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

Song Lyric of the Day (The Rolling Stones, on a Line of Cars, ‘All Painted Black’)

“I see a line of cars and they're all painted black
With flowers and my love, both never to come back.”—English rock ‘n’ rollers Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, “Paint It Black,” from the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath LP (1966)

Sixty years ago today, “Paint It Black,” was released as a single in the U.S., eventually spending two weeks at number one during the summer and serving as the lead song of their fourth studio album, Aftermath.

Among the early hits of the Rolling Stones, this one remains distinctive to me. With “Satisfaction” in 1965, Mick Jagger was already well-launched on the misogyny that characterized so many of his subsequent lyrics, and he stayed stuck in the same mental groove in in two songs from this new collection, “Under My Thumb" and "Stupid Girl."

But “Paint It Black” gave evidence of something larger than dissatisfaction with “the birds” that so obsessed the Stones’ lead singer. It’s far more than the sweet, strings-laden melancholy of “Yesterday” by their compatriots in the British Invasion, the Beatles.

From Brian Jones’ unusual, even unnerving sitar opening, the Stones were evoking a severe depression with the potential to throw you off your axis, even locating it in something specific: grief (that “line of cars” suggesting a funeral procession).

“ ‘Paint It Black’—I wrote the melody, he [Jagger] wrote the lyrics,” Richards recalled in his 2010 autobiography, Life. “It’s not that you can say in one phrase he wrote that and he did that. But the musical riff is mostly coming from me. I’m the riff master.”

According to Simon Harper’s May 2025 account, the March 1966 recording session for the tune in RCA’s Los Angeles studio wasn’t jelling. Producer Andrew Loog Oldham had decided that, if no movement occurred in 10 minutes, they’d move on.

Just then, bassist Bill Wyman suggested Hammond organ pedals, with Jones—tiring of his normal six-string guitar and becoming the band’s de facto multi-instrumentalist—tried out sitar chords he’d been strumming, the byproduct of tutelage under virtuoso Harihar Rao.

The song had evolved into something far more mesmerizing and disturbing than what everyone in the studio had been hearing originally. The other Stones supposedly felt that their collective improvisational input entitled them to share songwriting credit on the band’s sixth single with Jagger and Richards.

In the end, it may not have mattered that much. In the early 1970s, to free themselves from their early, pugnacious manager Allen Klein, the Stones signed away rights to this and others up to 1971.

And that would be enough fill most ordinary people with the kind of depression associated with “Paint It Black”—except that the Stones have made so much more money, and been even more savvy about saving it, since then.

Oh, by the way: some audiophiles have their recordings of the song with a comma in the title: “Paint It, Black,” as seen in the image accompanying this post. Why?

Years later, Richards confirmed that it was the band’s intention not to include the comma. It was a mistake on the part of their record company, Decca, that produced the errant punctuation mark.

This reminds me of what happened with one of my favorite Supremes songs, “Stoned Love.” Writer Kenny Thomas had written it as “Stone Love,” intending to evoke the strength of amour with the lyrics. Yet when it came back from the Motown warehouse, the letter “d” had been tacked onto the first word of the title.

I couldn’t help but think that someone at the record plant had been stoned when he made that mistake—and that similarly, a mind-altering substance led someone at Decca to insert that idiotic, confusing, useless comma. If that was the case, it’s too bad that the Rolling Stones didn’t take the cue and quit drugs cold turkey.

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 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.

Quote of the Day (Steven Hyden, on Classic Rock as a Continuing Force)

“[T]his generation from the ‘60s and ‘70s…has stayed around for a really long time, in a way that rock stars don't typically stick around. Before classic-rock radio, you were on the radio because you had hits, and once you didn’t have hits you were gone. Classic rock introduced this idea that you could stay on the radio forever without having any new songs. It created this situation where classic bands were competing with new bands. It was like rock history being split in two.” —Critic-historian Steven Hyden quoted in John Williams, “Five Things About Your Book: Steven Hyden—Drafting a Eulogy for Classic Rock,” The New York Times, June 18, 2018

(The image accompanying this post is from the Rolling Stones’ video for their single “Waiting for a Friend.”)

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.

Quote of the Day (John Fogerty, on What Buddy Holly Meant to Him and Others)

“I just want to tell you what Buddy Holly meant to me. I was twelve years old, and I was working at a beach resort, and that voice and guitar came up over the PA. I went out and bought ‘That'll Be the Day,’ started learning the words. A few months later, I bought the album, and that album set a course in musical history…. There was a group pictured on the cover… and it was the first time you saw a group in rock ‘n roll. I thought, ‘I'm gonna have a group.’ Over in Liverpool, the same thing was going on with four other guys. They named their group the Beatles because Buddy Holly's group was called the Crickets. In 1963, these four guys chose to end their great song ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ with the little syncopation Buddy Holly used in the chorus after the solo. Well, about twenty years later, a kid was writing a song about how it feels to be back [Fogerty’s ‘Centerfield’], and he ended his song with the same riff--came from the same place.”— John Fogerty, speech inducting Buddy Holly in the first class of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, Jan. 23, 1986

Considering that his life was cut tragically short in a plane crash at age 23, it’s hard to believe that Charles Hardin Holley was born 80 years ago today in Lubbock, Texas. But it’s even harder to believe that Buddy Holly, as singer, guitarist, songwriter, and producer, created a musical legend and legacy in a recording career that lasted only about 18 months—songs covered, on vinyl or in concert, not just by The Beatles and Creedence Clearwater Revival, but also by the Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, Linda Ronstadt, The Grateful Dead, and Bruce Springsteen, to name just a few: “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” “Oh Boy!”, “It’s So Easy,” “Heartbeat,” “Everyday,” and “Rave On.”

Listen and marvel at a catalog that will “Not Fade Away.”