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ROCK ’N’ ROLL CIRCUS
In his book The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, Stanley Booth tells an anecdote that can be dissected in the way of a homily. In it, you have Keith Richards in a drop of rain.
Keith, flying commercial, strikes up a conversation with his seatmate, an ad man who works for a big firm. Keith digs the guy as an example of another life, a road not taken. In explaining why his situation is superior, Keith says, “You’re not free, man, you’ve got to do what they say.”
“You have to play what people want,” the ad man replies. “What’s the difference?”
“We don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do,” says Keith. “I threw my favorite guitar off the stage in San Francisco.”
“You can’t do that every night,” says the ad man.
“I can do it as often as I feel like it,” says Keith.
“Well, what I do isn’t bad,” says the ad man. “I’ve never hurt anybody.”
“How can you be sure?” says Keith, thinking. He rambles a bit, then returns to his central point: “I really think it’s true that you can’t do what you want to do. So many people aren’t doing what they want to do.”
“Most of us do both,” says the ad man. “We like what we do but we have to make money. It’s a compromise.”
But that’s so sort of sad,” says Keith.
“But the world is not perfect,” says the ad man.
“No,” says Keith. “The world is perfect.”
This took place in 1969, when the Stones were promoting Let It Bleed, the second album of their golden run. A lot of the tunes were recorded at Sunset Sound in L.A. During the sessions, which lasted for months, Jagger and Richards stayed at Stephen Stills’s house near Laurel Canyon, which had become the unofficial capital of the music world. The West Coast scene at its stony peak, a commune of rock stars and hangers-on, the dusty hills jammed with houses that were in turn jammed with singer-songwriters, the distant strum of Spanish acoustic guitars, a party that did not end so much as shift from late night to early morning. At one point, the canyon was home to most of the Byrds as well as Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa, and Joni Mitchell. It’s a force behind Mitchell’s record Ladies of the Canyon and stands behind Graham Nash’s song “Our House.” For the Stones, it offered a respite, a dream of another life. Hanging out, writing music, getting high. Each day the same: the same groupies, producers, musicians, dealers, actors, and models; the same sun on the same swimming pool; the same tennis court; the same cocaine cut into the same rails; the same muscle cars parked in the same driveway.
Gram Parsons spent day after day on the couch, crashed or glassy-eyed, strumming a guitar. He was a Gatsby boy, a long-haired scion of fruit barons, the richest family in Winter Haven, Florida. When he was nine, he went to see Elvis, which would make all the difference. If you’re exposed to something that cool that young, you can be ruined. He began dressing like the King, performing for company. He fronted several bands in high school, including the Pacers and the Legends. He attended Harvard for one semester, but, having fallen in with folkies, he rarely went to class. He dropped out and moved to New York, taking up residence in a huge house in the Bronx where, with friends, he rehearsed around the clock. They performed as the International Submarine Band, a name lifted from The Little Rascals. On a trip to L.A., he landed a job with the Byrds, one of the most popular bands in America. Hired to play keyboards, he hijacked the group—Roger McGuinn, who led the Byrds, called him “a monster in sheep’s clothing.”
Assuming he’d hired just another rock ’n’ roll organist, McGuinn was surprised by Parsons’s devotion to country music as well as country culture. “And he exploded out of his sheep’s clothing,” McGuinn explained, “[and] God! It’s George Jones! In a sequined suit!”
Parsons trained the Byrds for a mission of his own, a mission akin to that of the Rolling Stones. Whereas Jagger and Richards mainstreamed the Delta blues, Parsons wanted to remake the sound of his childhood, the B-flat wail of Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow, as rock ’n’ roll. He urged the Byrds to cut an album in a new style, which he called Cosmic American Music. It seems natural today—alt-country has been perfected by Steve Earle, the Jayhawks, and Wilco, among others—but it was nuts back then. To hippies, country music was reactionary, square. But Gram Parsons made the case. The result was Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Though a flop at the time, it’s since been recognized as one of the greatest rock albums ever made.
Parsons met Jagger and Richards on tour. The Byrds were playing a London club called Middle Earth. Keith and Mick had gone to see McGuinn and his famous electric twelve-string guitar, but they were transfixed by the hippie kid on the organ. After the show, they all went to Stonehenge to get high and talk about aliens. Keith urged the Byrds to skip South Africa because “they’re not being kind to the brothers.” Gram would cite this admonition when he quit the tour a few days later, but even friends say he was really just jumping ship to hang out with the Stones. When the Byrds left for Johannesburg, Parsons moved into Redlands. In the weeks that followed, Parsons and Richards commingled, trading licks and trading clothes. It was a love affair absent only the sex—the epic jam continued when Mick and Keith moved into Laurel Canyon. “Gram taught me country music,” Richards said. “How it worked, the difference between the Bakersfield style and the Nashville style. He played it all on the piano. Merle Haggard, ‘Sing Me Back Home,’ George Jones, Hank Williams. I learned the piano from Gram and started writing songs on it.”
