Mick Jagger / Keith Richards /6:57
Musicians
Mick Jagger: vocals, harmonica
Keith Richards: rhythm guitar, slide guitar
Brian Jones: percussion
Bill Wyman: bass
Charlie Watts: drums
Recorded
Olympic Sound Studios, London: February, March, May 1969
Sunset Sound Studios and/or Elektra Studios, Los Angeles: October–November 1969
Technical Team
Producer: Jimmy Miller
Sound engineer: Glyn Johns
Assistant sound engineers: Vic Smith, George Chkiantz, Bruce Botnick, Jerry Hansen, Alan O’Duffy
In April 1969, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards took a few days’ vacation in southern Italy, at Positano on the Amalfi coast. This charming town is built on a hillside and is bathed in sunshine almost all year round. It was in this delightful setting that various tracks on the album Let It Bleed, including “Midnight Rambler,” were born. How did the Glimmer Twins come to write one of their darkest songs in such an enchanting place? This is just one more mystery in the long and enthralling history of the Rolling Stones. “Keith and I went to Italy, and Keith had this idea for ‘Midnight Rambler,’ so we just started changing the tempos within the tune,” explains Mick Jagger. “Melodically it remains the same thing, it’s just a lot of tempo changes. We worked on it with acoustic guitar and harmonica, just jammed it, went through the tempo changes and had it all organized by the time we had to record it for Let It Bleed.”
The figure of the “midnight rambler” was inspired by the serial killer Albert DeSalvo, who, between June 1962 and January 1964, raped and strangled thirteen women in Boston, Massachusetts, spreading panic throughout New England. The “Boston Strangler” was eventually arrested in November 1964 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was killed in jail in 1973.
Mick Jagger made direct use of DeSalvo’s confessions when writing his gruesome lyrics. The atmosphere is all the more oppressive as the singer identifies with the serial killer just as he identified with Lucifer in “Sympathy for the Devil.” The narrator addresses his wife and ends up confessing that he is the “rambler”: I’m called the hit-and-run raper in anger, the knife-sharpened tippie toe… or just the shoot ’em dead brainbell jangler.
“‘Midnight Rambler’ is a Chicago blues. The chord sequence isn’t, but the sound is pure Chicago,” explains Keith Richards in Life. “I knew how the rhythm should go. It was in the tightness of the chord sequence, the D’s and the A’s and the E’s. It wasn’t a blues sequence, but it came out like heavy-duty blues. That’s one of the most original blues you’ll hear from the Stones.” In an interview with Guitar World, he clarifies: “When we did ‘Midnight Rambler,’ nobody went in there with the idea of doing a blues opera, basically. Or a blues in four parts. That’s just the way it turned out. I think that’s the strength of the Stones or any good band. You can give them a song half raw and they’ll cook it.”
“Midnight Rambler” is dominated by Keith, at least on the instrumental level. In order to obtain his extraordinary guitar sound, he is probably using the same combination of guitar and amp as on “Gimme Shelter,” in other words the Maton SE 777 through his Triumph Silicon 100. From the very first notes of the riff, Keith’s guitar grabs the listener’s attention with its semi-distorted blues sonority that conveys all that African American culture he so admires, a Chicago blues sound, to be precise. For that matter, “Midnight Rambler” could almost have been recorded at Chess Studios with Ron Malo at the controls. Respect, however, is due to Jimmy Miller and Glyn Johns for their excellent work on the track. Not to forget the incomparable touch of riff master Keith and his obsession with sound and the perfect note. Vic Smith, one of Glyn Johns’s assistants, would later testify to the guitarist’s quest for the absolute: “One of my strongest memories is the guitar solo. We spent a whole week doing the guitar solo, which was all done in one take. So it would happen night after night. Just Keith would come in the studio with Jimmy and we’d be doing the ‘Midnight Rambler’ guitar solo and if that atmosphere wasn’t right or the vibe wasn’t right for that night, we’d jack it and come back another night. I think it took about five nights to get the final take.” Now that Brian Jones had thrown in the towel as far as the guitar was concerned, and was contributing only percussion to the track, it was Keith, bottleneck on finger, who was taking care of the slide parts. Had it not been for Mick Taylor, a specialist in the technique, he might easily have continued playing slide. Not only is Keith the king of the riff, he is also an excellent and probably much-underrated guitarist. On vocals, Mick Jagger is by no means outdone on this track, however. His performance is nothing short of a lesson in blues rock, and the rambler is a role he inhabits with an incredible intensity. “Midnight Rambler” assumes its full magnitude onstage, one of the high points of any Stones concert, halfway between rock and theater. Mick also underscores the Chicago blues flavor of the track, playing some superb harmonica from the very first bars. It is difficult not to think of Brian, who, just a short time before, had been setting the band’s music alight with incendiary, highly inspired harmonica solos.
“Midnight Rambler” also provides Charlie Watts with an opportunity to rhythmically differentiate four different sections, all highly successful and all involving an acceleration of the tempo or impressive drum breaks. The person who can be heard banging the head of a tambourine with a stick between 5:05 and 5:22 seems to be Brian. As for Bill Wyman, his bass part provides unfailing support. With a powerful, though somewhat undermixed sound, he is most probably on his new Vox Astro IV plugged into his Hiwatt amp. Lasting almost seven minutes, “Midnight Rambler” is one of the Stones’ longest tracks as well as one of their most successful.