...just ring him ... I'm sure he'll remember ....



ROCKMAN

Ok gotcha. That's what I thought. thanks

Mick, Keith and Jimmy interviewed for the Sunday Times:

[www.thetimes.co.uk]

Hey man ... please can ya copy and paste it here ....



ROCKMAN

Keith Richards is on the phone from his back garden in Connecticut, comparing lockdowns with me. “We’re just hunkering down. It’s Alice in Wonderland here,” he cackles. “I’m keeping my head down and let’s see what happens, mate.”

Keith is on the line and being filmed because he’s not going anywhere near a computer (“I don’t do mice,” he once told me). Mick Jagger, though, is Zooming in from his retreat in Tuscany, both of them in the cause of trying to remember what they were doing nearly half a century ago.

They’re looking healthy and relaxed, Keith casual in hat, beach shirt and patterned trousers, Mick in a crisp white shirt, surrounded by guitars. Their memory-searching has been prompted by a deluxe repackaging of the Stones’ 1973 album Goats Head Soup, which will arrive to fill the gap left by their postponed 2020 American tour. Covid has also put paid, for now, to the sessions for the new album they have been making, their first of original material since 2005’s A Bigger Bang.

It’s been a surprisingly productive few months, all the same. In April they were an inspirational part of the Global Citizen online special One World: Together at Home, performing from their respective quarters to recreate You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Days later they released the much praised and apposite single Living in a Ghost Town, completed in isolation — which became their first No 1 in Germany since Jumpin’ Jack Flash. “Ridiculous. It gives one hope, really,” Richards jokes.

Now there’s a new old record to sell. Jagger and Richards are both talkative as they pursue their twin-track lives of adding to the band’s legacy while living parts of it again.

Ten years ago, the deluxe reissue of the landmark Exile on Main St took that album back to No 1 in the UK after 38 years. Now Goats Head Soup gets the treatment: a deluxe box set offering three previously unavailable tracks (among them the excellent Scarlet, with lead guitar by one Jimmy Page) and seven other morsels from the sessions. There are three essays, the de rigueur high-res mixes and a live disc from a gig in Brussels during their 1973 European tour.

“It’s very nice that people remember them, even,” says Jagger of the original releases. “Pop music, by its very definition, is so transient, so if people would want to buy it again or be interested in it, it’s really nice. I like to find songs that haven’t been released.”

There’s some rediscovery for Richards too. “I’m not against it at all, otherwise you’d have heard about it,” he says. “Also, it actually makes you go back and listen and reconsider. Because sometimes you’ve forgotten a lot about what you did and how it got there.”

Goats Head Soup began its life in the aftermath of Exile on Main St. However debauched its creation, that album at least had its own headquarters, in sessions at Richards’s rented belle époque mansion in the south of France, Nellcôte. In its wake the Stones scattered, and phase two of the Jagger-Richards songwriting relationship began.

“It [Goats Head Soup] was the first album where Mick and I truly had to deal with the ‘exile’ bit,” says Richards. “On Exile, hey, we were ready to go. We just lived in my basement, everybody, and did what we did. But by the time we got to cut Goats Head Soup, Mick and I — well, all of the band — had separated over the world for a while. So we had to figure out how to write songs not being in each other’s pocket.

“Mick and I finally agreed, ‘We’d better get together,’ I don’t even remember where, and said, ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’ So it really came out of that way of working a bit more separately and then putting it together.”

The world of the Rolling Stones in 1972 was a litany of court appearances, arrest warrants, drugs charges and entry bans. Richards, by now the routine nemesis of immigration departments, had to hole up in Switzerland. How was it? “Not funky,” he says, semi-serious for once. “At least if you write songs and you’ve got an instrument, you don’t go bananas.”

Thankfully, even at the mercy of the class As, he continued to compose. The mournful (his word) Coming Down Again was one soul-baring result. Another was the immaculate ballad that became the calling card of Goats Head Soup and an American hit single, the deathless Angie. Richards wrote it, he says, in a Swiss clinic.

“Angie was a pretty ballad with strings,” says Jagger, “so if you’re going for the lead-off track, it couldn’t be further away from the gritty stuff of Exile. But we’d had ballads before that had been successful, so it wasn’t weird. I could hear its musical, singable potential, if you like. Always wanted to put strings on it and bring it out that way.”

Drilling down into the album, I’m reminded, as in every conversation, of the intense musicianship of the Stones. Jagger and Richards are ready with a laugh, sometimes at their haziness about dates and details, but alongside it all is a quiet pride in the band’s collective achievements.

That includes the first-team squad on whom the Stones could again confidently draw for the sessions. “The cats,” as Richards always calls them. “Billy Preston, Nicky Hopkins, Bobby Keys ...” he starts, reverentially. “All of our guys have gravitated to us, for some reason or another. And Jimmy Miller was one of the best producers I ever worked with, especially at that time for the Stones.

