Quote of the Day (Noah Baumbach, Imagining Keith Richards’ Desert Island Disks and Dinner)

“DAY ONE. Rigged a distress flag with me gypsy scarf, but it droops like Mick's jowls. While waiting for it to fly, played all ten disks. Ate a peanut-butter-and-Fluff sandwich that the missus packed for me dinner and washed it down with me new poison of choice: Stoli and Sunkist. Smoked a Marlboro Red and watched the sun go down. Was lulled into me forty winks by the island's own music, the flop flop of the waves and the caw caw of the parrots.”—American screenwriter-director Noah Baumbach, “Shouts and Murmurs: Keith Richards’ Desert-Island Disks,” The New Yorker, Nov. 22, 1999

Quote of the Day (Keith Richards, on How Records Represented ‘The Emancipation of Music’)

“I’ve learned everything I know off of records. Being able to replay something immediately without all that terrible stricture of written music, the prison of those bars, those five lines. Being able to hear recorded music freed up loads of musicians that couldn’t necessarily afford to learn to read or write music, like me. Before 1900, you’ve got Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, the cancan.  With recording, it was emancipation for the people. As long as you or somebody around you could afford a machine, suddenly you could hear music made by people, not set-up rigs and symphony orchestras. You could actually listen to what people were saying, almost off the cuff. Some of it can be a lot of rubbish, but some of it was really good. It was the emancipation of music. Otherwise you'd have had to go to a concert hall, and how many people could afford that?”—English rock ‘n’ roll guitarist and songwriter Keith Richards, Life (2010)

Quote of the Day (Keith Richards, on His Luck)

“I’ve been so lucky, I don’t believe it. I'm sure I'm going to pay in the next life. Hell is really going to be hell for me. I don't know why I've been given all this. You couldn't dream it up, man, you couldn't write it.”—Rolling Stones founding member, co-songwriter, and guitarist Keith Richards quoted in Alan Light, “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But He Likes It),” WSJ. (The Magazine of The Wall Street Journal), March 2018 issue

Surely, Mr. Richards feels “lucky” not just because of his astonishing commercial success as a member of the Stones, but also because, despite a lifestyle that could have killed him as many as 50 years ago, he has survived to turn 80 today.

BTW, his 2010 memoir co-written/ghosted by James Fox, Life, is, for my money, the most insightful autobiography by a rock ‘n’ roller about what has gone into the music he’s created.

Quote of the Day (Keith Richards, on Mick Taylor’s Contribution to ‘Sticky Fingers’)

“Mick Taylor being in the band on that ‘69 tour certainly sealed the Stones together again. So we did Sticky Fingers with him. And the music changed — almost unconsciously. You write with Mick Taylor in mind, maybe without realizing it, knowing he can come up with something different. You’ve got to give him something he’ll really enjoy. Not just the same old grind….Some of the Sticky Fingers compositions were rooted in the fact that I knew Taylor was going to pull something great."—Keith Richards with James Fox, Life (2010)

Fifty years ago this week, The Rolling Stones released Sticky Fingers, an LP with several distinctions:

*their first studio album to hit #1 on both the UK and US charts;

*the first studio album on their own label, Rolling Stones Records; and

*their first studio album to feature, from first to last, guitarist Mick Taylor.

Though Taylor only was a part of the band for a half-dozen years (1969-1974), the period is often considered the group’s creative peak, with the other studio LPs from the time including Let It Bleed (1969), Exile on Main St. (1972), Goats Head Soup (1973) and It's Only Rock 'n Roll (1974).

"Brown Sugar," "Wild Horses" and “Bitch” received the most air time, but it was on the 10-song collection’s “deep cuts” where Taylor could really make his presence felt—or, also Richards also put it in his bestselling autobiography, “Everything was there in his playing—the melodic touch, a beautiful sustain and a way of reading a song.”

Taylor collaborates beautifully with Richards and guest musician Ry Cooder (bottleneck guitar) on the haunting “Sister Morphine,” but he simply takes over the second half of “Sway.”

