Live with Me

Let It Bleed 
Track 4 
"Live with Me" – 3:36


[Download here.]

Huh. I always thought "Bitch" came first. Go figure.

That's the instantly-identifiable Bobby Keys on sax – I didn't even have to look it up, his sound is unmistakable. This is his first recording with the Stones, but not his last – he will go on to play on virtually every album that follows, along with most of their tours.

That Charlie Watts four-on-the-floor really kicks ass. Mick really has his slur working. That Keith harmony in the verses is a neat touch. But overall, this is another one of those songs I've always loved but couldn't really explain why.

Country Honk

Let It Bleed 
Track 3 
"Country Honk" – 3:10




Okay, maybe I was a little overenthusiastic about the Stones' "country" songs. After knocking "Love in Vain" out of the park with an inventive, exploratory performance, they immediately settle into kitsch on "Country Honk"[*]. The Stones are no strangers to self-parody, obviously, but it wasn't clear at this time that they would be able to go from one extreme of the artistic spectrum to the other with such ease.

God I hate this song – it reminds me precisely how thin the line is between creation and destruction. With "Love in Vain", they created something utterly new to the world. With "Country Honk", they tore that all down, explaining that the whole thing was just a joke and I can't believe you took it seriously.

[* which was recorded during the same period they recorded "Honky Tonk Woman" – neither song appears to have been "first", both simply came about at the same time.]

Love in Vain

Let It Bleed
Track 2
"Love in Vain" (Robert Johnson) – 4:22




Not the first time the Stones perform a blues as if it was a country song. This would prove to be fertile creative territory not just for them, but dozens of other artists who were perhaps uneasy at the thought of appropriating another culture.



The folkie-influenced "authenticity" movement had its day, but now some artists were tired of performing blues in blackface, and wanted to put their own creative spin on the art form. It was an interesting twist, and several artists, from Van Morrison to Gram Parsons to Lyle Lovett, produced some of their greatest music by exploring the territory. As George Carlin reminds us, it was a losing proposition overall, and in general white people were content to stand on stage and mimic their blues heroes without any artistic ambitions beyond homage. That is no way for a genre as powerful as the blues to end up. A fucking sacrilege indeed.

I have always given credit to Mick and Keith and the rest of the guys for breathing new life into the body of this dying art form. It was a brave move. While Cream and Zeppelin and all the other bands of the era were content to tread water, the Stones continued to search for ways to honour their heroes appropriately.

Interlude

Sorry for the lack of content of late. I have been crushed with work over the last couple of weeks, and while that is over now, my nerves have been absolutely frazzled to the point where I cannot think of anything intelligent to say about anything. (Just look at my lame George Carlin memorial – it has been a long time since I've been hit by a celebrity death like that, but all I could think to write was "Carlin = funny, durr".)

I promise to resume my evisceration of the Stones recorded output within a couple of days. I see that their ambiguous take on Robert Johnson's haunting blues "Love in Vain" is next. I should be able to string a few thoughts together this weekend.

In the meantime, here is a picture of Jesus racing Darth Vader on aardvarks. Let us now praise the nameless artist who memorialised this timeless event. He, too, will one day dine in Valhalla.

George Carlin RIP

George Carlin died today. Everyone knows who he is, I don't have to explain his impact on comedy. This one had me bummed out all day.

The web is filled with his material, so you won't have to go far to get some great Carlin goodness.

This is from one of his best specials, 1999's You Are All Diseased. About three minutes in is my favourite Carlin quote of all time.


Here, from the interview album Carlin on Comedy Carlin discusses comedy writing:





And pain:










Here's something I haven't seen uploaded anywhere else. It's a special from 1997 hosted by Jon Steward entitled "George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy". It's a retrospective/interview, but also has Carlin himself performing one of his greatest bits, "Advertising Lullaby", in which he delivers the immortal line, "Whoever coined the phrase 'Let the buyer beware' was probably bleeding from the asshole". You can download the entire mp3 by following the link here.

UPDATE: Jesus. The man wrote his own obit. Dammit George, you're supposed to be making me laugh, not cry.



LAST UPDATE: Louis CK, a great comedian himself, wrote a great piece on his website.

