JUMPIN’ JACK FLASH

Mick Jagger / Keith Richards / 3:38

SINGLE

Jumpin’ Jack Flash / Child of the Moon

RELEASE DATE

United Kingdom: May 24, 1968

Record label: Decca

RECORD NUMBER: DECCA F 12782

Musicians

Mick Jagger: vocals

Keith Richards: acoustic guitars, bass, backing vocals, bass tom

Brian Jones: electric rhythm guitar

Bill Wyman: organ, Mellotron (?)

Charlie Watts: drums

Ian Stewart: piano

Jimmy Miller: backing vocal

Rocky Dijon (?): maracas

Recorded

Olympic Sound Studios, London: March 12, 29, 1968

Technical Team

Producer: Jimmy Miller

Sound engineer: Eddie Kramer

Mixing: George Chkiantz, Glyn Johns

Genesis

In Life, Keith Richards looks back at the genesis of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”: “[The lyrics] came from a gray dawn at Redlands. Mick and I had been up all night, it was raining outside and there was the sound of these heavy stomping rubber boots near the window, belonging to my gardener, Jack Dyer.… It woke Mick up. He said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s Jack. That’s jumping Jack.’… Mick said, ‘Flash,’ and suddenly we had this phrase with a great rhythm and ring to it. So we got to work on it and wrote it.”²

The main character in the song may have been inspired by Keith’s gardener, but the adventures he recounts during the three and a half minutes or so are the fruits of a simultaneously fertile and feverish imagination that was also most likely feeding on distant memories either lived or heard. I was born in a crossfire hurricane, sings Mick in the intro. Is this a reference to the bombing of London during the Second World War? What can be said for sure is that the narrator is deeply traumatized and prey to contradictory feelings that may have damaged his mind. He claims to have been raised by a toothless, bearded hag and schooled with a strap right across my back, then drowned, washed up, and left for dead, before being crowned with a spike right through my head. In short, his life has been a torment, but this does not prevent the Christlike (?) figure from displaying a furious optimism in the surging refrain: But it’s all right, I’m Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas, gas, gas.

After two flower-power-tinged albums, were the Stones taking a step back with this number and heralding the end of a dream? The character of Jumpin’ Jack Flash seems totally alien to the countercultural world. On the contrary, this figure scarred forever by his past displays a frenzied individualism that verges on masochism. In 1995, Mick would explain in an interview that this text was all about “having a hard time and getting out. Just a metaphor for getting out of all the acid things.”¹⁹ By implication the period of Their Satanic Majesties Request…

Hats off to Bill…

Although credited to Jagger-Richards, the powerful, bewitching music of this number, very much in the image of the “lived” experience of Jumpin’ Jack Flash, is partly the work of Bill Wyman: “One night during rehearsals at Morden,” recalls Bill in Stone Alone,⁶ “I was sitting at the piano waiting for Mick and Keith to arrive. Charlie and Brian came in as I began playing the electric keyboard, messing around with a great riff I’ve found. Charlie and Brian began jamming with me and it sounded really good and tough.” Bill recalls Mick, who arrived at that moment, saying to him: “Keep playing that, it sounds great, don’t forget it.”¹ “A few weeks later,” continues Bill, “when we were in the Olympic studio, out came my riff, the backbone for Mick’s terrific lyrics: ‘I was born in a crossfire hurricane’. And we all worked on the music. The part I’d composed worked perfectly—but the credit for this, one of our best tracks ever, reads Jagger-Richards.”⁶

Although the riff originally came from Bill Wyman, there can be no mistaking the fact that Keith Richards found the right sound for it and made it the stuff of rock ’n’ roll legend: “All my stuff came together and all done on a cassette player. With ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘Street Fighting Man’ I’d discovered a new sound I could get out of an acoustic guitar.”² In terms of its musical qualities, Keith Richards offers the following insight into “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”: “It’s almost Arabic or very old, archaic, classical, the chord setups you could only hear in Gregorian chant or something like that. And it’s a weird mixture of your actual rock and roll and at the same time this weird echo of very, very ancient music that you don’t even know.”²

A New Aesthetic

“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was released five and a half months after the album Their Satanic Majesties Request. The contrast is more than striking—it is spectacular, breathtaking. Psychedelic rock has given way to a new Rolling Stones aesthetic: a savage, sensual, and untamable blues rock, a music that sounds not so much like a return to the virtues of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “19th Nervous Breakdown,” but more of a full-blown renaissance. No doubt this new work by the five musicians can be seen as the result of their growing experience, but it is also an expression of the talent of the producer Jimmy Miller, who launched his collaboration with the London quintet with this number.