As for "Can't You Hear Me Knocking": well, he simply took it in another dimension, a phenomenon that might be even better appreciated in this YouTube clip from Glastonbury in 2013, when—nearly four decades after leaving the group—he rejoined them onstage for a guest appearance, reminding so many fans what they had been missing.

For years, many speculated on what led Taylor to leave the group at the end of 1974: dissatisfaction with songwriting credits, personality differences with Richards, a desire to remove himself from the atmosphere feeding his heroin addiction, or simply feeling out of place (he was the youngest, and the only non-original, member of the band in his time). 

But both sides lost because of his departure: Taylor, a cut from the merchandise-fueled touring bucks of later decades, and the band, from the loss of an elusive personality but powerhouse musician.

Brian Jones and Ron Wood—his predecessor and successor, respectively, in the Stones—have enduring places in the history of the band. But many fans of the group continue, rightly, to mourn Taylor’s absence. Play Sticky Fingers and see why.

Quote of the Day (Keith Richards, on Which Nobel Prize He Should Win)

Q.: “What do you think about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature?”

Keith Richards: “Why not? About bloody time! It’ll be me next, I think.”

Q.: “You next?”

Richards: “Yeah. For Chemistry!” —Rolling Stones guitarist and songwriter Keith Richards quoted in Clark Collis, “The Rolling Stones, Recharged,” Entertainment Weekly, Nov. 16, 2016

Quote of the Day (Keith Richards, on Why Rock ‘n’ Roll’s ‘Nothing But Jazz With a Hard Backbeat’)

“There's something beautifully friendly and elevating about a bunch of guys playing music together. This wonderful little world that is unassailable. It's really teamwork, one guy supporting the others, and it's all for one purpose, and there's no flies in the ointment, for a while. And nobody conducting, it's all up to you. It's really jazz__that's the big secret. Rock and roll ain't nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat.”— Keith Richards with James Fox, Life (2010)

In 2004, I read predictions of the life expectancy of prominent musicians/singers by American gerentologist David Demko. In one case, he was, sadly, not far wrong (e.g., Whitney Houston did not live past middle age), while he was considerably off in another (the guess for Michael Jackson—75—missed by a quarter century). 

But I burst out laughing when Demko gauged the prospects for Keith Richards: “He should have passed away at 52. I'm not sure how he does it, but he defies all conventional wisdom.”

But then again, the guitarist and co-songwriter of The Rolling Stones has been defying “all conventional wisdom” his entire adult life.

It is impossible to imagine that Richards was born 75 years ago today in Dartford, England. Yes, for many of us growing up in the late Sixties and early Seventies, it doesn’t seem so long ago that he was in the vanguard of a group of musicians who epitomized rebellious youth. 

But these days, as Rich Cohen recalled in an April 2016 article for Vanity Fair, “There’s reassurance in talking to Keith. He stands for survival. There’s nothing you’ve done he’s not overdone—nothing you’ve suffered he’s not survived. Here is Methuselah, perhaps not infinitely wise but infinitely experienced. He can teach you how to remain dignified in a fallen age.”

There was a time, growing up, when Richards represented those aspects of rock ‘n’ roll I wanted to wish away—the dissipation, the aimlessness, the (literally) wasted opportunities for greatness. 

But over time, not only did the legacy of the Rolling Stones come to seem more durable, but my appreciation for Richards as a musician increased tenfold. That wasn’t merely a matter of watching the group’s electrifying concert clips, but reading Richards’ memoir Life, which gives the most vivid idea of a musician’s abiding passion—his instrument—of any account I've read in the growing literature about rock ‘n’ roll.

I now feel that, though bandmate and songwriting collaborator Mick Jagger might supply The Stones’ flash, it is Richards who brings the fire.

