Keith Richards

“Anyways the guy on the station, he is called Mick Jagger and all the chicks and the boys meet every Saturday morning in the ‘Carousel’ some juke-joint.  Well one morning in Jan. I was walking past and decided to look him up.” 

I think I also remember Keith’s saying in that letter, or telling his mother or something, that Mick Jagger was going to be famous. 

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Anyway, Mick Jagger was about the only member of the band who was generally well known by name among the kids that I knew, with Keith Richards less so.  Actually he wasn’t even Keith Richards in the early part of the band’s history; as explained in Wikipedia:  “After the Rolling Stones signed to Decca Records in 1963, their band manager, Andrew Loog Oldham dropped the ‘s’ from Richards’ surname believing ‘Keith Richard’ in his words ‘looked more pop’.  In the early 1970’s, Richards re-established the ‘s’ in his surname.” 

Hardly anyone knew the other band members in the Rolling Stones; well, maybe multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones – unquestionably the most under-appreciated Stone (who was saddled with the title of “lead guitarist” while playing alongside Keith Richards) – who was the “cute one” with the blond hair.  But the two men who are rightfully renowned as the greatest rhythm section in the history of rock music – bass guitarist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts – were virtually unknown to the American public.  Or at least, until I saw that photo in Mad, I certainly didn’t know their names or what they looked like. 

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“Tell Me” was one of the earliest Rolling Stones singles and the first song credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – that is, Jagger/Richards – that was used as the “A” side of a single release.  “Come On”, a Chuck Berry song was their first 45, as I wrote about several months ago.  

Their second single was actually a Lennon/McCartney song, “I Wanna Be Your Man”; from Wikipedia:  “According to various accounts, either the Rolling Stones’ manager/producer Andrew Loog Oldham or the Rolling Stones themselves ran into [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney on the street as the two were returning from an awards luncheon.  Hearing that the band were in need of material for a single, Lennon and McCartney went to their session at De Lane Lea Studio and finished off the song – whose verse they had already been working on – in the corner of the room while the impressed Rolling Stones watched.” 

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Like many of the British Invasion bands, the Rolling Stones primarily played and recorded R&B classics and were slow to begin writing their own songs.  By contrast, the Beatles were recording mostly new material, and this seemed to be more popular at least with American audiences – the Fab Four scored one #1 single after another over here, beginning with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in February 1964.   

Though that was not the only time the song was released on a 45, “I Wanna Be Your Man” became the “B” side for the first U.S. single by the Rolling Stones; the “A” side was their terrific cover of the Buddy Holly song, “Not Fade Away” that features a pounding Bo Diddley beat.  The Rolling Stones recording of “I Wanna Be Your Man” was only released as a single and did not appear on a studio album in either the US or the UK; it was included on several compilation albums in later years though, but was not released in the US until Singles Collection: The London Years (1989).  

Of course, the Beatles recorded their own version of “I Wanna be Your Man”; it was included on Meet the Beatles, with Ringo Starr on double-tracked lead vocals.  

“Not Fade Away” was not included on any of the Stones’ British studio albums either, although thankfully, it was the opening track on their first American album.  A wealth of blues and R&B singles in a similar vein were released by the Rolling Stones and numerous other British bands in this time period, but none of them made much of an impression over here.  In fact, Allmusic reports that the Rolling Stones 45 discussed above, “Not Fade Away” is the only one that did reasonably well on the Billboard charts; while the song reached #3 on the UK charts, it managed #48 in the US.    

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“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was the Rolling Stones’ first #1 hit in America; and believe it or not, that did not happen until the Stones had released some 12 or 15 previous singles over nearly a two-year period.  Their previous Top 10 hits were “Time Is on My Side” and “The Last Time”.  “Satisfaction” was released in the US 50 years ago, in June 1965.  After that, there was no stopping them. 

I had heard from several people that “Satisfaction” had dirty lyrics; we’d heard the same rumors about “Louie Louie”.  The line that was mentioned to me (probably by a summer camp counselor) was:  “I’m trying to make some girl” – I said, okay, but I didn’t actually know what that meant at the time.

