Rolling Stones: "Factory Girl" (1968), (With Some Silly Censorship on the Side)

(From top to bottom: The Original Cover, LP Inside Photo Art 

and The Cover Released in December of 1968)

ON THIS DATE (44 YEARS AGO)
July 26, 1968 - Mick Jagger expected to celebrate his 25th birthday with the release of the Rolling Stones album, "Beggar’s Banquet," the first time his guitar playing was featured on a Stones record. The release was held up, however, because label executives feared that the cover, featuring a filthy men's room urinal with graffiti on the walls, would be judged offensive. The album was finally released in December of 1968, but with an all-white cover made to look like an invitation. By: All Things Music Plus

My colleague Richard Stranger brought this to my attention. Much ado about nothing, looking back. I love that original cover art, but more importantly, the music this album contains is essential listening. Beggar's Banquet also marks the beginning of a period of blues rock productivity that that has few rivals.

Here's a deep album, non-rock cut that's always been a favorite of mine.

"The Dude Abides."

"The Dude Abides."

"Payin' the Cost to Be the Boss"

B. B. King's 1997 all-star duet album Deuces Wild released a plethora of genre-stretching collaborations showing blues roots everywhere. The track below lists not only Mick Jagger but The Rolling Stones as well. And yes, it is the whole ’97 line-up of the Stones with Darryl Jones on bass.

Enjoy (that is, dig it.)

Two Divas for the Ages: Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox

Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox

Here, from The Rock 'a' Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary Show, we find a very special collaboration. The Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, joins with British '80s rocker Annie Lennox to perform one of Aretha's timeless hits, Chain of Fools (original, 1967). To my mind, Annie's on of the few artists alive who can hold her own on stage with living legend Aretha Franklin.

The more I thought about this live performance, adding Aretha's original became imperative.

Enjoy!

'Believe It or Not, He Remembers It All': "Life": A Memoir by Keith Richards

Keith Richards

Keith, Mick and Brian and Co. in 

Achmed's Hash Shop, Tangier, Morocco

"I think I can talk for the Stones most of the time, and we didn't care 

what they wanted out there. That was on of the charms of the Stones. 

And the rock-and-roll that we did come out with on Beggars Banquet was enough. 

You can't say apart from "Sympathy" and "Street Fighting Man" that there's 

rock and roll on Beggars Banquet at all .... This is music." 

-- pp. 238- 239, Life (paperback, 2010) by Keith Richards

_____________________________________________________
....

Well his world is torn and frayed

It's seen much better days

Just as long as the guitar plays

He'll steal your hear away

Steal your heart away 
....

- chorus of Torn and Frayed (Jagger / Richards),
Exile on Main St (1972), The Rolling Stones

There is clearly no ghost writer here. Keith Richards, principal guitarist and co-songwriter for The Rolling Stones, let's his personality come shining through on every page of his memoir, Life. (Keith did, by his own admission, need an editor, his trusted colleage journalist James Fox.)

Livin' as hard as Kieth has, it's incredible all that he remembers. We read an unvarnished tale of this working class kid from the London projects (aka Estates) making good with the Stones, the band that fueled with his enormous talent. This memoir also gives us a window into how his music reflected his hard livin', on and off the road. Keith shares tales of sometimes dubious adventures, family lives, loves, and heartbreaks. We also hear of the battles Keith had with his partner and friend, Mick Jagger, with press distortions wiped away.

In a recent interview, actor Malcolm McDowell said he thought everybody should read this book. My goal here is less ambitious; I just want to share some pleasant surprises I founding reading the book. Wanna know how bands work: why some stick together and some blow apart? Interested in the evolution during the 1960s of the modern LP? And for hard core fans, there are details more specific to the Stones. I was fascinated reading that the original studio version of Jumpin' Jack Flash was done all on acoustic guitars, played through over-loaded 1st generation cassette players. Stones album back stories come alive with Richards' pen, just as his guitar brought brought a wealth of popular music to life. If you want to know more about why the music of late '60s and early '70s  is so important to a lot of folks like me, read this book.

Keith, a surprisingly charming man, tells his story with unexpected candor. He traces the path of a great British blues rock band making musical history over the last 50 years as well as his life inside and out of that band. I cherish what I learned from this detailed account of Keith on Keith.

Here's a little taste of Keith slowing things down, fronting his other great band, The X-Pensive Winos.

