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Start Me Up - Brown Sugar - Harlem Shuffle - It's Only Rock-n-Roll
Mixed Emotions - Angie - Tumbling Dice
- Fool To Cry
Rock And a Hard Place - Miss You - Hot
Stuff - Emotional Rescue
Respectable - Beast of Burden - Waiting
on a Friend
Wild Horses - Bitch - Undercover The
Night
Start Me Up
Recorded Musicland Studios, Munich, Germany
M Jagger vocals. K Richards, R Wood guitar and vocals. B Wyman bass. C Watts drums.
KEITH: Like all the tracks on Tattoo You, we already had this one in the can
from previous sessions, in this case Black and Blue. That riff is one of my trademark
things, I just keep finding different ways of playing it. It's strange how some things
escape, but when we originally started this we were convinced it had to be a reggae track.
I'd been living in Jamaica, and we were very tight with The Wailers. We did a couple of
passes in a rockier style, but after 15 years of playing rock and roll it was much more
interesting to us to get into the mechanics of how you did reggae, another form that was
so close but that turned the rythms around.
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Brown Sugar
Recorded Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, Alabama.
K Richards guitar and acoustic guitar. M Taylor guitar. B Wyman bass. C Watts drums.
Ian Stewart piano. M Jagger vocal and percussion. B Keys sax.
MICK: I wrote this in the middle of a desert in Australia on a portable electric
guitar while I was making the Ned Kelly movie in the summer of '69. I'd smashed up my hand
and I was off the set for a couple of weeks. It never was called Brown Pussy by the way.
The lyric was all to do with the dual combination of drugs and girls. This song was a very
instant thing, a definite high point. We played it at Altamont (Dec 69) even before it was
out on record.
KEITH: We use acoustic guitars a lot to shadow the electric, always have done.
It gives another atmosphere to this track, makes it less dry. It's cheap, too.
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Harlem Shuffle
Recorded Pathe Marconi Studios, Paris, France.
M Jagger vocals. K Richards, R Wood guitars and vocals. B Wyman bass. C Watts drums.
Bobby Womack vocals. Chuck Leavell keyboards.
KEITH: I was listening to a lot of oldies at the time of the Dirty Work album,
and I was in the studio with Charlie and Ronnie one day trying to figure out the chords to
Bob and Earl's 1964 hit when Mick came in, and tore straight into it. There was this
incipient power struggle going on between us at the time, but when The Stones are on the
job, all of that goes out of the window. Considering what volatile personalities Mick and
I are, this band has got along very well for the past 30 years.
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It's Only Rock-n-Roll (but I like it)
Recorded Musicland Studios, Munich, Germany and Ronnie Wood's house, Richmond.
K Richards guitar, acoustic guitar and vocals. M Jagger vocals. M Taylor, R Wood
guitar. B Wyman bass. C Watts drums. I Stewart piano.
MICK: The idea of the song has to do with cur persona at the time. I was getting
a bit tired of people having a gow, all that 'oh, it's not as good as their last
one'-bussiness. The single-sleeve had a picture of me with a pen digging into me as if it
were a sword. It was a light-harded, anti-journalistic sort of thing. We originally
recorded it in Ronnie Wood's demo-studio.
KEITH: Mick originally cut this in Ronnie's house in Richmond with David Bowie.
We re-cut it later, but we kept the rythm-track from the original.
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Mixed Emotions
Recorded Air Studios, Montserrat.
M Jagger vocals and guitar. K Richards guitar and vocals. R Wood guitar. B Wyman
bass. C Watts drums. C Leavell piano, organ. Luis Jardin percussion. Bernard Fowler, Sara
Dash, Lisa Fisher backing vocals. Kick Horns brass.
KEITH: I wrote this very early on in the session with Mick in Barbados. People
always accuse me of intending some sort of pun here, you know Mick's demotion, but it
isn't true.
MICK: A good song this, but it's very hard to do onstage. You go from the really
hard verse to the very melodic chorus, wich I like, but you always feel like you're not
going to pull it off, like it's speeding up.
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Angie
Recorded Dynamic Sound Studios, Kingston, Jamaica.
M Jagger vocals. K Richard vocals and guitar. M Taylor guitars. C Watts drums. B
Wyman bass. Nicky Hopkins piano. Nicky Harisson string arrangement.
KEITH: The basic melody and the title were mine. I don't think you can write
really interesting rock-n-roll songs if you can't get into ballads and slower stuff. Quite
often when you write a ballad it ends up as something else. Once we've got a song we
tussle around with it, roll in the dirt with it. I'd recently had my daughter born, who's
name was Angela, and the name was starting to ring around the house. But I'm into writing
about my baby's. Angie just fitted. I mean, you couldn't sing 'Maureen'...
