Keeef ......



ROCKMAN

It was my late sister's favourite Stones song. Black and blue was her last album.

Funnily enough, it was the last song on a homemade work out cd compliation at my local gym today....cool down part........Lav-er-ly....

Besides the actual music which is totally captivating, I like it as it's a solid down to earth story told like Bob Dylan's Brownsville girl.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2023-12-12 04:58 by EddieByword.

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rollmops
If I remember correctly, it is 2 parts created separetly 1 by Mick and 1 by Keith that were put together and it worked.The chord progressions, the grooves and the lyrics in both parts are simple but very effective at drawing the listener emotionnally into the song.
Great song by Mick&Keith!

Rockandroll,
Mops

Yeah, it's a very unique song for them that stands out as different.

Such a great song, I play it almost every day.

In Chicago 2019 the Palmer House hotel actually upgraded me to the 22nd floor.

No word of a lie.

It's easy to say this now, in 2023, or even 1993, I guess, but from 1973-1976 the Stones seemed to have found a softer side, a feminine side, as it's been used to describe chest beating males being loving, in the past, of balladry.

Memory Motel possibly was the pinnacle of that. Angie started it, of course, as well as Winter (and Through The Lonely Nights), and then you have Till The Next Goodbye and If You Really Want To Be My Friend, culminating with Fool To Cry and Memory Motel.

Memory Motel really is a brilliant song. Although not so much on BLACK AND BLUE, in their discography, it's way out there.


Keith or I might have had the initial idea (for a song), but after a while you can't separate who wrote it. We just sit down and do them, sometimes in the studio, sometimes at home. Like here, this song, Memory Motel, I wrote the first part, the piano part, which I played. Course I had to take time off from the Stones... that takes a lot of my time, let me TELL you... but I don't mind, it's my own time - to do my own solo stuff on the LP, but more of that later. So anyway... I play the bloody piano, right? Okay, so I'm going, mmmmm-mmmmm, a-mmmmmm, and Keith goes, hmmmmmgghh... uhhh... that sounds all right..., and I say, Well, I only just started it, I ain't finished yet, 'cause I like to get everything finished, done, written on paper, typed up, all written out. But he doesn't like that so he says, I've got a middle bit here, and he sits down at the other piano, the electric piano, and he plays the middle bit. Then I learn that and he learns my part, and THEN we make the track, and I sing what I've got. And then I go and finish the words. They're all done in a day. And in fact, when Keith wrote the middle bit, he did those words... he goes... mmmm... she's got a mind... of her own... Anyway, that's how, for instance, we wrote that song. Boring, isn't it?
- Mick Jagger, 1976

[timeisonourside.com]

One of their very best from an album that holds a very special place in my heart.

One of their best songs, easily in the Top 5 for me.
I have loved it since I heard it the first time, wish they would've played it live more often.

It's the song along with Beast Of Burden I will regret not being lucky enough to have been getting live.

Along with Acquiesce and A Day In The Life it's the pinnacle of co-operation.
Magic.

There is something timeless about the song. It's not part of classic Stones, it's not part of the 'new' Stones starting with Some Girls, it really stands on its own. This is amplified by the terrific sound of Black and Blue, probably the best sound they ever achieved.

Mathijs

Memory Motel is one of my all time favorites. Black And Blue always was a special Stones albums to me. Memory Motel is in my repertoir. I sing and play with my accoustic. It took quite a while to find out how I can play it to catch the arrangement. So I play it in G and tune my guitar down.
The accoustic studio version from 1995 is very nice too.
And I was lucky to hear them playing it live in 1999 in Cologne.

Great post hbwriter.
A wonderful song almost perfection and still sounds as beautiful today as it did back then.

Yes hope they play it next year.

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babyblue
Yes hope they play it next year.

Been a while since it was last played. 2013 in - Boston

This song is untouchable. There would be many songs which in case they should have been recorded in studio again by the stones they would roughly sound the same. But any new attemp with Memory Motel it would have been resulted in an abortive attepmt. The official release is unique. Inimitable by the stones themselves.

It's one of my bucket list songs for sure along with Worried About You.

This is fascinating

[avenuemagazine.com]

from the article

Jagger’s knack for a sly lyric is at its best in “Memory Motel” as he starts to recount the story of “Hannah” and their brief liaison. “We spent a lonely night at the Memory Motel,” he sings. It’s an elegant sketch of the isolation within a passing affair, and of the sometimes-desolate feel of the seaside village. The eponymous motel sits to this day at the head of Montauk’s commercial strip. The 1926 building is battered and worn; it’s reputed to have done its patriotic World War II duty as a bordello serving the nearby air and naval installations then maintaining a lookout for German U-Boats. By the time the Stones came to town, the place was being run by two sisters, both heavyset and aging, who believed that wearing their bikinis at all times was a draw for male patrons. The funky barroom still has some cheap Stones memorabilia — none of it relating to the song or to the 1976 Black and Blue album — scattered across walls painted black. And the oft-told tale that the song came about in some boozy Mick n’ Keith singalong at the Memory’s long-gone piano is pure canard. The Stones wandered in looking for a hard-to-find pool table, but were quickly shown the door lest their presence damage the place’s sterling reputation. Jagger got a line out of the indignity, anyway. Mick’s “lonely nights at the Memory Motel” are in the art, not the life.

