The Stones' sound was built on obsessive study of American blues

Richards is emphatic that the band's identity didn't spring from innate genius but from a near-scholarly devotion to blues and R&B records imported from America — Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed — which he and his bandmates studied and imitated with an intensity closer to apprenticeship than casual fandom. Learning to play wasn't about self-expression first; it was about faithfully reproducing a sound they revered until the technique became internalized.

He describes hours spent needle-dropping and re-dropping specific passages to work out exact fingerings and rhythmic feels, treating records as instructional material rather than mere entertainment. This immersion gave the young band a genuine grounding in a tradition most of their British peers only knew secondhand.

The broader claim is that what looked like effortless swagger onstage was underwritten by unglamorous, repetitive technical labor — the band earned its sound the same way any craft is earned, through study of masters before finding a voice of their own.

Takeaway: original style is usually built on obsessive study of your influences, not despite it.