Prolific, hard working... This is the way I would say George has had the most direct influence on me personally as a comedian. The guy did about seventeen full hour standup specials. Very generously, he explained how he pulled this off in a terrific interview that is available on a cd called Carlin on Carlin. He talks about spending every year on the road, working specifically on the next special. Every show has a goal, to hone the specific set he is expecting to shoot at the end of the year. Like writing a book. When he shoots the special, it's over. That material goes away and he starts again. I listened to that interview one night, in my car, while coming from a show where I had just done my regular, stump speech hour that took me fifteen years to perfect, at a Chinese restaurant in Saugus Massachusettes. The show had gone well. And I didn't care that it went well. It was solid material. It had been working for years. I'd been doing comedy for almost twenty. So what? Then I heard George explaining his process and I was terrified and inspired. What balls, to just chuck out perfectly good material and start again.

My first hour of material took fifteen years to write and I did it for another five. My second hour took one year. I shot it as a special called "Shameless" and never performed that material again. After a hard year of touring I shot "Chewed Up" and now that material is gone and I'm working on another hour now, from scratch. This is something I never dreamed I'd be able to do, let alone learn to do this late in my life and career. It has given me a new lease on life as a comedian and as a person. It's made me better, more honest and has made every single show of the last three years mean more than any shows in the previous 20.

All of that is due to George. His example, and his words in that interview, were an absolute revolution in my life. I owe him EVERYTHING.

Gimme Shelter

Let It Bleed
Track 1
"Gimme Shelter" – 4:32




I was psyching myself up to get to this song – which I think is probably the Stones' greatest recording – and of course by the time I get to it I have nothing to say. Despite Scorsese's attempts to reduce "Gimme Shelter" to a cliché, it remains as vital as ever due to some terrific percussion work from Charlie Watts and producer Jimmy Miller.

Merry Clayton is the singer who comes in a steals the show. Friend of the blog Mondo hipped me to her solo recording of "Gimme Shelter":



Thanks to YouTube, I found a brief clip of Merry doing her thing:



"Gimme Shelter" seems to inpsire some rather unfortunate cover versions. Here is the normally surefooted Funkadelic performing the song in a desultory manner:



Patti Smith can't seem to get her head around the song either:



I don't know who the fuck these people are, but it's this type of stuff that guarantees that I avoid listening to music made after 1979:

Honky Tonk Women

"Honky Tonk Women" – 3:02



I don't know if Keith had ever recorded a song playing in open-G tuning previous to this. I'm looking over my notes, and while I see that he's used open-D a few times ("Jumpin' Jack Flash", for example), I can't find an instance of open-G. Maybe one of the blues tunes on the Stones' first couple of albums, although I've heard that it was Ry Cooder that showed Keith the wonders of open-G ("Five strings, three notes, two fingers, and one asshole") during the Beggars Banquet sessions. In any case, "Honky Tonk Women" is certainly the first time Keith really exploited its possibilities.

I was considering writing up an "Open-G for non-musicians" primer here, but concluded that would be needlessly pedantic. It will suffice to say that non-standard tunings facilitate certain note combinations that aren't usually heard – suspended 2nds and 4ths are its identifying traits. Additionally, it is possible to use open strings (ie strings allowed to ring freely without being fretted by the player's fingers) more often in this tuning, creating a really full sound. Furthermore, minor chords are more difficult to finger in open-G, and you'll note a relative lack of minor chords in the Stones songs from this period. Anyway, even if you don't know what I'm talking about, you'll recognise the sound, it is quite distinctive – think of the opening bars of "Start Me Up" or "You Can't Always Get What You Want".

From here on out, Keith used open-G a lot: almost half of the tracks on Let it Bleed and Sticky Fingers used open-G (and most of the rest used open-D). On Exile, only "Loving Cup" and "Torn and Frayed" had Keith playing in standard tuning.

I am going on about the goddamn tuning because I want to avoid talking about "Honky Tonk Women", a song I don't particularly enjoy outside of Keith's great riff. I know it's part of their whole image and mystique, but the misogyny is really unappealing to me, and manages to poison the whole song. So there you go: a great riff ruined by Mick's personality.