There is a post discussing the meaning of “Satisfaction” on the website shmoop.com, and that makes reference to another line that I didn’t really understand at the time either (although I eventually decided that this must be what was meant):  “The anti-commercial rant [in the early part of the song] rubbed some folks the wrong way, but [Mick] Jagger’s blunt recapitulation of his failed attempts to ‘make some girl’ was the real problem.  Radio stations hesitated to play the song.  Funnily enough, they were actually hung up on one of its tamer lines.  When the Stones appeared on Shindig, a variety TV show, standards-sensitive execs bleeped ‘And I’m tryin’ to make some girl’.  Meanwhile, the reference to a woman being on her period – ‘better come back later next week, ’cause you see I’m on a losing streak’ – made it on air with no problems at all.”

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The same post about “Satisfaction” on shmoop.com also notes:  “Richards claims to have heard the [song’s opening] notes in a dream, as a dead-asleep epiphany in a Florida hotel.  Of course, this is Keith Richards we’re talking about — the distinctions between awake and asleep, day and night, are a bit sketchy for the hard-living rocker.  But whatever nocturnal state he was in, Richards was wise enough to record the historic riff on a cassette player before slipping back into it.  And the tape with the rock-changing riff (and about forty minutes of snoring) was enough to give Richards and his songwriting partner Mick Jagger a rolling start in the studio.”  

The guitar was run through a new toy that Keith Richards had purchased, a Gibson Maestro fuzzbox; the intention by Mick and Keith was to replace the guitar with horns.  But according to Wikipedia, they were outvoted by the other members of the Rolling Stones, as well as their manager Andrew Loog Oldham and sound engineer Dave Hassinger; and the song was released as it was.  As a result, Gibson sold completely out of fuzzboxes by the end of the year, and the fuzzbox sound became an integral part of the sound of the 1960’s. 

Initially I did not recognize the introductory music on the song as being played on a guitar; I thought that must be a saxophone.  That got some undeserved laughter thrown my way, as I remember it.  But I have to admit I had no clue that a fuzzbox was involved until just a few years ago.   

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The Jagger/Richards songwriting partnership is one of the keys of the success of the Rolling Stones over the years.  They have also partnered as record producers using the pseudonym the Glimmer Twins. 

John Lennon believes that their experience with “I Wanna Be Your Man” was helpful in getting the songwriting team underway; as he related in the famous Playboy magazine interview in 1980 (a few months before his assassination):  “We were taken down to meet them at the club where they were playing in Richmond by Brian [Epstein] and some other guy.  They wanted a song and we went to see what kind of stuff they did.  Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Richards] heard we had an unfinished song – Paul [McCartney] just had this bit and we needed another verse or something.  We sort of played it roughly to them and they said, ‘Yeah, OK, that’s our style.’  But it was only really a lick, so Paul and I went off in the corner of the room and finished the song off while they were all still sitting there talking.  We came back, and that’s how Mick and Keith got inspired to write . . . because, ‘Jesus, look at that.  They just went in the corner and wrote it and came back!’  You know, right in front of their eyes we did it.  So we gave it to them.” 

Their manager and producer Andrew Loog Oldham kept emphasizing to the two of them that there just weren’t that many obscure great songs out there.  Although Mick Jagger disputes that it was really this literal, Keith Richards relates their first songwriting experience this way:  “So what Andrew Oldham did was lock us up in the kitchen for a night and say, ‘Don’t come out without a song.’  We sat around and came up with ‘As Tears Go By’.  It was unlike most Rolling Stones material, but that’s what happens when you write songs, you immediately fly to some other realm.  The weird thing is that Andrew found Marianne Faithfull at the same time, bunged it to her and it [‘As Tears Go By’] was a f--kin’ hit for her – we were songwriters already!  But it took the rest of that year to dare to write anything for the Stones.” 

