Happy Birthday Keith Richards & Bobby Keys: Performing Live With X-Pensive Winos In 1993

Today marks the birthdays of legendary Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and the late renowned rock saxophonist Bobby Keys. The melding of these two musical minds seemed to be ordained by the gods as they were born on the exact same day — December 18, 1943 — worlds away from each other in the UK and Texas.

Keys came into the world on that day near Lubbock, Texas and began his musical career at 15 playing with another famed son of Lubbock, Buddy Holly. Bobby first met The Rolling Stones in 1964 at the San Antonio Teen Fair as a member of Booby Vee’s band. Keys would later rekindle his relationship with the legendary rockers and go on to lay down sax work on the Stones’ stellar records of the late 1960s and ’70s, most notably the iconic sax solo on “Brown Sugar” and the extended run on “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” as well as on a number of songs from the Stones’ landmark 1972 double LP, Exile On Main St.

Keith and Keys would become fast friends and Richards relates a number of musical, and extra-musical, adventures they had in his candid 2010 autobiography, Life. So it was only natural when Keith formed his solo project the X-Pensive Winos in the late 1980s, Bobby was at his side on sax.

On February 13, 1993, Richards, Keys and the X-Pensive Winos — also consisting of vocalists Sarah Dash and Babi (Bobby) Floyd, drummer Steve Jordan, bassist Jerome Smith, keyboardist Ivan Neville and guitarist Waddy Wachtel — performed the first of two shows at the Orpheum Theatre in Boston to support their 1992 album, Main Offender. The set, which opened with Eddie Cochran’s “Somethin’ Else,” included songs from Main Offender like “Wicked As It Seems” and “999” as well as tracks off their 1988 debut album, Talk Is Cheap, including “Whip It Up” and “I Could Have Stood You Up.” The concert also saw Keith doing Stones classics like “Time Is On My Side” and a grungy slowed down version of “Gimme Shelter.” Richards would deliver his signature Stones song, “Happy,” as the penultimate number of the evening ahead of closer “Take It So Hard” from Talk Is Cheap.

To celebrate Keith Richards and Bobby Keys birthdays, watch the X-Pensive Winos from Boston in 1993 below via the JamBase Live Video Archive (JBLVA) for this special edition of Full Show Friday:

Setlist:

Something Else, Wicked As It Seems, Gimme Shelter, 999, Running Too Deep, Locked Away, Time Is On My Side, Will But You Won’t, Words Of Wonder, Hate It When You Leave, Before They Make Me Run, Eileen, Bodytalks, Whip It Up, I Could Have Stood You Up, Happy, Take It So Hard