In April 1964, the Stones released their debut record in the UK, it would appear in a slightly different form in the US six weeks later. Recorded at the tiny Regent Sound studio in London, these would be their last recordings (aside from a few stray tracks) made in England until 1966's Between The Buttons. It's an amazing debut, and again is comprised almost entirely of covers. On the day of it's release in the UK, it sold 100,000 copies, and by early May had knocked WithThe Beatles off the top spot of the charts.
It opens with Bobby Troup's "Route 66," originally a hit for Nat King Cole, which they undoubtedly learned from Chuck Berry. Keith transposes Johnny Johnson's piano riff to the guitar, and it is one of their most searing live numbers of the early years. The song selection includes blues numbers they had been playing around London in the clubs, as well as their take on current US Soul and R&B hits. There's a version of Gene Allison's "You Can Make if you Try, which they probably learned from the Solomon Burke version, the b-side to "If You Need Me" which they would lay to wax months later at Chess Studios in Chicago. The single from the LP in the US, "Tell Me" was the first recorded Jagger-Richards composition, and went to #24 on the US Billboard charts. Keith plays a 12 string acoustic and sings harmony into the same microphone. It's also their first great pop record.
Between June of 1963 and February of 1964 The Rolling Stones released three singles, one EP, and a couple other tracks on a compilation. All in the UK, and all before the release of their first LP. All but two those songs were covers. The trajectory of their career couldn't yet have been imagined. Firstly, they wanted to be the the best blues band in London (they were), and by the time they started recording, they wanted to share their love of American Blues, Soul, and R&B with a larger audience (which they did). The Stones weren't the only band in London doing this, but they were the best. They eventually wrote songs of their own (as urged by their manager Andrew Loog Oldham) but for the most part, their early records, up until 1966's Aftermath are heavily comprised of covers of black American music.
So, as the story goes, nearly fifty years ago, in late 1961 on the outskirts of London in Dartford, Mick and Keith, old boyhood friends reunite at a train station. Mick is carrying a copy of Chuck Berry's Rockin' at the Hops and The Best of Muddy Waters. BINGO! The alliance is born. in the coming months they start playing, and find Brian Jones, who is masquerading around town as a slide-guitar playing Elmo Lewis. Later they add Stu, Bill and his Amp, and Charlie.
It's no accident that their first single would be a Chuck Berry song on one side and Muddy Waters on the flip, two artists they would re-visit frequently, and soon enough meet at Chess Studios in Chicago. Their second single "I Wanna Be Your Man" is a song they got from Lennon and McCartney, when Oldham invited them to the studio. It was a something that McCartney considered a throwaway, and the Stones took it gladly. I've never been one to choose between the Beatles and the Stones, but if you were comparing the their versions of this particular song, which the Beatles eventually recorded in their next sessions, the Rolling Stones win this one hands down. The b-side, "Stoned" was their first original 'composition,' - basically a blues jam - and was banned in the U.S. for it's suggestive lyrics. Their third single, "Fortune Teller," was shelved and eventually appeared on a UK compilation. Next, an EP of more great American R&B, and a single of a Bo Diddelyized version of Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away," backed by "Little by Little," a Stones original based on a Jimmy Reed riff - both recorded for the first LP which was soon coming. At that session, were Phil Spector and Gene Pitney, who contributed some maracas and piano respectively, and Spector copped a partial songwriting credit for "Little by Little."
Ernest Tubb is gonna call up the gypsy woman, and she's sending out a worldwide hoodoo. Those are Chuck Berry's words of course, and it's a gift to us to hear Tubb sing them on his 1955 version of "Thirty Days" released two months after Chuck put out his second single for Chess. They both raced up the R&B and Country charts respectively, and established Chuck Berry as a first rate crossover artist/songwriter. Berry's guitar solo is chunky and rhythmic, soaring over and leading the rhythm section. Tubb calls out to his soloists: Billy Byrd, "Half-Moon" Bradley, and Tommy Jackson of the Texas Troubadours, making it sound like his own. It was, after all, Berry's version of Bob Wills' "Ida Red" (a western swing number) that finally caught Leonard Chess's ear (on the insistence of Chess star Muddy Waters) from his homemade audition tape earlier that year. It evolved into "Maybellene," his first single.
Ronnie Hawkins recorded a blistering rockabilly version as "Forty Days." Maybe he was a more patient man giving his woman an extra ten days to come back home. Or perhaps, it's a biblical reference to Noah's Ark, after living with the torrential rains and flooding back home in Arkansas, where he and his band, including teenage drummer Levon Helm, had fled for the brighter pastures of the Toronto music scene.
Chuck Berry's liaison to Chess, Muddy Waters, recorded a single (different song) "Forty Days & Forty Nights" around this time with future murderer Pat Hare on guitar. Waters, also using the biblical reference, is "like a ship out on the sea" waiting for forty days and nights, and it's "raining all the time." His lover hasn't returned and most likely won't.
