Keith Richards has been ‘playing a lot of bass’ on new Rolling Stones tunes
Ashleigh Durden




Keith Richards has been “playing a lot of bass” on The Rolling Stones’ new material.

The 78-year-old guitarist and occasional bassist has recalled spending a week
in Jamaica with frontman Sir Mick Jagger, also 78, jamming and working on new
music for their new studio album, and him playing the four-stringer added
“another angle” to their sound. “It’s quite interesting – at the same time it’s
Stones man,” he said.

According to the Daily Star newspaper’s WIRED column, he said: “I was in Jamaica with Mick.
We were spending a week together putting material together and hanging around.”

Quizzed on how many songs they have, he continued: “More than I can count – it
was a very productive week.

“We had a setup there, bass, drums, and we got a very good sound going.

Richards went on to say that he and Jagger “got a very good sound going”,
adding: “Jamaica is good for sound.”

Keith – who is also joined by 74-year-old bassist Ronnie Wood in the band –
added: “I was playing a lot of bass so it was taking on another angle.

“It’s quite interesting – at the same time it’s Stones man.

“It was great fun and we are gearing up for Europe shortly.

“Once a year I like to keep my hand in – there’s nothing like playing on stage.”

The upcoming LP will be the first new music since the death of drummer Charlie Watts, who died last summer aged 80.

Keith recently revealed he and Mick had “eight or nine new pieces of material”, which they worked on with 65-year-old touring drummer Steve Jordan.

Appearing on ‘CBS Sunday Morning’, he spilled: “It’ll be interesting to find out the dynamics now that Steve’s in the band.

“It’s sort of metamorphosing into something else. I was working with Mick last
week, and Steve, and we came up with some, eight or nine new pieces of
material. Which is overwhelming by our standards. Other times, [songwriting is] like a desert.”

When quizzed on why penning new music can be challenging, he coyly replied:
“It’s the muse thing. If I could find her address (laughing).”

The forthcoming tracks will serve as the first new music from the Stones since Steve Jordan is now the group’s permanent touring drummer.

Richards previously revealed that Jordan had worked with him and Jagger on “eight or nine new pieces of material”, explaining: “It’ll be interesting to find out the dynamics now that Steve’s in the band.”

Elsewhere, he told the Daily Star that the Rolling Stones are currently
“gearing up” for their recently-announced UK and European 60th anniversary
tour, which takes place this summer.

“Once a year I like to keep my hand in – there’s nothing like playing on
stage,” Richards said of his desire to head back out on the road.





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-04-22 03:13 by exilestones.

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Quote
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Keith Richards: A 1969 Rant
The Stones guistarist opens up about what to expect on ‘Let It Bleed,’ the upcoming U.S. tour, and what he thinks of his contemporaries
By Ritchie Yorke


Keith Richards poses for a portrait circa 1969.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The news that the Rolling Stones are to resume personal appearances is likely to gladden hearts everywhere. The Stones always were the most important performing group to come out of England. At the Stones’ office behind Oxford Circus in London recently, guitarist-composer Keith Richards discussed the tour Mick‘s foray into films and the next Stones’ album, to be called Let It Bleed.

“The whole tour thing is very strange man, because I still don’t really believe it. We did the Hyde Park concert and it felt really good, and I guess the tour will feel even better. And we need to do it. Apart from people wanting to see us, we really need to do a tour, because we haven’t played live for so long.

“A tour’s the only thing that knocks you into shape. Especially now that we’ve got Mick Taylor in the band, we really need to go through the paces again to really get back together.”

Although the itinerary has yet to be confirmed, there will be at least a dozen gigs in North America plus a concert in London, another in the North of England, and a short tour of the Continent. George Harrison told me that he thought the reason the Stones were going on the road again was money, and Richards didn’t deny it.

“Yeah, well, that’s how it is. We were going to do the Memphis Blues Festival but things got screwed up. Brian wasn’t in that good a shape and we had various problems. I personally missed the road.

“After you’ve been doing gigs every night for four or five years, it’s strange just to suddenly stop. It’s exactly three years since we quit now. What decided us to get back into it was Hyde Park. It was such a unique feeling.

“But in all the future gigs, we want to keep the audiences as small as possible. We’d rather play to four shows of 5,000 people each, than one mammoth 50,000 sort of number. I think we’re playing at Madison Square Garden in New York, but it will be a reduced audience, because we’re not going to allow them to sell all the seats.

“I’m going to meet Mick in California about mid-way through October and we’re going to have to rehearse like hell. That whole film thing in Australia was a bit of a drag. I mean, it sounds dangerous to me. He’s had his hand blown off, and he had to get his hair cut short. But Mick thinks he needs to do those things. We’ve often talked about it, and I’ve asked him why the hell does he want to be a film star.

“But he says, ‘Well, Keith, you’re a musician and that’s a complete thing in itself, but I don’t play anything.’ So I said that anyone who sings and dances the way he does shouldn’t need to do anything else. But he doesn’t agree so I guess that’s cool.

“The trouble is that it has disorganized our plans; it happened just as we got Mick Taylor into the band, and just as we were finishing the album. We had one track to do and we accidently wiped Mick’s voice off when we were messing around with the tape. And there’s Mick stuck down in Australia, about 3,000 miles from the nearest studio. It’s pretty far out.”
Mick’s absence has also been felt in other areas. The Stones have not been able to record a follow-up single to “Honky Tonk Women,” which was the second biggest selling record of their career, after “Satisfaction.”

“I have a couple of ideas for the next record,” Keith said, “and I think we’ll cut it in Los Angeles when I meet Mick. I’d like to record again in Los Angeles because it’s been a long time since we worked in the studios there. ‘Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby?’ was the last track we did in L.A.

“Plus, we’ll get the album, Let It Bleed, finished. I think it will be the best album we’ve ever done. It will have some of the things which we did at the Hyde Park concert. There’s a blues thing called ‘Midnight Rambler’ which goes through a lot of changes; a very basic Chicago sound.

“The biggest production number is ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ which runs about seven minutes. But most of the album is fairly simple. There’s a lot of bottleneck guitar playing, an awful lot, probably too much, come to think of it. But I really got hung up on that when we were doing ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ on Beggar’s Banquet.

“There’s three really hard blues tracks, and one funky rock and roll thing. Not the ‘Street Fighting Man’ sort, but as basic as that. There’s a slow country song, because we always like to do one of them. All of the tracks are long, four, five and six minutes. There’s about four tracks to each side, but the sides run 20 minutes.

“Let It Bleed will also have the original Hank Williams-like version of ‘Honky Tonk Women,’ which was one of my songs. Last Christmas, Mick and I went to Brazil and spent some time on a ranch. I suddenly got into cowboy songs. I wrote ‘Honky Tonk Women’ as a straight Hank Williams-Jimmy Rodgers sort of number. Later when we were fooling around with it — trying to make it sound funkier — we hit on the sound we had on the single. We all thought, wow, this has got to be a hit single.

“And it was and it did fantastically well; probably because it’s the sort of song which transcends all tastes.”

While we were talking, the muffled sounds of a Creedence Clearwater Revival album could be heard in another office, and I wondered if Keith was impressed by the group?

“Yeah, I’m into a very weird thing with that band. When I first heard them, I was really knocked out, but I became bored with them very quickly. After a few times, it started to annoy me. They’re so basic and simple that maybe it’s a little too much.”


Blood, Sweat & Tears?

“I don’t really like them . . . I don’t really dig that sort of music but I suppose that’s a bit unfair because I haven’t heard very much by them. It’s just not my scene, because I like a really tight band and anyway, I prefer guitars with maybe a keyboard. The only brass that ever knocked me out was a few soul bands.”


Led Zeppelin?

“I played their album quite a few times when I first got it, but then the guy’s voice started to get on my nerves. I don’t know why; maybe he’s a little too acrobatic. But Jimmy Paige is a great guitar player, and a very respected one.”


Blind Faith?

“Having the same producer, Jimmy Miller, we’re aware of some of the problems he had with Blind Faith. I don’t like the Buddy Holly song, ‘Well All Right,’ at all, because Buddy’s version was ten times better. It’s not worth doing an old song unless you’re going to add to it.



Blind Faith - Eric Clapton, Ric Grech, Steve Winwood and Ginger Baker



“I liked Eric‘s (Clapton) song, ‘In the Presence of the Lord,’ and Ginger’s ‘Do What You Like.’ But I don’t think Stevie’s (Winwood) got himself together. He’s an incredible singer and an incredible guitarist and an incredible organist but he never does the things I want to hear him do. I’m still digging ‘I’m a Man’ and a few of the other things he did with Spencer Davis. But he’s not into that scene anymore.”



Jethro Tull?

“We picked up on them quickly. Mick had their first album and we featured the group on the Rock and Roll Circus TV show we taped last December (which still hasn’t come out, but hope remains).

“I really liked the band then but I haven’t heard it recently. I hope Ian Anderson doesn’t get into a cliché thing with his leg routine. You have to work so goddam hard to make it in America, and it’s very easy to end up being a parody of yourself. But he plays a nice flute and the guitar player he had with him was good. I think he left and started his own group, Blodwyn Pig. I haven’t heard that lot yet.”


The Band?

“I saw them at the Dylan gig on the Isle of Wight and I was disappointed. Dylan was beautiful, especially when he did the songs by himself. He has a unique rhythm which only seems to come off when he’s performing solo.

“The Band were just too strict. They’ve been playing together for a long, long time, and what I couldn’t understand was their lack of spontaneity. They sounded note for note like their records.
“It was like they were just playing the records on stage and at a fairly low volume, with very clear sound. I personally like some distortion, especially if something starts happening on stage. But they just didn’t seem to come alive by themselves. I think that they’re essentially an accompanying band. When they were backing up Dylan, there was a couple of times when they did get off. But they were just a little too perfect for me.”


The Bee Gees?

“Well, they’re in their own little fantasy world. You only have to read what they talk about in interviews . . . how many suits they’ve got and that kind of crap. It’s all kid stuff, isn’t it?”
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young? “I thought the album was nice, really pretty. The Hollies went through all that personality thing before Graham left them. The problem was that Graham was the only one getting stoned, and everybody else was really straight Manchester stock. That doesn’t help.”


The Beatles?

“I think it’s impossible for them to do a tour. Mick has said it before, but it’s worth repeating . . . the Beatles are primarily a recording group.

“Even though they drew the biggest crowds of their era in North America, I think the Beatles had passed their performing peak even before they were famous. They are a recording band, while our scene is the concerts and many of our records were roughly made, on purpose. Our sort of scene is to have a really good time with the audience.

“It’s always been the Stones’ thing to get up on stage and kick the crap out of everything. We had three years of that before we made it, and we were only just getting it together when we became famous. We still had plenty to do on stage and I think we still have. That’s why the tour should be such a groove for us.”

This story is from the November 15, 1969 issue of Rolling Stone.

[www.rollingstone.com]

People of the Year: Mick Jagger
As Rolling Stone celebrates its People of the Year issue, Mick shows another side:
more personal, more spiritual, and solo

by David Fricke


Keith Richards and Mick Jagger perform at The Concert for New York City to benefit the victims of the World Trade Center disaster.
photo Scott Gries

Mick Jagger’s new album, Goddess in the Doorway, is his first solo record in eight years, since Wandering Spirit in 1993. What took him so long? “I’ve been doing the Rolling Stones – that’s pretty much it,” Jagger says in his Manhattan hotel suite the evening before his appearance with Keith Richards at Paul McCartney‘s Concert for New York City. “But after that very long tour for Bridges to Babylon, I thought, ‘This is the point where I should do another one.’ If the band had really wanted to work . . . ” Jagger shrugs his shoulders. “Everybody was quite happy not to do anything.”

On Goddess, Jagger surrounds himself with the best of friends – including Pete Townshend of the Who, Lenny Kravitz and Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry – as well as new collaborators Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty and Wyclef Jean. But the album is a triumph of independence. Away from the automatic dynamics of the Stones, Jagger struts his matured strengths as a singer and writes about himself with unprecedented honesty. “I tried to let ideas flow,” Jagger says of his lyrics, “so I wouldn’t pull back from things l wouldn’t say normally.”



What do you get out of making solo records that you don’t get out of the Stones?

People are always trying to get you to talk badly about the Rolling Stones. The Rolling Stones have a certain personality. It’s a rock band. The Rolling Stones play Gershwin – it can be discussed, but it’s very unlikely that it’s donna happen. It’s like being an actor. In the Rolling Stones, you’re in the James Bond series. It’s really cool and enormously successful. But you’re expected to behave like James Bond all the time. If you want to do something else, you have to do it on your own.


How did you get started on the album?

I was writing songs at home, and I could record them with just a computer and a guitar. It felt free and easy. I’d have friends around. I could do it when the kids were there, although I’d kick them out of the room [grins].

But you have to be hard on yourself. Halfway through this, I thought I’d done all the writing. I’d play the songs to people, and they’d go, “Yeah, it’s really good, but you’ve only got half a record.” I’d go, “But what about all these other great things?” Well, they weren’t that good. You can tell by people’s reactions: “I gotta do more.”



Do you feel that you’ve opened up as a writer? In “God Gave Me Everything,” you’re really telling us you haven’t got it all – a notion many would find hard to believe.

No one has everything. Some people are luckier than others. That song is a bit ambivalent. Some of the songs were written quickly. You wonder, in the end, what they’re really about.

The one that’s really ambivalent is “Too Far Gone.” I put a big disclaimer at the beginning about hating nostalgia [“I always hate nostalgia/Living in the past”], and all I’m doing is talking about the past.



Are you turning more reflective? Some of the album’s best songs, like “Don’t Call Me Up” and “Brand New Set of Rules,” are ballads.

“As Tears Go By” is reflective. It’s nothing new. I write so many ballads that I have to put them aside. More fast numbers – that’s the dictum from Keith. The Stones record that has the most ballads is Tattoo You, which originally, in the pre-CD world, had an A side of rockers and a B side of ballads. Nice idea, but you can’t do that anymore.



You co-wrote “Visions of Paradise” with Rob Thomas. What is it like writing with someone other than Keith?

You’re in the room with the guy, and you don’t really know him. But he’s got something prepared. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t. Then something else comes up as you go along. Rob was very focused. His gig was to come up with a melody that’s different from what I would have come up with.

I would never have written “Visions of Paradise” on my own. It’s too pop for me. But I like it. It just worked out. I could have worked with Rob and three other people and not even mentioned it to you, because it wouldn’t have gone anywhere. I tried to write a song with Lenny on my last solo album. All we did was get completely stoned and go out dancing. We didn’t come up with a single idea. So we did “Use Me” [by Bill Withers] instead.



How did you pick your guest stars for the album? And how much of it was collaboration for art’s sake vs. marketing value?

It’s not like I’m in Los Angeles looking for the guitarist of the month. I had a list of people, and most of them I have a relationship with of some kind. Lenny I’d worked with before. I’d already met Rob. Pete’s my neighbor in London. He kept saying, “I know what you’re doing in the studio. I want to come down and play.” Wyclef – I’d been to his concerts. I liked his breadth of musical knowledge, and he’s got this Caribbean vibe that I can relate to. I wanted Missy Elliott to do a rap on “Hide Away,” but she didn’t turn up. We could never get a date together.

There is marketing value as well. But the thing about that Santana album [Supernatural] that people forget is that Carlos Santana is a guitar player, not a singer. What could be more natural than to have a ton of singers walking in and out of his record? For me, it’s not the same, especially with singers. I have to make duets.




Did you write “Joy” as a duet for Bono?

No. I’ve known Bono since I can’t remember. We’ve always had singsongs. There was one time when I sang “Satisfaction” – a hip-hop version – with Bono and [my daughter] Elizabeth at my birthday party, passing the mike. It was really funny.

When I’d done “Joy” – I hadn’t finished all the vocals – I thought it would be great to do with him. U2 were playing in Cologne, so I took my little recording system to his hotel room, and we did it.



In a hotel room? It sounds like you’re in church – band, choir and all.

It’s hard to spoil those things. You imagine the way it should have been. But Pete was in the studio with me. He was there, right next to the incredibly loud amplifiers. He seems to be over that hearing problem [laughs].




You sing the opening lines in “Joy,” about driving through the desert, looking for Buddha and seeing Jesus Christ. That’s usually Bono’s territory.

They were too good [laughs]. I wanted to do that.



So how spiritual are you? People tend to think of you as . . .

Hedonistic?



At least a rationalist.

I am. Of course, I have a spiritual side. Everyone has one. It’s whether they’re going to lock it up or not. Our lives are so busy that we never get any time to be, first, reflective, then afterward, to let some sort of spiritual light into your life. But there are moments in your life when that appears.

I’ve written about it before – touched on it in odd songs like “I Just Want to See His Face” and “Shine a Light” [both on 1972’s Exile on Main Street]. “Joy” is more fleshed out. It is about the joy of creation, inspiring you to a love of God. [Pauses] Not that I want to explain my songs, really.




Do you still experience that joy in music? Onstage with the Stones?

It’s not an every-night thing. It’s in certain moments. Whether that’s a religious moment is a matter of opinion. But it’s akin to a religious moment, the same way a sexual act can be akin to it. It is a transcendent moment. You get the idea that there is another state of mind, even though you’re not necessarily touching it.



Did September 11th cause you to reconsider your ideas about faith and fear?

Being a long way away, you take a slightly different view of it. If I’d been in New York, I’m sure I would have felt a lot differently: “Wow, I just escaped it.” But I felt this awful shock, where you don’t know what you’re thinking. When you try and recall what you actually did at that moment, you can’t recall it exactly.

So there was shock and revulsion. What we didn’t get in England and France was the feeling that there could be another one in a minute. I don’t want to sound cold. But because we were thousands of miles away, it wasn’t like, “It’s your turn next.” I didn’t feel fear for myself but for my daughter in New York.

Atom bombs: That’s one of my fears. Maybe that comes from being brought up with the fear of the bomb, the age group that I am in. Which is a horrible psychological thing.




Does it feel strange to be putting out a record right now? You want people to pay attention to your work, but their attention is elsewhere.

Everyone has to get on with their jobs. You can’t think everything is trivial except CNN. I know the news media have a job to do, but they wind people up unnecessarily. In England, the tabloids were vying to scare people the most. They’d have horrendous photos of People in bodysuits every day on the cover – people were terrified.

It is a difficult time. But we’re living in this together. I won’t get as many column inches as I might have. But that’s not the idea of making records.



What future does rock & roll have in a new era of Patriotism? The music was born to question established order.

I don’t think Bruce Springsteen was ever about questioning the establishment. I always saw Bruce Springsteen as very American, very patriotic. Look at the album covers. I don’t put him down for that. I think he’s a sweet guy, and I like a lot of his music. But even the questions he posed were part of the establishment by then. You had a president who refused to serve in Vietnam, something he questioned in “Born in the U.S.A.” I see Bruce Springsteen as the archetypal working-class American establishment rock star, which is why he is so successful.



Were the Stones the archetypal middle-class British establishment rock stars?

We were very suburban, embodying rebellious suburban attitudes. And the Rolling Stones were more cynical, much less part of the establishment, although people were always saying we were establishment because of the money. But we don’t have patriotism in England like you do in America. Patriotism like that went out the window with the First World War – when it was proved to be a load of bollocks.

Rock & roll is not a monolithic thing, any more than the cinema is. All these things can live in it – from the Beatles to Bruce Springsteen to Rage Against the Machine. Rock music is just a means of expression.



Do you have any solo tour plans?

I was going to do some shows, but I’m running out of time. I don’t really have a band for this record. I’d have to form a band and rehearse.



What about Stones plans for next year?

I’m working on it now. It’s one of my projects at the moment [grins]. I don’t think we’re going to do a whole new studio album. But what are we going to do? I really don’t know. It’s a whole year from now.



