On September 1, 1973, the day after the release of Goats Head Soup, the Rolling Stones, along with Billy Preston (keyboards), Steve Madaio (trumpet), and Trevor Lawrence (saxophone), embarked on an extensive promotional tour through Europe that would continue until mid-October. Their itinerary took in Austria, West Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Belgium. There was no question of the band performing in France, as Keith had been prohibited from entering the country for a period of two years after being found guilty of possessing heroin in October 1973. Hence the second concert at the National Forest in Brussels on October 17, given for French fans ferried to the venue on special trains chartered by the radio station RTL.
The Goats Head Soup promotional tour wrapped up with a concert at the Deutschlandhalle in West Berlin on October 19, 1973. Not long after, the Rolling Stones returned to Germany (Munich, to be precise) to record almost all of what would become their twelfth (British) studio album, It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll. This title only partially reflects the music on the record. Although the title song, “If You Can’t Rock Me,” “Luxury,” and even “Dance Little Sister” follow in the good old Rolling Stones tradition (at least since the band’s flamboyant return to blues rock with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Honky Tonk Women”), and although “Short and Curlies” is a blues number that sounds as if it could have been recorded back in the early days of the Stones’ career and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” is a respectful tribute to Motown soul, some other tracks are imbued with a very different spirit or, to put it more accurately, continue what the songwriters Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had begun on Goats Head Soup (even if Munich is a long way from Kingston!). In other words, the Glimmer Twins once again accord an important place to ballads (“Till the Next Goodbye” and “If You Really Want to Be My Friend”) and explore new sonorities: Latin American in the case of “Time Waits for No One,” and funky in the case of “Fingerprint File.”
To a considerable extent, the lyrics to these songs derive from Jagger’s personal experience. “If You Can’t Rock Me” deals directly with the furtive relationship between a rock star and the women who admire him, but could also be seen as a reflection on marriage. Wedlock is again at the center of the narrator’s preoccupations in “If You Really Want to Be My Friend,” in which he asks the person with whom he is sharing his life for a little more understanding and freedom. As for the title song, “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” is in a similar spirit to “If You Can’t Rock Me”: a singer is prepared to go to any lengths to seduce the woman he loves all over again. At the same time, however, the song is a vehement diatribe against journalists and segments of the public who were asking whether the Rolling Stones had any kind of future. On a very different note, “Till the Next Goodbye” is a very pretty love song steeped in the atmosphere of New York, while “Time Waits for No One” is a meditation on nostalgia and the inexorable passing of time, which is as precious as diamonds.
Despite both turning thirty during the sessions for It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll, the Glimmer Twins had lost none of their inspiration when it came to provoking or castigating conservative attitudes. “Luxury,” the story of a disgruntled employee of a Texas oil company who has had enough of working seven days a week simply to enrich his bosses, is nothing short of a social manifesto, while the heroine of “Dance Little Sister” is a teenage girl in a tight-fitting dress who turns heads on the streets of Port of Spain (Trinidad and Tobago). Finally, “Short and Curlies” is an all-out attack on women who emasculate men, in truth a misogynistic tirade.
It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll was released in the United States on October 16, 1974, and in the rest of the world two days later. It was a hit in the United States and the United Kingdom, where it was respectively number 1 and number 2 (and certified gold), and also in France. In general, the album was greeted favorably by the music press. Jon Landau, for example, saw it as “one of the most intriguing and mysterious, as well as the darkest, of all Rolling Stones records.”100 Other rock journalists emphasize the major role played by Mick Taylor in the recording sessions. In the columns of the NME, Nick Kent wrote: “Mick Taylor was involved in the actual composition of ‘Time Waits for No One,’ even though the writing credits will go to Jagger and Richards, as ever. It also turns out that Taylor has made creative inserts into other tracks like ‘Till the Next Goodbye’ and ‘If You Really Want to Be My Friend.’ Still no credit.”1 Was it this lack of recognition that would drive Mick Taylor to leave the band? “I had a falling out with Mick Jagger over some songs I should have been credited with co-writing on (the album) ‘It’s Only Rock ’N’ Roll,’” he would reveal in 2007. “I don’t get paid for some of the biggest-selling records of all time. Frankly, I was ripped off.”102
For whatever reason, It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll turned out to be Taylor’s last album with the Rolling Stones. His departure was officially announced on December 12, 1974, just two months after the record went on sale. In the same vein, Bill Wyman’s recording between December 1973 and February 1974 of Monkey Grip (released May 1974), the first solo album by a member of the Stones (with the exception of the atypical Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka, 1971), testifies to the bassist’s desire to express himself outside the group, in other words away from the influence of the Jagger-Richards duo. Evidently it was not all smooth sailing on board the good ship Rolling Stones, but although it may not be one of their best, to produce an album like It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll during such times shows that the band was capable of weathering choppy waters.
Mick Jagger asked Guy Peellaert to design the cover for It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll. Peellaert was a Belgian artist and illustrator, influenced by both pop art and psychedelia, who collaborated on the French satirical magazine Hara-Kiri during the second half of the sixties. At the beginning of the seventies, he made a name for himself with the publication of Rock Dreams, a collection of 125 portraits of rock stars that combined painting with photomontage. The portrait of the Stones was particularly provocative, depicting Brian, Keith, and Charlie in SS uniforms with Mick dressed in only a garter belt, surrounded by four young girls, naked, one of whom is playing the piano. Apparently impressed by this image, Jagger decided to commission Peellaert for the cover of the band’s new album. The artist produced an illustration in the same spirit as those that had made Rock Dreams so successful. It depicts the five Stones, in the guise of the Olympic deities, descending the red-carpeted steps of a colonnaded temple to the acclaim of a crowd of young women clad in Roman togas who are giving the Roman salute. In the foreground is a group of young girls joining hands in a children’s dance. The reverse simply shows the steps and the marble columns with the song titles. The cover of It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll was chosen by the British music magazine NME as the best record cover of 1974.