MICK: It's quite a straight schmailtzy poptune, with the piano and string
arrangement so prominent, wich is probably why it was so popular in Latin countries at the
time. It was definitely a change of pace for us, almost like a reaction to the harder
sounds of Exile.
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Tumbling Dice
Recorded on The Rolling Stones Mobile
K Richards guitar and vocals. M Jagger vocals and guitar. M Taylor slide guitar and
bass. N Hopkins piano. C Watts drums. Clydie King, Vanetta, plus friend backing vocals
KEITH: This was done in the basement of my house, this grand Edwardian Villa
called Villa Nellcote in Villefranche in Cap Fernat, where we did all of Exile. I remember
writing the riff upstairs in the very elegant front room, and we took it downstairs the
same evening and we cut it. A lot of time when ideas comes that quick, we don't put down
lyrics, we do what what we call 'vowel movement'. You just bellow over the top of it, to
get the right sounds for the track.
MICK: Tumbling Dice was written to fit Keith's riff. It's about gambling and
love, an old blues trick. I had a lot of friends at that time who used to fly to Las Vegas
for the weekend.
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Fool To Cry
Recorded Musicland Studios, Munich, Germany.
M Jagger vocal. K Richards vocals and guitar. B Wyman bass. C Watts drums. B Preston
keyboards and piano.
MICK: This dates from the period when I had a young child, my daughter Jade, around
a lot, calling me 'daddy' and all that. It's another of our heartmelting ballads, a bit
long a waffly at the end maybe, but I like it.
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Rock And A Hard Place
Recorded Air Studios, Monserrat.
M Jagger vocals and guitar. K Richards, R Wood guitar. B Wyman bass. C Watts drums.
Chuck Leavell, Matt Clifford keyboards. B Fowler, Sara Dash and Lisa Fisher backing
vocals. Kick Horns brass.
KEITH: This was like going back to the way we worked in the early days, before
Exile, when we were living around the corner of each other in London. Mick and I hadn't
got together in 4 years since Dirty Work, but as soon as we met up in Barbados for a
fortnight, with a couple of guitars and a piano, everything was fine.
MICK: All the songs on Steel Wheels were recorded in a whirl, in one five week
session. We had all these crazy deadlines to meet with the tour and everything. The
atmosphere though was much more relaxed than it had been.
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Miss You
Recorded Pathe Marconi Studios, Paris, France.
M Jagger vocals. C Watts drums. B Wyman bass. R Wood, K Richards guitar and vocals.
Ian McLagan electric piano. Mel Collins sax. Sugar Blue harp.
MICK: We didn't think of this as a disco track at all. I originally got this up
in a club in Toronto, around the time Keith got busted, with Billy Preston playing drums.
Billy was more into the club scene, more dance oriented, and he started the four on the
floor beat; nut blues harmonica isn't exactly disco, is it ? This has a bit of a comedy
lyric; there are lots of girls in it, and there's me doing that funny falsetto at the end.
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Hot Stuff
Recorded Musicland Studios, Munich, Germany.
M Jagger vocals. K Richards guitar. B Wyman bass. C Watts drums. Harvey Mandel
guitar.
KEITH: This was one of my groove riffs. Nearly all of our tracks are recorded
like this, with everybody there playing together in the room. After five and a halve
years, Mick Taylor had suddenly disappeared and we were auditoning new guitarists, Harvey
Mandel of Canned Heat played on this track. For quite a lot of the album we were using
Wayne Perkins, he was our first choice, and then, suddenly at the end Ronnie turned up,
because The Faces had split. And we all looked at each other and said: 'Let's face it
boys, the is an English band. It would have been too big a breech to have started going
international.
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Emotional Rescue
Recorded Pathe Marconi Studios, Paris, France.
M Jagger vocals. K Richards, R Wood guitar. B Wyman bass. C Watts drums. B Keys sax.
Ian Stewart electric piano.
MICK: This was done mostly by me, Bill and Charlie with loads of overdubs. I'm
not the only person to have sung in falsetto -Prince did three albums singing like that
around this time. I learned the trick from Don Covay. I got it from the record Mercy,
Mercy where he sings falsetto as a harmony. By the end, I've gone off into another more
reggae-inspired voice, but at the end of a track lasting 5 minutes and 43 secondes, you
have to try everything.
KEITH: This was all Mick. He wanted to go that way, with the clubby,
disco-stuff. I didn't particularly, but it was a good song. This was shortly after I'd
cleaned up my act, and nobody was taking a lot of notice of what I said at this point,
because I didn't say much. I was trying to re-establish myself as co-leader of the band.
