STONES IN MY PASSWAY
(1969)
Here’s the setup: November 27, 1969, Thanksgiving Day. Wife and I were sitting down to turkey dinner midafternoon, when the phone rang. It was Stanley Booth. He said, “Somebody here wants to talk to you.”
The next voice I heard said, “This is Jerry Wexler. Hello, baby.”
Wexler’s next words blew my mind, “How would you like to move to Miami and be a rhythm section?”
If you have read Stanley’s book, Dance with the Devil: The Rolling Stones and Their Times, you know some of this. To paraphrase Mark Twain, “Mr. Booth told the truth, mostly.”
While having Thanksgiving dinner in New York, Wexler and Stanley listened to the Albert Collins album we recorded at Sounds of Memphis. Wexler said, “I wish I could have a band like that to use down in Miami.”
Stanley, God bless him, said, “Well, that’s Dickinson and Charlie Freeman.”
Charlie had been banned from the studio for firing his shotgun in the control room. We were looking for another job. Working for Chips and Kesler, I had become convinced all you needed to be successful in studio work in the South was the Atlantic account. From Stax to Muscle Shoals, wherever Atlantic went, success followed. This seemed like a dream come true. I called Charlie. Tarp Tarrant had played drums on the Collins album due to Sammy Creason’s kidney stone attack, but Charlie convinced me we had to offer Sammy the job. We thought his wife would not want to move, but Sammy jumped at the opportunity. Tommy McClure and Mike Utley were eager, too. The deal was made. The contract was signed. We kept it secret in Memphis. We were stabbing Stan Kesler in the back and knew it. Like Br’er Fox high up on Chinquapin Hill, we lay low, preparing to move to Miami Beach and Criteria Studios in January. Stanley was on the road with the Rolling Stones. He called in the middle of the night. “The Stones have three days off at the end of the tour,” he said. “They’re looking for a place to record. Can they record in Memphis?”
In those days a foreign band could get a touring permit or a recording permit, but not both. The Stones had been denied permission to record in Los Angeles and needed a place without a strict union policy. The Beatles had been unable to record at Stax due to an insurance policy. I could think of no place in town where a secret session could be pulled off. I told Stanley, “No.”
“Where could they record?”
“Muscle Shoals Sounds,” I said without hesitation. “Nobody will even know who they are.” I could tell it made Stanley mad. He snapped back, “I don’t know any of those people. Who could put that together?”
“Call Wexler,” was my answer. I didn’t hear back from Stanley for a couple of weeks. My phone rang in the middle of the night again. Stanley said, “Be at Muscle Shoals Sounds on Thursday. The Stones are recording.”
I didn’t drive my too-well-known, lime-gold, fastback Mustang to Muscle Shoals. I took my wife’s nondescript tan Plymouth station wagon, incognito. Secret mission. The parking lot was empty. What the hell. I went to the back door and knocked. Jimmy Johnson cracked the door and peeped out, “Dickinson, what do you want?”
“Here for the Stones session,” I said.
“Oh, hell, does everybody in Memphis know?” he asked, his voice high-pitched with excitement. I assured him nobody in Memphis knew. I was there to meet Stanley.
“Come on in, man. They just made it to Muscle Shoals airport. The largest plane that ever landed there and three people got off.” We waited together.
Keith. He walked into the room like a scarecrow, mumbling to himself and chuckling over his private joke. His skin was greenish blue or bluish green. His best tooth hung from his left ear and formerly belonged to a cougar. Tied scarfs and bracelets hung from his skeletal arms like ragged, bloody bandages on a wounded soldier. The front of his projectile spiked hair was peroxide orange, like a high school harlot from 1957, the kind of girl who wore mouton. Keith Richards was a pretty picture.
Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman were tiny. That’s the first thing you think when you meet the Stones. They seemed so inappropriately small. They were friendly. Stanley was with them, thank God, but Jagger and others were not. They accepted my presence as Stanley’s friend. We shot the shit, easily and comfortably. Before long Keith and I were sitting at the studio piano playing Hank Williams songs. They had just met Gram Parsons, who turned them on to country music. I think somehow Keith associated me with Gram, which warmed him up to me naturally, bullshitting and talking to me good-naturedly, musician to musician. Wyman and Watts were beautiful. Bill was quiet, lurking with his gorgeous brunette wife all covered in white bunny fur like the ice princess. Charlie prowled the studio, checking everything out, mics, speakers, etc. He seemed like an old school jazz cat.
Ahmet Ertegun, the big he-bull himself, appeared grinning through expensive teeth. You knew, instantly, every hair in his beard was precisely the same length. Ahmet was starting a R. B. Greaves day session while the Stones would record at night. He seemed to be waiting for Mick to split.
By the time the rest of them arrived, I had passed the test and was part of the session crew. Jimmy Johnson was the engineer. No one else was inside. Business was about to pick up.
Late arrivals: Mick Jagger, Little Mick (Taylor), road manager/piano man Ian Stewart, and Tony-the-bag-man. Not Spanish Tony Sanchez, but a Black Panther from Detroit who shows up in the Altamont video with his arm in a cast. He broke both fists at the ill-fated gig. Once Jagger settled in, things began to pop. They started to run down Fred McDowell’s “You Gotta Move.” They were doing it in their live set as a Mick/Keith duet with acoustic guitar and vocal. When they started to play it as a band, it wasn’t working. Stanley and I retreated to the control room with engineer Jimmy Johnson.
Wyman played the Wurlitzer electric piano and no one played bass. It wasn’t coming together. I thought, what a drag, after all this I’m going to watch the Stones blow it. Stanley had become romantically involved with the little sister of an old Macon friend, and was anxious to go to the motel and telephone her, which would give me a chance to smoke a joint. The Muscle Shoals boys were paranoid about dope since the state police had recently busted another local studio. Things started pretty tight, but they soon loosened up.
Stanley and I headed to the Holiday Inn, each with our own agenda. When we returned to the studio not forty-five minutes later, the Stones were gathered in the control room for the first playback. Charlie Watts was smiling. What issued forth from the speakers at the old coffin factory was a far cry from Fred McDowell at Hunter Chapel. Jagger’s voice put an ominous tone on the old gospel song. Keith hammered the hook-riff in a way that sounded more like Bo Diddley than Old Fred. “When the Lord gets ready,” Jagger snarled, “You got to moooove.”
His accent seemed oddly appropriate. He mutated his young man’s English voice into the world-weary moan of an old black fieldhand from darkest Mississippi Delta. Delighted, Keith overdubbed the guitar hook that announced every vocal line with any guitar he could find—a Telecaster, a twelve-string Stella, and whatever else Eddie Hinton left behind. The guitar riff started to take on the whip-crack chain gang sound of the “Midnight Rambler” I had heard when Mick beat the stage with his silver-studded belt. The drums sounded a sort of death march; the electric piano rumbled with a distorted vibrato like a drunken gig at the V.F.W.
“You see that woman, who walks the street. You see that po-lice man out on his beat? But, when the Lord gets ready, you got to mooooo-ve,” Jagger mooed like a lonesome cow from hell. It was pure Rolling Stones. In the brief time Stanley and I had been gone, they had turned the ragged beginning of a disaster into a Rolling Stone classic. They forever owned the performance, as surely as Fred and the Hunter Chapel Singers owned their version.
The next night was different. They started with a heavy guitar. Keith was in G tuning, but he didn’t sound like Furry Lewis.
The inversion of the intervals
In what is actually a 5 string banjo
Tuning creates a meat-heavy twang
That somehow propels
The beat of the music
Like a melodic drumbeat,
Somehow mean
And hard
With a sexual strut
Like a belly dance rhythm.
D tuning is not the same
(D is bluer,
More lonesome
Somehow,
Not as familiar
Or primal and jungle).
The middle of the chord whangs,
Almost losing tuning.
The bottom of the chord rumbles
Deeper than standard
And the top treble creeps out
Like a scalded alley cat
In the middle of the night.