Is there a favorite song or record by another artist that knocked you out this year?

[Long Pause] There’s a lot of CDs I played a lot: Missy Elliott, Macy Gray. I played the new Bob Dylan quite a lot. I like the tunes, and I think it’s really funny. It’s the antithesis of pop music.



Is pop music interesting to you now?

Not really.



What’s missing?

Outrageous personalities with a great tune and a different sound. I’m sure one will crop up soon. I’m very patient [laughs]. Everyone said, “You must hear the Ryan Adams record.” I thought it was all right. It’s very old-fashioned music. But it is appealing.

Pop music is the kind of thing you catch yourself whistling in the bath: “Oh, it’s the Cher record! I’m whistling the Backstreet Boys! Oh, @#$%&!” Everyone does it, and it’s cool, because no one’s listening – hopefully.




What changes in music would you like to see next year? September 11th is bound to have an effect on what people think pop songs should say.

We’re gonna get some terrible lyrics, though. People who don’t have lyrical talent should stay away from that subject. It’s not easy. That’s not a no-brainer. Stick to moon-in-June for most people – that’s my advice. You’re going to need real language and real thoughts, not just pasted-on patriotism.



This story is from the December 6th, 2001 issue of Rolling Stone.


++++++



NEW YORK – OCTOBER 2001: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the “Rolling Stones”
perform on stage at “The Concert for New York City” held at Madison Square Garden
on October 20, 2001 in New York.
(Photo by Dave Hogan)

Muscians talk about Exile.

Guardian article

Interview with Ronnie and some great pictures of him , in the newest Spanish Esquire

[www.esquire.com]

Warner Brothers promo photo





Mick Jagger & Jimmy Rogers - Don't Start Me to Talkin'



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2022-06-03 17:32 by exilestones.

The Rainforest Benefit

September 24, 1988 – Grateful Dead plus many guests including Mick Taylor gave a
special benefit concert to help Greenpeace’s action towards the world’s tropical rain forest.

In the days leading up to the concert, Animal appeared in a PSA from a tropical setting shouting
"Save forest!" and "Deadhead!" over and over again. During one of the concert's set breaks, a
video shown on projection screens featured Animal doing a similar shtick while Kermit the Frog
urged concertgoers to protect the rainforests.

The material was written by Muppet writer Jim Lewis.


Concert Video Mick Taylor (16.00):
[rvm.pm]

Concert Audio:
[archive.org]

Grateful Dead Live at Madison Square Garden on 1988-09-24



"I was at this show. The big video screen flashing the rainforest imagery
to the music made a powerful impact. I remember thinking at the time
that it was the best use of music video I'd ever seen."
- Hitmeister


MADISON SQUARE GARDEN - SEPTEMBER 24, 1988

Benefit for the rainforests: Cultural Survival, Greenpeace & Rainforest Action Network - Bruce Hornsby & The Range opened - FM broadcast WNEW-New York, WMMR-Philadelphia -
"West L. A." & "Rooster" with Mick Taylor - "Chinese Bones" & "Neighborhood Girls" with Suzanne Vega on acoustic guitar and vocals - "Every Time" and "What's Going On" with Daryl Hall: guitar, lead vocals; John Oates: guitar; Tom "T-Bone" Wolk: acoustic guitar, then accordion, then bass; Mark Rivera: saxophone; without Phil - "River Drumz" with Baba Olatunji & Michael Hinton - Olatunji stayed for the rest of the set - "NFA" with Bruce Hornsby on accordion - Both encores with Hall: vocals & Oates: guitar & vocals; Jack Casady: bass; Bruce Hornsby: vocals & electric piano, then accordion; without Phil - "Heaven's Door" also with Suzanne Vega - only "Chinese Bones" - only "Every Time You G."



Setlist

Iko Iko
Feel Like a Stranger
West L.A. Fadeaway
Little Red Rooster
Box of Rain
Ramble on Rose
Masterpiece
Don't Ease Me In

Chinese Bones
Neighborhood Girls
Crazy Fingers
Man Smart/Woman Smarter
Every Time You Go
What's Going On
drums
The Wheel
Throwin' Stones
Not Fade Away

Good Lovin'
Knockin' on Heaven's Door



[www.amazon.com]




MORE (Rolling Stones): [rvm.pm]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-06-17 20:35 by exilestones.

Keith’s Melbourne Wife
The Quest of a Woman in a Paragraph


Keith Richards, Monsalvat 1973
(Photo Rennie Ellis)

This story first appeared in the book ‘Rock Country: The sounds, bands, fans, fun & other stuff that happened’ (Hardie Grant, 2015), edited by Christian Ryan.

Jenny Brown remembers handwriting the invitations. It was a hot Thursday night in February 1973, the night before The Rolling Stones were due to roll into Melbourne; the night before the Stones’ scheduled afternoon press conference in the mud-brick surrounds of the artist colony at Montsalvat; the night before Brown’s full moon twenty-first birthday pool party at her parents’ home in North Balwyn.

Brown decided to invite the Stones. ‘What can I say?’ she grins, as we order breakfast at the Northcote cafe where her daughter was working. ‘It was a brave time.’


1973 AUCKLAND poster
art by Ian McCausland

She had a head start on the average fan attempting to lure The Rolling Stones to her twenty-first: Brown was a music writer, which meant access to Montsalvat and the band. On the morning of her party she actually sat on Mick Jagger’s hotel bed, scribbling notes, while Jagger and tour manager Peter Rudge assessed artist Ian McCausland’s image of a curious kiwi prodding an extended tongue for a New Zealand tour poster. When the meeting broke up, Brown experienced a breathless moment, recounted in the alternative paper she was writing for, The Digger:

As we’re leaving Jagger deliberately jams himself into the doorway with me, his famous body crushed against mine, and grins into my eyes. ‘You look like you’re ou’ of it,’ he says, but he’s wrong. In fact I’m just practising with Tantric devotion the writer’s art of shutting up and listening.

Brown was young and radiant, and had a quality that attracted musicians. In her future she would live with Skyhooks’ Greg Macainsh, marry Dragon’s Todd Hunter, and spend six and a half years with Cold Chisel’s Don Walker. In the words of friend and twenty-first birthday attendee Philippa Finney, ‘She didn’t seem to realise the impact she had on people. She had this aura.’

At Montsalvat, a glorious informality helped Brown follow through with her invitation plans. After a banquet with open bar in the Great Hall, band members scattered individually around a picturesque reflecting pool, entertaining a well-lubricated press corps. ‘I walked around to each member,’ Brown says, ‘and gave them an invite. I imagine they were quite used to strangers handing them stuff. They kind of smiled and nodded.’

The party was at 39 Woodville Street, North Balwyn, a large family home that Brown’s father had built himself, set on a hill between Doncaster Road and Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbia. Famously, North Balwyn is a ‘dry’ suburb. On this hot, windless night, it was anything but.

‘A sensational party,’ says Brown. ‘It was one of those parties you’d want to have if you were turning twenty-one and you were in the rock press. A lot of journalists came, a lot of musos. We had MacKenzie Theory playing — they were an acid art rock band who I adored. Dave Dawson from the Truth was thrown into the pool by various members of the alternate press. People swam naked. Skinheads tried to break in. They threw a brick through the front window and Michael Chugg bounced them. I’ve always been grateful to Michael for that.’

And, then, The Rolling Stones came. ‘They just sort of materialised, like this amazing mist. I think it was about 3 a.m. Things were getting quieter. And lo and behold this limo pulls up out front.’

Through a side gate and into the Japanese-style garden area wandered Keith Richards, Mick Taylor, horn player Bobby Keys and some road crew. ‘It astonished me they came that late,’ says Brown, ‘because we all knew they had a noon show at Kooyong the next day.’ Taylor had a conversation about architecture with Jen’s mother. ‘He was very interested that Robin Boyd had co-designed the house with my father and I remember this very beautifully dressed, stunning and quite shy young man talking at length to Mum.’ Keith stayed outside, smoking in the Japanese garden. ‘A beautiful spot. Dad had built it with a little platform out over a small waterfall, and a pond, and a weeping cherry.’

Brown remembers seeing her editor, Phillip Frazer, chatting with Keith. She didn’t talk to Keith herself. ‘We were all being pretty cool. Nobody was going to make a fuss or ask for photos or anything. They stayed for about an hour and a half, and headed off after four in the morning.’ She smiles, basking in a forty-year-old memory. ‘They blessed me with their royal presence.’



Music writers Jenny Brown (Jen Jewel Brown) and Dvaid Pepperell
at Sunbury Music Festival, 1973.


Another was in Melbourne, Australia. She had a baby. Sweet, shy, unassuming, she was on the scuppers; the old man had left her with the kid. She could get me pure cocaine, pharmaceutical. And she kept coming to the hotel to deliver, so I went, hey, why don’t I just move in? Living in the suburbs of Melbourne for a week with a mother and child was kind of weird. Within four or five days I was like a right Australian old man. Sheila, where’s my @#$%& breakfast? Here’s your breakfast, darling. It was like I’d been there forever. And it felt great, man. I can do this, just a little semidetached. I’d take care of the baby; she went to work. I was husband for the week. Changed the baby’s diapers. There’s somebody in a suburb in Melbourne who doesn’t even know I wiped his ass.

– KEITH RICHARDS, Life

Keith’s Melbourne suburban adventure apparently didn’t end in North Balwyn. The ‘Sheila’ paragraph of Keith’s 564-page memoir, Life, has delighted and mystified Australian Stones fans. Who was she? Is she still alive? Could the owner of the wiped ass be found? Who would look at the 1973 Keith Richards and think ‘babysitter’?

I ask Jenny Brown (who is now Jen Jewel Brown and a contributor to this book) and she shakes her head. ‘I don’t know anything about that. It’s quite possibly true, but I really don’t know.’

I speak to Brendan Mason, owner of Real Guitars in Glen Iris and the guitarist from Madder Lake, who supported the Stones at Kooyong that weekend. ‘I didn’t take any notice of whether Keith was hanging around with a particular girl. I do remember he was absolutely off his nut. He may as well have been on the planet Zargon for how much sense he was making. But we weren’t with them except for backstage. I didn’t even get to go to Montsalvat because I was having my knee operated on.’

David Dawson, the trained tabloid nose who was chucked in the pool, suggests Jagger ‘hooked up with a blonde Sun journalist after the banquet at Monsalvat and so never made it the party in North Balwyn’. He has no post-party information on Keith.

I email ex-Stones tour manager and rock management impresario Peter Rudge via the ‘contact us’ section of Octagon Music’s website. That goes as well as expected.

I try the same trick with Fran Curtis, a director of the band’s PR firm, Rogers and Cowan.

To: fcurtis@rogersandcowan.com
Subject: Keith Richards’s 1973 Melbourne Mystery Lady

Dear Ms CurtiS
I’m guessing that with a 50th anniversary tour to organise, this won’t go straight to the top of your list …

Ms Curtis accepts my prevarication invitation and I’m still to hear from her.

My best chance is my close university friend, Tim McGregor, now group managing director at Paul Dainty Corporation. Paul Dainty promoted the 1973 tour — an anecdote in Rock Reader: Underneath the Riffs tells how Jagger, a notorious practical joker, got Rudge to purchase hundreds of pigeons for release in Dainty’s room, because Dainty disliked birds, not realising that Dainty himself had simultaneously arranged for sheep to be put in Rudge’s room, the end result being screaming, pigeons flapping everywhere, and sheep in the elevators and trotting up to the hotel bar. This was a time, let’s bear in mind, when the Stones were the world’s biggest act. They’d hit a creative sweet spot that produced Sticky Fingers (1971) and Exile on Main Street (1972) and were coming off a boisterous, colossal, headline-grabbing American tour. Forty years later that tour, sometimes known as the ‘Cocaine and Tequila Sunrise Tour’, stands as an Everest of rock & roll excess: the Playboy mansion, drug busts, Hells Angels, guns, groupies and a celebrity entourage that extended to Truman Capote and Andy Warhol.

I ask Tim about the wild barnyard scene and whether Dainty might comment on its veracity, with a view to slipping in some further questions about Keith’s suburban getaway. But Tim says Paul is overseas. And then, at Tim’s wedding no less, I discover he too is heading to London to pitch Dainty Corporation as promoters of the Stones’ ’50 and Counting’ tour. I know Tim has had face-to-face meetings with Mick and Keith before, so I call later to wish him a happy trip, and ask whether he’d pump Keith for Sheila’s real name.

Tim says he’ll ‘do what he can’. But we both know it’s a long shot. When is the right moment in your business meeting with the Stones to lean forward and say, ‘We can really do a good job on this tour for you boys, and … yeah, while we’re here chatting — Keith, I don’t suppose I could ask you about this chick you were shagging forty years ago?’

It isn’t going to happen. And it doesn’t.

I google ‘Keith Richards’ + ‘doesn’t even know I wiped his ass’ and discover a Ballarat-based writer named Nathan Curnow who’s as captivated by the paragraph as I am. His play “Keef: A Musical Romance” features Keith, Mick, a goldfish, Adolf @#$%&, Queen Elizabeth and … ‘Sheila Roadnight’. I ask Nathan if he knows who the real Sheila is. He doesn’t, and nor does his team, which includes former Stones lighting director Chip Monck. Nathan emails: ‘I’ve been told we have Buckley’s chance of tracking her down. Still, a bit of mystery makes this story folklore, and Keith is the master of folklore …’




Ifind her. When I say ‘I’, I perhaps mean ‘we’, because it wouldn’t have happened without Jen Jewel Brown. And when I say ‘we’, I perhaps mean ‘she’, because it would have happened without me. Four months after our first interview, Jen emails to ask how it’s going. I tell her it isn’t particularly — the Sheila trail is cold, and I’m battling to structure the article. Jen replies that she’ll ‘ask a friend of mine, who knows a million rock chicks, just in case’. Twelve hours later I check email:

She’s a rock chick. I know her. My friend is on the trail. She’s not well and is in Queensland. Will be in touch.

Nine days after that, Jen and I are sitting beside each other on a flight to Maroochydore. I’ve had the briefest conversation with Karen, for that is Sheila’s name, and she has not only agreed to be interviewed but invited us to stay. Again, the key has been Jen: it turns out she and Karen were good friends.

Jen tries to work on her Max Q article during the flight but I keep peppering her with questions.

‘No, “Balwyn Calling” isn’t about me. Everyone always asks that. It was written before Greg and I started seeing each other …’

‘I was there when Jimmy and Jane [Barnes] met. She was a chocolate milk girl at this speedway-type gig Chisel were doing …’

‘Don was originally going to call “Saturday Night”, “Show Me a Light”. I got to see some early drafts …’

I sing, ‘Show me a light, my company’, flat and off key, just to indicate I’m aware of the final draft. ‘Yes, that’s the one,’ Jen smiles.

She returns to her article. I resume reading Life.



The groupies were just extended family. A loosely framed network. And what I liked was there was no jealousy or possessiveness involved in any of it. In those days there was a kind of circuit … They’d just pass you on to their next friend down the road … And they were nurses, basically. You could look upon them more like the Red Cross. They’d wash your clothes, they’d bathe you and stuff. And you’re going, why are you doing all this for a guitar player? There’s a million of us out there.



Jenny Brown in 1973 (Photo Rennie Ellis)


Wedrive with the windows down, a chance to savour the air that Melburnians know as ‘Queensland warm’. Troubled independent MP Peter Slipper’s campaign office appears on the left. Jen gets me to stop the hire car while she takes a photo. We pass liquor marts, fast-food joints, Mick’s Meat Barns and the like, before turning off the highway and heading towards Caloundra. Karen lives on the third floor of a ’70s-style crème-brick apartment complex, two streets back from the beach. It is not a luxury complex. Access is up a dark, claustrophobic staircase exuding the aroma that old carpet accumulates in warm climates, but as we climb the final flight there’s a fresh blast of incense, and a beam of daylight spilling out of an open door.

‘Hello,’ Jen calls, knocking and yoo-hooing into an empty kitchen/living space. When Karen appears, she offers a delighted ‘hey!’, and they step into a long embrace. ‘What’s it been, thirty-five years?’ Karen has short, dyed red hair, black-rimmed glasses and is as fine-boned as the butcherbirds hopping about the balcony outside her window. She hasn’t been well, losing a third of her right lung to cancer and breaking a hip during recovery from a separate hospitalisation involving an aortic aneurism. Her voice is husky, deep and richly Australian, a smoker’s voice, although Karen is now an ex-smoker, except for forays into the medicinal variety that’s always interested Keith Richards.

She was twenty-five in February 1973, making her sixty-five now. ‘I know I look older,’ she says. ‘It’s been a hard life.’ She is indeed frail, and Queensland sun has etched some lines across her face, but she has Hollywood lips and her eyes are wide, green, striking. On the mantelpiece, among native American curios, oil burners, a Thai Buddha and a dozen family snaps, stands a single framed photo of Karen in her early twenties.

I pick it up. ‘That’s how I would have looked,’ she says, ‘when I met Keith.’ I tell her she was beautiful — only word for it. The same full lips; thick, well-defined eyebrows. Amazing backlighting sets fire to individual strands of hair, with the rest falling long and dark past her shoulders. She’s wearing a striped sailor top. She looks like Natalie Portman in ’60s mascara. Barbara Feldon with a slightly wider nose.

‘Thank you,’ she says, fixing us drinks to go with our camembert and kabana. ‘There’s another one over there of me and Shannon.’

In this photo Karen is nose-to-nose, lip-to-lip with a preschooler who has matching dark lashes and a Beatles bob with earflaps. So that’s his name, Shannon. The nappy wearer. Owner of the tiny backside that sneaked into one of the world’s most read autobiographies. In the picture he’s adorable.

Jen and I sit at a glass coffee table, and after a brief pause to survey a passing cargo ship — ‘I love the ships, watching them is one of the best parts of living here’ — Karen closes the balcony door and takes a seat beside us. ‘Anyway — Keith — from what I can remember, I went to this party in North Balwyn …’



Photo of Karen, aka “Sheila’, in her early twenties


The initial encounter was in the Japanese garden. Karen remembers escaping the house. ‘Some really straight stuff was going on in there.’ She headed outside for a joint. ‘This guy came up and said, “Are you smoking spliff?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Could I have some?”, and I said, “Certainly.” And then he said, “Would you like a line of coke?”, and I said, “Certainly.”

She didn’t realise who he was till she and him were standing at the front gate. ‘The limo was pulled up, and I thought, who is this guy, and then I had another look and worked it out. I mean, I was having a smoke in the middle of Balwyn. Who expects The Rolling Stones to roll up in the backyard?’

After sharing lines in the back seat, Keith asked Karen if she could access some more. ‘I said I could, but then he told me how much he wanted, and I went, “Well, I’m not sure I can get quite that much.” We were used to going and getting a little bit for the night. Not enough for the whole country.’

They returned to the party for about half an hour then left in the limo. Karen, unlike Jen, remembers it being earlier than 4 a.m., because she made it to Noah’s, the Stones’ hotel on Exhibition Street, then over to her supplier in Port Melbourne and back to the hotel all while it was still dark. ‘The first order I think was for $700. That was the cash they had on them. When I got back to the hotel there was security everywhere. I had a code — something like “Charlie” or “Bill” or “Bob” — to get past.’

Karen made her delivery and was invited to stay on at Noah’s, where the Stones had taken over an entire floor. Shannon was being babysat, so Karen accepted the invitation to party. She remembers Keith decorating the room. ‘He was saying “the room’s too bright”, and he put scarves over the lights, really nice-looking scarves. He made it look more like a pirates’ cove.’

She goes on: ‘Most of the coke went to Keith. The pretty one, Mick Taylor, he might have had some. I know that soon after I came back they all started playing cricket with the crockery. Up and down the hall. They were using the cups as balls.’

