This photo was taken in 1980. Ronnie, Mick, and Keith had an interesting year ahead of them in 1981
NINETEEN EIGHTY-ONE was an interesting year for the Stones on a number of fronts: a new album; a new tour; a new technology; and a new single destined to take its place among the greatest and most memorable Stones songs of all time.
Let’s tackle that last one first. “Start Me Up” was just another one of those instant Stones classics solidifying Keith Richards’s nickname: “The Human Riff.”
BILLY ALTMAN: On “Start Me Up,” I think the Chuck Berry riffs that Keith had teethed on as a kid, they have just become a part of his DNA as well. It’s all just a Chuck Berry riff turned a little bit sideways but now they don’t sound like Keith doing a Chuck Berry riff, they just sound like Keith Richards. At that point, it had become his own.
Charlie Watts’s work stands out as well.
BILLY ALTMAN: Charlie is just tremendous on “Start Me Up.” He uses space so well, which is something you don’t think of a rock drummer using much. They’re always trying to fill space. But Charlie is one of these drummers who understands the room between on his drum kit, especially on the later albums. I think it goes back to his being a jazz drummer. If you listen to the end when the song slows down and then starts to wind back up again, he becomes almost the center of the song as they use him to build everything up throughout the choruses.
The funny thing is that “Start Me Up” is a song that had been lying around for a long while before it ever made it out into the world on the Tattoo You album. Keith explains:
KEITH RICHARDS: That was in the can for ages, and mostly we’d forgotten about it. We had about thirty takes of it reggae and there was just one or two other takes where we did it with a backbeat, just straight rock ’n’ roll. So to us it was that interminable reggae track we did way back then. And then—right at the end of the reel—was this rock ’n’ roll version, you know.
While the song seemed like a sure thing to be the Stones’ ninth number one single, it never quite made it. It was stalled at number two for a couple of weeks by the likes of (get this!) “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)” by Christopher Cross, “Private Eyes” by Daryl Hall and John Oates, and worst of all, “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John, which stayed at the top of the American charts for a “physically” sickening ten weeks! Though denied number one status during its initial run, “Start Me Up” has more than earned its weight in gold in a number of high-profile ways in the years since. It was the show opener at many future Stones concerts; Microsoft paid millions for it to use for their Windows 95 advertising campaign; it has become a staple at sporting events of every conceivable kind; and it was one of the three songs that the Stones performed at halftime during the 2006 Super Bowl (chapter 48).
And if all of this wasn’t enough, “Start Me Up” served the very important purpose of introducing or reintroducing the Rolling Stones to generations of fans in America and globally as well. On August 1, 1981, MTV made its debut on cable television systems all across the United States. Stephen Davis explained the new wrinkle this way:
STEPHEN DAVIS: Traditionally musicians had always traveled to their audiences to sell their music. Now, with a video in heavy rotation to a select audience, a band could appear before several million fans several times per day. For rich bands like the Stones, video obviated the ancient need to keep moving or die. MTV also became a major launching pad for solo stars: Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, and—in epic fashion—Michael Jackson, whose Thriller album became the biggest seller in recording history on the strength of short- and long-form videos. Among the video audience, bands became almost passé. The video revolution’s cameras loved a face more than a band, a fact not lost on ever-ambitious Mick Jagger . . .
Longtime collaborator Michael Lindsay-Hogg was given the assignment to shoot the video for “Start Me Up.” He recalled:
MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: In ’81 we talk about doing “Start Me Up” and “Waiting on a Friend” and “Neighbors.” This was the beginning of MTV. Mick and Charlie and I went out for lunch one day and Mick said, “Have you seen anything from MTV yet? Because that’s the future.” So we did “Start Me Up” very down and dirty. I’ve always thought with the Rolling Stones, to do their performance is a gift to the director—you don’t want to get in their way too much.
Screen capture from 1981’s ubiquitous Start Me Up video
In the early days of MTV, “Start Me Up” was one of the most programmed videos on the upstart channel. And, true to Stephen Davis’s observation, the TV screen just loved Mick Jagger’s face. Yes, the rest of the band was there, but when you look at that video over thirty years later, you can’t help but notice that it’s mostly Mick, Mick, and Mick! His well-toned body; his bare arms flailing about; his face; but, more than any of those features, it’s his lips! As true as it was in the ’60s when we first noticed them, it’s those lips that hypnotize and mesmerize. Here’s what noted author Tom Wolfe had to say about them back in the day:
TOM WOLFE: In the center of the stage a short thin boy with a sweatshirt on, the neck of the sweatshirt almost falling off his shoulders, they are so narrow, all surmounted by this enormous head . . . with the hair puffing down over the forehead and ears, this boy has exceptional lips. He has two peculiarly gross and extraordinary red lips. They hang off his face like giblets. Slowly his eyes pour over the flaming bud horde (see chapter 11!), soft as Karo syrup, and close, and then the lips start spreading into the most languid, most confidential, the wettest, most labial, most concupiscent grin imaginable. Nirvana! The buds start shrieking, pawing toward the stage.
Fueled by MTV, Tattoo You would go on to become the Stones’ most successful selling album to date.
BILLY ALTMAN: Tattoo You as an album sounds a bit disjointed. A lot of the songs sound better out of context as opposed to sitting down and listening to the whole thing as an entire album. “Start Me Up,” “Hang Fire,” “Waiting on a Friend” are all really good songs that I think sounded better on the radio than they did on the album when listened to as a whole. I think that’s probably a function of it getting recorded over an amount of time.
Tattoo You itself was a patchwork quilt of outtakes and leftovers from Some Girls, Emotional Rescue, Black and Blue, even as far back as Goats Head Soup. But an album was needed to tour behind, and this is the one that came off the Stones’ assembly line. It put the group back on the radio and, even more important, back on the road to start the ’80s.