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I found another great Keith Richards quote on SongFacts concerning “The Last Time” – the 45 that was released right before “Satisfaction” – as taken from the 2003 book According to the Rolling Stones:  “We didn’t find it difficult to write pop songs, but it was VERY difficult – and I think Mick [Jagger] will agree – to write one for the Stones.  It seemed to us it took months and months and in the end we came up with ‘The Last Time’, which was basically re-adapting a traditional Gospel song that had been sung by the Staple Singers, but luckily the song itself goes back into the mists of time.  I think I was trying to learn it on the guitar just to get the chords, sitting there playing along with the record, no gigs, nothing else to do.  At least we put our own stamp on it, as the Staple Singers had done, and as many other people have before and since:  they’re still singing it in churches today.  It gave us something to build on to create the first song that we felt we could decently present to the band to play. . . .  ‘The Last Time’ was kind of a bridge into thinking about writing for the Stones.  It gave us a level of confidence; a pathway of how to do it.  And once we had done that, we were in the game.  There was no mercy, because then we had to come up with the next one.  We had entered a race without even knowing it.” 

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As with the songwriting teams that I wrote about last month, early on writing the music and writing the lyrics were handled separately.  From Wikipedia:  “One of the patterns that the Jagger/Richards collaboration initially followed has been that [Mick] Jagger wrote most of the lyrics while [Keith] Richards focused on the music.  Jagger discussed this in [a] 1995 interview with [Jann Wenner], whereby he explained how songs like ‘Get off of My Cloud’, ‘As Tears Go By’, ‘Wild Horses’, ‘Tumbling Dice’, and ‘Beast of Burden’ were created.  Jagger has also pointed out that this pattern was more prevalent in the early 1960’s, while in their later collaborations their roles have overlapped more, with both of them contributing lyrics and music.” 

As with Lennon/McCartney, additionally some of the songs were written only by Mick Jagger, and others only by Keith Richards.  Wikipedia gives as examples that Mick Jagger wrote “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Brown Sugar”, and that Keith Richards wrote “Happy”, “Ruby Tuesday”, and “Little T&A”.  In the same 1995 interview mentioned above, Mick Jagger said:  “I think in the end it all balances out.” 

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I thought that I had remembered Mick Jagger going to “art school” – that being where his flair for the dramatic in his song lyrics came from – but as it turned out, I could not have been more wrong.  From Wikipedia:  “Jagger continued his business courses at the London School of Economics, and had seriously considered becoming either a journalist or a politician, comparing the latter to a pop star.”  He has described himself as always being a singer from his earliest days, but he turned out to be one hell of a songwriter as well. 

I often had trouble figuring out the lyrics to songs by the Rolling Stones; they are easy enough to snag off the Internet now, but sometimes it was hard for me to get it from playing the songs back in the day.  In some cases, I even went down to Reznick’s Records and leafed through their sheet music for Rolling Stones songs to find out what the lyrics said – occasionally on multiple occasions for the same song. 

Some of it was just that they were British – not so much their accents but the idiosyncrasies of English in England.  In “Get off of My Cloud” – one of the Stones’ non-grammatical song titles according to what my English teachers told me, as was “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (in fact, this second #1 song was their next single) – the chorus was clear enough, like the great line:  “Don’t hang around, ’cause two’s a crowd”; but the first verse includes the lines: 

     Then in flies a guy who’s all dressed up just like a Union Jack

     And says, I’ve won five pounds if I have his kind of detergent pack. 

I knew about the British currency of “pounds” even when I was a little kid, and around here detergent comes in a “box” though I still knew what they meant.  However, it was a while before I learned the nickname of the British flag.  Then the final verse ends:

     It was so very quiet and peaceful

     There was nobody, not a soul around

     I laid myself out, I was so tired and I started to dream

     In the morning the parking tickets were just like

     A flag stuck on my windscreen

I wasn’t driving then of course, and I had no clue about what the last two lines meant – I’m sure I had seen parking tickets on a car before, but not a whole cluster of them.  And the British term for a car’s windshield, “windscreen” was totally foreign to me.  As a matter of fact, the website on the Internet where I got these lyrics just now didn’t even have it right – they had “window screen”. 