I ask if the cricket-loving Jagger was involved. Karen shakes her head. ‘I hardly saw Mick. He was in his room the whole time, locked in. It was actually quite weird, I thought. They had this joke going where they’d call him a girl’s name, “Mabel” or “Martha” or something. “Mabel’s in her room, she’s carrying on again.”’

The rest of the band impressed Karen with its inclusiveness. ‘You want a sandwich?’ they’d say. ‘We’re ordering room service.’ ‘Want a drink?’ ‘Pass the joint.’ At one point Karen needed two elastic bands for her hair. ‘And they sent down to room service,’ she remembers. ‘The room service guy said, “We haven’t got elastic bands”, and Keith said, “Well, get ’em.”’ Karen laughs at the memory. ‘And he did!’





Kooyong gig, 1973 (Photo Linley Godfrey)

For many Melburnians, the Stones’ back-to-back Kooyong shows that day, starting at midday, are seminal music events in the city’s history. It was bakingly hot, so hot that nobody who was there fails to mention the heat.

‘Breasts,’ says long-time Triple R presenter Max Crawdaddy when I ask him his Kooyong memories. ‘So many bare breasts that my hormone-charged fourteen-year-old brain went into overload.’

Jagger arrived on stage in a satin jacket and carrying a parasol, and with a setlist containing “Brown Sugar”, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, “Midnight Rambler”, “Street Fighting Man” and “Honky Tonk Women”, it was an endless parade of great songs played to an audience near-delirious with heat and expectation. ‘I remember laughing out loud — just at the sheer amazingness of being in the same arena as The Rolling Stones,’ says Rockwiz’s Brian Nankervis. It was the weekend of his seventeenth birthday. In the gap between shows, Nankervis and his mates scaled the nearby Scotch College wall. ‘It was like we felt all-powerful. Completely sober: no alcohol, no drugs, just absolutely high on the excitement of seeing The Rolling Stones. So we jumped the fence, swam in the pool, got out of the pool, and went and saw them again.’

The band itself was high on more than life. Jagger vomited. (Perhaps as a result of heat, or illness.) Bobby Keys, in his memoir, has this to say about ‘Oolong’:

We played one memorable — or not so memorable — show at the Oolong Tennis Centre in Melbourne. This was at the height of me and Keith’s bottle of Jack a day, bottle of tequila a day, and just about whatever else we could get our little hands on to amp up the situation … Well, in Melbourne … somebody had given us some psychedelics. LSD. So hey, down the ol’ gullet they go, man. This was like an hour and a half, two hours before the show.

There were three shows in two days, all of them attended by Karen, who thinks the partying took its toll. ‘They were out of time, out of tune. They were terrible. I mean, the vibe was fantastic; the vibe was unbelievable. But if you want to go in and nitpick their performances, they weren’t very good at all.’




Kooyong, 18th February 1973 (Photo Linley Godfrey)


In Life, Keith says he spent a week in the suburbs with ‘Sheila’. The tour dates suggest a week was impossible. The Stones arrived in Melbourne on Friday the 16th and had an Adelaide show on the 20th. Assuming Keith flew on the evening of the 19th, the ‘week’ was more like a long weekend.

Karen laughs as I try to calculate exact times and dates. ‘Well, my time’s warped, so why wouldn’t his be? He was twice as @#$%&-up as I was.’

Karen purchased an extraordinary amount of cocaine for him. She made ‘four or five trips to Port Melbourne’ and paid ‘about five thousand dollars’. ‘He was interested in not having heroin at the time,’ Karen says. ‘The idea was to take everything and anything else that would take his mind off heroin.’

I ask Karen whether she minded buying such quantities, given the personal risks involved. She grins. ‘I didn’t mind, because I was making quite a bit on it.’

Jen bursts out laughing. Karen is mock indignant. ‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you? Obviously I’ve got to make something out of it, and given it’s The Rolling Stones …’ She adopts an Italian mama’s voice: ‘I make something good for myself.’

At some point, Karen went home to two-year-old Shannon and the babysitter. Yet the cocaine orders kept coming. ‘They sent the limo, and I went and got more, and then Keith said, “This is stupid, you and the kid having to come back to the hotel all the time. I’ll come stay at your place.”’

Which is how Keith Richards ended up on Inkerman Street, South Caulfield.

There was no sex involved. I presumed from reading Life that there was, as did Nathan Curnow; “Keef” the musical opens with sexy Sheila lying naked on a kitchen table. I tell Karen this and she laughs herself into a coughing fit. ‘Had I been the most beautiful woman in the world, I don’t think Keith Richards could have risen to the occasion. I don’t even think it was on his mind. Had circumstances been different, there might have been sex, but everybody was too mindless.’

There was though, says Karen, an immediate connection. ‘Within half an hour of knowing him you were over the fact he was Keith Richards from The Rolling Stones, and he was just someone who was good fun to be with for a while. He was a very nice person, a very kind person. Very gentle.’

I pull out Life, and read out Keith’s memories of ‘Sheila’.

K.R: ‘Sweet, shy, unassuming …’

Karen (snorting): ‘That sounds like me, especially the unassuming bit.’

K.R: ‘She was on the scuppers.’

Karen: ‘My old man and I had broken up, and I had the kid, and he wouldn’t give me any money. He used to come around all the time at night, pissed out of his mind … He was never violent, just argumentative, and abusive.’

K.R: ‘She could get me pure cocaine. Pharmaceutical.’

Karen: ‘True. It was better than they’d had for a long time. They were blown out by how good it was. (Laughing) So good I could cut it down just a wee little bit. (Laughing harder) Like Keith says, “sweet and unassuming”.’

K.R: ‘Living in the suburbs for a week …’

Karen: ‘No, it wasn’t that long.’

K.R: ‘Sheila, where’s me @#$%& breakfast?’

Karen: ‘Bacon and eggs and a cup of tea. A cup of tea is a necessity with him.’

K.R: ‘Just a little semidetached.’

Karen: ‘It was a small house, two bedrooms, bathroom, lounge room, kitchen. I felt really embarrassed, thinking he’d be used to all these mansions, but he loved it. Thought it was cosy, cute. Told me it was the sort of place he could live.’

K.R: ‘I’d take care of the baby, she went to work.’

Karen (appalled): ‘I didn’t leave Keith in charge of my kid! I’m not stupid. I had a babysitter when I wasn’t there. Christine.’

K.R: ‘Changed the baby’s diapers.’

Karen: ‘He changed him once. It was just a wet one. Not poopy.’

K.R: ‘There’s somebody in a suburb in Melbourne who doesn’t even know I wiped his ass.’

Karen: ‘Shannon has only just found out, since Jen and you called.’

Curiously, the Keith Richards ass wipe is not Shannon’s only brush with rock & roll immortality. In March 1975, Skyhooks frontman Shirley Strachan put Shannon, aged about four, on his shoulders for “All My Friends Are Getting Married” in front of 300,000 people on the banks of Melbourne’s Yarra River as part of the Moomba Festival. Later that year, after the final Australian gig of the ‘Wings Over the World’ tour, band and crew, including Paul and Linda McCartney, came to a party at Karen and Shannon’s house in Moorabbin. ‘The police rolled up because of the noise. Then they found out it was Wings so they blocked the road off at each end.’ Karen grins. ‘The road crew stayed for a fortnight.’ Shannon also met B.B. King. And when Shannon was ten, he toured the US for ten months with Little River Band.

Shannon’s father Barry Sullivan, better known as ‘BG’, or Big Goose, was LRB’s bass player at the time. With Barry Harvey, or Little Goose, he’d been a member of the band Chain in its classic Toward the Blues incarnation of 1970–71. In Sullivan’s obituary, rock writer Ed Nimmervol described the Sullivan–Harvey pairing as ‘the greatest rhythm section Australian rock has known’. He was also Karen’s ‘old man’, referred to in the Keith passage. The one who left her ‘on the scuppers’.

After that relationship broke down, Karen lived with a prominent lighting/special effects director, Michael Oberg, who is now the tour and production manager for The Killers. She managed some significant bands in her own right, among them The Ferrets (“Don’t Fall in Love”) and Buster Brown (featuring a pre-Rose Tattoo Angry Anderson and a pre-AC/DC Phil Rudd). Towards the end of the ’70s she ventured overseas, primarily to Amsterdam and London. She moved to the Gold Coast, starting an entertainment agency and running a nightclub called The Grapevine. She raised three kids and dropped out of the music scene. ‘There is no music scene in Queensland,’ says Karen, as we tread an ocean-hugging boardwalk under a night sky of streaks and stars. She waves a delicate wrist in the direction of the surf. ‘What you get in Queensland is this.’



Back in February 1973, Sullivan and Karen had been split for a matter of months. When Big Goose heard she was spending time with Keith Richards, he hit the roof. ‘He assumed it was a sexual thing. I mean, everyone assumed it was a sexual thing. You know, Melbourne chicky babe meets Rolling Stones guitarist; you just would assume that.’ Big Goose was a heavy drinker and, as we’ve heard, a regular and unwanted late-night visitor to Inkerman Street. ‘The whole time Keith was at my house,’ says Karen, ‘I was scared Barry was going to turn up.’

Karen and Keith not only didn’t sleep together; they didn’t sleep. ‘This is coke we’re talking about. We stayed up the whole time. I’d like to tell you I can remember everything that was said, but that would be a downright lie. Because, you know …’ She shrugs helplessly. ‘Drug @#$%&.’

She does remember Keith cautioning her once. ‘He said to me, “Never get yourself a heroin problem, and never get yourself a cocaine problem.” He told me I was far too nice a person to @#$%& myself up with drugs. Which was possibly a bit late at that stage.’ She emits another throaty laugh. ‘He gave me this big lecture while snorting coke and giving me some.’

They spent most of their time in the lounge room. ‘That’s where the stereo was.’ The carpet was old, there was a round stained-glass window, and the gas wall-heater lay dormant. Keith had brought his guitar, and strummed it constantly. Karen played him Australian music, including Chain and Renee Geyer. There was a lot of talk about souls and reincarnation. Scarves and sarongs hung over the lights. Incense was burning; cushions and macramé were scattered about. Keith spent a good proportion of his time on his knees, playing with Shannon. ‘I think he reminded him of his own kid, Marlon. They played cars, Lego, normal stuff. That’s what he was. Really normal … No different, sitting here talking, to you, except you’re not as out of it. And I’m not as out of it.’

On that tour, Keith wore a pair of jeans fondly remembered by Max Crawdaddy for their Ford logo-shaped ‘@#$%&’ badge and by Jen Jewel Brown as an outstanding example of gypsy chic.

‘Incredibly cool pants!’ Jen effuses.

‘Frayed and threadbare,’ Karen counters. ‘He had these brooches of geckos and things that weren’t quite holding them together. In the hotel before one of the shows he said, “Can you pin these up for me?” I said, “Pin ’em? I think we’re beyond pinning here.” I could hardly sew, but I got a needle and thread and at least made them wearable.’

Keith, Shannon and Karen shared a limo from the hotel to Kooyong for the Sunday show. There, waiting, was Sullivan. ‘All I could hear,’ says Karen, ‘over these chicks screaming and everyone yahooing was BG yelling out, “@#$%&! @#$%&!” He was standing right where we got out of the limo. Keith said, “Do you want him thrown out?”, and I said, “No, he enjoys himself when he’s doing this sort of shit.” He yelled at me right through the show. It’s actually my only unpleasant memory of the whole experience.’

When the show was over, Keith ‘invited me to go on the rest of the tour. I couldn’t even contemplate that. My ex would have had me in court. Keith understood. He told me he respected that I put my kid first.’ Keith’s parting gift to Shannon was a metal-cast Aston Martin — ‘the sort where the doors and bonnet open’ — that he had in his suitcase. He gave Karen a Sticky Fingers pendant, a scarf, and a thousand dollars. ‘I lost the pendant,’ Karen groans. ‘It was on a gold chain around my neck. I lost that the day I went to visit a fortune-teller.’ As for the scarf, it went missing thirty years ago during transitions between Amsterdam, London and the Gold Coast. But she still has her memories, some of them, of that weekend, and of Keith’s last words to her.

‘I’d just like to tell you, lady, you’ve got soul. You’ve really, really got soul.


+++++++++




The Rolling Stones arrive in Auckland for a concert at Western Springs, 11 February 1973


RACHEL STACE AT THE ROLLING STONES CONCERT AT WESTERN SPRINGS, AUCKLAND, 1973



The 1970's Fashion Revolution on display at Stones concert



Fans await the Rolling Stones concert at Western Springs, Auckland. 11 February 1973



Western Springs, Auckland. 11 February 1973

Thanks for the 1973,and Record Collector

Quote
midimannz
Thanks for the 1973,and Record Collector

You're welcome. I was thinking of you, Rockman and Brandon when I posted it.

Here are a few more pics from Perth!

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2022-06-26 16:42 by exilestones.

 

              
              photos by Rennie Ellis

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Sydney - photo by Martin James Brannan



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-06-24 04:08 by exilestones.

Keith Richards' 1963 Gibson SG Custom
Ready to Ramble
Jim Carlton - Vintage Guitar magazine



Keith Richards with the '63 SG Custom onstage with Bill Wyman and the
Rolling Stones in New Zealand in February of 1973.
photo Lloyd Godman.

In 1961, Gibson introduced the double-cutaway Les Paul to replace the original version, which had been endorsed by guitarist Les Paul since being developed in 1952. Redesigned in response to falling market demand in the face of competition from Fender's lighter, curvier, more-contoured Stratocaster, the guitar was re-named SG (for "solid guitar") during the 1963 model year; part of the confusion over when exactly the name was changed revolves around the fact Gibson continued to use truss-rod covers engraved with Les Paul's signature until the supply was gone.

The new design was greeted with mixed reaction. While the guitar sold reasonably well - Gibson says the Les Paul SG sold more than 6,000 units, compared to the total of 1,700 single-cuts sold from 1958 to '60. But, as session guitarist, guitar historian, and former Gibson designer/clinician Mitch Holder recalled, "Les never liked the new design and joked about how people could injure themselves on the horn-like cutaways!"

When Gibson's contract with Paul ended in '62, he was in the process of divorcing Mary Ford, so beyond Paul's dislike for the new model, Holder added, "He didn't need any extra income on the table."

Like the original "Black Beauty" Les Paul Custom, the SG Custom was given lower/smoother frets and marketed as the "Fretless Wonder."

This SG Custom resides at the Hard Rock Cafe's home-base "Vault" in Orlando. Once played by Rolling Stones co-founder Keith Richards, it bears the requisite Custom specs - 24 3/4 ? scale, mahogany body and neck, bound ebony fingerboard, pearloid block inlays beginning at the first fret, triple-bound headstock, split-diamond peghead inlay, and pearloid Gibson logo. It sports gold-plated hardware and its three humbucking pickups bear early patent numbers and are controlled by the familiar two Volume/two Tone knob arrangement. Other appointments include a three-way toggle switch mounted to the pickguard, a Tune-O-Matic bridge, and a Maestro Vibrola with a lyre and logo on its cover plate.

Grabbing his calipers, Hard Rock guitar tech Kip Elder measured its nut width at 1.67? and its thickness at .800? at the first fret (dramatically narrower than the single-cut Les Paul once owned by Mick Taylor that also resides in the HRC Vault), graduating to .094? at the 12th fret.

Elder also noted that the pickguard-mounted toggle switch acts as a phase switch - a mod confirmed by Andy Babiuk, author of the definitive Rolling Stones Gear, who said the toggle "has something to do with the third pickup."

"In 1972 I doubt if Keith had a series/parallel thing going on," noted HRC curator Jeff Nolan. Whatever its cryptic purpose ,the mod is unimportant to the guitar's history in the hands of "Keef."

"It's cool because he used it for a brief time in '73, including on the Exile on Main Street tour," Babiuk said. "He also used it at the L.A. Forum benefit show to aid survivors of an earthquake in Nicaragua, and during the subsequent Pacific tour, particularly on 'Midnight Rambler,' which he played in standard tuning with a capo on the seventh fret."

The Hard Rock acquired it from Marshall Chess, a music and film producer who in 1970 was hired by the Stones to run the band's new label, Rolling Stones Records; he'd been acquainted with the band since they recorded a few songs at Chicago-based Chess Records - the label founded by Marshall's father, Leonard, and his uncle, Phil - in the midst of a U.S. tour in '64. He stayed with the band's organization until '77.



Richards installed this switch, perhaps to alter the phase of the guitar's middle pickup. Keith Richards' SG Custom: Tina Craig.

This article originally appeared in VG May 2016 issue.
[www.vintageguitar.com]

++++++++




Rolling Stones - Western Springs New Zealand - February 11, 1973

++++++++

2006 GIBSON SG LES PAUL CUSTOM W/ MAESTRO LYRE VIBROLA! WHITE HISTORIC SHOP! 1963 REISSUE - $3,499.00





2006 Gibson SG Les Paul Custom in White w/ Original Maestro Lyre Vibrola!



Beautiful 2006 Gibson Custom Shop Historic SG Les Paul Custom in White. 3-pickup model with gold hardware. Real EBONY fretboard. Maestro Vibrola. Very nice reissue model. Not sure if this is classified as a 1963 Reissue but basically that's what this is. The guitar comes with the original hardshell case and case candy as shown. The guitar is very clean overall except a few checks in the usual spots for this model. Very well-cared for overall. The guitar has no breaks, repairs, or changed parts except for one push-pull pot to allow for single coil sound and likely the strap buttons. Very nice 3 pickup SG LP Custom with factory Maestro tailpiece!

[kcvintageguitars.com]


SYDNEY
















photos by Philip Morris

In February 1973 the Rolling Stones returned to Australia for the first time since 1966 as part of their Pacific tour.

The band performed in Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Sydney, treating Melbourne and Sydney audiences
to two concerts each.

This set of Photographs contain live images from The Rolling Stones concert at Randwick Racecourse, Sydney on 26th February 1973.



The collection of photographs also contain posed & candid pictures from a party celebration
at a restaurant in Sydney called the 'Spaghetti Factory'.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-06-26 16:48 by exilestones.

“It Was Simply a Fine Instrument”: Keith Richards Talks Boutique Guitars in this Vintage Interview



[www.guitarplayer.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-06-24 18:26 by z.

Talo Tapani Sound Engineer with the Rolling Stones, 1973 to 1977





Having worked a sound engineer and a freelance photographer in his native Finland,
in the 1970s Talo Tapani found work in London at the Rolling Stone's mobile studio.

In 1973, Talo's first year working for the studio, he joined the Rolling
Stones's European Tour, where he was able to photograph the band rehearsing
and performing. The tour lasted 22 days but comprised over 40 shows, with two
shows a day part of the normal schedule. Speaking of his experience, Talo
observes "The Stones worked harder and better than anyone I ever met."



Mick Taylor during 1973 pre-tour rehearsals with
Ian and Bill playing pool at Mick Jagger's home.










photos by Tapani Talo





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-07-01 02:59 by exilestones.

+++++++


Neal Preston photo



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-07-02 18:28 by exilestones.

Keith Richards Discusses the Joys of Blending Lead and Rhythm Playing,
His Love of Chuck Berry, and More in 1977 GP Interview

"It’s never been the technique thing with me. I’ll never be a George Benson or a John McLaughlin,
and I’ve never tried to be," Richards told us at the time.


photo by Tom Hill


The following is an excerpt from GP's November 1977 cover story on Keith Richards.

Almost every sentence ever written about The Rolling Stones begins with the
word “Mick,” and ends with the word “Jagger” – which is odd, considering that
four-fifths of the band’s personnel has remained constant throughout the
group’s 14- year, 24-album history.



And from the band's inception as England’s top rhythm and blues outfit, to its
present status as one of the world’s most powerful and influential rock and
roll bands, the Stones’ principal guitar player has been Keith Richards.