BTW I should be starting Let it Bleed right now, but in this era bands like the Stones frequently released singles that did not appear on a contemporaneous studio album. Like "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and Beggars Banquet, "Honky" clearly is related to the material on Let it Bleed so I am sticking this entry here rather than wait for its actual album appearance (on the Through The Past, Darkly comp).

Also, check out this amusing document, from a Stones performance at Hyde Park in 1969.

BB King - You're Losin' Me (nonstones)

BB King
Completely Well
"You're Losin' Me"




Download here.

1969 saw the release of BB King's last great collection of songs, Completely Well. The idea behind the album was to combine BB King's straight blues singing and guitar playing with contemporary soul and funk arrangements. Unlike many of these types of experiments, it worked out great. The most well known track on the album, "The Thrill Is Gone", mixed King's slashing single-string work and his impassioned vocals with a low-key soul backing, including some Motown-like strings.

My favourite track however was "You're Losin' Me", which re-imagines a typical BB King cheatin' blues as a funk song. The standout is some nimble bass work by session player Jerry Jemmott, who has played with virtually every important soul and R&B artist in the 60s and 70s, but is in my Bassist Hall of Fame simply for playing on "Memphis Soul Stew".

Beggars Banquet Roundup

Beggars Banquet Roundup


1. "Sympathy for the Devil" – 6:27
2. "No Expectations" – 4:02
3. "Dear Doctor" – 3:26
4. "Parachute Woman" – 2:23
5. "Jigsaw Puzzle" – 6:17
6. "Street Fighting Man" – 3:18
7. "Prodigal Son" (Rev. Robert Wilkins) – 2:55
8. "Stray Cat Blues" – 4:40
9. "Factory Girl" – 2:12
10. "Salt of the Earth" – 4:51

See also the related single "Jumpin' Jack Flash".

A seminal album in many ways: It established a fruitful musical direction for the band, which they would explore for the next ten years, producing the bulk of their greatest output, perhaps best heard on Exile on Main Streeet. With it's country-ish songs and instrumentation, Beggars Banquet provided a blueprint that numerous other bands over the years would use – most memorably Rod Stewart's first few solo albums. Finally, the album gave the band's "dark side" image real definition, an image that gave credibility to later songs like "Torn and Frayed" and "Dead Flowers" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want".

Background from Wikipedia:

Following the long sessions for the previous album in 1967, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards decided that the band needed more direction in the studio and in early 1968 hired Jimmy Miller, who had produced the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic. The partnership would prove to be a success and Miller would work with the band until 1973.

In March, the band began recording their new album, aiming for a July release. One of the first tracks cut, "Jumpin' Jack Flash", was released as a single-only that May, becoming a major hit.

Beggars Banquet was Brian Jones' last full effort with The Rolling Stones. In addition to his slide work on "No Expectations", he played harmonica on "Dear Doctor", "Parachute Woman" and "Prodigal Son", sitar and tambura on "Street Fighting Man", mellotron on "Jigsaw Puzzle" and "Stray Cat Blues". On "Stray Cat Blues", Richards for the first time used the "open G" chord style that became a staple of numerous Stones classics for the rest of their tenure, including "Monkey Man", "Brown Sugar", "Start Me Up", and "I Go Wild".

By June, the sessions were nearly completed in England, with some final overdubbing and mixing to be done in Los Angeles during July. However, both Decca Records in England and London Records rejected the planned cover design - a graffiti-covered lavatory, and the band held back the album. By November, however, The Rolling Stones gave in, allowing the album to be released in December with a simple imitation invitation card cover. The idea for a plain album cover was also implemented by The Beatles for their eponymous white-sleeved double-album, which was released one month prior to Beggars Banquet. This similarity, coupled with Beggars Banquet's later release, garnered the Rolling Stones accusations of imitating the Beatles. In 1984, the original cover art was released with the initial CD remastering of Beggars Banquet.

Critics considered the LP as a return to form.^[1] It was also a clear commercial success, reaching #3 in the UK and #5 in the US (on the way to eventual platinum status).