Keith Richards and The X-pensive Winos

"Too Good for the Basement" Series (No. 2): Great Rock Vocalists: Peter Wolf & Co., "Nothin' But the Wheel" (2002)

[reworked and reposted; from early 2011]

Peter Wolf live at Wolftrap (2010)

____________________________________

This is one of the best crossover tracks by a great rock singer/songwriter giving us a modern country classic. Peter Wolf, former front man for The J. Geils Band -- here with another of the great rock vocalists and a first class team of studio musicians -- cutting the perfect road song for his 2002 solo album Sleepless.

One more a thing about "another of the great rock vocalists": Jagger may not have stuck around for more of the sessions for the Sleepless album than just to cutting the harmonies for Nothin' but the Wheel, but Mick certainly left his influence all over Peter's vocals on the other album cuts I've heard. But that's the way it goes when you're rollin' down the interstate looking for a back road to unwind.

And yes, the Highway 41 in Nothin' but the Wheel is the same road Dickie Betts was, in the song, 'born rollin' down' "... in the backseat of a Greyhound bus ..."

I love this song more each time I hear it. So give her a spin; eh, what do you have to lose?

"Money's Tight, Nothin's Free, Won't Somebody Come and Rescue Me; I am Stranded, Out in the Crossfire"

"Everyday takes figuring out all over again how to fuckin' live."

-- Calamity Jane

Stevie Ray Vaughn
(sings the title quote like he understands what it means)

Sullivan's Travels (1941; dir. Preston Sturges)

(film the Coen Bros. tipped their hat to with O Brother Where Art Thou)

[Written May 2012 through November 2012]

In the place where you are born and grow up, you begin to learn the things all men must know. Although they are the simplest things, it take a man's life to really know them. And if you are to be a writer, the stories you [tell] will be true in proportion to this knowledge of life that you have ... [of] the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, the people, the places, and how the weather was. (Except from narrative introduction in the 1963 film Ernest Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (dir., Martin Ritt) (Introduction by E. A. Hotchner -- 1968).

 When, despite your best efforts to keep things in balance, the money runs out and your Seven Spanish Angels are away for an audience with the Man with the thunder, changes simply must come.

My offline financial exile shattered my attempt to keep things fresh over the past five years of writing and editing Gold Coast Bluenote.

Here are of few of the treasures I've enjoyed during my break from the online life:

- Steve Earle Live From Austin TX (DVD of an Austin City Limits gig from 1986, New West Records, 2004) .... [with The Dukes]. Steve and his band turn in a crack performance that made one friend of mine wonder why he "didn't make it big." Whatever the answer to that question, the full Austin City Limits concert is first class -- what Gram Parsons would call "cosmic American music."

- The Dixie Chicks, Taking the Long Way (CD, 2006). I've written about this album here before, so I'm going to reprint part of one of two GCB posts on the record:

A friend of mine put on an album the other night, one I hadn't written about since it took home five Grammys and tore up the charts in 2006. The Dixie Chicks' Taking the Long Way still sounds great these five years later.

As an aging hippie, the idea that a band would stir up so much controversy by exercising an artist's right to criticize American foreign policy from overseas is more than a little disconcerting. I grew up at the height of the era where protest music and musicians speaking their minds were badges of honor. But judging on the first decade of this century, a band now puts its future on the line by stepping out of line. As I think about it, I guess its always been risky to oppose those in authority.

The Dixie Chicks are still thriving with a smaller fan base, having lost many of their more conservative, mainstream country fans. But they are still going strong, and their cathartic album Taking the Long Way stands as one of the decade's most important protest records.

- Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie and George C. Scott in The Hustler (DVD, 1961; dir. Robert Rossen). You will find a full post on this film here.

- Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake in Sullivan's Travels (1941; dir. Preston Sturges)

- White Shadow by Ace Atkins (historical novel, 2006). It's a vast over-simplification to say that White Shadow is Tampa, Florida's The Godfather. This noir novel is drenched in local color and the Mafia-drenched world of Tampa and Havana, Cuba in the mid-1950s. 

