I recall Bill once saying this was his favorite song to play live on stage.

My first stones record that got me hooked onto the stones, fantastic record.

The sound on HTW was completely original. The tone on Keiths guitar made the song fly, but clearly the band was very enthusiastic about making this record. The mix was just right and the guitar overdubs fit perfectly. One of my all time favorites along with JJF. These singles were stunning when they were released and caught everyone by surprise. Many had written them off prior to the release of Beggars Banquet. JJf and HTW proved they were still hungry, creative.

This is Charlie's master piece. What a sound from that kit.

Best version I ever heard was at MSQ, New York in 2005. It's such a New York song anyway. Mind you, it was also stunning as an opener at Earl's Ct in 76/European tour 76. Always been one of my absolute favourites.

An incredible version comes from the 78 tour with Keith riffing the intro
almost a minute(forgot the location,but not Fort Worth).

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shortfatfanny
An incredible version comes from the 78 tour with Keith riffing the intro
almost a minute(forgot the location,but not Fort Worth).

I think that's the great version on Handsome Girls - superb!

"No Anchovies, Please"

Heavy blues from 1929


2 1 2 0

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Elmo Lewis
No,not 40 year old MILFs, but the song.

Could you imagine in 1969 listening to a 40 year old song? A song from 1929? Too weird.

Great song though (I know we've all heard it plenty) - Charlie and Keith really weaving, the cowbell, the risque lyrics, the bass coming in at the chorus,a nice raunchy attitude.

I still love it.

Well, as far as I know the women around 40 are just getting better and better, but I leave this topic here...

But the point about 1929 is a valid one, even though Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson had some strong records at the time...

- Doxa

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Doxa

Quote
Elmo Lewis
No,not 40 year old MILFs, but the song.

Could you imagine in 1969 listening to a 40 year old song? A song from 1929? Too weird.

Great song though (I know we've all heard it plenty) - Charlie and Keith really weaving, the cowbell, the risque lyrics, the bass coming in at the chorus,a nice raunchy attitude.

I still love it.

Well, as far as I know the women around 40 are just getting better and better, but I leave this topic here...

But the point about 1929 is a valid one, even though Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson had some strong records at the time...

- Doxa

ha. yeah, they did...so did armstrong, goodman, ellington, earl hines...oh, and hundreds of others.....

40!!

That cute little floozie still ain't a day over 17.

This could be interesting for Cooder's fans, I saw few here in IORR.

Who Put The Honky Tonk in 'Honky Tonk Women'?
By Alec Wilkinson, Esquire June 1, 1999

THERE GOES RY COODER TO CUBA in 1996 to make a record with some African guitarists, but as it happens the Africans can't leave Africa--they've lost their passports or they can't obtain visas; exactly what occurred even Cooder's not sure, it was all very sudden. He rides from the airport in a taxi past buildings in pale colors, past motorcycles with eight people onboard, past the loopy trucks from Russia that haul semitrailers resembling moving vans, except that the trailers have windows and seats and carry passengers because the country doesn't have conventional buses, and right away he's happy to find himself among such tranquil festivity, and then he's in Havana--a picturesque and singular American at large, a man whom Walter Hill, one of the directors for whom Cooder has scored movies, says is "the most talented person I've ever known," who is not simply "a singer or a guitarist or a folklorist or a collector of indigenous musics or a rock 'n' roller or a bluesman but a very great artist who uses all these things to make the material of his own music," a traveler now at a loss in the landscape of fascinating rhythms and tricky chord changes. His eyes take in palm trees, old Studebakers and Lincolns, decrepit buildings, streets in deep shadow, the ocean and the wide-open tropical sky. The clear blue air smells vaguely of diesel fuel. He smokes cigars as big as hammers that last all day and make the inside of his head feel like a fabulous nightclub.