The original LP pressing did not credit Rev. Wilkins as the writer of "Prodigal Son". His performance of "Prodigal Son" at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival was included on the Vanguard LP Blues at Newport, Volume 2; that performance is similar to the Stones' cover, and this may have been where the band first heard the song, although this is not certain.

On 10 December 1968 and 11 December 1968, the band aimed to promote Beggars Banquet by recording a television extravaganza entitled The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus featuring John Lennon, Eric Clapton, The Who and Jethro Tull among the musical guests. However, the project did not air and would not receive an official release until 1996.

Salt of the Earth

Beggars Banquet
Track 10
"Salt of the Earth" – 4:51



A kick ass album that goes out on a whimper. I liked this song a lot more when the Stones recorded it as "You Can't Always Get What You Want" – but even then, I didn't like it all that much.

The problem is Mick. He is a man who cannot get away with singing lines like,

Let's drink to the hard working people,
Let's drink to the lowly of birth.

It's impossible to take Mick seriously when he sings those words, knowing what we know about him and his cocaine and jet-set entourage. Gives me the same angry feeling I get when I hear Bono talk about the starving people in Africa – don't you just want to punch him in the taint? How's about you just shut the fuck up and count your money, okay? Jesus, you just finished songs about riots in the streets and sex with underage girls – don't give me this salt of the earth bullshit, please? God fucking dammit.

Factory Girl

Beggars Banquet
Track 9
"Factory Girl" – 2:12



A terrific melody that must have sounded classic the moment it came off Keith's guitar. A neat, old timey arrangement with minimal percussion (including the return of Rocky Dijon!), some mandolin courtesy of Dave Mason, and viola care of Rick Grech.

So the question that keeps popping up in my head: why do these tunes sound so good, while the band's previous attempts at blues sound so bad? Part of the answer must be that I am partial to the more traditional arrangements they used on this album over the Chicago style the Stones used on their first few albums. Another part of the answer is surely Mick, who sounded so tentative on those early tracks and so self-assured on these. Compare his slurring delivery on "Factory Girl" with his earlier "Little Red Rooster":



The band also sounds more confident. But I think it's Mick that really gives authority to these songs on this album.

Stray Cat Blues

Beggars Banquet
Track 8
"Stray Cat Blues" – 4:40



Mick's really got that lazy slur working. I thought he perfected it around the time of Exile, but he sounds great here.

Not a great song, but a good enough rocker to maintain the energy level of the album (except for that interlude – what is that all about?). It's songs like this where you can really hear what Mick Taylor brought to the table: Keith is a great guitar player, but his leads are not particularly distinctive, and too many songs in this era of the Stones history simply omit the guitar solo. Strong tracks like "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Street Fighting Man" don't really miss anything, but weaker songs like "Stray Cat Blues" suffer a little.

Prodigal Son

Beggars Banquet
Track 7
"Prodigal Son" (Rev. Robert Wilkins) – 2:55




A weird track – it sounds like the type of album filler that was common on the Stones early albums, an old blues track with a neat little melody. It's a nice performance, but the track isn't especially strong itself – it is the placement of "Prodigal Son" on this album that gives it a credibility their earlier blues recording largely lacked. At the beginning, when the Stones were a band who had no ambitions beyond paying homage to their blues heroes, a track like this would just be another tribute. But this time, the Stones clearly have greater goals, and surrounded by tracks as strong memorable as "Street Fighting Man" and "Sympathy for the Devil", "Prodigal Son" serves as kind of a rest stop, a quick look back to the past for a band who is clearly going in another direction.

