The Rolling Stones, The #4 Artist of the Rock Era, Part Five

 

(Continued from Part Four)

 

The group's album Let It Bleed topped the U.K. chart and peaked at #3 in the United States.  This song, the flip of "Honky Tonk Women", "was something I just played on the acoustic guitar, one of those bedroom songs," Jagger said.  "It proved to be quite difficult to record because Charlie couldn't play the groove and so Jimmy Miller had to play the drums," he continued.  "I'd also had this idea of having a choir, probably a gospel choir, on the track, but there wasn't one around at that point," Jagger said.  "Jack Nitzsche, or somebody, said that we could get the London Bach Choir and we said, 'That will be a laugh.'"  Yet that is exactly what you hear opening on "You Can't Always Get What You Want".

Let It Bleed to this point was the Stones' best album, selling over two million copies, and included "Gimme Shelter", featuring vocals by Merry Clayton.  

Jagger created the music while sitting in his London flat on a stormy day in 1969 while thinking about Chuck Berry music as he strummed on his acoustic guitar.  "There was this incredible storm over London, so I got into that mode, just looking at all these people with their umbrellas being blown out of their grasp and running like hell," Mick wrote in his book, Life.  "And the idea came to me...My though was storms on other people's minds, not mine.  It just happened to hit the moment."

Another unreleased song that is among the best in their catalog, "Gimme Shelter" arguably features the group at the peak of its power and ranks high in The Top Unknown/Underrated Songs of the Rock Era*.

 

The title song, as the Stones tell it, came about because Richards' fingers began to bleed as he played acoustic guitar for hours while Jagger and an engineer worked on the drum track.  Richards overlooked the injuries and was intent on recording "Let It Bleed".

 

Here is one of the first songs that Richards wrote by himself, a love song to a gold digger, with organ from Nicky Hopkins, autoharp by Jones and acoustic slide guitar from Keith--"You Got The Silver".

"Midnight Rambler" is the tale of a home-invading ne'er do-well, made even more

creepy by Jagger's harmonica playing.  The group handles the constant tempo changes amazingly.

 

This song was written on that 1969 vacation in Italy when "Midnight Rambler" was also penned.  Wyman provided a biting bass line on "Monkey Man".

The Stones have always been two steps up and one step back.  What happened next was essentially five steps back.  For a concert at the Altamont Speedway, about 50 miles East of San Francisco, they hired the Hells Angels to provide security.  Dumb idea.  The Angels were far too aggressive and tabbed and beat one fan to death.  

The Stones released one of The Best Live Albums of the Rock Era*, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!, which went to #1 in the U.K. and #6 in the Untied States, in 1970.

After a dispute with Klein, the group launched their own record label, Rolling Stones Records, and released the album Sticky Fingers in 1971.  The band recorded some songs for the album at the legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studio while touring the U.S. in 1969.  The studio had just opened in May when four top musicians from nearby FAME Studios left to form their own company, and these next two songs both came from those sessions.  

Engineer Jimmy Johnson was one of the studio's founders, and Glyn Johns, the album's engineer, added overdubs in England, including the horns, but largely left Johnson's mix intact.  "Brown Sugar", another member of The Top 500 Songs of the Rock Era* club, landed at #1 in the U.S., Australia and Canada and grabbed the #2 spot in the U.K.

Sticky Fingers soared to #1 in both the U.S. and U.K. as well as Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden and has now sold over three million copies.  This next song was recorded two years before, but it's release was held up with legal confrontations concerning Oldham.

Stewart bowed out of the session because he "didn't like playing minor chords".  And Jagger took Richards' song, supposed to be about missing his just-born son Marlon and regretting the time he had to spend on the road, and turned it into a story about a deteriorating relationship.   Jagger talked about the song (in the liner notes to the 1993 release Jump Back:  The Best of the Rolling Stones) as if he doesn't remember Richards' original inspiration:

              Everyone always says it was written

              about Marianne (Faithfull), but I don't

              think it was; that was all well over by then.

              But I was definitely very inside this piece

              emotionally.  This is very personal,

              evocative, and sad.  It all sounds rather

              doomy now, but it was quite a heavy

              time.

Richards brilliantly used a 12-string to bring out the melancholy feeling that was his original inspiration in "Wild Horses".

 

Andy Warhol designed the album cover for Sticky Fingers.  This song features Bobby Keys playing saxophone, Rocky Dijon on percussion, and Billy Preston on organ.  Keys and Price joined the group for their 1970 European tour after the album.  The long sax solo on the end wasn't planned, but Keys kept playing while the tape ran and Richards loved it.  Enjoy "Can't You Hear Me Knocking?".

Jagger wrote most of this song before Taylor joined the group.  He composed the chord progression in 1968 while on vacation with Faithfull in Italy, and the two teamed to write some of the lyrics. 

At L.A.'s Elektra Studios, Faithfull sang the lead vocal and she released it the following year.  Nitzsche played piano, Ry Cooder was on slide guitar and Watts was the drummer on the track.  The single was banned and the label stopped circulation because of the drug reference.  

"I just liked the name, and loved Lou Reed's work, Sister Ray and Heroin," Faithfull told The Guardian newspaper in 2013.  "I liked the idea poetically.  I thought it was like Baudelaire, but the song doesn't glamorize anything.  It was a really interesting vision."

When Cooder and Nitzsche were in London to work on the soundtrack to Jagger's movie Performance, he asked them to record a version with the Rolling Stones.  Jagger has said the subject in the song has had an accident, though we do not know if that means he overdosed or if he had a car accident or other mishap and wanted the drug to ease the pain from his injuries.  This is "Sister Morphine".  

 

"[I] think a lot of Country music is sung with the tongue in cheek, so I do it tongue-in-cheek," Jagger said of the vocals on "Dead Flowers".

The group created more self-inflicted wounds in our next segment, but they were able to put together arguably the best album of their careers next.  You'll hear that in Part Six!