“It went on for weeks,” Phil Kaufman, who served Parsons and the Stones as a kind of nanny, told me. “Gram would make a point, then say, ‘Phil, play this George Jones or that Merle Haggard or Buck Owens.’ The Stones were blues guys. Gram interjected the country lick into them. And there was none of that weirdness. Gram was a rich kid so he could hang without being a straphanger. He could carry his own weight.”
The Stones toyed with country music from the start—Roy Rogers was Keith’s first hero—but Parsons introduced a crucial element, the laid-back seventies twang that has faded as beautifully as a pair of jeans.
His influence was enormous.
How can you tell?
By the way Jagger denies it.
Years ago, I worked with Jann Wenner on a long Jagger Q&A. We prepared by reading all the books, listening to all the records. Jann brought his guitar to the office to play the riffs. I wrote perhaps a thousand questions. Later, I listened to the tapes and helped edit the transcripts. The interview appeared in the magazine on December 14, 1995.
In my questions, I’d given special attention to Gram Parsons and the country infusion that changed the Stones during Let It Bleed. I was surprised by the vehemence of Mick’s response. I felt bad for putting Jann on the receiving end of it. When Jann asked if Gram had been an influence, Mick, who’s usually happy to acknowledge sources, snapped no, nada, nein—zero influence. Mick said country music was nothing new for the Stones, had in fact been an element from the start. It came not from Parsons but from English folk ballads, the very soil of Britain. Then he changed the subject. But listen to Gram Parsons performing “Love Hurts” beside Mick Jagger performing “Wild Horses.” Gram Parsons taught Mick Jagger how to sing American country.
One night, Keith sang “Honky Tonk Women” for Parsons, who picked up a guitar and played it back, remade as Cosmic American Music. The result is “Country Honk,” the original tune reverse-engineered, turned back into its sources. The Stones recorded it a few days later; it’s the third track on Let It Bleed. But when they listened to the playbacks, something was missing.
It’s a fiddle, Gram said.
What?
You need a country fiddle.
Well, do you know one?
Parsons had met Byron Berline, the great country fiddle player, a short time before. Though he was not yet twenty-five, Berline was rank with pedigree, having recorded with the Dillards and with Bill Monroe, the man who invented bluegrass. His playing was whiskey straight from the cask, learned from his father in Appalachia. “I was in Oklahoma when I got that call,” said Berline, whom I tracked down in his fiddle shop. “It was Keith Richards and Phil Kaufman. At first, I didn’t understand who they were. Then I remembered: Oh yeah, my roommate in college played all that Rolling Stones. I’d say, ‘Man, would you turn that off?’ What would my roommate think if he knew these guys were calling me! They wanted me to come out to L.A. and record. Immediately. They picked me up at LAX the next day. Phil Kaufman was driving. We went up to Sunset and Doheny where they had rented that house. They were all hanging out. They said, all right, we’re going to go to the studio. So we get in limousines and drive to Sunset Sound on [Sunset Boulevard at North Cherokee]. They were remodeling and there were bulldozers pushing dirt and all that kind of stuff. I went through the track. No way to tune back then unless you had a pitch fork, so it was tough. But I finally started laying it down. Then they called me in. I thought, ‘Oh, hell, they don’t like it, they’re going to send me home.’ It was Glyn Johns and Mick Jagger. They said, ‘We got an idea; we want you to go out on the sidewalk and record your track out there. Just to create an ambience.’ I said, ‘Really?’ People were experimenting with a lot of different things back then. Well, we go outside and…I’ll never forget this. I’ll bet Mick Jagger doesn’t remember it, but I do. There’s a bulldozer about fifty yards away pushing dirt, pretty noisy. Jagger waves his arms and puts his finger across his throat to shut it down, kill it. Which the guy did, immediately, turned off the engine and walked away. Strange. So we set up a microphone right out in the street. That’s how I played. On a little speaker. With all them guys standing around. At the start of the track, you can hear a car horn. That’s Phil Kaufman leaning on the wheel of his Cadillac. The Doors had come down to visit—the group the Doors. Bonnie Bramlett was there to sing. Leon Russell was hanging around. It was a party atmosphere. I played it seven or eight times. The last time, my bow slipped ’cause it was getting damp in the evening. And that’s the track they wanted. I said, ‘Don’t you hear that bow slip?’ And they said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s cool.’ ”