Cooder is fifty-two. He is tall and big-boned and a little bit portly. He doesn't fit easily into chairs. He has black hair, a wide and pleasingly proportioned face, and dark eyes. Lenny Waronker, the record executive who signed Cooder to his first contract, in 1969, describes Cooder as a young man by saying, "Of course he looked tremendous," and he pretty much still looks tremendous, does yoga and is the picture of rude health. Cooder, though, seems indifferent to what he looks like. From having walked behind him to tables in several restaurants, I know that he is the sort of person whose arrival in a room people notice. Partly this is because he has a head-bobbing walk that makes the movement appear to be a collection of gestures he is still practicing, but it is also because he is strikingly handsome. He has never, though, put an especially flattering picture of himself on the cover of any of his records. On most of them his features are obscured, or the lighting is unsympathetic, or he is making a goofy face, or there is no picture of him at all. Cooder is averse to self-promotion. He has never changed the color of his hair. He has no tattoos. He has never appeared in a beer commercial or made an arrangement to wear the clothes of a specific designer or connived with a press agent to be photographed in the company of a famous actress or released photographs of how he looks sitting around his house or ones that reveal his body or that portray him engaged in lewd activities, and it is unlikely that he will--it is difficult to persuade him to have his photograph taken at all. The photographs of him that best reveal the warmth and complexity and depth of his nature have been taken by his wife, Susan, to whom he has been married for almost thirty years.

By temperament Cooder is diffident and retiring. He is more apt to find fault with himself than with someone else. He worries a lot and is subject to unbidden apprehensions and is pleased to observe that his son, Joachim, who is twenty and plays drums, seems to worry about nothing at all. He has a versatile and agile intelligence, and he reads a great deal, and his talk is expansive and idiosyncratic. Walter Hill describes Cooder's conversation as a kind of "verbal jazz. It's very poetic," he says. "There's a kind of circularity to it." If you ask Cooder how he happened to record a certain song, "Hey Porter," for example, by Johnny Cash, he might say that what makes modern American music different from the music of other cultures is the jukebox, and that before World War II, during the jazz-band era, that is, musicians made records to promote their performances, so that people would come to see them--records were novelties, almost--radio hadn't yet embraced regional music, and there weren't that many radio stations anyway. After the war, people developed the habit of going to bars and cafés and feeding the jukebox, and if you were a musician and wanted your record to be chosen from among the fifty others offered, you had to come up with something conspicuous and memorable, and so the music of the period--Johnny Cash, say, with "Big River" or "Hey Porter" or "Ring of Fire"--was very poignant and microcosmic in its compression of experience, the best songs were honed to something that resembled miniature masterpieces--proof of this was that nothing else was going to come into your mind while you're listening to them--and meanwhile everyone was working to get a hit, even Howlin' Wolf, even Muddy Waters, and these great records were made in very informal settings, hotel rooms sometimes, and the offices of record companies where the employees pushed the furniture to the walls at the end of the day and set up microphones, and so the records had a warmth and informality that has surely been lost, because at a certain point technology overtook sentiment--bound to happen, there was so much money involved--and so you began to hear more of the equipment used in making the record and less of the music, more of the science and less of the feeling, and you can't go back now, no, you can't, you sure can't, and the only time you can perhaps is to a place like Cuba, where they still have beautiful music, and not so much of a technological society.

COODER WENT TO CUBA WITH THE PRODUCER NICK GOLD. Making a record in Cuba was Gold's idea. Cuban music having its origins in strains of African music, Gold thought something worthwhile would undoubtedly come of having Cooder and the Africans play with Cuban musicians. Without the Africans, there's nothing to do but start auditioning Cubans and asking the whereabouts of musicians Cooder knows from records. Twenty years earlier, as part of a cultural exchange, he was briefly in Cuba with some American jazz musicians. He brought home a wagonload of records and a tape someone gave him of a performance by a musician playing a type of guitar called the tres. Cooder found the music in Cuba deeply alluring--he loved the seductive and intricate rhythms, the concise and lyrical melodies, and the music's capacity to succinctly express emotion--but he says, "I was too young and uncertain to know what to do about it; I couldn't just go up to someone and say, 'Let's record,' so I went home and thought about it for twenty years." Occasionally when he met someone familiar with Cuban music, he played him the tape of the tres player and asked if he knew who it was, but no one did.

