THE FIRST POST-WYMAN effort was 1994’s Voodoo Lounge. The process of replacing half of their rhythm section wasn’t easy. The Stones interviewed dozens of bassists to fill Wyman’s shoes.
INTRODUCING DARRYL JONES
When did you first hear that the Stones were hiring?
DARRYL JONES: A friend of mine called me on the phone and said, “Bill Wyman is leaving the Stones.” He found Mick’s management’s number and I called. Whoever I spoke to said nothing was going to happen immediately, but they’d add my name to the list. Then I spoke to someone in the camp after I got the gig who told me, “You know, your name was already on the list.” I had met Mick very briefly when I played with Sting.
Darryl’s choice of beverages may have helped him land the gig. Darryl told us that when he was playing with Miles Davis in New York, he spent a lot of time hanging out in Irish pubs, drinking Guinness. By coincidence, all the bassists who auditioned for the Stones were offered a Guinness by Ronnie Wood, as a kind of icebreaker, maybe even a test. Most declined.
DARRYL JONES: Ronnie said, “Great to meet you. Do you want a Guinness?” I said, “Sure, I dig Guinness.”
Darryl’s time with the Stones was off to a great start! As for the audition itself?
DARRYL JONES: I was happy to be there and was looking forward to playing, no matter what the outcome. I walked in and saw Keith and Mick. Then Mick said, “Listen Darryl. If you don’t know the songs, we’ll teach you the songs, and then we’ll have you audition. From the beginning they created a really relaxed atmosphere. That they were that loose and that willing to really give me a chance made a real difference.
The final call about the band’s new bassist would belong to Charlie—an unprecedented position of power within the band for him. But Charlie and Darryl were a natural fit, both personality-wise, and musically.
DARRYL JONES: I think my work with Miles Davis didn’t hurt that.
Darryl told a funny story about how after the decision had been made to hire him for the tour, no one bothered to tell him at first.
DARRYL JONES: Charlie told Keith, “Don’t you think it would be a good idea to tell him he’s hired?” That’s when Keith told me. It was January of ’94.
How is it playing with Keith?
DARRYL JONES: I love standing next to him. Nobody plays guitar that way. He is a rhythm motherfucker. He’s one of the most improvisational guitarists I’ve worked with. He’s always trying new things. It’s always exciting. He’s always trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. That irreverence is a big part of the Stones’ sound.
Darryl brought his own fluid and funky style of bass playing to the Stones, not easy when replacing a legend like Bill Wyman, who was known for anchoring the Stones’ sound.
DARRYL JONES: If it was a case that the bass line that Bill played was really the song, then I cut it close to what Bill played. There are certain things on “Miss You” that have to be done for it to be “Miss You.” But I listened to the feeling of the songs and tried to re-create the feeling from what I do naturally.
Chicago-born bassist Darryl Jones
Jones seemed the perfect man for the job, as he was friendly with Keith’s colleagues in the X-Pensive Winos, and had played with acts as diverse as Eric Clapton, Madonna, and Miles Davis, the latter gig no doubt endearing him to Charlie Watts in particular.
CHUCK LEAVELL: I was not a part of that process . . . There was something like eighteen, twenty guys that auditioned for the gig. The word that I got through the band was that they were all good. Any one of them would work fine. “Charlie it’s up to you.”
Darryl’s such a versatile player; he’s well versed in many styles. He knows when to pump it and he knows when to lay back. He has a great sensibility of music. He’s a superb musician.
Voodoo Lounge also featured a new producer. Detroit-born Don Was saw his first Stones show in 1964 on the band’s very first trip to the Motor City. He has famously stated that hearing Exile on Main Street helped him decide to drop out of the University of Michigan in 1972.
DON WAS: I knew Mick a bit but I’d never met Keith before. I went to an audition in New York, where they were trying out bass players. My interview for the job was listening to Keith tell me why he doesn’t need a producer.
Like Jimmy Miller before him, a fine bass player in his own right, Was became an active participant in the studio.
KEITH RICHARDS: To me, [Don Was is] very much like working with Jimmy Miller, who’s a producer but also a musician. To the Stones, it’s a real extra plus to have a guy that knows how things are played, what’s done. And Don’s real contribution was, “You’ve got a hundred songs here. We have to choose!” (laughs) You know, “Let’s cut this list down by half to start with, and then eliminate,” because there was just songs coming up. We had more and more stuff and we were in danger of just being buried in an avalanche of material. And it was his job to hone down that. Also I had Don Smith engineering, the guy that did the two Winos records, as well. So I had a team going there that was very well used to working with each other. Don Was, the new guy, slotted in beautifully and handled the personal stuff really well. Just keep your mind on what you’re doing, you know? The atmosphere was very much Exile on Main St., actually. I can’t think of sessions since where things were quite that loose and free, and ideas were popping up.
Was would go on to be the band’s producer for eighteen years and counting, even getting the job of remastering Exile on Main St. (much to our friend Andy Johns’s chagrin) and also Some Girls, the most recent Rolling Stones reissue as of this writing.
There’s no doubt Voodoo Lounge has a retro feel that connected with Stones fans and the resulting tour showed that the Stones still had major drawing power—they played to over eight million people and racked up half a billion dollars.
The Stones at the Meadowlands on the Bridges to Babylon tour
Chuck Leavell’s role expanded for the Voodoo Lounge tour. He became a de facto stage manager for the band and also it was one of his responsibilities to create the set lists.