I was born in '57. Nobody talks anymore about the history this book is filled with, from the Latin and Sicilian mobsters who ran the city's underworld to the task faced by honest Tampa cops of trying to chip away at a granite mountain of corruption and decadence. Atkins takes the Pulitzer Prize nominated research on an unsolved mob murder in the fifties and spins an accurate, engaging tale of the darker side of life in my hometown. It's one of the finest historical novels I've found since discovering Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Deadwood: The Complete Series (DVD set, copyright 2004, 2006, 2007; created by David Milch)

 As reader's of Gold Coast Bluenote would expect, there was a good deal of rock 'n' roll that matters on the home jukebox while I was offline. Let me mention a few of these classics that were in heavy rotation:

Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, Derek and the Dominoes (1970; produced by Tom Dowd)

Exile on Main St, The Rolling Stones (1972, produced by Jimmy Miller)

The Chess Box: Chuck Berry, (3 DVD compilation, 1988)

The Bootleg Series, Vol. IV, The Royal Albert Hall Concert, Bob Dylan (the acoustic side, 1966). Especially Dylan's live version of, arguably, one of the greatest songs ever written, Visions of Johanna.

 If these albums, DVDs, or books are gathering dust in your collection or you haven't acquired the more recently released archival material, well, double clutch your mojo back into gear and let the good times roll. A little time offline did me a world of good. To quote Chuck Berry:

"C'est la vie, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell."

Campaign Speech Closers

In yesterday's Saturday Single at Echoes in the Wind, my buddy whiteray played a numbers game with some old Top 40 charts and ran across a single that brought back some strong memories for me. So here's a moderately embarrassing story from my high school days.

When I got my first stereo in 1970, and "plugged into rock 'n' roll", one of my first albums was Abbey Road by The Beatles. The single off that record that grabbed my attention, referenced by whiteray yesterday, was Come Together (backed by Something).

Now let's jumped ahead to the spring of 1974. I'm running for student body president at my high school and faced with delivering one campaign speech just before the election wrapped up. Rock 'n' roll had grabbed my soul by then and I came up with the closing line for that speech, the hook from that Beatles single, "Come together, right now, over me."

If you're thinking right now that might not have been such a good idea, you're right. I came to the end of the speech, delivered the line, and it quite simply died in the room. I still won the election, but that speech hadn't appeared to help.

Inspired by the Echoes in the Wind post from yesterday, with a little bit of hunting I found what appears to be the original video for the song Come Together. It's a piece of pop art and a fine song I thought I'd give you a chance to check out -- for many, again. So, from the beginning of the end of the beginning of The Beatles, here's one for the ages.

"Life, Life, Life!": "And the doctors say, you'll be okay ..."

The title of this post is a quote, a bit of reflection on his and all of our personal existence, I heard from a black gentleman on a bus one afternoon many years ago in Baltimore.

I'm gonna shift gears now, and the lyrics reprinted below break my family friendly rule here at Gold Coast Bluenote (i.e. this one isn't for the kids), but rock 'n' roll is sometimes medicine for me, a way for me to channel my frustrations and aggravations without busting up the drywall. So, without further ado, a few lyrics from Mick Jagger when he was about the age I am now, a video of the Stones song I Go Wild (1994, 1995) and I'm out.

... I go wild
I go crazy, I go insane
I get sick somebody stop this pain

And the doctors say you'll be okay
And if you'd only stay away
From femme fatales and dirty bitches
And daylight drabs and nightime witches
And working girls and blue stockings
And dance hall babes and body poppers
And waitresses with broken noses
Checkout girls striking poses
And politicians' garish wives
With alcoholic cunts like knives

I go wild ...

Jagger / Arcade Fire on SNL 5/19/12

In case you missed it, this is the first of 3 songs Sir Mic performed with different backing artists on the season finale of Saturday Night Live this past weekend.

Judge for yourself; for me, The Last Time with this lineup rocked the house, and mine too.

Mick Jagger & Arcade Fire - The Last Time - SNL, 19 September 2012

Merry Clayton: "After All This Time" (1972)

The most powerful vocal performance on the Stones' signature anti-war song is Merry Clayton's duet vocal with Mick Jagger on Gimme Shelter (studio version, first released as the opening track on the band's 1969 Let it Bleed album.)

That said, now I'll move over and let Merry take over.

whiteray at Echoes in the Wind inspired and contributed to this post. See his post: One Chart Dig: January 3, 1972.

Complementary Presentations of "Lord Jim": Conrad's Book and Brooks' Film

Redux

Jim (Peter O'Toole): .... I've been a so-called coward and a so-called hero and there's not the thickness of a sheet of paper between them. Maybe cowards and heroes are just ordinary men who, for a split second, do something out of the ordinary. That's all.

Though truly divergent works of art, with more than a few threads of a central theme, Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim (written 1899-1900) and Richard Brooks' 1965 film of the same name are both adventures worth taking. Each work stands on it own merits, Conrad's accomplishment standing as one of the great books in modern English.