Street Fighting Man

Beggars Banquet
Track 6
"Street Fighting Man" – 3:18



TimeIsOnOurSide.com has a lot of great quotes about this song. A compilation:

It was a very strange time in France. But not only in France but also in America, because of the Vietnam War and these endless disruptions.... I wrote a lot of the melody and all the words, and Keith and I sat around and made this wonderful track, with Dave Mason playing the shehani on it live. It's a kind of Indian reed instrument a bit like a primitive clarinet. It comes in at the end of the tune. It has a very wailing, strange sound.
- Mick Jagger, 1995

Street Fighting Man was recorded on Keith's cassette with a 1930s toy drum kit called a London Jazz Kit Set, which I bought in an antiques shop, and which I've still got at home. It came in a little suitcase, and there were wire brackets you put the drums in; they were like small tambourines with no jangles. The whole kit packs away, the drums go inside each other, the little drum goes inside the snare drum into a box with the cymbal. The snare drum was fantastic because it had a really thin skin with a snare right underneath, but only two strands of gut... Keith would be sitting on a cushion playing a guitar and the tiny kit was a way of getting close to him. The drums were really loud compared to the acoustic guitar and the pitch of them would go right through the sound. You'd always have a great backbeat.
- Charlie Watts, 2003

(O)n Street Fighting Man there's one 6-string open and one 5-string open. They're both open tunings, but then there's a lot of capo work. There are lots of layers of guitars on Street Fighting Man. There's lots of guitars you don't even hear. They're just shadowing. So it's difficult to say what you're hearing on there. Cause I tried 8 different guitars. And which ones were used in the final version, I couldn't say... (A) the same time the guitar was going on, I had Nicky Hopkins playing a bit of piano, and Charlie just shuffling in the background. Then we put drums on it and added another guitar while he was doing that. And we just kept layering it.
- Keith Richards, 2002

Jimmy Miller was one of the most simpatico producers I have ever worked with. He could handle a band - especially this band - and give everybody the same level of support. He was a great drummer in his own right, so he could talk to Charlie on equal terms, and he had a very good rapport with Mick. He didn't mind any idea that came up. He loved improvisation. I don't think I could have done Street Fighting Man without him. Mick would get impatient with my experiments sometimes, but Jimmy gave me a lot of encouragement saying, let's take this down the line and let's see where it goes.
- Keith Richards, 2003

"Street Fighting Man" is the musical companion piece to "Jumpin' Jack Flash": they both achieved incredibly high energy levels through Keith's method of recording the guitars (mostly acoustics) through a crappy cassette mic; both tracks featured a simplified but pounding rhythm section, with Charlie laying off the cymbals entirely and Bill Wyman sticking mostly to the chord roots; both songs rounded out the sound later by overdubbing all kinds of exotic instruments later.

It's almost astounding to hear how quickly the Stones found their sound after struggling through their various blues and psychedelic fads, and the way it came together almost all at once.


Also, one of the best mashups I've heard, from Go Home Productions:

Jigsaw Puzzle

Beggars Banquet
Track 5
"Jigsaw Puzzle" – 6:17



Here's another song I never paid much attention to before. The highlight is Mick's vocal attack – similar phrasing that he used in "Sympathy for the Devil", but with a lot more bite. I get the feeling that Mick was the driving force behind the composing and recording of "Jigsaw Puzzle" – in addition to the distinctive vocals, the lyrics are rambling and impressionistic in a way that I've never heard before on any Stones tune. At AllMusic, Richie Unterberger notes

... the similarity to some of Dylan's long, wordy surreal songs of the mid-'60s is close enough that it's a little surprising "Jigsaw Puzzle" hasn't been singled out by more listeners as being a Dylan imitation, particularly since it frankly sounds a little hackneyed in its approximation of Dylanesque weirdness.

The lyrics and vocal are pretty much all there is to the song. The band never develops the country/funk groove they use for the first verse, instead add in some acoustic guitar and piano to the rhythm section, and layer on Brian Jones' rudimentary slide guitar on top, turning the song into what sounds like an extended jam.

"Jigsaw" clocks in at over 6 minutes, almost the same as "Sympathy" – both songs lack a chorus or bridge and use the same chord pattern throughout, but while the latter has a clear direction, using changes in instrumentation and dynamics to build to a crescendo, "Jigsaw" simply repeats those four chords over and over without leading anywhere in particular. It's not a bad song, but I feel like it would pack more power if it had been edited and rewritten into something a little more focused.

Parachute Woman

Beggars Banquet
Track 4
"Parachute Woman" – 2:23



Excuse the video.