With It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll, one story ends and another begins. It was the first album since the highly atypical Their Satanic Majesties Request to be produced by the Rolling Stones, or more precisely the Glimmer Twins, following the exit of Jimmy Miller after six years of good and loyal service. Heroin is not a good mentor, as the brilliant producer discovered to his detriment. Keith recalls him carving swastikas into the desk at Island Studios: “He had assumed that anybody could adopt my lifestyle after a while, but he hadn’t realised that my diet is very, very rare.”9 As a result, Miller was dismissed, permanently and irrevocably, despite all the assistance he had given the band. Keith could not speak highly enough of him after the event, however: “He was one of the warmest guys and an incredible friend. We made our best records with him.”103 Apparently this was not enough… Andy Johns, initiated into dope by the master himself in 1970, would meet the same fate. The severity of his addiction meant that he was nearing the end of his collaboration with the Stones, and It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll would be his swan song. The final firing was that of Bobby Keys, who had also become overdependent on hard drugs. He incurred the wrath of the Glimmer Twins when he decided to take a bath with a young beauty in a tub filled with Dom Pérignon rather than join them onstage with his sax, effectively leaving the band in the lurch. Keith later wrote: “And it took me ten goddamn years or more to get him back in the band, because Mick was implacable, and rightly so.”2
The Stones’ twelfth studio album was recorded at Musicland Studios in Munich, which had been founded at the end of the sixties by Giorgio Moroder, the future master craftsman of disco. Under the supervision of the producer and sound engineer Reinhold Mack, a succession of big names in rock and pop would come here to work, such as Marc Bolan of T. Rex, Queen, Black Sabbath, ELO, Deep Purple, and Led Zeppelin, to name but a few. Mack recalls his first session with the Stones: “They had a look around the studio, then sat down and one of them began to tinkle away at the piano. Basically, they were like a schoolboy band. Then Mick said: ‘That won’t do. Let’s have a go at something we’ve done before.’ I discovered that there were no rules with them. They always record everything. And at some point it comes together.”104
Between November 14 and 25, 1973, and February 20 and March 3, 1974, the Stones cut eight of the album’s ten tracks in Munich with Andy Johns at the controls: “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” “If You Can’t Rock Me,” “Fingerprint File,” “If You Really Want to Be My Friend,” “Time Waits for No One,” “Luxury,” “Dance Little Sister,” and “Till the Next Goodbye.” Various other songs recorded were not used (an exception being “Waiting for a Friend,” which would end up on Tattoo You in 1981). Only “Short and Curlies” and the title song predate the Bavarian sessions, the former having originated during the Goats Head Soup sessions at Dynamic Sound Studios in Kingston in late 1972, while the second had taken shape in Ron Wood’s studio in his London home, The Wick, in July 1973 before being reworked by Keith at Musicland Studios in Munich at the end of February and the beginning of March 1974. In charge of the overdubs was George Chkiantz. Further sessions would follow at Stargroves, using the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, with Keith Harwood as the new sound engineer. Harwood went on to work on Black and Blue in 1976 and Love You Live in 1977. Sadly, he died in a car accident during the sessions for the second of these albums. Finally, It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll was mixed by Harwood, with Glyn Johns making a brief appearance to work on one track, “Fingerprint File,” at Island Studios in London from May 4 to 27. The assistant sound engineers included Tapani Tapanainen (John Mayall, Deep Purple), Rod Thear (Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, Santana), and Howard Kilgour, who had already worked on Goats Head Soup.
Mick Taylor was reportedly unable to take part in the November 1973 sessions for It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll in Munich for medical reasons. He was present at Musicland Studios from the end of February to the beginning of March, but this was to be the last time he would record with the Rolling Stones. As for Mick Jagger, faced with an incapacitated Keith Richards, ravaged by dope, the singer took command of operations, as Mack Reinhold attests: “[Keith] was sitting on a chair with his head resting back and his guitar hanging down.… When Mick thought they’d done enough, they simply left.” And the engineer elaborated further on Jagger’s role: “He was always in control of everything… A control freak without appearing to be one.”104
New musicians made an appearance on the disc, as was to become the norm with each new Stones album: the must-have percussionist Ray Cooper, who played with everyone who was anyone in rock music, including Pink Floyd, Sting, Elton John, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, and many others; Jolly Kunjappu (alias Charlie Jolly) on tabla; Ed Leach on cowbell; and the vocal quintet Blue Magic on “If You Really Want to Be My Friend.”
When Reinhold Mack took charge of production and recordings at Musicland Studios in Munich, he equipped the control room with a sixteen-channel Helios desk (for which Dick Swettenham, at Mack’s request, designed an extension with a further sixteen channels), a Studer A80 sixteen-track tape recorder, and JBL monitors.
For the It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll sessions, the Stones used more or less the same instruments as they had on the previous album. One big innovation was the use of a multi-effect synthesizer for guitar, the Synthi Hi-Fli, brought to the studio by Mick Taylor with no clear aim in mind.