I read the book first and highly recommend starting with it. Then the film may serve as, not an equal, but a fine supplementary work of art. Supplementary in the most important sense in that it is an action adventure film with its serious themes stripped down, but still looming. While Conrad's novel is a meticulous examination of the diverse elements of the human character and and "simple twists of fate", the novel brings the characters into sharp focus. The film's outstanding cast truly bring the characters to life.

So take a South Seas adventure from the late 19th century and learn a little about what heroes and courage are really all about.

Dusty Springfield: "Breakfast in Bed" (1969)

Repost from the summer of 2011:

Think back, it's 1969 and the R&B wizards at Atlantic Records are wrapping the Memphis sound around an extraordinarily talented British pop singer, Dusty Springfield. And the product couldn't fit in less with the times in America. So the tracks must age and then resurface.

They don't write 'em and record 'em like this anymore. Damn shame, too. This one gets more soulful and just plain gutsier the more you think about all the rules the lyrics break. But the sound, that Memphis sound wrapped around Dusty's blue-eyed soul voice -- it's still not politically correct, but that's not what's important here. Listen and you will find out what I mean.

Addendum: By coincidence, a song of Dusty's related to this one came up at Echoes in the Wind today. Here's the relevant part of what I wrote as a comment:

A sidebar regarding Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me”, in that No. 5 slot [on the US pop singles chart this week in 1966]. A few years later, Muscle Shoals songwriters Eddie Hinton and Donnie Fritts used that song line in the chorus of a new song for Dusty’s 1969 album “Dusty in Memphis”. My lead post this week at Gold Coast Bluenote, by coincidence, is about that song, “Breakfast in Bed”.

Groovy coincidence, eh?

Don't Sell My Culture!

One of the things that drives me crazy is important rock songs showing up in TV commercials. I went through the roof in '87 when the classic Beatles song Revolution turned up in a Nike commercial. I have not and will not buy another Nike product, ever. And it's not just me; George Harrison spoke on this issue in October of '87 with more authority than I ever could:

If it's allowed to happen, every Beatles song ever recorded is going to be advertising women's underwear and sausages. We've got to put a stop to it in order to set a precedent. Otherwise it's going to be a free-for-all. It's one thing when you're dead, but we're still around! They don't have any respect for the fact that we wrote and recorded those songs, and it was our lives. (George Harrison, as quoted in J. Doyle, 2009)

And the free-for-all George predicted is upon us. I've been gritting my teeth for years as the practice of using classic popular songs in commercials has somehow become acceptable. Well, it's not acceptable to me. So before you stumble across a new commercial that has me cursing at the TV screen now and again, here's a chance to listen to another classic, from another era, that is being transformed into a lame product endorsement. This is the single that lead me to buy the monumental first Pretenders album. Here's their break-out single (with its old-school video), Brass in Pocket (1979). Revolution survived, but it's a truly timeless song. The jury is still out on whether Brass in Pocket can survive.

"Wait a Minute! That's the Same Song": Derek and the Dominoes, Buddy Holly and the Crickets

Back Cover of the Layla LPs (1970)
(not pictured: Eric Clapton, Carl Radle, Duane Allman, Bobby Witlock, Jim Gordon)

Buddy Holly and the Crickets (1957)

As I started my adventure into rock 'n' roll in 1970, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (1970) was one of the first important albums I owned. And I had completely missed Buddy Holly, a fading 50s memory to the newcomers like me. Gradually though, I learned more about Derek and the Dominoes as well as picking up little bits of information on Buddy Holly and his band The Crickets.

But it wasn't until I purchased a comprehensive Buddy Holly anthology last year that a connection clicked between the Layla album and Buddy Holly.

The experts out there will know this often covered Chuck Willis tune, but maybe I can make what was a startling connection me for a few folks out there.

On side four of the Layla double LP, there's a cover of the song It's Too Late. Derek and Co. cover the song in straight-ahead Clapton blues rock arrangement. I always liked the cut but had no idea of its history.

I was quite surprised as I listened to the Buddy Holly anthology Gold and I started to recognize the lyrics of one song but couldn't place them. Then it hit me. Buddy Holly had covered the very same song but in his pioneering Texas style of 50s rock. It's Too Late appeared on Holly's 1958 EP Rave On.

Below you can listen to the two covers in the order I was exposed to them: 1970 then 1958.