The Stones go back to the traditional blues for this one, something they haven't done for a while. The instrumentation is stripped down: an acoustic, standup bass, some harp. The Stones recorded the track directly onto a two-track cassette deck, which resulted in the murky mix. (They later added some overdubs in the studio – there appears to be another bass that drops in and out, along with another harp.) I read that the murkiness was more or less a conscious decision, part of their new "getting back to their roots" philosophy, and while it produced great music on the rest of the album, the results are a little less exciting here.

I guess it's the "parachute woman" theme that's bothering me. The Stones were setting out to deliberately re-create the atmosphere of those old depression-era blues recordings they loved, and to my ears they mostly succeeded. But "parachute woman" rings false to me – I just can't imagine Charlie Patton or John Hurt singing those words.

However, that is a minor complaint. Like I said, the song was a mostly successful recreation of a traditional blues, and there's no shame in that.

Dear Doctor

Beggars Banquet
Track 3
"Dear Doctor" – 3:26



This is the blueprint for "Sweet Virginia" and "Far Away Eyes" and other songs that I guess we'd classify as "country-rock". Doing this type of stuff was a real breakthrough for the band: unlike their attempts at blues, which were almost farcical in their slavish attempts at authenticity, the Stones achieved a level of credibility on the country songs precisely because they paid no mind to the traditional values of the genre – they brought their rock and roll sensibility to these songs, and produced music that was vital and exciting.

"Dear Doctor" doesn't quite have the formula down yet – the vocals are mannered and unsure, and the band doesn't quite seem committed to the idea of mixing a country waltz ballad with their rock and roll instrumentation. But this is an important recording for the Stones in that it pointed in a direction that would, in time, produce some of their best music.

No Expectations

Beggars Banquet
Track 2
"No Expectations" – 4:02



Yeah, I know I'm not supposed to like it: its self-consciousness is unseemly – Mick's arch vocal is especially irritating. But dammit, the melody is memorable, the first time the Stones have managed to compose something like this. The deliberate and unhurried tempo adds credibility to the fake gravity of the lyrics. Nicky Hopkins' languorous piano part adds class to what should have been a throwaway ballad. So I end up loving it in spite of myself.

Bo Diddley

I'm sure you've all heard by now that Bo Diddley has died at age 79. He was a huge influence on not just the Stones (who covered "Mona", and used his beat on many other songs), but a whole generation of early rock and roll musicians, particularly those in England during the sixties.





The "Bo Diddley Beat" gets all the headlines, but I think his most lasting influence is his guitar – the impact of his rhythmic, distorted playing was visceral. Rest in peace, Mr. McDaniel.

Sympathy for the Devil

Beggars Banquet
Track 1
"Sympathy for the Devil" – 6:27



I wrote this blog entry four times, and erased it four times. If you're counting, that means I'm writing it for the fifth time. The problem is that I cannot summon any modicum of objectivity or distance. The song exists in that wasteland of overplayed classic rock songs – I've listen to "Sympathy for the Devil" maybe hundreds of times, and I just can't hear it anymore. I listen to it, but I'm not hearing anything. It's like that scar I have on my finger, where I had to get a mess of stitches after cutting myself trying to slice a carrot. I know it's there, but I just don't pay it any attention.

I know, in some abstract sense, that it is an important recording in an historical sense, helping to establish Mick's lasting image as... well, something. It also showed a musical progression, from the dippy psychedelia of the Summer of Love to... something else. Dammit, I told you I can't say anything interesting about the song.

Reading the Wikipedia article, there appears to have been quite a bit of public distress upon the release of "Sympathy", something about satanism and such. From our perspective in these enlightened times, that's all faintly ridiculous, but I can't put myself in the position of someone hearing the song for the first time. Was it really all that dark? Was there a discernibly evil vibe? Or were listeners in on the joke? Like I said, I'm too close to the song – it just won't come into focus.

Wait – I thought of one piece of trivia worth passing along: this is the second time the wonderfully named Rocky Dijon makes his appearance on this blog, playing percussion – but the first time, chronologically, he played with the Stones. It won't be the last.

UPDATE: Via friend of the blog Mondo comes this clip of the Stones in the studio playing Sympathy. Pretty cool. The hilarity starts at 1:20.



Also, see



I miss John Lennon.