COODER DOESN'T LIKE TO PERFORM. HE WOULD RATHER PLAY music in a recording studio than in public, with the result that he has probably been seen onstage less often and by fewer people than any other popular musician of his stature. More than ten years have passed since he appeared on tour to promote one of his rock 'n' roll records. Seven years ago, he played a series of concerts with Little Village, whose other members were John Hiatt, Jim Keltner, and Nick Lowe. Last year, with a collection of Cuban musicians and Joachim, he performed at two concerts in Amsterdam and one in New York at Carnegie Hall, all of which were sold out. Rather than occupy a position at the front of the stage, he sat toward the back, on a folding chair, beside Joachim.

Cooder withdrew from performing partly because he doesn't like leaving home, partly because there are areas of the world, especially northern Europe, where he feels an unease that is close to dread, but mainly because onstage he feels exquisitely self-conscious. "I don't like being watched," he says, "and I don't like being an entertainer. You get up there, and it's all so loud, and the stage is so big, and how you do is all so critical, and I thought, I can't stand there one more time and say, 'Ladies and gentlemen, and especially you ladies .-.-.-'- " Furthermore, once a show was over, he tended to become despondent. "I felt like a withered balloon under a chair on the day after a birthday party," he says. "People who love the applause should have it, but I don't care for it."

Very few people hear Cooder play guitar anymore. He lives in Santa Monica, California, and mainly he plays by himself or with only a few people present, in a recording studio usually somewhere in Los Angeles or the practice room he has at home in what used to be the garage. Joachim has a friend named Sunny Levine, who mixes records in the bedroom he occupies in his parents' house in Pacific Palisades, the next town north from Santa Monica. Recently Joachim asked his father if he would play guitar on a song that Levine was working on, and Cooder said that he would, so one afternoon I went with Cooder to Levine's room, which had a view out a sliding glass door of the roofs of Pacific Palisades and beyond them the ocean, and Joachim and a friend of his sat on the bed, and Cooder sat on a chair in the center of the room, with his back to the view, and untangled guitar cords and plugged himself into a small amplifier and put on some headphones and tinkered with his guitar until he got it to produce the swampy, raspy, low-down, growly tone that he wanted. Sunny set up a microphone by the amplifier, and for Cooder's benefit we listened to the song, which was a trancy, ethereal dance tune with a guy sort of half singing, half whispering a refrain that went more or less, "I used to love you," something, something, "but that was enough for me," and Cooder said, "Uh-huh-.-.-.-that's nice-.-.-.-well, all right, I can do something on that." He recorded three takes, each lasting several minutes. On the first, he played a restrained and sinuous figure involving two dense chords. On the second, he played a rhythmic and piercing tenor line that had a slightly Indian feel to it. On the third, he added a series of steplike bass figures. He started beating time with his foot on the floor, and then he closed his eyes and his head began moving from side to side and back and forth like a bird's, and his knee rose higher and higher until his foot was pounding on the floor, and he was frowning and flinching and wincing, and he looked like a holiness preacher at a tent revival, and I felt like I was sitting in the amen corner.

CUBA: COODER AND GOLD HAVE NO SIMPLE TIME ORGANIZING the musicians. Nearly all of them are elderly--the oldest is eighty-nine--and one of them Cooder hoped to find is dead. Few of them have phones, and most people in Cuba, he learned, don't answer the phone anyway. "Down there when the phone rings," Cooder says, "it's like a dog barking--no one pays any attention." After a few days, Cooder and Gold have chased down and invited and talked from retirement a collection of suave and spry and elegantly accomplished men and one woman, nearly twenty altogether, and they set up shop in Old Havana in a studio called Egrem, which is on the second floor of a sprawling, rickety, wooden, and termite-ridden apartment house. Egrem belongs to the government. It is hardly used anymore and has been allowed to dilapidate. Water leaking from apartments above has soaked the tiles on the ceiling. When the tiles dried out, they shrank, and some of them fell off and others hang loose, but something about the age of the walls and the shape of the room is sympathetic, and anything recorded here sounds warm and natural and true and has the breath of life, and later, in California, when Cooder plays back tapes of music recorded at Egrem, he sometimes says, "You can hear the room, can't you?" The tape machines at Egrem are old and over the years have been repaired with whatever materials were at hand--"It's real dime-store engineering," Cooder says--and he and Gold send to Mexico City for parts, and they're almost ready to make a record. What they need is a singer. Someone suggests Ibrahim Ferrer, who is seventy and two years earlier, having no work, completely gave up the idea that he was ever going to sing again, but he's graceful and thin as a reed and moves like a cat, and his voice is fit.