It's Too Late Derek and the Dominoes (1970)

It's Too Late Buddy Holly and the Crickets (1958)

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones (2010 DVD release): "Tumbling Dice"

Though I've been an ardent Stones fan since the 70s, I've never had the chance to see any concert footage from what many would argue is the best tour the band ever did -- their 1972 tour in support of Exile on Main St. This is Mick Taylor's last tour as a Stone and the band is in peak form.

Can't think of a holiday gift for that Stones fan you know? Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones was re-released in October 2010 on DVD for the first time, and this Stones fan will act very surprised (and pleased) if he gets a copy in his stocking. 'Til then, I've got a wonderful bootleg of one of the tour concerts to keep me warm.

Folks, enjoy this little taste above, the Stones live in '72 performing a favorite of mine, Tumbling Dice.

Billy Preston at the Concert for Bangladesh: "That's The Way God Planned It"

Three performances that most shaped where my musical tastes would wander are all from one concert film and album -- the first rock superstar benefit concert of its kind -- The Concert for Bangladesh (1972). Those performances were from Bob Dylan, Leon Russell and Billy Preston. Here's a little taste, Preston's song for the two Madison Square Garden shows in the summer of 1971.

Preston, the keyboard power behind the Beatles (at the very end) and the early seventies Stones, shows his gospel roots on this one, with all the hip rockers thinking they are in heaven. For me, when the movie finally did hit town, I was in heaven too.

The Making of "Exile on Main St.": "Stones in Exile" (2010)

My ex-wife is a very opinionated lady. Back when we were together, she was never afraid to take a stand on some issue that was her view and often hers alone. And so it was when we got down to discussing Rolling Stones albums. Her view was that everything after Let it Bleed was a formula album. I never agreed. Exile on Main St. is by far my favorite Stones album, but until the release earlier this year of Stephen Kijak's documentary Stones in Exile, I had no retort other than "I don't agree!" Now, with this documentary, I do.

Stones in Exile, filled with recent interviews, rare photographs and excerpts from the notorious, unreleased documentary of the Stones' 1972 tour, lays to rest any notion that there was anything formulaic about the recording of Exile on Main St. The controlled chaos of the core recording sessions at Keith's villa Nellcôte in the the south of France is well documented here. Marathon 12 hour jam sessions extending over months with songs evolving as the sessions progressed is no recipe for "formula album". Quoted in the October 1997 issue of Guitar magazine, Jagger put it this way:

Just winging it. Staying up all night ... It was this communal thing where you don't know whether you're recording or living or having dinner; you don't when you're going to play, when you're gonna sing -- very difficult. Too many hangers-on. I went with the flow and the album got made. These things have a certain energy, and there's a certain flow to it, and it got impossible. Everyone was so out of it.

Jagger may not have been having much fun, but the result is an unparalleled rock/blues/country/soul document. So check out Stones in Exile and get a taste of how Exile on Main St. got made. It might even convince my ex-wife that this was no formula album.

"Memo from Turner"

This clip from the 1970 film Performance foreshadows the music video format to come years later. And the music here is raw rock 'n' roll at its finest.

In the clip Mick Jagger acts out the second of the two dramatic personae of his film character Turner. Earlier in the film he establishes Turner as a petulant, reclusive but seemingly harmless rock star. Here we see Turner shifting identities, now a rock-star-as-psychedelic-gangster personifying corruption and decadence.

The song would have disappeared into the void of Stones-related cult material but for Martin Scorsese placing a slice of Memo from Turner right in the heart of a cocaine binge sequence in his acclaimed film Goodfellas (1990). While very few people will ever see Performance, Scorsese brings Ry Cooder's searing slide guitar work on Memo to a wider audience. My hat's off to Mick, Ry, and Marty.

(A version of Memo from Turner with better audio quality is near the top of the red jukebox at left.)

Rolling Stones: "Love is Strong"

I've always loved this opening track to 1994's Voodoo Lounge. It was the first single off an album that marked the end of a 5 year hiatus for the band while Jagger and Richards recorded a number of albums separately. It also marked the first album after bassist Bill Wyman's retirement and Darryl Jones took over as the Stones' regular bass player.

This track successfully reproduces the "archetypal 'Rolling Stones' sound". And the video is a perfect footnote to Martin Scorsese's remark in Shine a Light that the Stones are, in essence, 'a New York band'.

Voodoo Lounge is not a perfect album, but it's well worth exploring. Keith's track Thru and Thru, standing alone, is worth the price of the record. And very few Stones albums lead off as well as this one does with Love is Strong.