“Live with Me,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Monkey Man.” Every song on Let It Bleed is built on biography. Keith Richards conceived the opening track, “Gimme Shelter,” in Robert Fraser’s flat—burned out, hungover, staring out a big window as a thunderstorm broke over London. It mirrored his internal weather. Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg had been cast as lovers in the movie Donald Cammell codirected with Nicolas Roeg, Performance. Though the sex scenes were tame, the leaked outtakes were graphic. Each day, Keith, who had offered Anita money to turn down the role, parked in front of the townhouse where the film was being shot and glowered. “Gimme Shelter” is that glower turned into music. Its feat is to transcend its subject, to turn the chaos of Keith’s life into chaos in general. In 2012, Jagger, who filled in the lyrics and bridge, described the song as “a very moody piece about the world closing in on you a bit. When it was recorded, early ’69 or something, it was a time of war and tension, so that’s reflected in this tune.” It was cut at Olympic Studio and recut in L.A., where a producer added the famous background track of the soul singer Merry Clayton moaning the penultimate lyric: “Rape! Murder! It’s just a shot away…” “The use of the female voice was the producer’s idea,” Jagger says in According to the Rolling Stones, an oral history of the band published in 2003. “It would be one of those moments along the lines of ‘I hear a girl on this track—get one on the phone.’ ”
Life in the studio had been remade. Once upon a time, it was quick and dirty, in and out, but it had became a lazy float down the river. Once upon a time, five songs meant five hours in a soundproof room. By the late sixties, weeks might be devoted to a single passage in the rock opera. Many of these songs are less about the world than about the recording process itself. That’s why producers often included a few moments of the band at work in the studio, hanging out before the drummer counts four. In this era, the sideman became a storied figure, the ace player recruited like a mercenary to fix a track. One of the best—the most magical if not the most skilled—was Al Kooper of Queens, New York, who’d famously bluffed his way onto a Hammond organ at Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” session. That organ is a trademark sound, distinct because Kooper didn’t know what he was doing. “After the song became a hit, I went out and bought all the records that copied the ‘Dylan sound,’ ” he told me. “I took them to Dylan’s house and we listened to them laughing. The imitation ‘Al Kooper organ’ is my favorite, those great musicians copying my ignorance!”
Kooper, who went on to found Blood, Sweat & Tears and discover Lynyrd Skynyrd, among other bands, had a knack for turning up at key moments—a long, lean rock ’n’ roll Zelig. He was backing Dylan when Dylan went electric. He was playing with George Harrison and Ringo Starr when they heard John Lennon was dead. On a trip to London in 1968, Kooper bumped into Brian Jones, who talked him into coming to a session. “I got there early,” Kooper told me. “That’s my thing. After a while, Mick and Keith showed up. Mick was wearing a gorilla coat. Keith had on a Tyrolean hat with a feather. Everyone sat on the floor with acoustic guitars so Mick could teach us the chords and changes on ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want.’ Jimmy Miller was the producer. And man, did he look ill! Basically, Jimmy was just rolling joints. Then he got into a situation with Charlie Watts, sweetest guy in the world. Jimmy comes over to Charlie and says, ‘It would be great if you could play this fill.’ Jimmy sings the fill. Charlie tries to play it and can’t—not to Miller’s satisfaction. Charlie finally says, ‘Why don’t you show me?’ So Jimmy sits down and he’s very, very comfortable. It’s obvious he’s a drummer. Charlie says, ‘Why don’t you play it instead of me having to play something I wouldn’t.’ Jimmy jumped at that. I saw it and thought, ‘Disgraceful,’ ” said Kooper, who, in his own producing work, tries to remain invisible. “Charlie, without resentment, went into the control room and watched,” Kooper continued. “So that’s not Charlie on ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want.’ It’s Jimmy Miller.
“The song took all night. It was really Mick who produced it. At some point I said to him, ‘If you ever want to put horns on this, I know exactly what to do.’ He called a year later….‘Remember what you said?’ He sent me the tapes in New York. I wanted to imitate the Memphis horns, Stax. I wrote an arrangement and hired players but they couldn’t do it. It sounded terrible. I was devastated. I knew they’d never use it. But I thought, you know what? Let me play the intro. I played organ at the session but I’ll erase that and do it on a French horn. I just really wanted to play horn on a Stones record. So that’s what I did. And that’s the only thing they kept.”
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is often compared to the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” There’s a similar end-of-the-era sentiment. In it, Jagger name-checks just about everything that was happening: the demonstration, the Chelsea drugstore, Mr. Jimmy. He hired the Bach Choir to sing a preamble. The melody is achingly simple, just two chords—A and D—with a B minor in the chorus for melancholy.
On a car trip in 1978, my brother Steven said the shift from the sixties to the seventies is perfectly captured in the differing sentiments between “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and the hit of the moment, “With a Little Luck” by Wings.
Steven: With a little luck? What kind of a loser depends on fuckin’ luck?
Mom: Steven!
People say “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” was inspired by Marianne Faithfull, less the lyric than its aching sadness. When I asked Marianne if “Wild Horses” had been written for her, she said, “I was told so, but that doesn’t mean anything. Musicians do that all the time. ‘This song’s for you, darlin’.’ ” But when I asked if she was behind “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” she said, “Absolutely. That’s my song. Every time I hear it, I’m right back with Mick in the flat. Music can’t tell time.”