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Respectable
Recorded Pathe Marconi Studios, Paris, France.
M Jagger vocals and guitar. K Richards, R Wood guitar. B Wyman bass. C Watts drums.
MICK: It's important to be somewhat influenced by what's going on around you and
on the Some Girls album, I think we definetely became more aggressive because of the
punk-thing. On this track, I was banging out three courts incredebely loud on the electric
guitar, wich isn't always a wonderful idea but was great fun here. This is a punk needs
Chuck Berry-number. The lyric carries no fantasticely deep message, but I think it might
have had something to do with Bianca.
KEITH: Mick had this one already to go. This was one of the first times we
allowed him to join in on guitar. He's a really good rythm-player, man; but then, he's had
a good teacher.
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Beast Of Burden
Recorded Pathe Marconi Studios, Paris, France.
M Jagger vocals. K Richards, R Wood guitar, acoustic guitar and vocals. B Wyman
bass. C Watts drums.
KEITH: This was another one where Mick just filled in the verses. With the
Stones, you take along a song, play it and see if there are any takers. Sometimes they
ignore it, sometimes they grab it and record it. After all the faster numbers on Some
Girls, everybody settled down and enjoyed the slow-one.
MICK: Lyrically this wasn't particulary heart-felt in a personal way. It's a
soul begging song, an attitude-song. It was one of those where you get one melodic lick,
break it down and work it up, their are two parts here wich are basically the same.
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Waiting On A Friend
Recorded Dynamic Sound Studios, Kingston, Jamaica.
M Jagger vocals. K Richards guitar and vocals. !! Mick Taylor Guitar !! Billy
Preston piano. C Watts drums.
MICK: This one (from Tattoo You) dates from the Goats Head Soup sessions. We all
liked it at the time but we didn't have any lyrics, so there we were. As well as the
vocal, we stuck on that amazing sax solo at the end by Sonny Rollins. The lyric I added is
very gentle and loving, about friendships in the band. At least I think what it was about.
The influence of the video comes in here because when we scripted it we had me and Keith
sitting round waiting for each other. But I can't actually remember now if that was the
original idea of the song.
KEITH: The thing with Tattoo You wasn't that we'd stopped writing new stuff, it
was a question of time. We'd agreed we were going to go out on the road and we wanted to
tour behind a record. There was no time to make whole new album and make the start of the
tour.
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Wild Horses
Recorded Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, Alabama.
K Richards guitar and vocals. M Taylor guitar. B Wyman bass. Jimmy Dickinson piano.
M Jagger vocals. C Watts drums.
KEITH: If there is one classic way of Mick and I working together this is it. I
had the riff and the chorus line, Mick got stuck into the verses. Just like Satisfaction.
Wild Horses was about the usual thing of not wanting to be on the road, being a million
miles from where you wanna be. We recorded it in the same session as Brown Sugar, in the
middle of the infamous Altamont tour.
MICK: I remember we sat around originally doing this with Gram Parsons, and I
think his version came out slightly before ours. Everyone always says it was written about
Marianne but I don't think it was; that was all well over by then. But I was definitely
very inside this piece emotionally. Ti is very personal, evocative, and sad. It all sounds
rather doomy now, but it was quite a heavy time.
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Bitch
Recorded Olympic Studios, London and on The Rolling Stones Mobile.
M Taylor guitar. C Watts drums. K Richards guitar and vocals. M Jagger vocals. B
Wyman bass. Bobby Keys sax. Jim Price trumpet. Jimmy Miller percussion.
MICK: This is one of our groove tunes. We recorded the backing track at Olympic
but the overdubs, with the brass and everything, were done live one night in my house in
the country, a sort of mock baronial hall I used to have called Stargroves, where The Who
and Led Zeppelin also recorded later on. The Stones' Mobile studio was one of the first.
We used to park it outside our houses and do tunes. We eventually gave it to Bill, and
he's just sold it to be broken up.
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Undercover The Night
Recorded Pathe Marconi Studios, Paris, France and Compass Point, Nassow, Bahamas.
C Watts drums. M Jagger vocals. K Richards, R Wood guitar and vocals. B Wyman bass.
Sly Dunbar percussion.
MICK: I'm not saying I nicked it, but this song was heavily influenced by
William Burroughs' Cities Of The Red Night, a free-wheeling novel about political and
sexual repression. It combines a number of different references to what was going down in
Argentina and Chile. I think it's really good but it wasn't particularly successful at the
time because songs that deal overtly with politics never are that successful, for some
reason.
KEITH: Mick had this one all mapped out, I just played on it. There were a lot
more overlays on this track, because there was a lot more separation in the way we were
recording at that time. Mick and I had started to come to loggerheads.
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