How did you and Brian Jones relate as guitarists?

Really fantastic. But, later, Brian got fed up with the guitar, and he started
to wander around to every other instrument. He found that he had this facility
for any instrument that might be lying in the studio. He’d play vibraphone,
marimba, or harp – even though he’d never touched them before.

He had this incredible concentration, where he could apply it all, and in an
hour or so, he’d have it down enough to be used on the record.



When you two first started playing together, who did what?

We were both feeling each other out, because we were all very much into
electric Chicago blues. Our styles varied a lot. I was personally more into the
commercial stuff from Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, and Jimmy Reed.

For some reason, these were the people Brian had never heard of. He was more
towards Elmore James, B.B. King, and Howlin’ Wolf.


On the early Stones tracks, did you work more out of chord forms, or were
your lines based on scales or single- or two-string patterns?

I love two-string stuff. That was mainly the influence of Chuck Berry. What
interested me about him was the way he could step out of the rhythm part with
such ease, throwing in a nice simple riff, and then drop straight into the feel
of it again.



Obviously, a lot of your style comes from Chuck Berry.

Oh, without a doubt. When I was learning guitar, I spent so long learning from
him and his records.



Do you play off Charlie Watts’ drum accents?

We tend to play very much together. I have to hear Charlie, and I think he has
to hear me. I love playing with Charlie – he knocks me out every time.



How do you interact musically with Bill Wyman?

I don’t really know what to say about Bill, because he is, like, the perfect
anchor between Charlie and myself. To me, his strong point is that he’s always
there, but he’s always unobtrusive. And, for me, straight-ahead rock and roll
bass should be there, but you should feel it – it should never stick out so
that you actually notice it more than anything else.

A bass should be something that you can walk on, and not have to worry whether
there are going to be any holes there.

How was your playing relationship with Mick Taylor?

Always very good. It was a different thing for me. There is no way I can
compare it to playing with Brian, because it had been so long since Brian had
been interested in the guitar at all. I had almost gotten used to doing it all
myself – which I never really liked. I couldn’t bear being the only guitarist
in a band, because the real kick for me is getting those rhythms going, and
playing off another guitar. But I learned a lot from Mick Taylor, because he
is such a beautiful musician.

When he was with us, it was a time when there was probably more distinction
between rhythm guitar and lead guitar than at any other time in the Stones. The
thing with musicians as fluid as Mick Taylor is that it’s hard to keep their
interest. They get bored – especially in such a necessarily restricted and
limited music as rock and roll.

That is the whole fascination with rock and roll and blues – the monotony of
it, and the limitations of it, and how far you can take those limitations, and
still come up with something new.

You’re using a lot more chords onstage than you have in the past.

It’s true. Now – especially with [co-guitarist] Ron Wood – the band is playing
a lot more the way it did when Brian and I used to play at the beginning. We
used to play a lot more rhythm stuff. We’d do away with the differences between
lead and rhythm guitar.

It’s like, you can’t go into a shop, and ask for a “lead guitar.” You’re a
guitar player, and you play a guitar. What’s interesting about rock and roll
for me is that if there are two guitarists, and they’re playing well together
and they really jell, there seems to be infinite possibilities open. It comes
to the point where you’re not conscious anymore of who’s doing what.

It’s not at all a split thing. It’s like two instruments becoming one sound.
It’s never been the technique thing with me. I’ll never be a George Benson or a
John McLaughlin, and I’ve never tried to be. I’ve never been into just
playing, as such. I’ve been more interested in creating sounds, and something
that has a real atmosphere and feel to it.

The Rolling Stones in Paradise Honolulu on $1700 a day
By BEN FONG-TORRES


ROLLING STONES; perform in HONOLULU, Hawaii in 1973.
Robert Knight Archive/Redferns/Getty

The Rolling Stones are in Hawaii. Aloha means hello and goodbye.
Mick Jagger hoists his first glass of 1957 Chateau Margaux to a table of 20. “To the shortest American tour in history,” he says.

* * *

The Rolling Stones, the heart of their Pacific tour cut out when Mick Jagger was refused a Japanese visa because of a 1966 marijuana conviction, are in Hawaii, where on January 1st, by previous vote of the electorate, possession of two ounces or less of marijuana was no longer a felony but, rather, a petty misdemeanor with maximum punishment set at 30 days and/or $500. “More likely a $25 fine, like a traffic ticket,” according to one resident.

The Stones, who don’t talk so much about free concerts any more since that one in 1969 in California, are in Honolulu, where on January 1st each year—since 1969—upwards of 75,000 persons have gathered for music festivals atop Diamond Head Crater, on land owned by the state and used by the National Guard. And perhaps because they’re Hawaiians, islanders, their Sunshine Festivals have been largely innocent parties, just the way their director, Ken Rosene, conceived them: “to get a lot of people together to have a good day.” In Hawaii you can talk like that, and keep a straight, have-a-happy-day face.

The Stones, no longer playboys after dark, stick close to their Hilton in Waikiki, the power side of town. Waikiki is the contempo melting pot, stalking and stomping grounds for prostitutes, gamblers and fighters, not to mention surfers, sunbums, and, ignoring it all, the tourists. The night before Sunshine ’73, while Copperhead is doing a sound check 760 feet up at the crater and entertaining the volunteers setting up, a man is killed in Waikiki. It was simple: A local, a beefy Samoan, working as a doorman at a club on the main drag, Kalakaua Avenue, got a little backtalk and hit the guy just a little too hard. Somewhere else in Waikiki, a local put out a doorman’s eye with a whiskey glass. A melting pot, all right, equal parts paradise, Manhattan, Miami Beach and Las Vegas.
“You don’t talk back to local cops here,” Ken Rosene is advising between Stones concerts. “They come back twice as strong.”

But Bill Graham will try anyone once. So while the kids, these mellow little suntanned specimens, float around smiling in their colorful lack of clothes, it is co-promoter Graham, from San Francisco, who gets the heat hot, trying to pull rank on a Honolulu cop and nearly ending up at the bottom of a beige-shirted pile of beef.

So Graham hoists his glass of ’57 Chateau Margaux at the 1 AM dinner, and Mr. Ready-Quip reflects the utter tiredness around the table, as he manages the basic toast: “To Hawaii.”
* * *
Thank you for your wines, Ah-no Lew-loo,
Thank you for your sweet and bitter fruit…
—Mick Jagger, “Sweet Virginia,”
first show, January 21st,
Honolulu International Center.
* * *
By the time dinner breaks up, at 4 AM, the Stones will have rung up a bill of $1700 for 20, mostly because Mick cleaned out all the ’57 Chateau Margaux left in the cellar here at Nick’s Fish Market, something like 16 bottles at $85 the bottle, plus other spirits and plenty of continental seafood. And yet it was kind of a high pointless night, everybody silent and nibbling, Charlie Watts and Mick Taylor smoking and drinking and chatting, ignoring the silver platters of hors d’oeuvres spread out in front of them; Keith Richard and Mick Jagger sitting together nearby, almost formal in their quiet. Keith looked wasted; he still had some of his nasty, pasty, deadeye make-up on. Mick’s was washed off, and he looked older, more fragile than he does onstage. When he smiles, he puts his whole face into the effort, teeth bursting up front over the famous labial-lookalike lips, sometimes a hand moving up to cover the throaty laughter while the eyes close or glisten, childlike. But here, at 1:30 AM, he is yawning, the hand keeps moving up …
* * *
On a warm Monday evening at five o’clock, this voice comes rising out from the patio of the Hawaiian Hilton. No guitars or ukuleles; no gourd rattles or coconut drums; just this lone voice from the bandstand, singing out to a cluster of tourists. All the matched and screaming shirts and blouses are stilled for the moment. It is the traditional torch-lighting ceremony, and today it is being preceded by the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Somewhere in Texas, the 36th President lay dead (Hey, hey, LBJ …). Somewhere in Paris, some kind of Vietnam peace was within some kind of grasp. And I’m looking down at this frozen little luau from an 11th floor balcony of the Hilton’s Rainbow Tower, where I’m still waiting for word from those five tourists, W. Grace, F. Truman, P. May, L. Hutton and T. Bailey, known up on the 30th floor as Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, Mick Taylor, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts. Because aside from whatever else is happening, the Rolling Stones are in town.

Once again, the gathering madness. Chartered flights from San Francisco, Los Angeles and Denver. Stories in the local papers about kids waiting in line through Christmas Eve and Day for tickets, about how Don Norton, manager of a gas station in Pearl City, left his line Sunday morning at 2:30 AM because his wife Maria was having their first child. He got someone to save his spot, and he was back in line at the Honolulu International Center within two hours. A couple flew in from Boston to see the concert, explaining, very simply, “It’s the whole Mick Jagger thing.”

Imagined madness. The Stones people, as they always do, keep asking, “What’s the angle of your story going to be?” I think they know that there’s no real story. But if I am patient, the tour manager says, I will get to talk with Jagger, and he will tell me whatever news there is—about Japan and Jamaica, about the live album that won’t come out, the new studio album that will, The Beard, that won’t; the TV special, that will. I will ask about his place in the new high society, about his being a husband and father. But I must be patient, and I am, because, after all, there’s no reason—especially no journalistic reason—to be impatient.

And so, a few flashes on the way to Mick:
“It’s interesting,” says a 25-year-old schoolteacher from Waianae, ages and an hour away from the sunbum ambience of Honolulu. “All this activity”—she is observing the local boy ushers, the cops, the light, sound and stage crew members, the STP (Stones Touring Party) people—accountant, travel agency woman, baggage man, guitar caretaker, security guards, record company people, promoters Barry Fey from Denver in official tongue jacket, Graham in his blue volcanic tie-dyed tank-top, and local radio giant/promoter Tom Moffat, in Aloha shirt; tour manager Peter Rudge looking like a wired Paul Simon; stage manager Chip Monck onstage, walkie-talkie strapped to his walking shorts—and the kids, all glowing from another day on the beach, all jabbering away excitedly…all this activity—”just for one person.”

The first show, more than anything, was loud, to the point where Chip Monck would deride the sound crew who’s been with the Stones since the U.S. tour last year. “They seem to think the development of sound means getting it louder,” he said after the three concerts. By decibel measurement, the sound was 7 db short of the point at which ears shrivel. First act was Z.Z. Top, who took every available decibel and poured out an ornamented Grand Funk sound.

The Stones did their usual set, Jagger looking drunk, teasing the band, toying with the mike, evoking Rod Stewart with one move; Fred Astaire (the mike being Ginger Rogers) the next. Strong rhythmic support, as always, and superb work from Bobby Keys on sax and Jim Price on trumpet and trombone, and Nicky Hopkins and Ian Stewart alternating on piano.

Early on, a girl rose from her seat near the front row to do that shiver-wiggle dance that young maniacs have perfected over the years. A teenaged usher immediately moved to her row to stop her. Sure, she was obstructing the view, but the usher had this look about him. He seemed genuinely annoyed that people could do that, right in front of everybody. He sat in a chair in the aisle, facing away from the stage.

The next day, Monday, Lyndon Johnson has died, and the Stones are asleep, out shopping, or otherwise not around.

Newman Jones, a lanky kid who runs a guitar repair shop in Arkansas, talks about how he got onto the Rolling Stones’ touring payroll. “It’s hard to say why they call on anybody,” he says. “I was traveling through Europe last fall carrying this old guitar—one of the first Rickenbacker electrics—that I thought Keith might like. I went to his house in France, looked around, and he bought the guitar from me. Then they came to L.A. Well, in France someone stole his guitars, so he needed some work done on some new ones he’d bought. I came in from Tennessee, and now I’m on tour to do repairs, and I’m the guy that hands Keith his guitars onstage. He uses five different guitars during a set, and they all tune differently.” One of them is a beauty that Newman built: “Like a car with all the options,” he says, with a maple neck, cherrywood back, rosewood top, and just five strings, for open tuning, for the hard rockers like “Street Fighting Man” and “Jumping Jack Flash.”

Up in Peter Rudge’s suite, the tour manager continues to nurse the Stones’ wounds. They are not all over Honolulu and the outer islands, he says, because they are still so depressed about the Japanese cancellation. They are pissed, in fact. He is busy working out a modified budget for the rest of the tour, offering two-week vacations to STP staffers in exchange for a cut in salaries. “Japanese television is here to interview Mick,” he says. “They wanted to film the concert. Absolutely not. We still intend to go back to Japan. Next? Probably Europe next summer. Celebrate the Common Market, you know.”
* * *
For the first show Monday night, Mick Jagger wears a vintage LAND OF ALOHA shirt, a bluish silkie complete with hula dancers, surfers and sunshine, gathered at the waist, over his velvet jumpsuit. The shirt begins to look ludicrous soon enough, as Jagger suddenly begins a dramatic, nearly a capella introduction to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” searing and reminding of Turner in Performance. Which is to remind us that, after all, Jagger is an actor. Mick, this time with yellow make-up above the eyelids, looks like an aged Fellini vamp. The set seems slow; the audience holds back. A young girl, having stood for the first number, is soon slumped back in her seat. “I think he looks tired and old,” she says to a friend.

The limos are ready to whisk the Stones back to the hotel between shows; Keith, moving quickly down the stage-steps, pauses at the door, recognizes the patient reporter. “We’ll see you at the hotel, right?”

At the hotel, I’m told by someone in Keith’s room that he is busy…something about a TV interview. At the suite where the Japanese crew is set up and waiting, all is hushed. At 9, on time, Jagger arrives, all washed up and dressed in white football jersey, number 86, and chartreuse bellbottoms. For the next 15 minutes, he is terribly civil, smiling in anticipation of each question, telling his Japanese audience how their government’s refusal of a visa for him made him “unhappy, very dishonored,” how he would still like to visit Japan, even if just as a tourist, “to go to the country as well as the town.” Asked about chopsticks, Mick formed his biggest smile, flashed the diamond set into one of his front teeth, leaned forward, and told how an “old Chinese gentleman” taught him to handle the sticks, how Mick still hadn’t learned to eat without letting the sticks touch his lips. The Japanese interviewer smiled automatically and moved on to the next question.

In the elevator, Mick laughed it up with Marshall Chess, president of Rolling Stones Records, imitating a Japanese accent. “That chope-stock bit,” he said, giggling, hand to the face, “that’s bullshit. I made it up.” He said we could talk at the party after the second show.

The second show Monday night is the upper, the breakthrough the Stones needed. All the charter-flown audiences are here raving it up. Honolulu meets San Francisco by way of Jerry Palmer, who looks to be the gay community’s queen bee, standing tall in black turtle-necked leotards, boosted by four-inch heels on white sequined slipper shoes. His nails are dipped in silver, his face and mouth in lava red. His glittering hair is shaped to give him the look of a Roman, with maybe a stardusted artichoke squashed on his head. And that dance she is doing, aimed at Mick, is not the Hula.

Chip Monck has the overhanging 10-by-40 Mylar mirror tilting back and forth, so that from backstage, where the seven super-trouper spotlights are fixed like anti-aircraft machinery, you see the people in repetitive waves, all seemingly flying backward, now forward, as they stand on their chairs. The house lights are up and the kids are allowed, as they have been the previous two shows, to move towards the stage. On “Street Fighting Man,” Keith pounds and sashays away on his five stringer, completes his break and rolls his eyes toward Mick, proud. Rose petals and orchids fly out to the audience, and the band members march down the stairs, into the sleek limos, one blue, one white, one black, sweeping out behind the flashing blue lights of the Honolulu police escorts. The Rolling Stones’ 1973 American tour is over.

Back at the hotel, the word spreads: There is no party. Instead, Nicky Hopkins will leave his wife Lynda and come down for a drink.

People have been wondering about this strange man who spells him on the piano now and then, this man with the middle-American look, with the monster-mashed face. There’s even a blowup photo of him pasted up in Peter Rudge’s suite, right next to the ice box. It is, of course, Ian Stewart, the Stones’ first roadie, a friend of theirs as long as Nicky’s been, and Nicky knew them back in 1962, when he was with the Cyril Davies group at the Marquee and the Stones were the “interval band” on R & B nights. “Stew,” Hopkins explains, “did ‘Sweet Virginia’ on the record; he recorded part of Let It Bleed. I was touring with (Jeff) Beck during Sticky Fingers, and he did that, except ‘Sway’ was mine. So he plays them onstage. Stew is a boogie piano player, an incredible rock & roll player. He knows every boogie piano record; he has every boogie piano record.”
And Mick Jagger?

“I think people just accept him for what he is.”
And what is he?

“I don’t know. Whatever people want him to be, or expect him to be.”

* * *

Tuesday morning, the band should be packing up and heading for the mainland before going off to Australia in early February, to prepare for the final quivers of this decapitated tour.

Near noon, out on the breakfast patio, Leroy Lennard, Mick’s security guard, has some news: There was a party last night—if you want to use such a festive word to describe a few people standing around drinking in Barry Fey’s room, and then a dozen or so Honolulu lulus—”models,” someone called them; “dancers,” Leroy had been informed—showing up and scaring off Mick and Keith, who ducked out to another guard’s room and watched TV. Anyway, the 30th floor is secure—some elevators have broken down, and besides that, Leroy’s removed the outside knobs from the fire escape doors, and he’s just checked in on Mick in bed: “He’s sprawled out like a lion after a kill.”

And Keith? Leroy pauses. “Keith is the one taking this Japanese thing the hardest. He’ll let out with this smile, and then…[Leroy lets his sample smile dissipate]. Man, I told him last night he was bullshitting. …”

* * *

Room 3001, Barry Fey’s room, looks more post-conference than post-orgy. Bill Graham is seated, using Fey’s phone, on the line to the mainland, negotiating for some future concert. Fey, the major rock concert promoter in Denver, was an assistant manager at a Robert Hall clothiers; his first promotion was a show in Rockford, Illinois, headlining Baby Huey and the Babysitters, to whom he paid $90. Last year, he did well by the Stones for ten Midwest dates, and now he is sharing in this paradise quickie, in a gross of $172,000 for three shows in a small hall, capacity 8500. “What an area to work in,” Graham exults. “A great balance. Work hard for a gig, and then rest.” Graham, shirtless and shoeless, does an impression of a 15-year-old blonde he saw last night, “in total orgasm, going from Mick Jagger …” unhhhHH…”to Mick Taylor. Nonstop.” Barry Fey, tubby and tanned, pats himself on the back, on his bed, for booking Z.Z. Top. “They got the people off, quick. Even got an encore. I made the right choice.”
“And neither of us owns a piece of them,” adds Graham.

* * *

Of all the Stones in Hawaii, it appears that Mick Jagger is the most resistant to sunshine. Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman had found some time to go speeding around on a catamaran, and everyone had ventured out of the Hilton Hawaiian Village at least once, to go shopping.

“Sho-ping,” sneers Mick. “What’s there to @#$%& buy in Hawaii?”

At two o’clock, Tuesday, he has finally awakened, and we’re about to kill two birds: let Mick have a good time and do a photo session. Jagger has been invited to take a cruise on The Flying Cloud, an 82-foot, restored 1929 schooner owned by George Walker, who came in from Kona, 100 miles away, to accommodate Mick Jagger.