It is the perfect tuning for Richards and the Stones, swinging with an arrogant snake drive that instantly takes you to a midnight party in the Moroccan whorehouse. The riff Keith introduced that night in Muscle Shoals in the old coffin factory was perfect, hitting the augmented five chord of the blues progression, creating the turnaround pattern to hook the lyrics and push the verse back to the top of the form.
Keith sang what weren’t words but grunts and groans, painful and sexual. Jagger wrote on a green steno pad as if taking dictation. He was translating. When he had the idea, he walked away, humming to himself. He circled the room like a buzzard over a carcass. After what seemed like not enough time, he turned over three pages of finished lyrics to “Brown Sugar.” Some say it’s about Claudia Lennear, the Ikette from Ike and Tina Turner’s Revue, who toured as an opener for the Stones in ’69 (later she showed up as a member of the Space Chorus on Leon Russell’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour). Be that as it may, Jagger had responded to his environment. He soaked up the Old South’s ghosts and the deep Alabama accents that surrounded him. In the first verse he refers to “Sky-Dog Slave-Trader.” Sky-Dog was the nickname the Muscle Shoals gang had for slide guitarist Duane Allman. (I have seen a lot of songwriters in my day, but I have never seen anyone compare to Mick Jagger.) When he finished the lyrics, he stood in the center of the room with a handheld mic and ran it down with the band until they had an arrangement. Then he went into the control room with Jimmy Johnson to work on the sounds as the band played the song instrumentally.
Satisfied, he retreated to the vocal booth and recorded it maybe three times. They listened to a couple of playbacks. The eighth-note tom-tom ride in the “A” verse rubbed harmonically with one note in the bass pattern. Somebody said, “Charlie, you need to tune the tom-tom, so it doesn’t rub the bass.”
Charlie said, “I never tune me drums.”
Ian Stewart, the road manager and sideman piano player who had been with them since the beginning said, “Wait a minute. You can’t say something like, ‘I never tune my drums’ and just go on.”
“Why should I tune something I’m going to go out there and beat on? I’ll hit for a while and it will change,” Charlie said, and walked off into the studio. He did and it did. Two more takes and they had it. That was the second night.
They stashed a vial of cocaine in the tack piano in the back corner of the studio. Not Spanish Tony slept on a nearby couch, guarding the goods. Keith offered Stanley and me a line. Charlie Freeman and I had done coke with Bettye LaVette on her session at Sounds of Memphis but I didn’t get it. It made me feel supernormal, taking away brain clouds I carefully constructed, but I was polite, taking my share.
That night somebody brought barbeque sauce and containers of pulled pork. As we made sandwiches, Jagger and I ended up together. “Don’t you think you could stand to lose a bit of weight?” he asked. Before I could reply, Charlie Watts answered, “He ought to kick your ass.”
Mick picked up a container of meat and walked away, eating it by hand. The same thing happened when you passed him a joint: he walked away with it. The privilege of celebrity.
The Stones wanted to play a free gig, which seemed simple enough. Their touring permit had run out; they wanted to promote it themselves. They wanted to schedule a gig in California. Jann Wenner helped them over the telephone from San Francisco. It wasn’t going well. Keith had visions of state police troopers blocking his entry to the festival ground. He was looking forward to the confrontation like some bizarre civil rights demonstration.
Albert and David Maysles, documentary filmmakers, showed up for the third night of sessions. They maneuvered around without speaking. They had filmed the Stones’ first concert of the tour in New York, and were following the band to San Francisco for the free concert.
My mother read in the Chicago newspaper an article with the headline, “WHERE ARE THE ROLLING STONES?” Nobody knew. Another thing nearly nobody knew was that their recording contract with EMI/London Group was expiring. They had signed early in the “British Invasion” and did not receive high royalty front money. Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler knew it. Wexler flew in for the last day of the session to talk turkey. Ahmet was the supercool jetsetter; Wexler was the snake charmer, old-school record man who could sweet-talk the most extreme hard bop blues musician hip to record industry hype and typical bullshit jive. Before you knew it, you had signed the napkin and given him your first-born.
