As told in "..the making of LET IT BLEED", Mick and Keith went to Positano, Italy in April 1969. In this beautiful, sunny place they wrote "Midnight Rambler" and "Positano Grande", later retitled "Monkey Man". Has there ever been written any account of Mick and Keiths stay there? Where did they live, what cafes are the ones they performed in? ( Again, this info is lifted from the book, which may be wrong)

I'm asking because I'm a) going there and b) I like visiting places of "Stones importance".

Best, RB

Wow! I didn't know that the working title of "Monkey Man" was "Positano Grande"! Living in Naples, I'm somehow proud that "Monkey Man" end especially "Midnight Rambler" are said to be written in Positano. I've seen footage from that vacation in a convention with Anita Pallemberg in Milan. After the movie being displayed, people were allowed to meke questions to her, and one of them asked exactly which songs have Mick and Keith written in Positano... Anita answered "Honky Tonk Women", but I'm not sure if she really remembers it (it seems that her drug habits at the time eventually led to a kind of memory loss).



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2007-06-29 20:15 by Wild Slivovitz.

Keith Richards: "Honky Tonk Women" started in Brazil. Mick and I, Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg who was pregnant with my son at the time. Which didn't stop us going off to the Mato Grasso and living on this ranch. It's all cowboys. It's all horses and spurs. And Mick and I were sitting on the porch of this ranch house and I started to play, basically fooling around with an old Hank Williams idea. 'Cause we really thought we were like real cowboys. Honky tonk women. And we were sitting in the middle of nowhere with all these horses, in a place where if you flush the john all these black frogs would fly out. It was great. The chicks loved it. Anyway, it started out a real country honk put on, a hokey thing. And then couple of months later we were writing songs and
recording. And somehow by some metamorphosis it suddenly went into this little swampy, black thing, a Blues thing. Really, I can't give you a credible reason of how it turned around from that to that. Except there's not really a lot of difference between white Country music and black Country music. It's just a matter of nuance and style. I think it has to do with the fact that we were playing a lot around with open tunings at the time. So we were trying songs out just to see if they could be played in open tuning. And that one just sunk in." (thanks, bertrand - Paris, France)

Lead guitarist Brian Jones was a founding member of the group and was considered their leader in their early years. Unfortunately, drug abuse made him pretty much worthless, and when The Stones finished recording this on June 8, 1969, they drove to his house and fired him. This was released July 3, 1969, the same day Jones was found dead in his swimming pool.
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