George Walker. That’s—Right, from the Merry Pranksters. Ken Kesey…Neal Cassady…The Bus…nine years ago. And CLOUD—Right, the Beatle / Arab / Ringo / Help! / acid vision out of the Electric Kool-Aid book. George Walker had been thinking about the sea…about maybe trying out a $15,000 floater when he ran across this Rolls-Royce of a schooner, which he snapped up at the bargain price of $300,000 by selling off some inherited land. Now, the captain of the ship meets the Rolling Stone. George proceeds to fill Mick in on all the Hawaiian legends . . . about Captain Cook, and the Forbidden Island of Niihau, and Mick takes it all in. He’s come prepared for the sea. He’s wearing his aloha shirt, his lime pants, track tennies, sports watch, and a turquoise Afro/jockey cap to catch the wind. He meets the vegetarian crew, six men, two women, inspects the laboriously re-wooded deck, checks downstairs in the forecastle and the galley, where a tape is playing Crosby, Stills and Nash. As the ship moves off from the Ala Wai Harbor and smoothly gathers up speed, Jagger easily roams the deck, staying quiet, looking fragile. The ship heads out past Koko Head, into the Molokai Channel, begins to hit the wind, has to slice through mounting swells. Jagger holds on to the shrouds, posing here and there, old Mick and the sea….Six miles out, Walker turns The Flying Cloud around and offers the wheel to Mick. Jagger sits down, consults for a moment—”Aim for that big white building,” Walker instructs—and Mick becomes captain for the next two, three miles, discarding his floppy cap leaning from side to side, surely guiding the schooner through the 20-knot-per-hour winds back toward Honolulu. He is, he says, relaxed, and ready for dinner.

We decide on Chinese food. At the hotel, Charlie Watts and Mick Taylor are hanging around, nothing to do, shrugging, almost, to show their helplessness. It’s dinner for five at Wo Fat, this garish red and gold facility for baby luaus and Cantonese food. It is a social gathering and the talk is light. Taylor tells why he’s so quiet on the stage: “I don’t want to upstage Mick.” Jagger talks about the time he visited the gay Continental Baths in New York, and why he split in such a hurry: “Well, these guys in these towels, they’d walk up to me and drop their towels and just stand there.” He laughs about his arch-promoter Bill Graham: “You remember that dinner at Nick’s?” Ah, yes—Honolulu on $1700 a night. “And Bill and Barry are sittin’ there at the ‘ed of the table. And all they do is tell these promoter jokes that nobody else could understand. [Adopting a rough American accent:] ‘Hah! I booked so-and-so and paid this much, hahahaha.’ And that’s it, all night!”

Mick Jagger is seven months away from age 30, and he acts it, constantly on the edge, on stage and off. Writers have had out and out field days figuring him out, but almost always from a distance—the distance between stage and loge seat; the distance between protected pop figure and inquiring reporter, so that he is a devil, a unisexual zombie, a cockteaser, a man by turns ruthless, unhappy, fey, charming, quiet, generous, and sensitive. That’s what I had read, anyway.

On the mid-high seas, in Chinatown and, now, in his hotel room with an hour to kill, Mick Jagger is neither devil nor angel; yes, he looks like he’s got nasty habits; yes, it’s difficult to pin him down when the question hits too close to the nerve, and he does carry a mask at all times, he sashays, 24 hours a day. But also, he cares so little about what people say, and guess, about him. “The whole Mick Jagger thing,” indeed. In conversation, he smiles through my questions and through his own answers, implying, “You ain’t got much of a story, do you? Well, neither have I. But we both got a job, don’t we? [American accent:] AFTER ALL, THE PUBLIC WANTS TO KNOW.”

First, he denies the Stones being depressed, pissed, about the Japanese cutoff: “It’s just a minor sort of frustration. The main thing that bugs us is we got nothing to do for ten days, but that’s about all. It’s not a great financial loss.”

Second, there’s the live album, expected last November, from the U.S. tour, one album of the Stones, one album of Stevie Wonder and somewhere in there a couple of jams, Stevie singing “Satisfaction” and Mick winging “Uptight.” Then, according to Mick, Allen Klein and Decca, the Stones’ old business manager and British label, stopped the album. By contract, the Stones were prohibited from re-cutting any songs previously licensed to or released by the original label. And besides, Abkco and Decca and London had Christmas plans of their own: More Hot Rocks.

“Yeah, well,” says Mick, “they’re just greedy and stu-pid, cutting their own necks despite their noses. We’ll just put out a live album of something else, maybe some old tour stuff, maybe some new things, maybe a mish-mash”—and probably in the fall, since the Stones are now finishing up the new studio album for release in March or April.


What’s this about being a part of the high society Cat Pack in New York?

That’s just a magazine thing.



And the Best-Dressed List?

That too. I really do my best not to be well-dressed.


How has Bianca changed you, if she has at all?

I don’t like talking about women.



What about being a father?

I don’t want to talk about family either.



(Room service interrupts with coffee; I ask again about his baby daughter Jade.)

I don’t see the baby; I’m always @#$%&’ on the road. It’s my own choice, but I’m @#$%& negligent, I just am. But when I was a kid, my father was away a lot. It’s important to be there in the formative years of childhood, but I’m not there. And short of carrying the kid about in the next room, which I also don’t particularly dig, you just see your kid when you can, same as anyone else. [Changing voice:] IT’S THE AMERICAN WAY.


Then why did you choose to become a father?

I didn’t; that’s why I don’t want to talk about it. ‘Why do I have a child?’ I have lots of other children that I also like.

Charlie will talk about parenthood. Charlie will stay in South of France all the time. I just don’t. Even two weeks in one place gets to be a maximum. The only time we stay anywhere longer is to finish off an album. I could go back to South of France but I never liked it there; soon as we cut the first album we left; I left im-me-diately. I visit Ireland a lot; I had a house there for six months, and I prefer London, but I can’t go there. So I’m very happy moving every two weeks. I’ve got it down.

Onstage, on that shiny white floor, I see you as kind of a child, a kid playing in the kitchen, your older brothers standing around ignoring you.
(Mick, laughing I was going to make popcorn on the side of the stage. This is the last year of the rose petal, actually.

See, we had a lot of different shows for Japan; we were just building up for that. We were going to do seven shows in one place—we’ve never done that before—and by the time you’ve done three or four, there’s all kinds of things you can do, @#$%& around. I was going to cook popcorn, hundreds of things, we were really mad, had it all going…But it needed two weeks rehearsal, and they never gave it, the State Department, God bless ’em.

Anyway, we didn’t do a @#$%&’ show in Japan, so it didn’t matter. I was actually more brought down because I would’ve really gotten it off and would’ve got all the popcorn up in crates and hundreds of other gimmicks and crap.
People always seem amazed to see you playing harmonica on “Sweet Virginia.” It’s lip-synched, isn’t it?

(Mick, laughing Yes. I’m tolerable, but I’ve forgotten it all. You have to play every day for that—however, your mouth bleeds. That’s the problem. You go home to see your old lady and you’re bleeding. (Into a Manchester growl “‘Ello, Dahlin’,” and your mouth is all covered with blood. …

I can just see Ralph Steadman doing your next album cover.
(Mick portrays Steadman submitting his work “I’m not sure if this is really gonna sell the album!”…


So what’s the cover going to be like?

Aw, @#$%&, you know, some bullshit or other. (Brightly to the tape machine, to the public It’s what’s inside that counts. ‘Sgonna be quite a good album, folks. (Shrinking, into a wisp It’s gonna be a bit different from the last one. Ahh…it’s gonna be evocative, and romantic and tender and loving.
What about the song “@#$%&?”

That’s the only song with any slice of cynicism. All the others are into…beauty. (The violins swell as Mick continues It’s very difficult to write about those sort of primitive emotions—without being cynical about it; that’s when you sound old. I mean, if you can’t go into a coffee shop and sort of fall in love with every glass of coffee, and listen to the jukebox—that’s difficult to portray in a song.

(Mick continues to dismiss himself as a songwriter and performer; he said the Forum benefit for the Nicaragua earthquake victims had good bits but was just a warm-up; so, in fact, were the Honolulu shows. Then after it gets good and revved up, slicing through the winds, the band coasts. And then there were the old days


You know what we used to do in the South? We would go on—and if the audience wasn’t very good, we’d do 15 minutes and go off.

Honolulu remembers that. I heard that in the 1966 show here you did 22 minutes and were drunk.

(Laughing again Yeah, 20 minutes—but I wasn’t drunk. I’m usually pretty straight when I go on. You just do it automatically. You’re complete off your head. Completely around the twist. I mean, you can try and get @#$%& up if you want, but then, basically you’re @#$%& up anyway.


Mick, after the Japanese refusal of your visa—are you sorry that you ever took drugs?

(Laughing again, louder than ever, what kind of interview is this? NO! I’M GONNA GO AHEAD RIGHT ON TAKIN’ ‘EM! (Then, seriously, maybe I don’t take drugs. I don’t approve of drugs, and I don’t approve of people taking drugs unless they’re very careful. Most people can’t control themselves, they’re not happy enough just to get a big high; they’ve got to get @#$%& up all the time.
(A writer for UPI had asked Mick, mid-way through the last tour, “What is your sense of American audiences so far?” and Jagger had replied, “They don’t seem to be quite so stoned as they were….I think they’re more straight, possibly younger.” Now. he is saying there’s “more and more” hard drug abusers, “everywhere, soon as you get anywhere somebody’s got a bunch of smack, floatin’ around.” And just as Mick recalls his own abuses—”in the acid stage; looking back at it it was a bit of a laugh”—a Honolulu police siren begins to sound, 30 floors down …)


What about that report about all of you being arrested for using heroin in France?

That’s propaganda. That’s what propaganda is, isn’t it—a distortion of the real facts. That’s what @#$%& us up; everyone thought we’d been arrested on heroin charges. That’s bullshit. They’d love to have us on heroin charges, I’ll admit, that’s their dream. But so far they haven’t managed to. They’re jumpin’ the gun.


What about Keith?

Same. Completely jumped the gun. They’d like to arrest him and put him in prison, I suppose. Like to do it to all of us. (Pouting But they can’t, in my mind…(long pause)…because they’re full of shit. (Laughing, again, then spitting, huffing out the words Disgusting people…fascist pigs. They really are!

What’s to be made of all this? The next time the Stones tour will probably be in Europe; the next time America gets to see them will be in spring, on TV, with a special scheduled on ABC in April, and in the film made by Robert Frank (“On-tour nonsense,” said Mick). The TV show, filmed at the Houston concert last year, may also include bits of backstage shots gathered by Frank. And after that, it’ll most likely be Mick in yet another costume. He’s just signed with CMA, who’ll be his agent in the matter of motion pictures, and he’s still reading scripts, trying to avoid the “period films,” looking to portray “a certain character,” no further explanation. Just: “I’ve got to stop doing rock & roll for a year.”

* * *

The last time I saw Keith Richard, he was heading out of the Rainbow Tower, heading, with Taylor, Jagger and Watts into a station wagon towards the Honolulu airport. Again, he turned to me, told me what hotel he’d be at next, how he really would like to cooperate. I said thanks and turned away to my own friends, still not sure what the story would be.

And now, back on the mainland, the phone rings. Hawaii calling. Ken Rosene, Sunshine Festival director, has been taking Chip Monck around Diamond Head Crater, talking shop, and now he’s got some news: Chip has quit the Stones tour; with all that optimism over Japan, in all that popcorn fever, he’d overspent by some $25,000, and there was a…meeting with Peter Rudge. So, since the Australian concerts are all outdoors, there’s no need for the Mylar and the super-trouper backlights, the Stones will just make do…coast…Rudge is off to Tokyo, to close the books. And Chip Monck, for one, is going off for a vacation—on Maui.

Mick Jagger Remembers



In one of his most in-depth interviews ever,
the Rolling Stones frontman looks back on
30 years in the world’s greatest rock & roll band
By Jann S. Wenner




FULL TEXT OF THIS ARTICLE IS BELOW THE MAGAZINE SCANS.



Being interviewed is one of Mick Jagger‘s least favorite pastimes, a necessity that accompanies his career. A typical session with a journalist lasts 20 minutes. His life has been public for so long, he sees little need to explain or justify himself and has everything to be gained by holding on to what privacy he has – such as the privacy of his thinking – as well as the value of a little mystery.

Nonetheless, after a 25-year professional and personal friendship, during which Mick and I have often discussed the private affairs of his life and the band, I suggested doing a long interview. He agreed, and we proceeded on the basis of trust and familiarity.

This interview was conducted in three-to four-hour sessions in Palm Beach, Fla.; Montreal; and Cologne, Germany. We began in November of 1994 and finished in October of 1995 with a New York-to-London phone call. We did this throughout the Voodoo Lounge tour, a time when Jagger and the Stones were proceeding at a new level of assurance, maturity and status. The atmosphere and congeniality surrounding the band were exceptional, reflecting the upbeat confidence and ease that occurs when you are at the top of your game. I think Mick felt this, too, and thought this was a good time to go on the record, knowing I wanted to go back to the old days and start from there. Also, it was a long tour, and he seemed to enjoy the company whenever I came to do background reporting or the interview.

This is the most comprehensive interview Jagger has ever granted, and I decided at the outset to avoid the gossipy byways in favor of getting Mick to recall and interpret the most significant aspects of the group’s history and its music.

Mick is a difficult interview, not only because of his natural reserve and lack of interest in the past but also because he communicates as much with his elastic body gestures, great smile and expressive face as he does verbally: Half of what he says never makes it to the page. There is so much he doesn’t want to talk about and therefore says only with a knowing look; you know how distasteful or delightful a particular experience was for him, but that information remains at best a confidence between interviewer and interviewee… You’ve been told, and you’ve been had!
We entered into this as a collaboration, and despite his reluctance about being interviewed, I think he enjoyed the reminiscing and was happy to get some things on the record.

I certainly enjoyed it, as a longtime Stones fan and great admirer of Jagger’s talents, artistry and aplomb. I also had a pleasurable excuse to see more than half a dozen shows, in all kinds of circumstances, throughout the tour. It’s my opinion that the Stones are still the greatest rock & roll band in the world, and based on both the Steel Wheels and Voodoo Lounge world tours, I think they are also the greatest show on earth.
Herewith, the ringmaster.
~ J.S.W.
Nov. 7, 1995



When did you first realize you were a performer, that what you did onstage was affecting people?

When I was 18 or so. The Rolling Stones were just starting to play some clubs around London, and I realized I was getting a lot of girl action when normally I hadn’t gotten much. I was very unsophisticated then.



It was the attention of the girls that made you realize you were doing something onstage that was special?

You realize that these girls are going, either quietly or loudly, sort of crazy. And you’re going, “Well, this is good. You know, this is something else.” At that age you’re just so impressed, especially if you’ve been rather shy before.

There’s two parts of all this, at least. There’s this great fascination for music and this love of playing blues – not only blues, just rock & roll generally. There’s this great love of that.
But there’s this other thing that’s performing, which is something that children have or they haven’t got. In the slightly post-Edwardian, pre-television days, everybody had to do a turn at family gatherings. You might recite poetry, and Uncle What ever would play the piano and sing, and you all had something to do. And I was just one of those kids [who loved it].

I guess you just want some sort of gratification. You have to want some sort of approval. But it’s also just the love of actually doing it. Fun.




You were going to the London School of Economics and just getting started playing with the Stones. How did you decide which you were going to do?

Well, I started to do both, really. The Stones thing was weekends, and college was in the week. God, the Rolling Stones had so little work – it was like one gig a month. So it wasn’t really that difficult – we just couldn’t get any work.




How committed to the group were you then?

Well, I wasn’t totally committed; it was a good, fun thing to do, but Keith [Richards] and Brian [Jones] didn’t have anything else to do, so they wanted to rehearse all the time. I liked to rehearse once a week and do a show Saturday. The show that we did was three or four numbers, so there wasn’t a tremendous amount of rehearsal needed.



Were you torn about the decision to drop out of school?

It was very, very difficult because my parents obviously didn’t want me to do it. My father was furious with me, absolutely furious. I’m sure he wouldn’t have been so mad if I’d have volunteered to join the army. Anything but this. He couldn’t believe it. I agree with him: It wasn’t a viable career opportunity. It was totally stupid. But I didn’t really like being at college. It wasn’t like it was Oxford and had been the most wonderful time of my life. It was really a dull, boring course I was stuck on.



Tell me about meeting Keith.

I can’t remember when I didn’t know him. We lived one street away; his mother knew my mother, and we were at primary school together from [ages] 7 to 11. We used to play together, and we weren’t the closest friends, but we were friends.

Keith and I went to different schools when we were 11, but he went to a school which was really near where I used to live. But I always knew where he lived, because my mother would never lose contact with anybody, and she knew where they’d moved. I used to see him coming home from his school, which was less than a mile away from where I lived. And then – this is a true story – we met at the train station. And I had these rhythm & blues records, which were very prized possessions because they weren’t available in England then. And he said, “Oh, yeah, these are really interesting.” That kind of did it. That’s how it started, really.

We started to go to each other’s house and play these records. And then we started to go to other people’s houses to play other records. You know, it’s the time in your life when you’re almost stamp-collecting this stuff. I can’t quite remember how all this worked. Keith always played the guitar, from even when he was 5. And he was keen on country music, cowboys. But obviously at some point, Keith, he had this guitar with this electric-guitar pickup. And he played it for me. So I said, “Well, I sing, you know? And you play the guitar.” Very obvious stuff.

I used to play Saturday night shows with all these different little groups. If I could get a show, I would do it. I used to do mad things – you know, I used to go and do these shows and go on my knees and roll on the ground – when I was 15,16 years old. And my parents were extremely disapproving of it all. Because it was just not done. This was for very low-class people, remember. Rock & roll singers weren’t educated people.



What did you think was going on inside you at 15 years old that you wanted to go out and roll around on a stage?

I didn’t have any inhibitions. I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and I thought, “Well, I can do this.” And I liked doing it. It’s a real buzz, even in front of 20 people, to make a complete fool of yourself. But people seemed to like it. And the thing is, if people started throwing tomatoes at me, I wouldn’t have gone on with it. But they all liked it, and it always seemed to be a success, and people were shocked. I could see it in their faces.



Shocked by you?

Yeah. They could see it was a bit wild for what was going on at the time in these little places in the suburbs. Parents were not always very tolerant, but Keith’s mum was very tolerant of him playing. Keith was an only child, and she didn’t have a lot of other distractions, whereas my parents were like “Get on your homework.” It was a real hard time for me. So I used to go and play with Keith, and then we used to go and play with Dick Taylor [who was later in the Pretty Things]. His parents were very tolerant, so we used to go round to his house, where we could play louder.



What was it like to be such a success at such a young age?

It was very exciting. The first time we got our picture in the music paper called the Record Mirror – to be on the front page of this thing that probably sold about 20,000 copies – was so exciting, you couldn’t believe it. And this glowing review: There we were in this club in Richmond, being written up in these rather nice terms. And then to go from the music-oriented press to national press and national television, and everyone seeing you in the world of two television channels, and then being recognized by everyone from builders and people working in shops and so on. It goes to your head – very champagne feeling.



You became quite the pop aristocrat in swinging London.

Well, it’s quite a while until all that. But the earlier bit was even more exciting. The suits, the ties and getting ready for Thank Your Lucky Stars,the innocence and naiveté of it all, and famous photographers wanting to take your picture and being in Vogue. In England they were very ready for another band. It was funny, because the Beatles had only been around a year. Things happened so quickly. Then there were a lot of popular bands, and all these bands were from the North of England. Most people in England don’t live in the North, and people are snobby in England, so they wanted a band from the South. We were it.



Satisfaction In the ’60s
I recently listened to the very early albums, the first four or five you did, and they’re all pretty much the same. You were doing blues and covers, but one song stood out: “Tell Me (You’re Coming Back),” your first U.S. hit and your first composition together with Keith. It’s the first one that has the seeds of the modern Stones in it.

Keith was playing 12-string and singing harmonies into the same microphone as the 12-string. We recorded it in this tiny studio in the West End of London called Regent Sound, which was a demo studio. I think the whole of that album was recorded in there. But it’s very different from doing those R&B covers or Marvin Gaye covers and all that. There’s a definite feel about it. It’s a very pop song, as opposed to all the blues songs and the Motown covers, which everyone did at the time.