“Hannah” herself (not her real name) is a different matter. I found her quite by accident a few years ago. She’s still out East, but has long since decamped for the Madison Avenue-by-the-sea splendor of East Hampton. She didn’t require a whole lot of poetic license from Mick. The period photo she showed me over a recent lunch has that glow that’s completely specific to Ivory Girl 1970s blondes. Jagger’s lyric nods to her hazel eyes, and she’s “a honey of a girl” to this day. Her first meeting with the singer came “down by the ocean” at Eothen. Hannah was walking her dogs on the beach below the compound when she cut across the property to reach the long, sandy private road that threaded out toward her cabin at the Deep Hollow horse ranch. It had just started to rain when Mick pulled up slowly in a vast sedan, a Lowenbrau wedged between his legs. At first she demurred, but as he drove away — even more slowly, to let her consider it — she thought, “What am I, crazy?” and ran to the car. Back at her place, things, ahem, took off. It was, after all, 1975. The affair “just felt so easy and natural,” she told me. The world’s biggest rock star facing the world’s biggest tour made every last move seem effortless.

“I was breakfast for him!” she laughs. “But I never, ever, felt dirty or used.” Hannah’s still impressed: “He was just so cool and laid-back. They all were.” Even back in the village, the local code of rugged individualism worked for the band. “No one made a big deal about the Stones because they didn’t make a big deal. Montauk gave them their space.”

If there’s a clubhouse at the heart of Montauk’s “Wild East” culture, it’s Jimmy Hewitt’s Shagwong Bar (primary) and Restaurant (very secondary) in the middle of town. Hewitt has by now owned the place for 45 years and he’s got the weathered mug to prove it. While running the saloon by night, he used to procure Bluefish blood (which doesn’t turn brown, but stays a deep, rich red) for Halston to use in hand-dyeing his coveted and très cher curtains. Paul Simon, Robert De Niro and Elizabeth Taylor have hoisted drinks with the fishermen at the bar over the years, and celebrity status has never conferred the same clout and distance it does elsewhere. The first time Jagger came by, he had a strange notion to bring his own bottle. “I kicked him out,” Hewitt told me. “I didn’t know who the @#$%& he was.” But the relationship was mended, and Mick was in the bar often. Local artist Noel Arikian remembers the singer arriving in “a copper-colored Mercedes with English plates.” Altered states and culture shock may have been in play: Jagger drove the car in from the east and slid into a spot immediately in front of the gin mill — convenient, but pointed into traffic on the Imperial “wrong side of the road.” The impossibly chic Bianca Jagger had a smoother run in the Shagwong. She sat in the corner, where she learned how to open clams during the summer of 1972, a little more than a year into her ill-fated marriage to Mick. In that spring of ’75, the singer was arriving with Hannah, sometimes by bicycle, sometimes in the battered turquoise truck that she had driven into town from Taos, New Mexico. “She drove a pick-up truck,” goes the song. “Painted green and blue. The tires were wearin’ thin. She turned a mile or two.”

Back at Eothen, film producer and Warhol confidant Vincent Fremont served as the artist’s emissary and trouble-shooter for the Stones’ rehearsals. Fremont had circulated within the overlapping Stones and Warhol orbits for a number of years since 1972, and had passed seaside afternoons with Mick, Bianca and Catherine Deneuve. “All the Europeans who visited loved the place,” he told me. “The lawns and grasses reminded them of moors, I think.” But the rich social history didn’t spare him the singer’s tough business approach. Jagger flatly declared the estate’s proposed rental fee “a rip-off ” before a deal was finally hammered out. Later, as the Stones’ workweeks unfolded, Fremont oversaw the security detail that eventually had to be put in place. The Stones, who are these days chronicled moment-by-moment on Facebook, had run into New York and pulled a memorable pre-tour publicity coup by performing “Brown Sugar” while on a flatbed truck rolling down Fifth Avenue. As anticipation for the Tour of the Americas built, New York rock stations spread word of the Montauk residency, spurring obsessed fans to make the three-hour expedition east. Fremont’s second security brief involved keeping the Eothen groundskeepers safe from Keith by delaying their noisy work until four in the afternoon, when the Stones finally arose for the coming night’s work.