To conduct the musicians, Cooder hires Juan de Marcos González, who is considered the best tres player on the island. Cooder plays González the tape, and González's eyes open wide as umbrellas, and he says, "How did you get that?" Cooder says, "Twenty years ago" and "present from someone" and "kept it all this time," and González says, "It is me, when I was a young man."

After a Havana hangout that no one remembers the exact location of anymore, Cooder and Gold call the record Buena Vista Social Club, and the rest of the story is perhaps sufficiently familiar that I needn't add that the record sells more than a million copies and wins a Grammy, and as a result every agent and promoter and performer in America sees dollar bills when he looks at the map of Cuba, and in February 1999 The New York Times prints an article (more americans going to cuba as performers) that fails to mention Cooder and instead says that seventy country-and-western and rock 'n' roll acts and Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Buffett and MTV are all going to Cuba, most of them together, and you might think that a life on an island, even a hard life on a semi-impoverished island, with palm trees and sugarcane and the smell of diesel fuel and raw sewage in the air and the ocean and the wide-open tropical sky, such a life, bereft of seventy American pop acts and Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Buffett and MTV, is not an existence a person would necessarily rush to describe as one of deprivation, but even if Cooder thinks so, he is far too gracious a person ever to say such a thing.

UNDER HIS OWN NAME, COODER MADE ELEVEN RECORDS FROM 1970 to 1987, and then he quit making them. The records consist of songs he found beautiful for one reason or another. Some of the songs are so primitive in their structure that they are hardly songs, and some are so complicated that they would tax the capacities of most popular musicians. The records include songs he wrote; songs from the catalogs of blues, soul, rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll, rockabilly, and jazz; Hawaiian songs; cowboy songs; drifter, tramp, and hobo songs; Mexican songs; American songs from bygone times, especially the Depression and the Dust Bowl era; pop songs, gospel songs, folk songs, and songs from the Caribbean. They represent a variety unexampled in the repertoire of any other popular musician. "The biggest inspiration I had," he says, "was to take norteño soul music and fuse it with Mexican music. It was my great big idea to do that. I was listening to norteño stuff--accordion and rhythm and boleros. This is the seventies. You got a culture that is centered around northern Mexico and the border and southern Texas, people who got across the border but didn't go far. They play this music with an accordion, which was brought to them by Germans that worked on the railroads, and so they play these polkas, but in a Mexican style." Cooder learned to play the accordion well enough that he could go to San Antonio and teach songs to the accordion player and bandleader Flaco Jimenez and then come back to Los Angeles and teach them to the singers he worked with, and finally he got Jimenez and his band and the singers together in Los Angeles to make a record he called Chicken Skin Music.

The rhythms of Cooder's arrangements are distinctive and highly eccentric. He describes them sometimes, especially the earlier music he recorded, as having the feel of "some kind of steam device gone out of control" or as having "a weird teapot effect, like the lid's about to blow off." Such a keen sense of the divisions and stresses of rhythm were inspired partly, he says, by listening as a young man to a record of brass music made by a group of black men who had found in a field the instruments belonging to a regiment of Civil War soldiers who had dropped them when they fled an engagement. No one had taught the men how to play the instruments, and they had arranged the music to suit their own ears. If you happen to be unfamiliar with the sound of a typical Cooder arrangement, one way I can think of to describe it is to say that when Cooder was a young man, he was brought into the studio to assist the Rolling Stones in recording their album Let It Bleed, and one day he was playing guitar, goofing around, clicking this and popping that, and Mick Jagger came dancing over and said, "Oh that's very interesting, what you're playing; how do you do that? You tune the E strings down to a D, and you put your fingers there, oh, I see, and you pull them off quickly like that, yes, that's very good," and Cooder showed him the whole thing--he was young, he didn't know that sometimes you got to keep your stuff indoors--and the next thing he knew, the Rolling Stones were picking up royalties for "Honky Tonk Women," which sounds precisely like a song arranged by Ry Cooder and absolutely nothing like any other song ever arranged in thirty years by the Rolling Stones.