CHUCK LEAVELL: The next tour that came around was Voodoo Lounge . . . I think there were some in the band that felt we really didn’t need the extra keyboard; there really wasn’t a whole lot of call for orchestral sounds with the band. There were some songs: “Angie,” for instance, had strings on the record. So I suggested, “Why don’t we get a horn section that has a fellow that can play keyboards. If we have two or three songs that need a string part or some other keyboard part, then he could come down and do that . . .” That seemed to go down well with everybody.
Another album followed in 1997, Bridges to Babylon. Though to be fair, that record is more like a mash-up of a Richards solo album and a Jagger solo album.
KEITH RICHARDS: A long way from Andrew Loog Oldham’s kitchen—a collaboration without actually being together.
Despite the unusual process of getting the album made, the Stones would go on to tour it for the better part of two years. This was emblematic of who the Stones had become by the second half of their existence: road warriors intent on making money and spreading the gospel of rock ’n’ roll.
KEITH RICHARDS: Being on the road is the life of the band, it’s the essence of it. Without that, the band wouldn’t be capable of doing anything else. If we stopped doing everything else, and could still be able to play live, it would be fine. But if the band couldn’t play live anymore, you can’t just do recording sessions and playing for yourself, the only way you’re going to get the full experience of the band, the band needs to be able to improve all the time, is to have an audience to play to.
I enjoy the whole thing about being on the road, I enjoy the pace of it, and anything that would normally be a drag maybe is really insignificant because you do have those two and a half hours on stage. I sometimes feel sorry for the people that come round on tours and I don’t know how they make it because they don’t have those two and a half hours on stage. They just have been watching the band each night and saying yeah, that was a good show, living it through us, that would be murder for me. I enjoy watching the band improve, tighten up, all the time. The more it plays, the better it gets, which is always very sad that last week when you know you’ve got three more gigs left . . .
For two or three months it’s total energy output and then everybody’s gone, there’s nothing to do. You’re ready to go but there’s nothing that requires that amount of energy that you’ve still built up.
BRIDGES TO BABYLON
Mick Jagger famously studied for two years at the London School of Economics. He never did graduate, and instead had to learn many lessons the hard way. Like so many of the seminal blues artists they admired, the Stones in their early years were ripped off, exploited, taken advantage of, and advised improperly about management contracts, record deals, royalties, and even performance fees.
But a lot has changed.
In the beginning, the measure of the Stones’ success was taken by the teen magazines and fanzines; then it was by the more serious rock periodicals such as Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, Fusion, and Creem; the once-mighty general-interest magazines like Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post all got in on the act too; but these days you’re more likely to find accurate information about the Stones juggernaut in Fortune magazine or the Wall Street Journal.
The Stones began to take control of their finances as early as the free Hyde Park concert in 1969, and the formation of Rolling Stones Records a year or so later. Since then, they have made very few errors in their quest to maximize earnings and profit potential. They have been in the vanguard of every financial growth spurt in the evolution of rock ’n’ roll. Even leaving out recording and publishing royalties, here is a litany of ways in which the Rolling Stones have paved the way for all the others who followed in their wake. Here are ten of the Stones’ ingenious marketing ploys:
1. Partnering with Granada Productions to make a documentary about the Hyde Park concert.
2. Commissioning a film about the ’69 US tour (that captured all of the drama and turmoil of Altamont).
3. The Jōvan sponsorship of the 1981 tour, notably the first major rock tour sponsorship. (Total investment for name on posters and tickets: one million dollars)
4. Also in ’81, and also a first, using a concert as a pay-per-view event.
5. During the Steel Wheels tour in ’89, launching a Stones-themed clothing line sold not only at the concerts but also in retail outlets. This too was a first.
6. In 1991, they became the first rock band to release an IMAX concert film, The Rolling Stones at the Max.
7. In 1995, the Stones made an unprecedented deal linking one of their songs to the ad campaign of a major consumer product. Here’s the story Pop-History Dig chronicled: “In the annals of advertising history, one of the great coups in the use of rock ’n’ roll music to help sell things came in the summer of 1995 when Bill Gates of the Microsoft Corporation used the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” song to help launch his company’s Windows 95 computer software. As the story goes, it was Gates’s idea to use the song, as the tune dovetailed nicely with the prominent “start button” feature that appeared on the Windows computer screen. Initially it was rumored that Gates paid something in the neighborhood of ten to fourteen million dollars to the Stones to use their song. The actual figure may have been lower than that. But as the story goes, Gates reportedly asked Jagger personally how much it would cost to use the song. Jagger, being the naughty boy he is, threw out what he thought would be a very high number, something in the millions; a number that would surely dissuade Gates in his quest. But Jagger’s ploy didn’t faze Gates—at least according to legend. Whatever amount Jagger had suggested, Gates agreed to it on the spot.
8. In September of 2002, the Stones did their first live television concert ever, for HBO subscribers only from Madison Square Garden in New York.
9. Brilliant repackaging/remastering of classic albums, like Exile on Main Street in 2010 and Some Girls in 2011. Don Was told Rolling Stone, “There’s so much material if they never went in the studio again, you could have a new Stones album every year for the next fifty years, and it would all be good.”
10. Bridges to Babylon on PBS in 1998. The Stones took their act to public television, a savvy move that helped PBS gin up donations and also made money for the band. As a certain lucky DJ said on the radio, “Mick and Keith have been on public television more this week than Bert and Ernie.”