When Jerry arrived the stage was set and the cast was complete for the Stones’ final act at Muscle Shoals Sounds. Everybody else was at the Holiday Inn. I was day-sleeping at the Kings Inn, a truckers’ motel on the Birmingham highway. It was impossible to sleep. I had signed to Atlantic Records as a session musician and was moving to Miami Beach with no idea what would happen next. I had watched the Rolling Stones write and record what would surely be one of their biggest hits.
I dressed carefully for the last night session. Black and white striped bell bottoms, black Spanish boots, a purple button-front undershirt, and a shiny black jacket-shirt with a multicolored paisley print scarf tied around my neck. I looked like the Summer of Love.
As different as the second night had been from the first, the third night was different still, lower key. The studio was more relaxed, settled in, yet with the feeling this was the last act.
The curtain.
Like a production in theatre,
Studio sessions take on a “play life.”
A chance camaraderie
That has forever
A life
Of its own.
The recording
Is a document
Which tells the story
In the future.
Only the players share the truth.
There is a predictable
Sadness
To the end of
The session
The play,
The end
Of the game
Yet it is the goal, the object of the whole process.
As we started
It was already over.
The song was different, too. Keith had fathered a son, Marlon; this was a lullaby. “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away” was about Keith not wanting to tour. He had a fully developed melody and chord progression, a complete chorus, and sketchy non-word verse melodies. Jagger took his green steno pad and walked to the lounge where the old beanie-weenie machine and coffee pot were located. This song took him a little longer.
Celebrity gossip columns had carried a story about Marianne Faithfull, Mick’s old girlfriend, and her rumored marriage to Lord somebody, unconfirmed. Jagger was like a high school boy about it. He turned the simple lullaby into a metaphoric tale of unrequited love and betrayal.
As they started to run down the song, Ian Stewart rose from the piano and started packing gear that wasn’t being used, as if leaving. “Well,” said Jagger. “I assume we need a keyboardist.”
He stood with Wexler and me. Wexler said, “Baby, we could call Bewey Beckett,” in his Jewish Elmer Fudd voice.
I said, “I don’t think that’s what he means.” I didn’t find out for ten years why Stew didn’t play on “Wild Horses.”
They were too out of tune for the studio’s concert grand and the Wurlitzer. I couldn’t see giving Keith the old E-note tune-up routine. I didn’t think that would work. I sought the old upright tack piano in the back of the studio where they had their cocaine stashed. When I started to play, Not-Spanish Tony woke from a deep sleep and moved the stash, making for a nice little dramatic scenario. I found a section of the old piano just out of tune enough to work with the Stones, and started trying to interpret the chord chart I had gotten from Keith. It was instantly apparent something was wrong. Keith had just learned to write a “Nashville-system” chord chart, where the chords are represented by numbers and look like a phone number.
Bill Wyman saw me having trouble, and said, “Where’d ya get them chords, mate?”
“I got them from Keith.”
“Pay no attention to him,” he said. “He has no idea what he’s doing. He only knows where he put his fingers yesterday.” This is the best description of rock ’n’ roll guitar playing I have heard.
Once I figured the song out, it all made sense. The song was in the key of G but the progression started on B minor, which Keith had called #1 on his chart, throwing the following chords up a minor third. Bill and I rewrote the chart. Little Mick came over, snatched my copy of the chart, and walked away. Fuck it, I thought, and started to play.
The song had a sort of cowboy ballad feel. All I had that would fit was my old Texas Ramsey Horton/Floyd Cramer licks. I had two. Starting with a one-note bass and an open fifth after the downbeat minor sixth, I applied my Floyd second-interval grace-note phrases wherever they fit. Charlie was dropping out for whole “A” verse patterns and coming back in like a drunken sailor falling down the stairs. Several times in the song I was literally leading the changes in the form. We struggled along for say forty-five minutes, playing the changes instrumentally with Jagger in the control room with Jimmy. I heard the click of the talkback and Jagger spoke the words that I had been dreading. “Hey, Keith,” he snarled. “What do you think about the piano?” Silence. And then Keith replied, “It’s the only thing I like.” I breathed a sigh of relief and put in my second Floyd Cramer lick with silent thanks to God and Ramsey Horton.