THE FIRST OF COODER'S ANCESTORS TO ARRIVE IN AMERICA, around the time of the Revolution, came from the Low Countries--that is, the area including Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. He spelled his name Kuder, and one of his descendants married into a family in Ohio named Ryland.

Cooder grew up in Santa Monica. His father went to World War II, then, with a GI loan, bought a house on a hill above the Santa Monica airport. Cooder was an only child. As a boy, he often had trouble sleeping. In the middle of the night, from the window of his bedroom, he aimed binoculars at the planes landing and taking off and at the people on the night shift coming and going from a factory where aircraft were built. The activity suggested a world at one remove from his own--men and women who worked while the rest of the world slept--and he tried to imagine what they did. When he was about four, his parents gave him a radio. "The guy on the air would tell the time and give the ads brought to you by whoever," he says, "and it was reassuring." Part of Cooder's apprehension derived from an accident he had when he was three. He was fixing a toy car with a knife, and the knife slipped and entered his left eye. For a year after that, he says, "all I remember is sitting in dark rooms and going to hospitals and seeing doctors. A kid can't foresee anything like that, and once it happened it seemed as if the sky could fall in, as if at any time something can go wrong in a big hurry, and forever." He was eventually fitted with a prosthetic eye. His left eyelid occasionally droops, which makes him look sleepy.

One night in the year after the accident, when Cooder was four, he was lying in bed in the dark on his back. The door to his room opened. A friend of his father's, a violinist, came in and laid something on his stomach. Cooder asked, "What's this?" and the man said, "It's a guitar."

Throughout his growing up, Cooder kept mainly to himself. He rode his bike to the ocean. He liked to visit the airport because "it was quiet and peaceful, and the little planes looked like toys." Sometimes he took the bus to the beach or down to Venice, where the oil wells were. "To me that was heaven," he says. "It was messy, and it looked like the desert." When he got a driver's license, he liked to drive downtown and look at the old buildings, whose appeal for him was strong but obscure. "It's empty enough to where you could like something in there," he says. "I just don't know what it is, I'm sure I don't."

He didn't care for school. "It was like something I thought I'd never survive," he says. "Like it was Devil's Island, and I was each night making one more mark on the wall, crossing off the days." By the time he was sixteen, he played guitar well enough that he was working as a sideman on various records. When he was eighteen, a producer engaged him to help the legendary figure Don Van Vliet, who performed as Captain Beefheart, make his first record, Safe as Milk. Van Vliet's outfit was called Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band. Cooder was taking the place of his guitarist, who had suffered a nervous breakdown. Van Vliet lived in the desert. Cooder would drive out to rehearse with the band. Occasionally the guitarist would appear at a rehearsal, and Van Vliet, whose manner with the members of his band was imperious, would order him to return to his room. One day the guitarist showed up carrying a loaded crossbow. "The first thing I thought," Cooder says, "is that he's going to point it at me, since I'm taking his place, and the next thing he's going to hiccup and shoot me." Van Vliet ordered the guitarist to put down the crossbow and go back to his room. Cooder finished the record and then decided to enroll at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he lasted only a year. "I liked the trees, I liked nature, I liked being up in Portland," he says, "but once you've recorded with Captain Beefheart and looked down the barrel of a crossbow, you might get a little bored in college." While he was in Oregon, he kept getting calls to return to Los Angeles to contribute to various records. Finally, he had missed enough school that he was summoned by his adviser, who asked him to explain the absences. Cooder described what was involved in playing on sessions. The adviser asked, "Do you get paid?" Cooder said, "Last time I played about a week and made $5,000." The adviser recovered himself and said, "What are you doing here?" and Cooder said, "Well, it was kind of my parents' idea."