The first full album that really kind of jumps out is “Out of Our Heads.”

What’s on there? [Laughter] I have no idea. I’m awfully sorry.



“Cry to Me,” “The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man,” “Play With Fire,” “I’m All Right,” That’s How Strong My Lore Is”…

Yeah. A lot of covers, still.



But it had a unity of sound to it.

Most of that was recorded in RCA Studios, in Hollywood, and the people working on it, the engineers, were much better. They knew how to get really good sounds. That really affects your performance, because you can hear the nuances, and that inspires you.



And your singing is different here for the first time. You sound like you’re singing more like soul music.

Yeah, well, it is obviously soul influenced, which was the goal at the time. Otis Redding and Solomon Burke. “Play With Fire” sounds amazing – when I heard it last. I mean, it’s a very in-your-face kind of sound and very clearly done. You can hear all the vocal stuff on it. And I’m playing the tambourines, the vocal line. You know, it’s very pretty.



Who wrote that?

Keith and me. I mean, it just came out.



A full collaboration?

Yeah.



That’s the first song you wrote that starts to address the lifestyle you were leading in England and, of course, class consciousness.

No one had really done that. The Beatles, to some extent, were doing it, though they weren’t really doing it at this period as much as they did later. The Kinks were kind of doing it – Ray Davies and I were in the same boat. One of the first things that, in that very naive way, you attempted to deal with were the kind of funny, swinging, London-type things that were going on. I didn’t even realize I was doing it at the time. But it became an interesting source for material. Songwriting had only dealt in cliches and borrowed stuff, you know, from previous records or ideas. “I want to hold your hand,” things like that. But these songs were really more from experience and then embroidered to make them more interesting.



Where does that come from in you? I mean, you’re writing about “Your mother, she’s an heiress/Owns a block in St. John’s Wood,”but she’s sleeping with the milkman, or something.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it was just kind of rich girls’ families – society as you saw it. It’s painted in this naive way in these songs.



But at the time to write about stuff like that must have been somewhat daring.

I don’t know if it was daring. It just hadn’t been done. Obviously there had been lyric writers that had written stuff much more interesting and sophisticated – say, Noel Coward, who I didn’t really know about. He was someone that your parents knew.

The lyricist who was really good at the time was Bob Dylan. Everyone looked up to him as being a kind of guru of lyrics. It’s hard to think of the absolute garbage that pop music really was at the time. And even if you lifted your game by a marginal amount, it really was a lot different from most everything else that had gone before in the 10 years previously.

A lot of it was perhaps not as good as we thought, but at the time it was fantastic. “Gates of Eden” and all these Mexican-type songs, even the nonsense ones: “Everybody Must Get Stoned” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Positively 4th Street.”



Then you did “December’s Children (and Everybody’s).” Does that title mean anything particular?

No. It was our manager’s [Andrew Loog Oldham] idea of hip, Beat poetry.



That record features “Get off My Cloud.”

That was Keith’s melody and my lyrics.



This is decidedly not a love song or “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

Yeah. It’s a stop-bugging-me, post-teenage-alienation song. The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early ’60s, and I was coming out of it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society in thought and behavior and dress.



Based on your coming to the States in ’64?

’64, ’65, yeah. And touring outside of New York. New York was wonderful and so on, and L.A. was also kind of interesting. But outside of that we found it the most repressive society, very prejudiced in every way. There was still segregation. And the attitudes were fantastically old-fashioned. Americans shocked me by their behavior and their narrow-mindedness.

It’s changed fantastically over the last 30 years. But so has everything else [laughs].



Is there anything more to say about “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” than has already been said on the record? Written sitting by a pool in Florida…

Keith didn’t want it to come out as a single.



Is there anything special to you about that song, looking back at it after all these years?

People get very blasé about their big hit. It was the song that really made the Rolling Stones, changed us from just another band into a huge, monster band. You always need one song. We weren’t American, and America was a big thing, and we always wanted to make it here. It was very impressive the way that song and the popularity of the band became a worldwide thing. You know, we went to playing Singapore. The Beatles really opened all that up. But to do that you needed the song; otherwise you were just a picture in the newspaper, and you had these little hits.



Was “Satisfaction” a great, classic piece of work?

Well, it’s a signature tune, really, rather than a great, classic painting, ’cause it’s only like one thing – a kind of signature that everyone knows.



Why? What are the ingredients?

It has a very catchy title. It has a very catchy guitar riff. It has a great guitar sound, which was original at that time. And it captures a spirit of the times, which is very important in those kind of songs.



Which was?

Which was alienation. Or it’s a bit more than that, maybe, but a kind of sexual alienation. Alienation‘s not quite the right word, but it’s one word that would do.



Isn’t that a stage of youth?

Yeah, it’s being in your 20s, isn’t it? Teenage guys can’t often formulate this stuff – when you’re that young.



Who wrote “Satisfaction”?

Well, Keith wrote the lick. I think he had this lyric, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” which, actually, is a line in a Chuck Berry song called “30 Days.”



Which is “I can’t get no satisfaction “?

“I can’t get no satisfaction from the judge.”



Did you know that when you wrote it?

No, I didn’t know it, but Keith might have heard it back then, because it’s not any way an English person would express it. I’m not saying that he purposely nicked anything, but we played those records a lot.



So it just could have stuck in the back of your head.

Yeah, that was just one little line. And then I wrote the rest of it. There was no melody, really.



When you play it today, how do you feel about it? You’ve got to play it every night.



Well, I try to do it as well as I can, and I do the verse softer, so I give it some sort of dynamic. I try to make it melodic. Maybe we shouldn’t really do it every night; I don’t know.



“As Tears Go By” was your first big, classic ballad. Who wrote that?

I wrote the lyrics, and Keith wrote the melody. But in some rock, you know, there’s no melody until the singer starts to sing it. Sometimes there’s a definite melody, but quite often it’s your job as the singer to invent the melody. I start with one melody, and I make it another melody, over the same chord sequence.



You wrote it when you were 21. What do you think of it now?

It’s a very melancholy song for a 21-year-old to write: “The evening of the day, watching children play….” It’s very dumb and naive, but it’s got a very sad sort of thing about it, almost like an older person might write. You know, it’s like a metaphor for being old: You’re watching children playing and realizing you’re not a child. It’s a relatively mature song considering the rest of the output at the time. And we didn’t think of doing it [initially], because the Rolling Stones were a butch blues group. But Marianne Faithfull’s version was already a big, proven hit song.



Why did you go and rerecord it? Because you had a particular affection for that song?

Well, it was already a hit, so, you know [laughs], and Andrew was a very simple, commercial kind of guy. A lot of this stuff is done for commercial reasons.



Were you surprised that something of this kind popped out of you at 21?

It was one of the first things I ever wrote. I see songwriting as having to do with experience, and the more you’ve experienced, the better it is. But it has to be tempered, and you just must let your imagination run.

You can’t just experience something and leave it at that. You’ve got to try and embroider, like, any land of writing. And that’s the fun part of it. You have this one experience looking out of a window, seeing children. Well, you might not have felt anything, but then you just let your mind drift and dream, and you imagine an older person doing that. You put yourself in their point of view, and you start to write other things, and all this is a very subconscious thing. Out of that comes a mature thought, out of a young person.

I was reading Pushkin, and his stories are autobiographical. But not totally, because he was never in Siberia – but his friends were, so he uses it. You use your own experience, and then you spice it up with your friends’ observations and your imagination.



The next record was Aftermath, which has “Paint It, Black,” “Under My Thumb” and “Stupid Girl.” Does that stand out in your mind at all?

That was a big landmark record for me. It’s the first time we wrote the whole record and finally laid to rest the ghost of having to do these very nice and interesting, no doubt, but still cover versions of old R&B songs – which we didn’t really feel we were doing justice, to be perfectly honest, particularly because we didn’t have the maturity. Plus, everyone was doing it.

[Aftermath] has a very wide spectrum of music styles: “Paint It, Black” was this kind of Turkish song; and there were also very bluesy things like “Goin’ Home”; and I remember some sort of ballads on there. It had a lot of good songs, it had a lot of different styles, and it was very well recorded. So it was, to my mind, a real marker.



Why does “Under My Thumb” work so well?

It’s got Brian playing these marimbas. That riff played on marimbas really makes it. Plus, the groove it gets in the end of the tune. It speeds up, actually. And it becomes this kind of groove tune at the end. It was never a single, but it was always a very well-known album track. And then it became a thing feminists fastened on.



Illegitimately, you think.

It’s a bit of a jokey number, really. It’s not really an anti-feminist song any more than any of the others.



It’s more caricaturish than it is about real women.

Yes, it’s a caricature, and it’s in reply to a girl who was a very pushy woman.



Somebody specific?

No, I don’t think so.



Also, on that same album you’ve got “Stupid Girl,” which is a really nasty song.

Yeah, it’s much nastier than “Under My Thumb.”



What was going on in your life when you were writing songs like “Stupid Girl”?

Obviously, I was having a bit of trouble. I wasn’t in a good relationship. Or I was in too many bad relationships. I had so many girlfriends at that point. None of them seemed to care they weren’t pleasing me very much. I was obviously in with the wrong group.



Your pain worked out well for the rest of us.

[Laughs] The pain I had to go through!



Then you did “Between the Buttons.” What do you think of that album?

Frank Zappa used to say he really liked it. It’s a good record, but it was unfortunately rather spoiled. We recorded it in London on four-track machines. We bounced it back to do overdubs so many times, we lost the sound of a lot of it.



Does that record mean a lot to you?

No. What’s on it?



“Connection.”

It’s nice. “Connection” is really nice.



“Yesterday’s Papers.”

Yeah, the first song I ever wrote completely on my own for a Rolling Stones record. “My Obsession,” that’s a good one. They sounded so great, but then, later on, I was really disappointed with it. Isn’t “Ruby Tuesday” on there or something? I don’t think the rest of the songs are that brilliant. “Ruby Tuesday” is good. I think that’s a wonderful song.



Why?

It’s just a nice melody, really. And a lovely lyric. Neither of which I wrote, but I always enjoy singing it. But I agree with you about the rest of the songs – I don’t think they’re there. I don’t think I thought they were very good at the time, either.



You then did “Their Satanic Majesties Request.” What was going on here?

I probably started to take too many drugs.



What do you think about “Satanic Majesties” now?

Well, it’s not very good. It had interesting things on it, but I don’t think any of the songs are very good. It’s a bit like Between the Buttons. It’s a sound experience, really, rather than a song experience. There’s two good songs on it: “She’s a Rainbow,” which we didn’t do on the last tour, although we almost did, and “2000 Light Years From Home,” which we did do. The rest of them are nonsense.



I listened to it recently, and it sounds like Spinal Tap.

Really, I know.



Was it just you trying to be the Beatles?

I think we were just taking too much acid. We were just getting carried away, just thinking anything you did was fun and everyone should listen to it.

The whole thing, we were on acid. We were on acid doing the cover picture. I always remember doing that. It was like being at school, you know, sticking on the bits of colored paper and things. It was really silly. But we enjoyed it. [Laughs] Also, we did it to piss Andrew off, because he was such a pain in the neck. Because he didn’t understand it. The more we wanted to unload him, we decided to go on this path to alienate him.



Just to force him out?

Yeah. Without actually doing it legally, we forced him out. I mean, he wanted out anyway. We were so out of our minds.



After it came out and it was kind of a chunk record, how did you consider it?
A phase. A passing fancy.



You followed up with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

We did that one as a single, out of all the acid of Satanic Majesties.



What’s that song about? “Born in a crossfire hurricane…”

It’s about having a hard time and getting out. Just a metaphor for getting out of all the acid things.



And it did bring you back. You launch this golden era: Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street.
Let’s start with Beggars Banquet, a record that you could not have predicted from your earlier work. It had extraordinary power and sophistication, with songs like “Street Fighting Man,” “Salt of the Earth,” “Stray Cat Blues” and “Jig-Saw Puzzle.” What was going on in your life at this time?
What were you listening to and reading?

God, what was I doing? Who was I living with? It was all recorded in London, and I was living in this rented house in Chester Square. I was living with Marianne Faithfull. Was I still? Yeah. And I was just writing a lot, reading a lot. I was educating myself. I was reading a lot of poetry, I was reading a lot of philosophy. I was out and about. I was very social, always hanging out with [art-gallery owner] Robert Fraser’s group of people.

And I wasn’t taking so many drugs that it was messing up my creative processes. It was a very good period, 1968 – there was a good feeling in the air. It was a very creative period for everyone. There was a lot going on in the theater. Marianne was kind of involved with it, so I would go to the theater upstairs, hang out with the young directors of the time and the young filmmakers.



Let’s start with “Sympathy for the Devil.“

I think that was taken from an old idea of Baudelaire’s, I think, but I could be wrong. Sometimes when I look at my Baudelaire books, I can’t see it in there. But it was an idea I got from French writing. And I just took a couple of lines and expanded on it. I wrote it as sort of like a Bob Dylan song. And you can see it in this movie Godard shot called Sympathy for the Devil [originally titled One Plus One,] which is very fortuitous, because Godard wanted to do a film of us in the studio. I mean, it would never happen now, to get someone as interesting as Godard. And stuffy.

We just happened to be recording that song. We could have been recording “My Obsession.” But it was “Sympathy for the Devil,” and it became the track that we used.



You wrote that song.

Uh-huh.



So that’s a wholly Mick Jagger song.

Uh-huh. I mean, Keith suggested that we do it in another rhythm, so that’s how bands help you.



Were you trying to put out a specific philosophical message here? You know, you’re singing, “Just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints”…

Yeah, there’s all these attractions of opposites and turning things upside down.



When you were writing it, did you conceive of it as this grand work?

I knew it was something good, ’cause I would just keep banging away at it until the @#$%& band recorded it.



There was resistance to it?

No, there wasn’t any resistance. It was just that I knew that I wanted to do it and get it down. And I hadn’t written a lot of songs on my own, so you have to teach it. When you write songs, you have to like them yourself first, but then you have to make everyone else like them, because you can force them to play it, but you can’t force them to like it. And if they like it, they’ll do a much better job than if they’re just playing ’cause they feel they’re obligated.



They get inspired.

And then you get inspired, and that’s what being in a band’s about rather than hiring people. But I knew it was a good song. You just have this feeling. It had its poetic beginning, and then it had historic references and then philosophical jottings and so on. It’s all very well to write that in verse, but to make it into a pop song is something different. Especially in England – you’re skewered on the altar of pop culture if you become pretentious.



The song has a very strong opening: “Please allow me to introduce myself.” And then it’s this Everyman figure in history who keeps appearing from the beginning of civilization.

Yeah, it’s a very long historical figure – the figures of evil and figures of good – so it is a tremendously long trail he’s made as personified in this piece.



What else makes this song so powerful?

It has a very hypnotic groove, a samba, which has a tremendous hypnotic power, rather like good dance music. It doesn’t speed up or slow down. It keeps this constant groove. Plus, the actual samba rhythm is a great one to sing on, but it’s also got some other suggestions in it, an undercurrent of being primitive – because it is a primitive African, South American, Afro-whatever-you-call-that rhythm. So to white people, it has a very sinister thing about it.
But forgetting the cultural colors, it is a very good vehicle for producing a powerful piece. It becomes less pretentious because it’s a very unpretentious groove. If it had been done as a ballad, it wouldn’t have been as good.



Obviously, Altamont gave it a whole other resonance.

Yeah, Altamont is much later than the song, isn’t it? I know what you’re saying, but I’m just stuck in my periods, because you were asking me what I was doing, and I was in my study in Chester Square.



After Altamont, did you shy away from performing that song?

Yeah, probably, for a bit.



It stigmatized the song in a way?

Yeah. Because it became so involved with [Altamont] – sort of journalistically and so on. There were other things going on with it apart from Altamont.



Was it the black-magic thing?

Yeah. And that’s not really what I meant. My whole thing of this song was not black magic and all this silly nonsense – like Megadeth or whatever else came afterward. It was different than that. We had played around with that imagery before – which is Satanic Majesties – but it wasn’t really put into words.



After the concert itself, when it became apparent that somebody got killed, how did you feel?

Well, awful. I mean, just awful. You feel a responsibility. How could it all have been so silly and wrong? But I didn’t think of these things that you guys thought of, you in the press: this great loss of innocence, this cathartic end of the era…. I didn’t think of any of that. That particular burden didn’t weigh on my mind. It was more how awful it was to have had this experience and how awful it was for someone to get killed and how sad it was for his family and how dreadfully the Hell’s Angels behaved.



Did it cause you to back off that kind of satanic imagery?

The satanic-imagery stuff was very overplayed [by journalists]. We didn’t want to really go down that road. And I felt that song was enough. You didn’t want to make a career out of it. But bands did that – Jimmy Page, for instance.



Big Aleister Crowley…

I knew lots of people that were into Aleister Crowley. What I’m saying is, it wasn’t what I meant by the song “Sympathy for the Devil.” If you read it, it’s not about black magic, per se.



On that same record you did “Street Fighting Man.” Tell me a bit about that.

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.



Did you write that song?

Yeah. 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.



The shehani?

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.



It’s another of the classic songs. Why does it have such resonance today?

I don’t know if it does. I don’t know whether we should really play it. I was persuaded to put it in this tour because it seemed to fit in, but I’m not sure if it really has any resonance for the present day. I don’t really like it that much. I thought it was a very good thing at the time. There was all this violence going on. I mean, they almost toppled the government in France; DeGaulle went into this complete funk, as he had in the past, and he went and sort of locked himself in his house in the country. And so the government was almost inactive. And the French riot police were amazing.



Was this written in response to having seen what was going on with the students in Paris, a direct inspiration from seeing it on television?

Yeah, it was a direct inspiration, because by contrast, London was very quiet….



Sleepy London town?

Isn’t “No Expectations” on that record?



It’s got that wonderful steel guitar part.

That’s Brian playing. We were sitting around in a circle on the floor, singing and playing, recording with open mikes.

That was the last time I remember Brian really being totally involved in something that was really worth doing. He was there with everyone else. It’s funny how you remember – but that was the last moment I remember him doing that, because he had just lost interest in everything.



“Let It Bleed”?

Yeah. What’s on that? It was all recorded at the same time, these two records.



What do you mean? Those two records were recorded back to back?

Some of them were recorded on one and spilled over to the next.



It’s got “Midnight Rambler,” “Love in Vain,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” This seems to be one of the bleakest records that you made. The songs are very disturbing, and the scenery is ugly. Why this view of the world? The topics are rape, war, murder, addiction….

Well, it’s a very rough, very violent era. The Vietnam War. Violence on the screens, pillage and burning. And Vietnam was not war as we knew it in the conventional sense. The thing about Vietnam was that it wasn’t like World War II, and it wasn’t like Korea, and it wasn’t like the Gulf War. It was a real nasty war, and people didn’t like it. People objected, and people didn’t want to fight it. The people that were there weren’t doing well. There were these things used that were always used before, but no one knew about them – like napalm.



Are you saying the Vietnam War had a heavy influence on this record?

I think so. Even though I was living in America only part time, I was influenced. All those images were on television. Plus, the spill out onto campuses.



Who wrote “Midnight Rambler”?

That’s a song Keith and I really wrote together. We were on a holiday in Italy. In this very beautiful hill town, Positano, for a few nights. Why we should write such a dark song in this beautiful, sunny place, I really don’t know. We wrote everything there – the tempo changes, everything. And I’m playing the harmonica in these little cafes, and there’s Keith with the guitar.



“Gimmie Shelter”?

That’s a kind of end-of-the-world song, really. It’s apocalypse; the whole record’s like that.



Whose idea was it to do the Robert Johnson song “Lore in Vain”?