We got the cut quickly. Jagger was pleased with the track. Jimmy Johnson set up to overdub vocals. They took the songs in the order they were recorded. Mick and Keith were in the vocal booth on the same mic, passing a fifth of Jack Daniel’s Black Label bourbon whiskey back and forth, singing background and lead on the same pass. They were redoing “Brown Sugar” during a break in overdubbing. Stanley and I were in the control room. I thought we were alone. I said, “He’s leaving a line out that he was singing last night on tracking. And it’s a good one.”
“Tell ’em.” Charlie Watts’s voice came from the couch in front of the console. “Tell ’em,” he said, again, more emphatically.
“I’m not going to tell him,” I stuttered. Charlie rose from the couch and pressed the talkback button. “Tell him,” he ordered.
“Mick, Mick,” I said. “You’re leaving out a line that you were singing last night.”
“What is it, then?” Jagger replied.
“‘Hear him whip the women.’ Last night you were singing ‘hear him whip the women’ as a pickup to the chorus of the first verse.”
“Who said that?” Mick asked. “Was that Booth?”
“Dickinson,” Charlie replied through the talkback.
“Same thing,” Jagger replied. I’ve never figured out what he meant, though I’m sure it was a put-down.
With the vocals finished, Jimmy Johnson and Mick set about doing rough mixes. Jimmy Johnson had been playing guitar on the daytime R. B. Greaves sessions and cutting the Stones overnight. He had been awake for at least three days. His eyes were bugging out like a tree frog’s.
As they mixed, I couldn’t help notice the Maysles brothers setting up two light trees pointing at the control room window from the tracking side of the glass. They had been shooting with available light only, which was lacking. My vast theatrical training at Baylor Theatre led me to realize that whatever they shot with lights had more chance of making it to film. I studied the situation.
Nobody was on the big couch where Charlie had been hiding. The lights and the camera aimed directly at it. I had the last joint. Keith knew it. As they started working on “Wild Horses,” I put the joint behind my ear and sat down on the couch. Keith joined me. The light came on. Tape and camera began to roll, and I was in the movies.
Two shots from the Muscle Shoals session survive in Gimme Shelter: a shot of Mick and Jimmy Johnson behind the mixing console and the shot of Keith and me on the couch, eyes closed during the “Wild Horses” playback. Thank you, Baylor Theatre.
We all met at the Holiday Inn restaurant for a farewell breakfast. Jagger disappeared for twenty minutes. When he reemerged, he had changed clothes for the first time in three days, now wearing a white suit, a long red and white striped scarf, oversized golfer tam, a cartoonish bebop-cat hat, and dark glasses. He had also managed to get high as a kite. His voice had dropped at least an octave. He sat between Wexler and Ertegun and started talking about eighteen million dollars.
During our time on the couch, Keith asked me, “What do you think about Atlantic?” I gave him the old party line. We had just signed on to the Dixie Flyer deal and I was a true believer: tradition, catalogue, musical and genre knowledge, Tom Dowd, the atomic scientist engineer. I gave him the hard sell. Now with Jagger talking turkey with Wexler and Ahmet, it started making sense. They were negotiating the Stones’ new record deal.
I was sitting in a booth with Bill Wyman and his white-bunny-furclad ice princess, who spoke not a word. A waitress asked, “You boys in a group?”
“Yes,” announced Wyman. “We’re Martha and the Vandellas.” The girl shrugged and took our order.
The Stones (and Stanley) went to Altamont. I went back to Memphis with a 7-1/2 ips reel-to-reel tape copy of “Wild Horses.”
“Don’t let your disc jockey friends copy that,” Mick warned.
“He ought to kick your ass,” Charlie Watts grunted.