MANY ROCK GUITAR PLAYERS CONSIDER THEIR GUITAR TO BE AN accessory to their appearance. They match its color to their outfits. They have guitars made in peculiar shapes. They have flags painted on them, or maybe the insignia of a liquor company. They have the necks and bodies inlaid with

mother-of-pearl dragons or death's-heads or devils or snaky patterns of geometric figures. Cooder's guitars are homely. He plays guitars that a lot of other musicians would be embarrassed to be seen with. He cares about how a guitar sounds, not how it looks. He plays guitars that look as if he bought them at a yard sale on a trailer lawn in Arkansas where the lawn wasn't grass but pavement and the only other things for sale on the floppy little card table set up for the affair were some not thoroughly washed jam jars and glasses, a few pieces of cheap pewter flatware, a drink box without a lid, some filthy children's clothes, and a fan whose blades don't turn anymore and whose motor (you would discover when you got it home) makes a bad smell when you plug it in.

Most of Cooder's guitars are built for him from parts obtained from other guitars. He has an affection for the sound of guitars that no longer exist. A person can examine a photograph of, say, Robert Johnson or some other historical figure holding a guitar and try to determine what company made it, but the guitar in the picture might not be the one the musician played on his records. It might have belonged to the photographer, or it might have been rented as a prop for the occasion. Even if the guitar in the photograph is the one the musician played, it was undoubtedly a cheap guitar that likely ended up stolen or pawned or changing hands in a card game and by now the strings have pulled the neck out of line or someone left it in a basement that flooded or ran over it while backing out of the garage.

When Cooder finds a guitar with a sufficient number of companionable qualities, he sends it to a guitar builder and repairman on Staten Island named Flip Scipio. Describing Cooder's collection of guitars, Scipio says, "He has a few vintage instruments, but he also has things that seem to be out of the trash can. There's a certain kind of music he wants to play where you need cheap instruments. You can't use a $13,000 guitar to play a song that was recorded in a hotel room in Chicago in the fifties by a blues musician who bought his guitar at Sears." Cooder says, "Everything I got is irreplaceable, junk though it may be."

Cooder is not attempting merely to reproduce the sound of cheap, old guitars. He is obsessed with finding a sound that is resonant and authentic to his ear and that frees his mind from thinking about anything else when he's playing. Scipio says that Cooder is "always looking for the big note, the sound that makes all the inhibitions fall away." Not having the sound that he wants frustrates him the way not having a sufficient grasp of the grammar and vocabulary of a foreign language frustrates a traveler abroad who has something important to communicate about what he is feeling.

Cooder is receptive to intuitions and impulses and the texts of dreams. As a young man he dreamed one night that he was lost in the jungle. "You could see the sky through the tops of the trees," he says, "but that's about all you could see. Everywhere else you looked was just the trees. I knew that if I kept on walking, I would probably come to a place where I could see where I was, so I continued and eventually found a little clearing. By now it was night, and I thought I would lie down and get some sleep, and just as I did I heard this crash, crash, crash coming through the jungle, and out jumps Curtis Mayfield, from the Impressions, looking like a savage, with the war paint on his face and his chest and the bone in his nose and the necklace of teeth and a spear in one hand and a shield in the other and the black-rimmed glasses he wore. He had this guitar strung on his back, and the guitar was made out of bark and leaves and branches and snake skins, and it had barbed-wire strings. I said, 'Whoa, so that's it, that's the secret--the barbed-wire strings.' He said, 'If that's what you think is the reason for the sound, then I can't help you,' and he turned around and disappeared back into the jungle. I had that dream twenty years ago, and I never forgot it."

ONE NIGHT A FEW WEEKS AGO, JOACHIM'S band, Speakeasy, was playing at a club in Hollywood, and I went with Cooder to see them. The band has eight members--two sisters who are singers and six guys, who among them play drums and percussion, guitar, lap guitar, violin, accordion, trumpet, and trombone. Joachim has known the younger of the sisters since they were classmates in the seventh grade--that year, she and Joachim performed together in the school's talent show; she sang and Joachim played drums. The girls are tall and slender and have dark hair and big, dark eyes and sharp cheekbones--not long ago, a movie star offered to keep one of them--and from time to time Cooder's lawyer is occupied making phone calls to executives in the record business who would like to separate them from the band. The lawyer, Cooder says, instructs the executives "to stay the hell out of Dodge."

Speakeasy plays music like Cooder played during Joachim's childhood, which is to say, some rhythm and blues, some ballads, some rockabilly, some car songs, and some country songs. Cooder sometimes helps them with arrangements and teaches the guitar player parts.