I don’t know. We changed the arrangement quite a lot from Robert Johnson’s. We put in extra chords that aren’t there on the Robert Johnson version. Made it more country. And that’s another strange song, because it’s very poignant. Robert Johnson was a wonderful lyric writer, and his songs are quite often about love, but they’re desolate.



“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”?

It’s a good song, even if I say so myself.



Why is that one so popular?

‘Cause it’s got a very sing-along chorus. And people can identify with it: No one gets what they always want. It’s got a very good melody. It’s got very good orchestral touches that Jack Nitzsche helped with. So it’s got all the ingredients.



Anything else you can think of on “Let It Bleed”?

I think it’s a good record. I’d put it as one of my favorites.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-07-04 18:22 by exilestones.

SOME BOYS!
AUGUST 8 1994

BY BRIAN D. JOHNSON

It is disconcerting to meet Mick Jagger in the flesh. Like most living legends, he confounds expectations. Showing up for an interview with Maclean’s, he walks into an empty dining room at Crescent School, the private boys school in North Toronto where The Rolling Stones spent most of July rehearsing. Looking pale and dishevelled, he is dressed in an untucked terra-cotta shirt, light beige pants and running shoes. Although he is known to be short, and impossibly slim, his slightness still comes as a shock: the chicken-bone chest, a few baby hairs peeking through the half-buttoned shirt, his frame a squiggle under the clothes.

The face is familiar—the puppet head that seems too big for the body, the delinquent mouth. But in repose, the exaggerated features seem slack, a mask waiting to be animated. The eyes look fatigued. Yet the lines seem softer, more delicate than in the photographs, the cheekbones less gothic. It is a face that does not quite add up, a picture of restless adolescence one moment and jaded middle age the next.

He is ushered into a classroom with no desks, selected by the publicist for privacy. “Oh my gawd,” mutters Jagger, looking aghast around the barren room. Finding a little red plastic chair in a comer, he sits down to talk. His voice, the melted English drawl, is as rubbery as the face, the voice of a man with a terminal fear of being bored to death by the same old questions. I zt.É The band’s handler has warned Maclean’s

that the Stones are fed up with the media’s fixation on their age, and that Jagger will walk out “if one more @#$%& asks what’s it like to be 51 years old.” But, inevitably, the A-word comes up. “Everybody brings it up,” sighs Jagger. “I don’t really care.” Age, he states, does not cramp his performance. “My singing’s better than it ever has been. I can’t quite do the sort of jumps I used to. But I do other things, different dances. And I can still cover a lot of ground, so it doesn’t really worry me very much. I can do everything I did five years ago, just as good, if not better. I have a lot of control.”

So there.

Like their front man, The Rolling Stones keep defying expectations. They are a living, breathing paradox—ancient youths and ragtag millionaires, a filthy-rich gang of corporate rockers who still manage to look lean, mean and freakishly unwholesome. And as they embark on their yearlong Voodoo Lounge world tour this week—it kicks off in Washington on Aug. 1 and comes to Toronto on Aug. 19 and 20 and Winnipeg on Aug. 23—the Stones can still make a plausible claim to being the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world.

Now in their fourth decade, they are certainly the world’s oldest great rock ’n’ roll band. Jagger, who is a grandfather, turned 51 last week. Cohort Keith Richards is 50. Drummer Charlie Watts is the eldest at 53, guitarist Ron Wood the youngest at 47. (Bass player Darryl Jones, who replaced 57-year-old retiree Bill Wyman, is just 32, but he is not officially considered a Rolling Stone.)

Harking back to the era that started it all, the Stones are rock’s unofficial royal family. And while their longevity has been the butt of jokes, it has also become a tangible asset. “This is one of the things we’re proud of,” Richards told Maclean’s, “to keep a band together this long and still deliver new things. We’re not on a nostalgia trip. We’re not playing for people who remember when they got laid to one song in the Sixties. We’re trying to connect then with now and keep going.”

With their new bassist, a new album (Voodoo Lounge), which many critics are hailing as their best since the 1970s, and an ambitious tour under way, the Stones are enjoying a renaissance. And their mystique seems only enhanced by the years. During the six weeks they spent rehearsing in Toronto, Stones sightings became an obsessive media sport. The Toronto Star set up a “Stones watch”—and one day, more than two dozen readers phoned to say they had spotted Jagger browsing through the electronics section of a Canadian Tire store. And when the band gave a surprise concert at RPM, a downtown nightclub, on July 19—their first Toronto club date since the infamous El Mocambo gig attended by Margaret Trudeau in 1977—the city was consumed by Stones fever. Those lucky enough to get in witnessed a raw, energetic performance that cut through the hype to the bottom line: after all these years, the Stones still deliver like no one else.

The evening before the RPM performance, Maclean’s attended a rehearsal at the school and conducted separate interviews with Jagger and Richards. The two bandleaders are a study in contrasts. Jagger is all accent and inflection, onionskin layers of self-conscious irony. Richards is gregarious, chatty and bristling with sound bites. Jagger seems to take pleasure in deflating the myth surrounding the Stones; Richards seems to incarnate it.

Asked if the band will do anything very different on the current tour, Jagger says: “No, it’s the same old thing, really. It’s a very limited medium in a lot of ways. You like to think of all these wonderful things you can do. But the reality of it is that, aside from a few little twists, it’s a rock ’n’ roll stadium show and you’re not reinventing it. The songs change, the set will be different, but essentially it’s people up there playing guitars.”

Asked the same question, Richards says: “No one’s ever taken a band this far, and that’s one of the fascinations with this gig. We’re on uncharted territory. It’s always new. It’s not just stepping out in front of a football stadium every five years. You’re always learning. It’s never the same.”

The Jagger-Richards partnership is one of the longest-running rough marriages in show business. Since meeting as schoolboys in Dartford, Kent, England, friction seems to have held them together. For much of the 1980s, their relationship was on the rocks. The band did not perform for seven years. Mick and Keith hurled insults back and forth in the media.




Maclean’s: Is there anything more at stake in this particular tour than in the others?

Jagger: No, it’s the same amount of throw-of-the-dice. You’re staking a certain amount on your reputation every time you go out. Richards: We could collapse on stage and croak. There. That would be the end [laughs].




Maclean’s: Do you still get a big thrill when you go out on stage?

Jagger: A tremendous thrill. It’s a big buzz. It must be like playing football.




Maclean’s: Could you give it up?

Jagger: Oh yeah. I didn’t do a show for seven years and I didn’t really miss it much.




Maclean’s: The Stones used to be considered subversive. Do you think they still are?

Jagger: No, The world was such a straight place that you could be subversive very easily without even wanting to. I don’t think we wanted to be subversive.

Richards: I would say that rock ’n’ roll and blue jeans had more to do with the Soviet Union collapsing than all of those missiles, in the long run.




Maclean’s: What are you reading these days?

Richards: Volume six of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Incredible stuff.

Stones “a millstone around my neck,” while Richards called Jagger “a lunatic with a Peter Pan complex.”

Then, rejuvenated by a fat cash guarantee from Toronto-based promoter Michael Cohl—reported to be more than $60 million—Mick and Keith made up, and the Stones staged a triumphant comeback with their Steel Wheels/ Urban Jungle tours in 1989 and 1990. Now, Cohl is promoting and directing the Voodoo Lounge safari, which is set to wind through Mexico, South America and Japan after the United States and Canada. Cohl, in fact, is one of the reasons the Stones decided to rehearse in Toronto (page 44).

Money was another—if they had rehearsed in the United States, they would have exceeded the number of days that U.S. immigration law allows them to work there without paying taxes. (Richards is based in Connecticut, but Wood lives outside Dublin, and Watts in Devon, England, while Jagger divides his time among a Thames-side mansion in London, a château in France’s Loire Valley and a villa on the Caribbean island of Mustique.)

The band members have also said that they like Toronto, although they stayed at a safe distance. Cohl billeted them and their families in separate country homes north of the city, near Nobleton and Aurora. Only Watts elected to stay in a hotel downtown. Jagger and his wife, Jerry Hall, showed up in town at a restaurant once or twice. But they spent most of their time in the country house with their three children, aged 9, 8 and 2. “It’s very nice,” says Jagger, “because it’s not a hotel, which the next year is going to be. I enjoyed the countryside—I saw a bald eagle.”


Monday evening, the final rehearsal before the RPM gig. The Stones start drifting into Crescent School at about 6 p.m. They usually hang around for an hour or two before settling down to work. The atmosphere is relaxed and cozy. In a lushly upholstered lounge with video games, Ping-Pong and pool tables, a soap opera plays on a vast TV screen that the band has set up to watch World Cup soccer games. There are no groupies in evidence, no hangers-on. The band’s personal staff is small, tight-knit and protective.

By 8:30 p.m., the Stones have assembled in the school auditorium. Their equipment is set up on the floor, with blue curtains around the walls to baffle the sound. Tonight, they are breaking in a new horn section, with the help of the Stones’ veteran saxophonist, Bobby Keys. In the far comer, Jagger sings scales with the two black backup singers. He flirts with the female one, Lisa Fisher, who is constantly giggling. At one point, he goes over and gives her a kiss.

Then, it is down to business. Taking his place at a microphone facing the band, Jagger quietly calls the rehearsal to order—“So we do each song twice.” And the Stones launch into I Can’t Get Next to You, a punchy rhythm and blues standard by The Tempations. Jagger finger-paints the air as he sings, moving to the rhythm without making a show of it Richards bends studiously over his guitar, drawing long chords out of its neck, as if he were working with a large needle and thread.

Flanking him, Wood trades slinky riffs back and forth, while Jones lays down a cautious groove on bass.

Behind the drums, a fit-looking Charlie Watts sits up as smartly as a schoolboy, administering the backbeat When the song ends, Jagger takes a swig from an Evian bottle and says the tempo needs to “speed up just a little bit near the front.” Richards hoists a beer and shrugs. “It’s a Monday,” laughs the guitarist, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke. After doing the song again, Jagger straps on a black guitar and croons Brand New Car, a burlesque catalogue of automotive metaphors for a woman’s body:

“Jack her up baby, go on, open the hood/I want to check if her oil smells good/Mmmm, smells like caviar.” Jagger delivers the outrageous lyrics as posturing farce, the unrepentant bad boy in an age of sexual correctness. Then, he strolls over to study the brass section as it tries to nail the horn part, a sliding line that stretches out like taffy to mimic the vocals.

The band works through some old tunes: Tumbling Dice, Rocks Off, All Down the Line, Honky Tonk Women. The rehearsal is efficient and good-natured. Between songs, Jagger and Richards share a private joke, Watts twirls his sticks and grins. The band hits a snag over the ending of Heartbreaker—is it eight “doo-doo doodoos” or four? “Depends how you count it,” says Jagger. For a moment, they could be any band rehearsing anywhere, seasoned professionals discussing doo-doo doo-doos.

At one point, Richards spots a visitor who has just walked in: an old, bandy-legged man with a potbelly who is dressed in shorts, moccasins, white socks and a T-shirt with a sailing ship on it. He has muttonchop sideburns and shaggy white hair sticking out from under a black captain’s hat. “Bert!” shouts Richards, who runs over to embrace him. Bert? An old roadie from the Sixties? A retired drug dealer? No, he turns out to be Keith’s father, 78-year-old Bert Richards, a former factory foreman who now lives in the gatehouse of the guitarist’s Connecticut mansion. Taking a seat in a corner, he sits puffing on his curved pipe, and watches the rehearsal like a proud parent checking out his son’s garage band. Suddenly, The Rolling Stones do not look so ancient after all.

Keith Richards takes his tum in the interview classroom, smoking Marlboros and nursing a vodka and orange juice. The face, which has come to resemble the skull ring he wears on his hand, is as lined as a dried-up riverbed. But strangely enough, he looks good. There is a vital spark in the deep-set eyes, an exuberance in his laugh. He has just returned from a weekend at actor Dan Aykroyd’s grand country house near Kingston, Ont. “It’s like Valhalla,” says Richards, “a cross between Valhalla and a lodge.” Otherwise, Richards has been staying in a house north of Toronto with his wife, Patti Hansen, their two children and two dogs. He has not even ventured downtown. “I haven’t been in the slab,” he says. “That’s Dan Aykroyd’s word for this town—‘Relax, boys, we’re out of the slab.’ ”

To hear him talk, it sounds as if the band is just beginning to take off after a mid-life crisis of feuds, drug abuse and creative inertia. “I’ve been dying to do this for years,” he says. “This is the culmination, the rebirth. With Steel Wheels, I was happy just to get ’em back together. Now, we can do something with it.” In the 1980s, adds Richards, “the Stones’ juggernaut had become so big it was defeating itself.” We invented it, but nobody was in control. Now, I feel we have our hands on the driving wheel again. With Darryl in there, it’s a fresh engine. I’ve never seen Charlie more involved. And Ronnie’s playing his ass off, the dear little boy.”

Richards, the prodigal son, has turned into the band’s benevolent patriarch. The former junkie has mellowed. “After 30 years on the road, you collect a few kids and a few dogs and you drink more water,” he says. Yes, he has cut down on alcohol, but would never give it up altogether. “Interviews,” he adds, “demand a drink.” Richards thanks Toronto for helping him to kick heroin—he was convicted for possession there in 1978. A blind woman, a fan who used to hitchhike to Stones shows across North America, visited the judge at home and persuaded him to sentence Richards to play a concert for the blind rather than go to jail. “Somehow she worked that magic on the judge,” says the guitarist. “She just came and went, that blind flash.” He recently had her tracked down in Quebec City: her name is Rita Bedard, she is 39, and the Stones are arranging to bring her backstage to a concert. Richards has made her part of his legend—“my blind angel.”

The quintessential rock ’n’ roll survivor, Richards seems to relish the Stones’ mythic stature, and often talks about them in the third person. “They’re wiry little blokes,” he says. “They don’t look like much. But they’re as tough as nails, man. They’ve got energy to bum, and they know where to put it now.” The guitarist seems bemused by the fact that Jagger does not share his vision of band solidarity. “Mick doesn’t like the idea of a gang,” he says. “He always likes to feel that he’s independent. But he’s one of us. And he’s never going to escape. Mick and I couldn’t even get divorced if we wanted to. We could shed our old ladies—maybe. But Mick and I would still have to meet each other.”

If Richards sees the band as a gang, Jagger treats it as a club—with different classes of membership. Jagger, Richards and Watts each own a piece of the Stones, but Wood is a salaried employee. Jones, meanwhile, is not even a member. “As far as Charlie and I are concerned,” explains Richards, “if you’re onstage, you’re one of The Rolling Stones. I guess it’s negotiated between Darryl’s people and ours. But sometimes the way contracts are worded can really put stuff up your nose.” Richards laughs. “This is racial discrimination—the guy’s black! Darryl, you should sue the motherf—ers, you should sue mel” He is joking but then adds, “I guess if there’s anywhere Mick and I disagree, it’s on how to handle things like that.”

They also have musical differences. Jagger likes fast tempos, Richards slower ones. And the guitarist gets suspicious of his lead singer’s infatuations with pop-chart fashion. “I find it interesting,” says Jagger, “that it’s almost impossible not to be influenced by what’s fashionable in music. Keith will tell you ‘not in a million years.’ But whether it’s coming through me, or through [Voodoo Lounge producer] Don Was, or through Charlie, or through the air-conditioning, The Rolling Stones do get influenced by what’s going on.




Maclean’s: Do you feel vulnerable onstage? Do you ever feel In clanger?

Jagger: Well, sometimes. I was doing this show In New Zealand when someone threw a gin bottle at me. Paffftl I was flattened. I really went out for a while.





Maclean’s: It hit you on the head?

Jagger Yeah. You’re quite vulnerable. It can be funny. They were throwing shoes at me in Anaheim, [Calif.]; sneakers and sandals [laughing]. They were all whizzing past me. So I said, ‘OK, throw all your shoes and let’s get it over with,’ and they threw hundreds of pairs of shoes. I really asked for it.





Maclean’s: You don’t fear something more sinister?

Jagger People do stupid things sometimes. People do walk around in the United States with a lot of weapons.

When we played the Superdome [New Orleans] last time, they confiscated over 500 weapons at the door [more laughter]





Maclean’s: But it isn't something that keeps you from sleeping at night? Jagger: No, but America’s a very violent society.

Jagger: [after reading a stack of Voodoo Lounge reviews]: There was one I read this morning-talking about ‘his unbidden irony’ in the line ‘I was a hooker losing my looks’ [from the song You Got Me Rockin’], I wrote that completely as a joke on myself. It was obvious.




Maclean’s: Do you worry about losing your looks?

Jagger: There’s nothing you can do about it.





Maclean’s: Have you ever had cosmetic surgery?

Jagger: Get out of here! What kind of magazine is this?





Maclean’s: People want to know those things.

Jagger: Even if I had, I wouldn’t tell you.

mean you have to be slavish to it.” With Voodoo Lounge, he adds, the band tried to make “a more human record” by moving away from “the slick sound of the Eighties.” The tracks were recorded more directly, with fewer overdubs. “At the moment, it’s more fashionable to be like that,” he says, “to be human.”

On Voodoo Lounge, the band also dips into a more eclectic variety of styles than usual, from the Tex-Mex lilt of Sweethearts Together to the vintage-Stones balladry of Out of Tears and the madrigal-like New Faces. “I used to sing in a madrigal choir,” says Jagger—whose persona, after all, borrows from both black music and English affectation—“so I’m just as happy singing madrigals instead of blues.” He is also playing harmonica and maracas again for the first time in ages, for which Richards takes some credit. “I got Mick playing harp early on in Barbados,” he says. “I thought, ‘He’s not going to go for this, but I’ll try.’ ”

While recording the album last November in Dublin, Richards put up a cardboard sign in the studio saying “Dox Office—and Voodoo Lounge”—alluding to himself as “the doctor” and to a stray cat that he had adopted and named Voodoo. Three months ago, the band was still desperate for an album title. “The record company’s screaming at us,” recalls Richards. “We need a title, an angle, artwork. Then, suddenly, Mick turns around and says, Tour sign.’ ”

What had begun as a whimsical gesture was magnified into a mass-market image. By then, however, the band had already developed a radically different concept for staging their concert tour. It was the brainchild of British expressionist designer Mark Fisher, who also created the set for Steel Wheels and the most recent Pink Floyd and U2 tours. Last month, Fisher could be found supervising the erection of the Stones’ new stage in an aircraft hangar at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.

The hangar is shrouded in tight security. Inside, it looks like one of those enemy headquarters in a James Bond movie. Dozens of technicians are milling about—riggers, welders, forklift drivers. At the back of the hangar, rising like megalomaniacal vision, is the 200-foot-wide stage, with a wall of stark metal gridding behind it—a backdrop built to resemble a vast sheet of curving graph paper. Lights are embedded in each of its hundreds of joints. In the middle, a giant video screen plays a computer animation graphic of the Stones’ trademark tongue rippling luridly in and out. It is spiked, like a blowfish. And thrusting up from stage-left is a tower of quilted stainless steel that, when completed, will become a 100-foothigh cobra. The hangar can accommodate only 60 feet.

After the Steel Wheels stage, a vision of industrial decay, Fisher says, “We wanted to try to represent the invisibility of the new information technology.” The designer based the graph-paper design on “the sorts of diagrams people create when they try to portray time or the behavior of subatomic particles.” To integrate the Voodoo Lounge concept, and humanize the set, he created a comic tableau for part of the show featuring a mock shrine of giant inflatables. They include a black friar, a madonna, a one-armed baby, a goat’s head, rosary beads, some furry dice and a 45-foot doll of “someone who looks a lot like Elvis—although we are not allowed to say so because he’s copyrighted.”

Compared with the stylistically “puritanical” U2 and the “conservative” Pink Floyd, Fisher says that the Stones have allowed him to be “astonishingly bold” with stage design. But in the end, he adds, the band “will be the centre of attention—there’s a big empty space for these guys to fill up.”