From the moment of its release in the United Kingdom, on May 24, 1968, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was a runaway success. It was number 1 in the UK for two weeks from June 25, 1968. In the United States, it peaked at number 3 on the Billboard chart on July 6 (and was number 1 for a week on the Cashbox chart). In the Federal Republic of Germany, the single shot to number 1 on May 28. In France, it reached number 8 just after the student revolt.

Production

“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” is the first Stones song to be produced by Jimmy Miller. Eddie Kramer, who had been the Stones’ assistant sound engineer since Between the Buttons, assumed the role of sound engineer in place of Glyn Johns. “And the first thing Jimmy Miller did was fire me because he’d been using Eddie Kramer as an engineer,”¹⁵ recalls Johns.

When testing his new cassette recorder, a Philips EL 3302, which in 1967 represented a real technical revolution, Keith noticed that by using the basic mic that came with the device, he could saturate the input with his acoustic guitar to obtain a distorted sound not unlike an electric guitar. “You were using the cassette player as a pickup and an amplifier at the same time. You were forcing acoustic guitars through a cassette player, and what came out the other end was electric as hell.”² Thrilled with the results, he told Jimmy Miller about it, and he and Eddie Kramer set about reproducing the same sound in the studio. Miller placed his own cassette recorder (most probably a Wollensak 4310) on the floor and positioned Richards with his acoustic and Watts with his snare drum around it. “After we cut the track on the cassette machine, we played it back on a little speaker, then rerecorded that on one track of a four-track machine [Olympic Studios was not yet equipped with an eight-track]. That was the guide track, then everybody overdubbed to that,”⁷³ explains Eddie Kramer. And Keith then played the intro on his Gibson Hummingbird, tuned to open D: “Then there was a capo on it [second fret], to get that really tight sound,”⁷⁴ (and to enable him to play in open E).

Keith then added a second guitar, this time with “Nashville” tuning (the four lowest strings are replaced with the same four strings of a 12-string guitar [the finer gauge] which are then tuned up an octave). He also plays some excellent bass on his Fender Precision, making an effective contribution to the power of this track. It is interesting to note that in the verses he does not shadow the riff but repeats the same note, a B (the tonality is imprecise, probably because of the guide track recorded on the cassette player, whose speed fluctuates). It is Stu who shadows the riff on the piano. Brian, meanwhile, adds some guitar using Keith’s Gibson ES 330TD. Bill is on the organ and is audible mainly in the coda (2:44).

Another keyboard sound can be heard from 2:51, a sustained note somewhere between the harmonica and horns. Is it a Hammond? Is it the Mellotron? Difficult to say. As for Charlie, he has not yet replaced his Ludwig kit with the Gretsch, and contributes some very good, efficient drumming of a somewhat sober character—bearing Jimmy Miller’s signature—that differs considerably from his usual style. Charlie reveals that he is not the one playing the toms: “Keith is playing my floor tom-tom on it to give the ‘boom-da, boom-da’ sound.”⁹ Another key rhythmic element is provided by the maracas, played presumably by the excellent Rocky Dijon, a newcomer to the world of the Stones. Finally, Mick, who is responsible for the legendary lyrics, gives a classic performance, quite simply recording one of the best takes of his career. Three voices can be distinguished on backing vocals: Mick, Keith, and Jimmy, the latter probably taking the lowest notes. We have come a long way from the rough and ready harmonies of the early days.

Keith considers the final results to be “… the best thing we ever did with Jimmy Miller…”² and describes the number as a “… ‘Satisfaction’ in reverse”² Mick, on the other hand, takes a more qualified view: “I remember the recording session for ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash,’ and not liking the way it was done very much. It was a bit haphazard—and although the end result was pretty good, it was not quite what I wanted.”⁹ A difference of opinion between the Glimmer Twins, then?