“Before that we’d not really worked with a producer who was a musician, and I think that really tightened us up and brought out the best in us. I loved him dearly. For that period Jimmy was part of the band, because that’s what happens with the Stones. If you’re in, you’re in.”

With its funk and soul undercurrents, Goats Head Soup is a less overtly rocking record than Exile, which numbered Tumbling Dice, Happy, Rocks Off and All Down the Line among its strutting highlights. But Jagger says the contrast was by no means calculated.

“Most of it was recorded in Jamaica, but not all of it, and it’s obviously very different from Exile. But Exile was this sprawling thing. It was recorded over a long period, and it was mixed up with excerpts from previous sessions. I don’t really recall us having a sit-down talk and saying, ‘OK, we’re going to make a record that’s different.’ I don’t think we did at all.”

The Jamaican sessions took place across two block bookings at Kingston’s Dynamic Sound Studios, where Bill Wyman recalls in his Rolling with the Stones book that the band were admitted by a guard carrying a shotgun. Richards had been to the island for a few days off in 1969, but these sessions crystallised his love for its culture. Not to mention its recreational possibilities.

“There was so much happening in Jamaica at the time,” he says. “Apart from us making a record, it was the year Bob Marley came out with Catch a Fire, and Jimmy Cliff with The Harder They Come soundtrack. There was a feeling in the air in Jamaica that something was happening. In a way it reminded me of London in ’63. Jamaica was feeling that it was finally on the map, and it was a great moment.”

So great, in fact, that, with Anita Pallenberg and their children Marlon and Angela, he stayed and, as he says in his book Life, effectively became Jamaican. “Yeah, it took me a while to get out of there,” he says. During the recording they didn’t really have enough time to “soak up what was happening. I did stay later — and I did a lot of soaking.”

The album’s rerelease was triggered by Universal Music’s discovery of recordings they felt were ripe for exposure: as well as Scarlet there are the equally infectious Criss Cross and the Brown Sugar-esque All the Rage.

“They said, ‘We’ve found these three tracks,’” Jagger recounts, grinning. “I said, ‘They’re all terrible.’ That’s always my initial reaction, ‘They’re all useless!’ I mean, actually, I always liked the songs, but they weren’t finished.

“Sonically they still sound like they were recorded then, even if they weren’t perfect. You can make them sound a little better than they did. But I think these three songs are all up there with the rest of the songs on this record.”

Jimmy Page, calling in via Facetime, puts his appearance on Scarlet in the context of his already long relationship with the Stones. “I first met Mick and Keith at one of those very early blues festivals,” he tells me. “We were all in the back of a van going from one place to another. But I’m sure it registered with them. It registered with me.”

He has more clarity than either of them about the session that produced the exhilarating track, which took place at the future Stone Ronnie Wood’s house in Richmond. “He had a studio in the basement,” Page says, “and he said there was an invite to do a session. It was with Keith, and Ian Stewart [“Stu”, the Stones’ long-suffering road manager and Jimmy’s old friend] was going to be there. So I thought, ‘That’s going to be really great, let’s go along.’

“Ronnie didn’t actually play on it. Keith came in and set up his equipment, and I took my guitar. Obviously I paid a lot of attention to what he was doing and then came up with a riff that would go with a contraflow. It was great to work with Keith right from the bare bones of something.

“More recently they sent through a file of the mix, and I thought, ‘Wow, that sounds really powerful.’ All the guitar parts I remember doing, everything was on there. I thought it sounded really solid, and everybody’s really on form.”

Only the Stones could launch a decades-old album simultaneously with a merchandise store, as they will on September 9 when RS No 9 Carnaby arrives in Soho. They hope to return to the road next year.

“We can’t be touring,” says Jagger, “so it’s good to do this kind of stuff and keep moving.” Richards agrees: “It’s one of those things to stay in contact with everybody as much as we can, which is why I miss playing on the road this year. But some things we can’t do.”



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2020-08-30 07:59 by slane82.

Thanks man ... much appreciated ....

Stay safe



ROCKMAN

*Photo from Times article.

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2020-08-30 08:12 by Hairball.

thanks a lot for sharing

That was a great article, thanks Slane. A nice contrast to all the negativity about the new tracks on these boards.


plexi

Is there a possibility to buy the Japanese Super Deluxe Box somewhere here in the EU, so that I do not have to pay a lot of customs when I buy it in Japan? JPC (in Germany) doesn't offer it (yet?)...

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wiredallnight

Is there a possibility to buy the Japanese Super Deluxe Box somewhere here in the EU, so that I do not have to pay a lot of customs when I buy it in Japan?

It was already offered by [www.jpc.de] - [iorr.org] . But who knows why they had withdrew this offer. An alternative would be [www.Amazon.co.uk] - (£225.69).

Indeed, a nice article. Thanks slane82!

Interesting that thought by Mick that they didn't intentionally tried to make the album to sound different than EXILE. I cannot help that the album has the feel that it actually tries that with mixed results. Probably that was not the intention while making the tracks - that probably naturally reflected their muse and, like always, had influences from contemporary scene - but how they picked up the suitable tracks, and like, why they rejected some (such as "Criss Cross" and "All The Rage"). I think their artistic ethos still were 'we don' t want to repeat ourselves too much', no matter how Mick remembers it now. It could've been unconscious at the time.

