"As you go along, you realize that this whole concept of growing up is ... you're not grown up until the day they put you you six feet under. You're never grown up."
— Keith Richards
[As quoted in the documentary Keith Richards: Under the Influence.]
My bedtime reading lately was Life, the Keith Richards autobiography that I had received as a birthday present from Ivan and Helene. It's a very entertaining read, and while it's not wonderfully written - I suspect the voice of Richards we hear comes only from the multiple interviews he gave to his collaborator, James Fox - there is a wonderful sense of storytelling. There are plenty of yarns and anecdotes (e.g., of how Charlie Watts dressed himself to the nines after being awoken by a drunken Mick Jagger, and then punched him square in the face for calling him "my drummer") but some of the most astonishing involve Richards's son, Marlon, who grew up in an astonishingly dysfunctional manner.
His mother, after all, is Anita Pallenberg, who was more of a junkie than Richards himself (think about that for a moment), and considerably more self-destructive. Eventually, young Marlon was a buffer on tours, and the only person, for instance, who could wake Richards in time for a Rolling Stones gig. He was still a kid when he saw his mother's teenage lover shoot himself in a game of Russian roulette. He was barely at school when he was left pretty much alone in a series of Long Island mansions, a decrepit twist on the Great Gatsby.
You have to be surprised, and impressed, when Marlon reveals - he speaks for himself at key passages of the book - that he wanted to go back to England, go to school, and do something ... and that he scored some A-levels, to boot. Today, he's in his 40s, and is, of all things, pretty normal.
These details from a Daily Mail profile underscore what his earliest years were like:
Instead, and quite extraordinarily, this child of two heroin-addicted parents was raised on the road as a Rolling Stone. He learned to count by pushing the buttons in hotel elevators; his first words, famously, were ‘room service’.
To Pallenberg tell it, Marlon Richards turned out that way by - get this - rebelling against his parents.
"I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous."
- Keith Richards
I picked up a copy of February's edition of The Word - a finely produced music mag - and was taken by an article about cover versions that exceeded the originals. Subjective stuff, particularly as each entry came from a different writer.
The lead entry was one I didn't know until know even existed: Merry Clayton's cover of the Rolling Stones classic, Gimme Shelter. This sounded strange; after all, every music trivia buff knows that it was Clayton herself whose background vocals help define the song for the ages.
But, yep, Clayton recorded the song herself for a 1970 album that was named after the song that I would imagine was her calling card in the industry. And yes, when you hear her take on the lyrics - "Rape, murder, it's just a shot away," which are still pretty incendiary - you're inclined to agree that she more than held her own. Just listen.
The backing band includes Billy Preston, evidently. You can buy the whole album on iTunes.
Maybe Martin Scorsese would use this alternate version the next time he needs a transcendent tune for a violent sequence ... :)
In case you wanted to compare, here's the Stones tune, as it was released.
But.... THIS is where things get really interesting. Last year, the original tracks of Gimme Shelter made their way online, and it's something else to hear Jagger and Clayton laying down their vocals live together. Indeed, as mentioned in the Word article, you can actually hear Jagger's astonished reaction when she hits her crescendo. Take the video below to 2:46 and just listen!
Beggars Banquet is not even my favourite Rolling Stones album cover, but I've always admired it: gritty, dirty, bang-on for hitting the adolescent rock fan (of whatever age) square in the face ... and no doubt pissing off some parents to boot.
The death of Tom Wilkes, 69, who created this and other rock album covers, reminds me of something that is often not obvious with Beggars Banquet, among many other items in my record collection: it was designed. Every rotten, Trainspotting-esque element in the shot is there, not by accident. Says veteran Rolling Stone magazine writer David Fricke: "The magic and the sort of importance of album design was to be able to catch the eye, to try and get a sense of what the music and the personalities were inside and also make you want to buy it."
You can read that comment, and more about Tom Wilkes, here. Look also for some Rolling Stone links on album covers that matter.
The above shot of Mick Jagger is by Annie Liebowitz, from 1975, and it's featured in Vanity Fair in an excerpt from a forthcoming book on how Liebowitz works. An excerpt of how the then fledgling Rolling Stone photographer wound up taking a leave of absence to go on the road with Jagger and the Stones, as the tour photographer:
The band was rehearsing at Andy Warhol’s place in Montauk, at the end of Long Island, and I went out there for a month or so, and then there was a break and the tour started in June. I was very naïve. I brought my tennis racket with me. I thought that maybe as we went from city to city I would take tennis lessons. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. They were paying me a few hundred dollars a week and I was supposed to create publicity pictures, but I only managed to get a few out the first day and that was it. I was never up during the day again. I was always with the band.
At the time, I thought that the way to get the best work was to become a chameleon. To become so much a part of what was going on that no one would notice you were there. It was unbelievably stupid of me to pick that situation to become part of. I did everything you’re supposed to do when you go on tour with the Rolling Stones. It was the first time in my life that something took me over.
More here. Looks to be a good read in the works.
CBC.ca's arts folks have a trivia quiz all about Mick, Keif and the rest of the Rolling Stones. [I did OK, with 9 outta 10. How did you do?]
In the late Seventies, there was a flood of new music going on ... and I was into it. A lot. And while Elvis Costello and Talking Heads and the Police and all that was exciting, I'll cop to being more than a passing fan of bands that had supposedly passed their prime years earlier.
Indeed, my 14-year-old self thought all of these guys were ancient. Ancient. I realize, of course, that I'm a fair bit older now than all of them were then. At that point, Ray Davies was 35; Pete Townshend 34; Robert Plant 31. In any event, Doors nostalgia kicked in a little while later, the "classic rock" radio formula was pretty much invented (and, to its shame, scarcely changed since), and the geezer bands knocked one compilation out after another.
At the time, though, I bought these records, and played them continually.
Led Zeppelin: Hot Dog. In Through the Out Door seems, in retrospect, like the soundtrack of the fall of '79. Didn't think this would be the end of the road. Looking back, with just seven tracks, it doesn't seem like much, but I love running through it, and Hot Dog is still a hoot.
The Kinks: (Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman. The disco groove sounds more obvious with distance, but Superman is not too dated. (The opening riff also sounds like it got nicked a few years later by Survivor for Eye of the Tiger.) More tuneful than anything punk was dishing out, but just as immersed in Seventies malaise.
The Who: Won't Get Fooled Again (Live). From The Kids Are Alright, which I played enough for my parents (at least once) to ask for something else on the stereo I had put together in my room. Punk may have been bitting at bloated rockers, but the Who - and at this point they were arguably at their most bloated - could cut through it in style. Besides, that stuff about "Meet the news boss, same as the old boss" turned out to apply to that trend, too, didn't it?
The Rolling Stones: Shattered. I didn't realize until a few years later (when, to borrow a phrase, the Stones were sucking in the Eighties) that Some Girls is quite a good record, with nods to the discos and to the edgy punks telling them to piss off. Shattered is my favourite Stones tune from the period.
Paul McCartney & Wings: Arrow Through Me. To be truthful, I didn't and still don't much like Back to the Egg, although I can hum along to Arrow Through Me. I read a piece a month or so ago about Wings, and how Back to the Egg was to have been a relaunch of the band, with the musicians filling up on new wave and reggae as recording began, expecting that would be Macca's direction. None of that, of course, wound up on record; pity. Makes you wonder.
A five-song playlist is filed to this blog each Saturday. Click below to see others.
I am a journalist with CBC News in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. I'm taller than I look. This blog has been running quietly since 2004.
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