Video of the Day: Rolling Stones, ‘Waiting on a Friend’

Tattoo You was the last Rolling Stones LP to impress me, and perhaps no song on it so much as "Waiting on a Friend." Mick Jagger’s seeming goodbye to his randy days (“Making love and breaking hearts, it is a game for youth”) proved ephemeral, but not the subtle musicianship of this tune: Nicky Hopkins’ beautiful running piano, Keith Richards’ restrained strumming guitar, 
"saxophone colossus "Sonny Rollins closing out in plaintive fashion--and, because it had been originally recorded for the Goats Head Soup sessions back in 1973, an uncredited Mick Taylor on guitar as well.

It wasn’t till near the end of the Eighties that I watched MTV, so I missed this marvelous video when it premiered in 1981. The cable station, just starting out, was delighted to have a group of the Stones’ caliber offering them a video. 

Other directors before and after would pull out every pyrotechnic stop in the coming music video era, but Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s visual style matches the Stones’ aural one in its simplicity. It’s not just a song about friendship, but “friendships in the band,” Jagger would say later. Sure enough, it tracks the Glimmer Twins, with Jagger hanging out on a stoop on New York's St. Mark's Place as a smiling Richards wends his way through the street scene, before the two head over to a bar, where they are joined by the rest of the band.

“Waiting on a Friend” captures a moment of uneasy peace in the group’s dynamics. Richards was battling heroin addiction at the time. When he emerged two years later, for the Undercover album, the tensions between him and Jagger—asserting control to keep the band going in the interim—burst into the open. The songwriting partnership between the two has not been the same since.

But “Waiting on a Friend” allows us to revel in them at their peak. “A smile relieves a heart that grieves, remember what I said.” We do, Mick.

Flashback, July 1969: Rolling Stones Score With ‘Honky Tonk Women’

“Honky Tonk Women,” released as a single in the U.S. 45 years ago this week, was a triumph wedged between two tragedies that shadowed the Rolling Stones in 1969: the mysterious “death by misadventure” of founding member Brian Jones, on the day of the song’s release in the U.K., and the free December concert at Altamont, Calif., that ended disastrously with one fan murdered and three dead by accident.

Reading Keith Richards’ 2010 memoir, Life, I’ve come to the conclusion that, aside from consuming mind-altering substances, the Stones’ lead guitarist enjoys nothing more in life than talking about the technical aspects of music. So it is, certainly, with “Honky Tonk Women.” He remembered his experimentation with open five-string tuning in late 1968 and early 1969 as the event that “transformed my life.”

It transformed the band’s sound, too, inspiring the riffs  that would become instantly recognizable over the years in "Brown Sugar," "Tumbling Dice," "Happy," "All Down the Line," and "Start Me Up." It also marked the seamless integration into the band of Jones’ replacement, Mick Taylor.

Listening to the radio this past week, I heard a DJ observe that, of all the singers associated with the British Invasion of the Sixties, the one who sounded most recognizably English was Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits. The one who most certainly did not was Mick Jagger. Part of the reason why "Honky Tonk Women” is such a central part of the Stones’ half-century-long discography is because of the total immersion by the Stones' lead singer in Muddy Waters, John Lee Hookers, and other blues belters.

The title of the Stones’ chart-topper indicates where the song began—as a Hank Williams-style country tune, concocted when the group’s songwriting partners were on vacation in Brazil with girlfriends Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg, absorbing the gaucho life. Other Jagger-Richards songs would emerge as more identifiably country over the years (especially “Wild Horses” and “Far Away Eyes”). But, after Richards’ open tuning, the song morphed into something different: “a funky track and dirty too….It's got all that blues and black music from Dartford onwards in it, and [drummer] Charlie [Watts] is unbelievable on that track,” as Richards fondly recalled it.

The Stones’ mid-summer single sounds like a master class in raunchy insinuation (“The lady then she covered me with roses/She blew my nose and then she blew my mind”). So much of it also lends itself to feminist complaints about the Stones’ misogyny, starting with the title characters (dancing girls in a Western bar who may work as prostitutes); continuing with Jagger’s use the song as an opening for an affair with African-American model Marsha Hunt (he sounded her out on posing for a cover for the single, dressed as a prostitute); and gaining even greater ballast during the 1989 “Steel Wheels” tour, which featured giant inflatable women during performances.