“They made the most god-awful racket I ever heard,” Jimmy Hewitt exclaimed when I asked about his privileged audiences with the band at work. Stones sessions and rehearsals have for decades had a lore unto themselves in which observers are stunned by how absolutely dreadful the band is — right up to that magic moment when it’s not. I visited the compound a couple of times in the mid-2000s and it still boggles my mind to think about the musicians setting up on the stone floors of Eothen’s main hall, bashing the music into road-worthiness. Hannah remembered coming in off the beach and spending several afternoons smoking pot before repairing to the hall’s far corners for discreet visits with Mick as band members and roadies began to drift through the large darkened space. But with all the chaos and challenges of the setting, the work got done. “The World’s Greatest Rock ‘n Roll Band” found itself once again. Vincent Fremont, for whom there were so many logistical and interpersonal challenges, remembered standing out in the seaside mist and listening to the Stones do an aching version of “Wild Horses.” “That was, you know…pretty good,” he told me with a laugh.

“Memory Motel” the song eventually shifts locations out of Montauk and onto the road. Not long before the band had “to fly today on down to Baton Rouge” and opening night of the Tour of the Americas, Hannah brought Mick and Keith over to see the horses at Deep Hollow Ranch, not far from Eothen. “It was a rodeo!” she told me with a laugh. “There were maybe eight people there. Just another quiet night in Montauk.” Richards, who had grown up working-poor in drab post-war Britain, had spent his entire childhood dressed as Roy Rogers and dreaming of an America that he saw in the cinema. But that spring evening, he was dressed for the rococo middle 1970s. Keith wandered around the ranch, among riders and spectators, over hay and manure, positively resplendent in a three-piece pink satin suit. The Rolling Stones had gotten what they had needed from the town before leaving it with stories to tell and a song to be sung: “Just a memory… of a love that used to be.”

It was the web choice in Philadelphia, 1998. When Keith stepped up and did the "She got a mind of her own" line, it was goose bumps all over, the place went crazy. One thing I will never forget from that show.

The vulnrability of the song strikes me considering the context of the time it was recorded. The Stones were perhaps at their most hedonistic and dangerous at the 1972 tour, but 1975/76 was darker, more tragic and sad. The coolnes of Hot Stuff, Crazy Mama and Hey Negrita was a bit false, an image covering the real state of affairs that is revealed in Memory Motel. Drugs had now become a serious problem since the 'golden age' - Mick Taylor, Bobby Keys, Jimmy Miller all out because of heroin, and Keith being a complete mess if we're honest. Mick admits he doesn't really want to tour, "my nerves are shot already". At this time, he was a drinking a lot (and thus singing worse than before on the 1975-tour) "I hit the bottle and hit the sack and cried." Although all is not true, Memory Motel is an unusual open and personal sentimental song from Mick that doesn't bring hope for the future, but longing for the past. It comes across as real and genuine. Keith's part brings some light to the sadness, a weird kind of hope. This is what I get from it, anyway.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2023-12-12 19:09 by The Worst..

Perfectly stated, HBWriter. A rich, melancholic masterpiece.

I heard long ago that " Hannah" was none other than Bonnie Raitt....she fits the description...check it out!

Mick gets the words wrong and left out a chunk but whatever... pretty damn sweet.

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Mathijs
There is something timeless about the song. It's not part of classic Stones, it's not part of the 'new' Stones starting with Some Girls, it really stands on its own. This is amplified by the terrific sound of Black and Blue, probably the best sound they ever achieved.

Mathijs

Couldn't agree more. Sonically it is brilliant with every instrument clearly audible in the mix.

A song like only the Stones were able to write. It's not soul, it's not country, it's not rock,...

I really like the Dave Matthews live one.The music is played so well by the band



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2023-12-13 22:41 by Taylor1.

It's secretly the best Stones song and no one knows it but me.

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Taylor1
I really like the Dave Matthews live one.The music is played so well by the band

yes, but ruined by Dave's vocals

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LeonidP

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Taylor1
I really like the Dave Matthews live one.The music is played so well by the band

yes, but ruined by Dave's vocals

So true.
Memory Motel is one of my absolute favorites.
I use to hear Memory Motel at every rehearsal before tour start.
If they play it live, then Boston is the place to get it.
I hope they do it next year, no guest singer of course.

Bjornulf

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bv

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LeonidP

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Taylor1
I really like the Dave Matthews live one.The music is played so well by the band

yes, but ruined by Dave's vocals

So true.
Memory Motel is one of my absolute favorites.
I use to hear Memory Motel at every rehearsal before tour start.
If they play it live, then Boston is the place to get it.
I hope they do it next year, no guest singer of course.

... I know DM has a cult following, but I really can't stand his voice, especially as a guest on any Stones track

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emotionalbarbecue
This song is untouchable. in case they should have been recorded in studio again by the stones they would roughly sound the same. But any new attemp with Memory Motel it would have been resulted in an abortive attepmt.

well, they actually did record it again (1995), and it is really not that bad ....

[we.tl]