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“19th Nervous Breakdown” is one of the Rolling Stones’ songs that illustrated to me just how dense and colorful their lyrics could be – the very concept just amazes me to this day (not that I was really clear on what a nervous breakdown was at age 15).  The verses tell the story of a mixed-up girl with all sorts of problems; the first two verses go: 

     You’re the kind of person you meet at certain dismal, dull affairs

     Center of a crowd, talking much too loud, running up and down the stairs

     Well, it seems to me that you have seen too much in too few years

     And though you’ve tried you just can’t hide your eyes are edged with tears

     When you were a child you were treated kind

     But you were never brought up right

     You were always spoiled with a thousand toys but still you cried all night

     Your mother who neglected you owes a million dollars tax

     And your father’s still perfecting ways of making sealing wax

Adding to my puzzlement of figuring out the meaning of these words from the sheet music at Reznick’s Records was the British spelling at the end, “ceiling wax”.  I know that I had seen sealing wax used in several movies (though I doubt I knew what it was called back then), but I couldn’t imagine what you would do with wax on a ceiling! 

And naturally, I completely missed the drug reference in the last verse (I guess I figured it was some sort of vacation): 

     On our first trip I tried so hard to rearrange your mind

     But after awhile I realized you were disarranging mine

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When Linda Ronstadt released her version of the Rolling Stones song “Tumbling Dice” (she and Mick Jagger dated for a while), I was reminded again of how masterful the Jagger/Richards team was at crafting song lyrics.  The song is included on her 1977 album Simple Dreams; Linda had to noticeably slow the tempo in order to get all of those words out of her mouth but still turns in a fine performance.  The Ronstadt concert that forms the focal point of the 1978 film FM also features “Tumbling Dice”.  But there was no need to look up the words that time; Linda Ronstadt included the lyrics on most of her albums, so they were right there on the album sleeve.  These are the original lyrics for “Tumbling Dice” as the Stones sang them – I will just give all of them this time; they are that great: 

     Women think I’m tasty, but they’re always tryin’ to waste me

     And make me burn the candle right down,

     But baby, baby, I don’t need no jewels in my crown.

     ’Cause all you women is low down gamblers,

     Cheatin’ like I don’t know how,

     But baby, baby, there’s fever in the funk house now.

     This low down bitchin’ got my poor feet a itchin’,

     You know you know the deuce is still wild.

     Baby, I can’t stay, you got to roll me

     And call me the tumblin’ dice.

     Always in a hurry, I never stop to worry,

     Don’t you see the time flashin’ by.

     Honey, got no money,

     I’m all sixes and sevens and nines.

     Say now, baby, I’m the rank outsider,

     You can be my partner in crime.

     But baby, I can’t stay,

     You got to roll me and call me the tumblin’,

     Roll me and call me the tumblin’ dice.

     Oh, my, my, my, I’m the lone crap shooter,

     Playin’ the field ev’ry night.

     Baby, can’t stay,

     You got to roll me and call me the tumblin’ (dice),

     Roll me and call me the tumblin’ (Got to roll me.) dice.

     Got to roll me. Got to roll me.

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Linda Ronstadt isn’t the only woman to cover a song by the Rolling Stones; Bette Midler recorded “Beast of Burden” in 1984 – her music video for the song includes a cameo by Mick Jagger playing a somewhat exaggerated version of himself (if that’s possible).  Here is a sample of the lyrics in “Beast of Burden”:

     I’ll never be your beast of burden

     My back is broad but it’s a hurting

     All I want is for you to make love to me

     I’ll never be your beast of burden

     I’ve walked for miles my feet are hurting

     All I want is for you to make love to me

     Am I hard enough

     Am I rough enough

     Am I rich enough

     I’m not too blind to see 

(May 2015)

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Items:    Keith Richards