That said, it would be interesting if Mick could remember more about the tracks and of their origin, like he did with STICKY FINGERS. For example, something about his drive to write reflective ballads at the time - "100 Years Ago", "Winter" - which would continue in the following years, or how he sees "Star Star" today, etc. Funny thing is also how surprised he was how many 'slow songs' STICKY FINGERS contains - what about GHS then!

- Doxa



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2020-08-30 14:06 by Doxa.

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Irix

Quote
wiredallnight

Is there a possibility to buy the Japanese Super Deluxe Box somewhere here in the EU, so that I do not have to pay a lot of customs when I buy it in Japan?

It was already offered by [www.jpc.de] - [iorr.org] . But who knows why they had withdrew this offer. An alternative would be [www.Amazon.co.uk] - (£225.69).

You can also go through amazon.co.jp
[www.amazon.co.jp]
But you'll need to open a separate amazon account there (don't be scared, they have English language option to select on the front page).
Japanese amazon ships worldwide using Amazon Global International Shipment option (2196 JPY in this case). And they also will calculate for you all taxes and import duties. You will pay them in one take and will not need to deal with local authorities. In my case calculation is like this
Items: JPY 18,000
Shipping & handling: JPY 2,196
Import Fees Deposit: JPY 4,645
Order total: JPY 24,841
Payment Total: EUR 204,15
I used them a couple of times as an alternative to jpc.de. Everything worked smoothly.
Although, in this case there could be a problem. Amazon calculated only VAT but while import taxes for an item over 120 € is missing.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2020-08-30 13:28 by ironbelly.

Thanks for posting The Times piece, slane 82. Credit to Paul Sexton for the interviews.

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timbernardis
That was a great article, thanks Slane. A nice contrast to all the negativity about the new tracks on these boards.


plexi

Nice article...But it kinda bothered me that Mick Taylor isn't mentioned in the article but that just about everybody else is...

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Hairball


*Photo from Times article.

This picture....it may be the most shocking thing in 2020 so far.....

Yeah I agree .... Keith on a mobile phone !!!!!!



ROCKMAN

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Rockman
Yeah I agree .... Keith on a mobile phone !!!!!!

We live interesting times, indeed...

- Doxa

That's fake-news.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2020-08-30 14:33 by TheflyingDutchman.

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Rockman
Yeah I agree .... Keith on a mobile phone !!!!!!

Must be a wireless home phone

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DandelionPowderman

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Rockman
Yeah I agree .... Keith on a mobile phone !!!!!!

Must be a wireless home phone

yeah, if that's a mobile phone, it's from circa 1998.

Thanks for the read Slane. Hope we get to see them on the road next year!

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ThePaleRider

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Hairball


*Photo from Times article.

This picture....it may be the most shocking thing in 2020 so far.....

Nah, that's the TV remote...........

I always found interesting Keith’s main home for 30 yearsis in Greenwich CT.I live about 10 miles from him , and if you don’t know Greenwich , it is a very upscale suburban community. But it is not exotic or historical.It does not have spectacular topography or beautiful countryside.Its about 30miles north of NYC,but it’s really bland suburbia.

Keith’s looking good. Not sure about those trousers, though.

"The album’s rerelease was triggered by Universal Music’s discovery of recordings they felt were ripe for exposure: as well as Scarlet there are the equally infectious Criss Cross and the Brown Sugar-esque All the Rage.
“They said, ‘We’ve found these three tracks,’” Jagger recounts, grinning. “I said, ‘They’re all terrible.’ That’s always my initial reaction, ‘They’re all useless!’ I mean, actually, I always liked the songs, but they weren’t finished.
“Sonically they still sound like they were recorded then, even if they weren’t perfect. You can make them sound a little better than they did. But I think these three songs are all up there with the rest of the songs on this record.”

I think that Scarlet is far superior to "Can you hear the music"!!

I guess I can understand why Mick added to Criss Cross since there was a bit of just instrumentation in sections but the previous released version is just fine.

As much as it could be interesting if the leftovers were actually taken advantage of I highly doubt there will be any kind of deluxe treatment for IORR, BAB or ER.

Maybe instead of doing a VOODOO deluxe (considering some of the tracks they left off it might be worth while) maybe they'll release MEMORY MOTEL.

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Big Al
Keith’s looking good. Not sure about those trousers, though.

Yeah he does like good. I was afraid he would put on some Covid lbs but not the case

I think he is looking incredibly good, considering.

So he lives in some suburbs? I always figured his place in Connecticut was out in the hills surrounded by woods. Guess not.

At least this year he will be around to harvest his cannabis plants. I read he complained about never being able to do that because he was always out on tour when they matured. It will occupy some of his time doing the trimming.

Hey Keef, fly me out and I will help, got lots of experience.


jb