Cooder and I arrived at the club early and drank two margaritas. There was a stage at one end of a dance floor and a bar to one side. Cooder said that the place was similar to plenty of clubs he had played during the early days of his career, when he traveled with a guitar and a mandolin and played by himself. "I used to love to come to these places early," he said. "Arrive and watch the waitresses set up and lay out the napkins. It was a nice, quiet time." Before long, he grew nervous, though. He began to pace. Then he sat down and tried to keep still. He went to talk to the sound man, because he said they usually only know how to set up microphones for heavy-metal bands and that his son's band was more complicated than that. Joachim arrived, and I heard Cooder tell him, "The song's too slow."

"Still?"

"Give it a bit of a groove tempo. It'll still feel down, but it won't be so down," he said, the way another kind of father might say, "Quit chasing the ball. Don't swing until you get the pitch you really want."

Several bands were on the bill for the evening, and Speakeasy had been engaged to play first. While the members were setting up their instruments, Cooder sat at a table toward the back of the room and said to no one in particular, "See how good I'm being--I'm just sitting here." He was especially anxious because Eliades Ochoa, who played guitar on the Buena Vista Social Club album, was in Los Angeles making his own record and had said he would come hear Joachim. Eliades arrived with his girlfriend, who had an oval-shaped face and long, shiny black hair and wore a T-shirt and a full, pleated skirt. Neither she nor Eliades speaks English. Around eight-thirty, the two beautiful sisters stood in the center of the stage, and the boys stood on either side of them, like parentheses, and the girls sang like angels, and the boys played wonderfully, while Cooder ran up and down the stairs to the sound booth, making suggestions.

Afterward we helped Joachim load his drums into his car. Then we drove Eliades and his girlfriend to their hotel in Hollywood. Eliades wanted a cigar, and Cooder tried to find a place where he could buy one. "What we need is one of those yuppie places with fancy cigars," he said, and he thought of one, but when we arrived it was closed. Eventually we pulled up in front of a convenience store next door to their hotel, and Cooder sat double-parked in the car, and I went in with Eliades and his girlfriend and stood with them in front of a glass cabinet filled with cigars that I felt sure could only disappoint someone from Cuba. After a lot of deliberation with his girlfriend, Eliades bought two cigars, and I followed them back outside. Cooder had parked the car and was walking toward us. The evening was a little cool, and he was wearing a blue duffle coat, like a boarding-school boy. Eliades was wearing jeans and a shirt and cowboy boots and a straw hat in the shape of a cowboy hat. He is short, and Cooder towered over him. The three of them stood talking. Cooder doesn't speak Spanish, so the talk was mostly gestures and a few words, with Cooder leaning toward Eliades as if he were addressing the brim of his hat. Cooder thanked him for coming to hear Joachim. They all nodded. Cooder seemed fatigued by having seen to all the details of the evening, among them their comfort. For a moment the three of them stood there--an exotic American, a notable Cuban, and a woman for whom "Señorita" seemed the only proper form of address, three figures on the Hollywood pavement, awash in the shimmering light that was a mixture of the light from the streetlamps, neon and car headlights, and the illumination from the windows of the big hotel. Cooder patted Eliades on the shoulder, and then he and his girlfriend started walking toward the hotel, Eliades rocking from side to side on the worn heels of his boots like a small boat in heavy weather. Not until the crowd on the street had absorbed them did Cooder turn toward his car.

Don't know whether the Stones stole something from Cooder. Probably he was a inspiration to them.

But it's ridicilous to say they never did something like Honky Tonk Woman before, so it has to come from Cooper.
Everything on Beggars and Bleed was new and different from their older stuff. They were in a period of change and transition.

One of their greatest tracks, of course...
Also the first with Keith´s great classic guitar SOUND!
And the there´s the drums sound too...

Anyone else thought about the similarities in the guitar/drums sound on HTW and Monkey Man?
It´s like they were recorded at the same session(s) to my ears.
(I don´t hear this on the rest of Let It Bleed)

I think Jimmy Miller deserves lots of credit for the great sound on this record and others he worked on with the Stones. Charlie's drums never sounded better than what we heard from the Jimmy Miller years.