Oh, the Stones are bad boys, to be sure! (Especially Mick—still positively priapic in his seventies.) But the song is irresistible, as Greil Marcus pointed out in a Rolling Stone review at the time of the record’s release. His judgment, that "Honky Tonk Women" contains “the strongest three minutes of rock and roll yet released in 1969,” is not that far off the mark. Three years ago, it placed #116 on Rolling Stone’s list of “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”

This Day in Rock History (Stones Score 1st US Hit With Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’)

February 21, 1964—In a particularly auspicious day for the post-Beatle phase of the British Invasion, three singles destined to be classics were released. The first was Billy J. Kramer’s “Little Children”; the second, the Hollies’ “Just One Look.” The last, a cover version of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” did more than just provide the Rolling Stones with their first single to hit the U.S. pop charts; it also served as a seque into the songwriting that would make them pop forces in their own right in the next half century.

Like their contemporaries and competitors, the Beatles, the Stones began their careers by, in effect, reflecting back to American audiences rock ‘n’ roll songs seemingly familiar for the last dozen years, but now revivified. What the Beatles did for the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” for instance, the Stones did for the B side of Holly’s “Oh Boy!”—i.e., they made it fresh in their own interpretation.

Actually, they took it a step further: they unlocked potential that had been somewhat muted, substituting Mick Jagger’s growling, rougher vocals for Holly’s trademark hiccup (while stripping away the doo-wop harmonies), accentuating the Bo Diddley bomp, bomp-ba-bomp, bomp-bomp beat of the guitar, along with Brian Jones’ bluesy harmonica. The new take on the song was different enough from the original that manager Andrew Loog Oldman even termed it “the first song that Mick and Keith [Richards] wrote. The way they arranged it was the beginning of their shaping of them as songwriters.”

The idea that the longhaired British youths, with no real songwriting credits of their own, just signed to Decca Records, could have so reinvented a song by the brilliant, blazingly prolificTexas artist might have seemed laughable on the surface. It becomes even more astonishing when one recalls how green they were in the studio, and how unprepossessing that particular environment itself was. 

As Keith Richards recalled in his bestselling 2010 memoir, Life, Regent Sounds Studio in London was "just a little room full of egg boxes and it had a Grundig tape recorder, and to make it look like a studio, the recorder was hung on the wall instead of put on the table.” The space was cramped, allowing little definition between instruments, and so, by necessity, the sound approximated the band’s raw feel in concert at the time. The boys loved their primitive environment—especially the Stones’ guitarist, co-songwriter and ultimate pirate spirit, who learned the art of overdubbing there on a basic two-track tape recorder.

The Rolling Stones did for “Not Fade Away” what Frank Sinatra did for Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”: refocus attention on a relatively neglected portion of a major song catalog to such a point that it became a standard. Clearly, Holly’s record company didn’t see it as a major commercial hit, but the British band took their version to #3 on the charts in their own country and #48 in the U.S. (Not quite “She Loves You” territory, perhaps, but the ground overseas was becoming prepared for bigger things soon.)

Over the years, other artists have followed the lead of the scruffy U.K. upstarts.  Florence and the Machine recorded a four-minute take on the song three years ago, and that only begins to scratch the surface of what others have done with it. The Grateful Dead jammed for an epic 10 minutes in their version. But, as longtime readers of this blog might guess, my favorite version was done by Bruce Springsteen, who made it the first half of a melody with his own, equally fiery “She’s the One” in a Madison Square Garden concert I attended back in August 1978. (Hear for yourself in these two YouTube clips—“Not Fade Away” and “She’s the One”—that are, admittedly, far better in sound than visual quality.)

Today, “Not Fade Away” is the second most-covered song by Holly, exceeded only by “Peggy Sue.” Rolling Stone has even listed it among its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” What accounts for the awesome power that the Rolling Stones sensed? Joe Ely, who’s been playing the song in concert for years, told an interviewer several years ago: “The easiest thing to do is get it started. The hardest thing to do is find a place to stop. It’s infectious. It’s like a freight train you can’t stop.”