve got to make a living here and there.
Looks like all the current band members have been together since 2013.
We’re all on the same page musically, which is good. It’s hard to find people who are into the same sensibility that you have. We’ve been very fortunate to keep this band together as long as we have.
What is your sensibility?
Appreciation for our roots, for the genres of music that we like and the ability to play it correctly, I would say. … Roots, sticking to the basic 1-4-5 chord progression and all Chuck Berry licks.
What can people expect at Friday’s The Georgia Satellites performance?
Oh, just the same old thing we always do, man. Just rock and roll. Plug in and play.
You all toured with Tom Petty. How did that influence you?
That was a great tour, we learned a lot from Tom and Mike (Campbell). As far as musically influencing, it didn’t really do the much. We just learned how to be human beings hanging around those guys. They were the salt of the earth and treated us great. But we were already pretty much entrenched in our style of music… You want to stay apart from what they’re doing. You don’t want to go out there and play a song that sounds like Free Fallin’.