Today, Keith Richards turns sixty-seven in mortal human years. To say he's an "old soul" is an understatement--he's more like an embalmed soul--one who's avoided death more times than the combined lives of an entire litter of kittens. Despite topping the notorious NME's Most Likely to Die list for 10 solid years--while those around him perished or wasted away--Keith kept nodding along, making some of the greatest (and a few not so great) rock and roll records along the way. You can read all about it in his extended 550 page interview/auto-biography, Life, which is alternately, a gripping and fascinating read, and at other times, a grandiose tale of a supreme denial.
The inside cover flap reads: "This is the life. Believe it or not, I haven't forgotten any of it." And while that's partially true, and the best parts of the book--the first 350 or so pages-- are filled with incredible details on the emerging Rolling Stones and their dedication to music and their initial goal: to be the best blues band in London--something they quickly achieved and far exceeded--becoming the greatest rock and roll band on the planet. Keith's lucidity and ability to remember takes a vacation sometime after the '72 tour, and while this is understandable considering his extreme condition in the mid-70s, it seems the year 1974 pretty much eludes his memory.
But enough about the book.
2010 has been a banner year for Richards, starting in May with the re-release of his greatest achievement, 1972's Exile on Main Street--the sprawling Rolling Stones classic recorded in Keith's sweaty basement in the south of France; his book, of course; a reissue of his long out of printWingless Angels recordings; and a collaboration with Jerry Lee Lewis of the Rolling Stones' "Sweet Virginia" for an album of duets. Lewis also collaborates with fellow Stones, Ronnie Wood on the title cut "Mean Old Man," and with Mick Jagger on a lackluster and tentative sounding version of "Dead Flowers," but it's the duet with Keith that rises amongst the heap.
This isn't the first time Keith and the Killer have teamed up, and it's clear, that the two of them share a mutual admiration for one another. And while they seem to be from two separate generations of rock 'n rollers, the 50s and 60s, respectively, they are only eight years apart in age, still active, and were both at the top of their game throughout most of the 60s and 70s. Lewis was born into the Pentecostal Deep South during the Great Depression, and Richards, outside of London during the final wave of the German Luftwaffe attacks of World War II. Lewis began recording in 1957, and the Rolling Stones were in full swing with the acquisition of Bill Wyman and his amp by 1962--a mere five year difference--a blip in the grand scheme of rock and roll time. I see them as contemporaries, as well as kindred spirits, both who have openly shared a fondness for (among other things) firearms, whiskey, controlled substances, the songs of Chuck Berry, Harold Arlen, and Hank Williams, as well as the possession of an instantly recognizable and singular voice in their instrumental style.
When I first heard the new version of "Sweet Virginia," I was disappointed to hear that Lewis had changed the word "shit" in the chorus to "shine." It's one of the Stones' great throwaway lines, and the word substitution actually changes the meaning of the song in subtle ways. But Lewis--who knows shit from Shinola--is prone to all kinds of profanity in conversation, he is, however, not one to record such language. During the recording sessions for "Great Balls of Fire" at Sun in 1957, Jerry Lee, became weary and convinced in his drunkenness that he was going to go to "H-E-L-L" if he sang that song. Sam Phillips and Jack Clement went to great lengths to convince him that he had to do it. In speaking about his 1974 version of the Stones song "Satisfaction," he humbly remarked, "They done that one so good that me singin' it would be like stickin' a greasy noodle up some critter's ass." In 1977, when Keith holed up in a Toronto recording studio at a piano, while awaiting trial on drug-trafficking charges that threatened to put him away for several years, he recorded a suite of still unreleased tracks, some that he had learned and played with his then dead running buddy Gram Parsons, and some other old favorites, among those, two Jerry Lee Lewis numbers.
With the promise of a bonus disc of unreleased Stones tracks announced prior to this year's re-release of Exile (which I dutifully bought for the fourth time) I was excited and ultimately let down to find that it was largely a hoax, which I'll get into another time. It did, however, contain a rough version of "Soul Survivor" with Keith making up lyrics as he goes along. It's full of profanity, makes no sense at all, and I love it. Jerry Lee wouldn't have sung it that way, but that's beside the point. Both of these guys have fished in the same pond for many years, and today, in celebration of Keith's birthday we will listen to both of these old coots.
I was on 125th street in Harlem when the news broke. I think you could have been anywhere in the city and elsewhere in the country and experienced the same collective sigh of relief. It was the most joyous celebration I've ever witnessed. There was dancing in the streets. New York can be like that, but I haven't seen it for a long time, and this was something much bigger than us that we were all a part of. When the announcement came on the jumbotron, the crowd erupted. "He won!" I yelled. An older woman turned to me and threw her arms around me jumping up and down. My friend Barron said it looked just like The Price Is Right. I was Bob Barker, yet she and we all won something much better than a new car. We got our country back.