Seeing a Stones concert spectacle, however, cannot compare to the rare thrill of glimpsing them up close, on a nightclub stage, with no special effects. On the morning of July 19, a small sign goes up in front of RPM saying “ROLLING STONES $5.” Word spreads quickly. By midday, hundreds of fans are gathered out-side the club, queueing up for the plastic wristbands that guarantee them a ticket. Most of the 1,100 who finally end up inside have lined up for nine hours in sweltering heat. Many are young, male and unemployed. But there are also office workers playing hookey and amateur scalpers getting more than $200 a ticket. One businessman boasts that he had bought a wristband from “some poor teenage kid” for $160.

Inside, the air is thick with sweat and smoke as the crowd waits for the band. Young men have shirts off. The floor is wet with beer. There are surges of chanting and clapping, then finally promoter Michael Cohl steps out to introduce The Rolling Stones.

Jagger gives the audience a sharp salute, grabs the microphone and the band rips into Live With Me, a seamy rocker from the album Let It Bleed (1969). He bites off the lyrics with startling ferocity—“Don’t you think there’s a place for you/In between the sheets?” His narrow hips, shrink-wrapped in black spandex, are fluid with rhythm, his face and neck muscled taut. Suddenly, all the fuss about Jagger’s age seems beside the point. The man onstage bears no resemblance to the laconic interview subject from the day before. He looks, quite simply, like a man possessed. A breeze rippling his hair from a fan at the edge of the stage enhances the effect, making it look as if he is singing into a storm. When a spray of beer from the crowd arcs past his face, he does not flinch. A bra comes flying out of the audience and he catches it without missing a beat. He stuffs it under his belt.

The band makes some mistakes. A guitar plays out of tune; an ending disintegrates. And Richards halts Love is Strong in the first few bars, then starts it over again. But the imperfection seems to enrich the value of the occasion, like a flaw on a stamp. And it is reassuring to be reminded that the world’s oldest, greatest and richest rock ’n’ roll band is, in the end, mortal.

A Lucky Fan gets a ticket to the Rolling Stones


A Sign of the Times - Movie Cinemas Convert to Concert Halls

In line with many large cinemas of that time, it was decided to pursue live stage shows. A major problem at this cinema was that there was no grid in the stage roof to enable the huge screen frame to be lifted. Therefore, towards the end of 1963 local builders James Parker & Son Ltd began work to remove the original timber beams in the stage roof to attach borders, legs, spot bars and lighting battens.

New auto colour change focused lighting spots lamps were installed, the colour change of four modes were selected in the projection room. Upstage, a full width 3 circuit lighting batten provided overhead illumination while the front stage overhead lighting was provided by 9 large Strand pageant lamps. Side lighting was provided by two dip on the left and right of the stage. The original follow spot lights were replaced with new Strand carbon arc follow spots.

The first stage show was the Rolling Stones on Monday 14th September 1964.

American R&B (Soul) vocal duo, Inez and Charlie Foxx, opened
the show, and included their new big hit song "Mockingbird.

Inez Foxx (vocals), and Charlie Foxx (vocals, guitar), were brother and sister. Their professional career began in 1962 with the signing of a contract with Symbol Records. Their biggest hit was the catchy Mockingbird (1963), a cover of the traditional Hush song, Little Baby, which hit No. 2 on the rhythm'n'blues chart and No. 7 on the pop chart.




INEZ & CHARLIE FOXX -"mocking Bird"

Aretha Franklin , James Taylor , Carly Simon, Taj Mahal, Etta James and Dusty Springfield covered it. Other successes: Ask me (1964), Hurt by love (1964) and 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 (Count the days) (1967).

Fans queue to see The Rolling Stones at Chester's
ABC cinema on Love Street, 14th September 1964.

After sleeping on the pavement all night, the queues of fans, four to five deep, had to endure a rain storm before the booking office opened at 11am for the first stage show in September 1964~ ROLLING STONES. No phone bookings and all four thousand tickets sold-out by 1pm!


Two fans meet Mick Jagger on the staircase at the entrance of ABC Cinema Chester

Ticket prices were 7/6, 10/6, 12/6, with two performances at 6.15 & 8.30.



The story of The Rolling Stones' Chester rooftop getaway 'through a laundry chute'

The iconic band played at the ABC cinema on Foregate Street in Chester on September 14, 1964


The Rolling Stones performing at the ABC Cinema Chester.
photo by Brian Shaw



Fans at the Rolling Stones, ABC Cinema Chester.



Rolling Stones perform in Chester at the ABC Cinema



At the Stones show, ABC Cinema Chester, 14th September 1964.




[www.cheshire-live.co.uk]


photo Brian Shaw

The black and white images were taken by Brian Shaw, who attended the gig with his camera.

Speaking with CheshireLive back in 2014, Brian said: "The Stones were appearing in 32 towns and cities as part of that tour.

"I had bought my ticket at the ABC ticket office on Love Street and it was for the second performance - costing me 12s 6d.

"At that time, photography at the ABC was forbidden but I took my camera along anyway, and took about 125 black and white shots but most of them were spoiled by fans jumping up and down in front of me.



"The show included several supporting acts and the Stones were last on stage.

"Their performance lasted about half an hour and they sung about eight numbers, although because of all the noise the fans were making, and the primitive sound system on stage, you couldn’t hear anything and couldn’t even tell which songs they were doing - they may as well have sung ‘Ba Ba Black Sheep’ and nobody would have noticed - but the fans were happy having seen their idols.”

However, following the gig, everything got a bit hectic for the band, as fans 'surrounded' the theatre.

Mick Jagger, recalled the incident in 2013 when he was on the red carpet before the world premiere of documentary Crossfire Hurricane, celebrating the band’s 50th anniversary.

The Rolling Stones front man was asked by former Chronicle reporter Marc Baker about a concert his own mum Beverly went to in Chester in the 60s.

The band had to escape along the rooftops after the gig because the venue was surrounded by screaming teenage fans.

Mick said: "I remember we had a lady pianist with us also, who was one of the opening acts, I forgot her name and she was a concert pianist and it was quite funny."

Doubt had been cast over where the gig took place, but Jagger confirmed it was at the former ABC Theatre (new Primark extension) on September 14, 1964.

Mick reassured the journalist he was not losing his memory when it came to recalling the earlier gigs. “I remember everything darling!” he said.


The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards recalled the same Chester gig back in 2013.

He told BBC 6 Music's Paul Sexton: "One time in Chester, we have the Chief Constable of Cheshire with us in full regalia with the ribbons and the medals and the swagger stick. Show’s finished earlier than he expects.

"The whole theatre is surrounded. Mayhem. Maniac teenage girls, bless their hearts.

"‘Right,’ he says. ‘The only way out, up the stairs, over the rooftops, I know the way!’

"Suddenly you’re in his hands. So we get up on the Chester rooftops, and it’s raining. The first thing that happens is the Chief Constable almost slides off the roof.

"A couple of his bobbies managed to hold him up. We’re standing in the middle of this rooftop saying: ‘I’m not too familiar with this area, where do we go?’

“He pulls himself together, and in a shambolic sort of way, they manage to get us down through a skylight and out of a laundry chute, or something. That was what happened every day, and you took it as normal. Everything was a Goon Show.”


++++



The show went well, but afterwards, mobbed by fans, the band had
to escape in an extraordinary manner.


Everyone has heard about the infamous Rolling Stones gig at Chester when the band had to escape along the rooftop of the ABC Cinema to avoid being mobbed by hordes of screaming fans.

But did you know that their performance at the city's Royalty Theatre earlier that year provoked just as much hysteria?

Chester History & Heritage Centre have uncovered some newspaper coverage from what was either the Cheshire Observer or the Chester Courant, describing the 'beat mad screamers' who descended on the Royalty gig on Saturday, April 18 1964 with their support band 'Some People', and there are also some previously unseen pictures of the night itself.

'Casual almost to the point of disinterest - unruffled and unmoved by the screams of their enthusiastic fans', the band surely couldn't have known what they were letting themselves in for as they faced the mob of hysterical teenagers who had turned out for the gig.

According to the newspaper: "Schoolgirls and their boyfriends tried every device they knew to get into the theatre - trying windows and the stage door and when they were unsuccessful they screamed all the more.

And although things didn't get quite as raucous as the next time the band would come to Chester the following September, the crowd still required some intervention from the police.

"The reception for the Stones was the most enthusiastic ever seen at the theatre," the newspaper said. "When they finished their act the audience screamed and called for more and afterwards, anyone leaving the theatre took their lives into their hands.

"A colleague who tried leaving by orthodox means had to hasten back to the safety of the stage when the beat mad screamers seemed likely to trample him down in their efforts to meet the Stones.

"Luckily though, Chester police were marvellous and managed to control the teenagers."

++++



The Rolling Stones with a fan at the ABC Cinema Chester while on tour with Inez & Charlie Foxx. The Stones played several shows at ABC.



ABC Cinema in Carlisle. Female fans at Rolling Stones concert on September 17, 1964




The Rolling Stones Live, 21/09/1964, ABC Cinema, Hull (synced)



++

Paulette Walters remembers the stream of big name international stars that performed regularly on stage at the ABC in Foregate Street throughout the swinging 60s. Although the cinema had staged concerts previously, this was something very different. The stage had undergone major alterations enabling the massive screen to be flown up into the roof space over the stage. New lighting and sound systems were installed to accommodate the demands of the 1960s pop groups.

In 1964, along with her brother, Paulette was at the first pop concert that was staged at the ABC on Monday 14th September, when Mick Jagger and the rest of the Rolling Stones took the stage by storm; Paulette said “all you could hear was girls screaming!”



++++



To spite the fiasco at ABC, the Rolling Stones came back to the cinema to perform again.

++++






++++


Rolling Stones at the Royalty Theatre in April 18, 1964





The ABC Cinema, Love Street, Chester – Circa 1960’s



ABC Cinema in Carlisle. A fan is removed from the scene. September 17, 1964


++++++++

"I can remember the ABC cinema well. There were always queues to go in and the queue used to extend to the entry opposite Love Street. It was a regular Saturday treat for me as mum always took me to the pictures. We saved our coupons as it was wartime rationing, and there was a wonderful sweet shop next to where C&A is today.

If I was lucky we would get sweets and then in to the 1 and 3s, 'cheapest seats'. If we stayed to see the film all over again, which you could in those days, we crept up to the 1 and 9s.

Little did I know that the commissioner, who was resplendent in red and gold uniform, was my future husband's grandfather. I thought he was wonderful- just like Father Christmas- and I always saved him a sweet". Dorothy Carline, Chester Standard 1998

It's difficult to imagine now, but there was a time when major pop groups regularly performed in Chester. The Rolling Stones, for example, played at the Royalty Theatre in April 1964 and here at the ABC along with Inez & Charlie Foxx in September of the same year. In October 1965, they played the ABC again, accompanied by the Moody Blues and the Spencer Davis Group.



+++++++

"Mockingbird" is a 1963 song written and recorded by Inez and Charlie Foxx,
based on the lullaby "Hush Little Baby".

The song was covered by Dusty Springfield for her album A Girl Called Dusty
(1964); Springfield sang both parts of the track. "Mockingbird" was also
recorded by Aretha Franklin for her album Runnin' Out of Fools (1965); Franklin
performed the song (with Ray Johnson providing the counter-vocal) on the March
10, 1965, episode of the TV program Shindig!. Franklin's version of
"Mockingbird" was one of several tracks to which Columbia Records company gave a
single release after the singer's commercial success with Atlantic Records in
1967; released at the same time as Franklin's Atlantic single album "Chain of
Fools"—which would reach #2—Franklin's version of "Mockingbird" scored two weeks
at No. 94 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1967.

American singer-songwriters Carly Simon and James Taylor recorded a remake of
"Mockingbird" in the autumn of 1973, and the track was released as the lead
single from Simon's fourth studio album Hotcakes (1974). It was Taylor's idea to
remake "Mockingbird", which he knew from a live performance by Inez and Charlie
Foxx at the Apollo Theater in 1965, and which song Taylor and his sister Kate
Taylor had often sung for fun as teenagers. The song features a considerable
lyrical adjustment by Taylor and keyboard work from Dr. John, Robbie
Robertson's rhythm guitar and a tenor saxophone solo by Michael Brecker.

"Mockingbird" became an instant hit, peaking at No. 5 on the Billboard Pop
singles chart and No. 10 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, and was
certified Gold by the RIAA, signifying sales of one million copies in the US.
[5] The single also charted in Canada (No. 3), New Zealand (No. 7), Australia
(No. 8), South Africa (No. 13),[6] and the UK (No. 34).

Simon overcame her fear of live performing to come onstage to sing "Mockingbird"
with Taylor during his 1975 tour; the duo also performed "Mockingbird" live at
the No Nukes Concert at Madison Square Garden in September 1979, the performance
being recorded for the double LP album No Nukes: The Muse Concerts for a Non-
Nuclear Future (1979) and the film version No Nukes (1980).

The Jim Brickman album Destiny (1999) features Carly Simon singing "Hush Little
Baby"—as "Hush Li'l Baby"—which Brickman chose for Simon because "I thought it
would be cool if she was singing about the mockingbird since she had a Top 5
[success with "Mockingbird"] in 1974"








James Taylor, Carley Simon & Waddy Watell











Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-07-19 04:03 by exilestones.

The Globe Theatre, Stockton on Tees
2017

Derelict Art Deco theatre where Beatles, Rolling Stones and many more played is saved by National Lottery

The building closed its doors in 1997 and has since fallen into significant disrepair.

£4.5 million of National Lottery money is to be used to restore a derelict Art Deco theatre where the Beatles,
the Rolling Stones and Buddy Holly played.

The funding will help transform the Grade II-listed Globe Theatre in Stockton-on-Tees into a live music
venue with capacity for 3,000 people, creating the equivalent of 250 full-time jobs, the Heritage Lottery Fund said.



Undated handout photo issued by the Heritage Lottery Fund of the interior of the
Grade II listed Globe Theatre in Stockton-on-Tees, where the Beatles, Rolling Stones
and Buddy Holly played, which is to be restored with £4.5 million National Lottery money



As the National Lottery support was announced, Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council said the Ambassador Theatre Group
will operate the Globe for the next 25 years to attract top bands, artists and comedians.

The "super theatre" on the High Street in the centre of Stockton first opened its doors in 1935.

From the 1950s to the 1970s it was was a major venue hosting the likes of the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry,
Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Buddy Holly, Lonnie Donegan, Bay City Rollers and Mud.


The building closed its doors in 1997 and has since fallen into significant disrepair.

The money is being awarded through HLF's Heritage Enterprise programme which helps to restore historic
buildings when doing so is not commercially viable, bridging the financial gap with grants ranging from
£100,000 to £5 million.
The project will cost £15 million in total, with the council contributing £10.5 million.

Ros Kerslake, HLF chief executive, said: "In almost every town and city there is at least one historic building,
like the Globe, standing empty that at one time was at the heart of the local community.

"Whilst much-loved, these buildings present huge financial challenges. Heritage Enterprise is using money raised
through the sale of National Lottery tickets to unlock the potential of the Globe.

"The result is good for us all - wider regeneration, substantial local economic growth, much-needed new jobs
and a wonderful part of our heritage saved from further neglect."



Workers discovered problems after "stripping the building back to its bones"


Nigel Cooke, cabinet member for regeneration and transport, said: "This is a full restoration for a
building of national significance.

"We've had a number of setbacks, there's no point shying away from that, but even when you factor in the
additional costs this is still a fantastic investment that's well worth making.

"It will bring an iconic building back into use as a 3,000 capacity venue. It's expected to bring £18m into
the local economy every year.”








Stockton Globe: Over-budget theatre revamp finally finished
2021






A delayed and over-budget theatre renovation has finally been completed.

Work to refurbish Stockton's Globe Theatre began 10 years ago but structural problems meant the original
budget of £4m ballooned to £27.9m.

With a capacity of 3,000 it is the biggest live entertainment venue between Newcastle and Leeds, Stockton Council said.

Cabinet member for regeneration Nigel Cooke said it was an "absolute game-changer for the area".

"It puts Stockton back on the map as a live entertainment destination," he said.



The theatre will be operated by the Ambassador Theatre Group, which runs major venues in London's
West End and New York's Broadway. The Ambassador Theatre Group has a 25-year lease agreement with
the council to run the venue

General manager Jo Ager said the restoration was "absolutely incredible".

"We simply cannot wait to throw the doors open, welcome people in and show this phenomenal venue off," she said.

Our promoters had delayed events until later in the year "to ensure a safe environment for all who attend", she added.

The first acts will perform from the end of September.



The Grade II-listed, Art Deco theatre closed in 1997 after being used as a bingo hall for 20 years.

Developers Jomast started work on what was to be a £4m restoration in 2011, to which the council allocated £1m.

The renovation uncovered problems with the roof, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, lifts, plumbing,
toilets and drainage.

The council took over in 2016 after work stalled. The final bill is expected to be more than £30m, with
£22m coming from the local authority.





+++++++


LEGENDARY Echo photographer Ian Wright returned help the
Duke of Gloucester reopen the Globe in Stockton.




On Wednesday evening, Ian held a one-man show to launch his new book, which is a history of the Globe and features many of the extraordinary pictures he took backstage at the height of the Beat boom in the early 1960s.

The Northern Echo’s editor, Harry Evans, took Ian on as a darkroom assistant when he was 15. Evans noticed the growth of the teenage craze for Beat music, and despatched “Wrighty”, the youngest member of staff who understood the craze, to get the pictures.

Evans launched a weekly supplement, Teenage Special, full of Ian’s pictures, which is said to have sold an extra 30,000 copies on a Monday, such was the teenage appetite for their new stars. It granted Ian a backstage pass – even if, too young to drive, he did have to cycle over to the Globe to get his pictures.

His book, Curtain Up: The Globe 1935-1975, tells some amazing stories in the conversational style that has made Ian, and his wife Lauren, such a big hit on the cruise liners, such as this one…




OCTOBER 8, 1965, was the third time Ian had photographed the Rolling Stones (above).

“It was a wild, more menacing atmosphere than I had experienced before,” says Ian in the book.

“In the centre of the stalls was a group of 20 Teddy Boys, unusual for a Stones’ concert, as it was always girls.

“As soon as Jagger appeared, there was loud booing and hissing – these yobs were turning up the ante. Security could not get to them as they were in the middle, things were getting out of hand, and many of the girls looked terrified.

“Next thing, a nine inch spanner whirred above my head, bounced off the metal covering the floodlights and clattered into Charlie Watts’ drum kit.

“Then I saw Jagger in a spin-like jump. He finished with his back to the audience, carrying on singing while fumbling in his trouser pocket.

“Eventually he pulled out a handkerchief which he put over the side of his face.

“He turned. Facing the audience, I could see he was bleeding profusely from a cut over his right eye, blood was dripping onto his shirt and pants. No one, least of all Jagger, knew what had happened.

“At the end of the number, management closed the curtains. I’d managed just one photograph of the incident (below).




“Then I was backstage. Jagger was being attended by a member of the St John’s Ambulance Brigade.

“George Skelton, the Globe manager, arrived holding a collection of coins recovered from the stage. Each had been filed down to produce a razor-sharp edge.


“One of the ushers said he has seen a Teddy Boy, standing and screaming and throwing something.

“It was one of these coins which had miraculously missed blinding Jagger by half an inch.

“A doctor arrived and administered stitches. I phoned the office to alert them.

“Next day there was my photograph on the front page of The Northern Echo with the best headline I have ever had, courtesy of Harold Evans: ‘Blood from a Stone’.”

20 September 1964, Globe Theatre Stockton on Tees
photo Ian Wright



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-07-25 22:44 by exilestones.