favorite song friday: it's only rock 'n' roll

It's not summer yet, but whenever I hear oldies but goodies like this one on the radio I can't help but think of the summertime ...

If I could dig down deep in my heart
Feelings would flood on the page
Would it satisfy ya, would it slide on by ya

favorite song friday: bobby womack

Bobby Womack passed away on June 27. The versatile Womack wrote and performed music in many genres, including soul, rock, gospel, R&B, and even country. He worked with artists as diverse as Sam Cooke and the Gorillaz.

Probably his best known song, and one of my personal favorites, was "Across 110th Street," but Womack covered also recorded an interesting cover of "California Dreamin'" and wrote the Rolling Stones' hit "It's All Over Now." Quentin Tarantino gave "Across 110th Street" another life when he featured it in his film Jackie Brown.

Here he is performing "Across 110th Street" on Later with Jools Holland. And here's a link to a nice profile from the BBC.



RIP Bobby.

the meaning of life

"What is it that makes you want to write songs? In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people's hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at last get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you're playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people."

I was brought up in a Beatles household. My mom played Lucy on the Sky with Diamonds as our lullaby at bedtime. I never really heard the Rolling Stones until I was much older, on the radio. I didn't buy a Stones album until Some Girls, which is still my favorite Stones album. A college roommate had Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street, which I helped to wear out, but I still never really knew much about the band. While in art school in NYC I rode an elevator with Mick Jagger once, but I never saw Keith in person.

So I'm not sure why I have been intrigued to read Life, Keith Richards' autobiography that he wrote with James Fox, ever since I heard it was coming out, but I was. Throughout the book "Keef" keeps reminding the reader how he came from the wrong side of the tracks and wasn't as educated as people he met along the way, like longtime flame Anita Pallenberg, but the man has a wonderful way with words. His writing is entertaining and well, musical. The book is also available in audio format, with Keith reading excerpts and Johnny Depp doing the bulk. Talk about a dream team.

Life begins with Keith talking about his post-war childhood (he was born in December of 1943) in Dartford, Kent, England. He really brings the area and era to life, with his tales of troubles at school and relationship with his parents and maternal grandfather, Gus, who helped to introduce him to music by fostering a love for musical instruments, especially stringed instruments. Richards' introduction and then love and obsession with blues music is fascinating. He immersed himself in all kinds of music, from Bix Beiderbecke and Sarah Vaughan to Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. When he met Mick Jagger, who was also nursing a similar obsession, it was like coming home. He wrote about Mick in a letter to his aunt: "You know I was keen on Chuck Berry and I thought I was the only fan for miles but one mornin' ... I was holding one of Chuck's records when a guy I knew at primary school 7-11 yrs ... came up to me. He's got every record Chuck Berry ever made and all his mates have too. ... Anyways the guy on the station, he is called Mick Jagger . . . the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don't mean maybe."

The Glimmer Twins quickly became inseparable. The nascent Stones began to play together, always trying to learn how to play better. In the beginning the two really didn't have much ambition with their music, apart from a desire to perfect the playing and performing of their musical heroes' songs. They didn't have any original songs, which is why the Beatles gave them a song, "I Wanna Be Your Man." Their manager, Andrew Oldham, literally shut the pair in a room together one day and told them not to come out until they had written a song. Oldham knew that the only way to break through, to really succeed in pop music, was to sell songs and play original material, like the Beatles. It took them a while, but Mick and Keith did just that. It wasn't easy, but once they clicked, it was alchemy. Their first song was "As Tears Go By." Not bad for a first effort.

Life is full of anecdotes about the road - sex, drugs and rock and roll. As far as sex was concerned, he was very different from pal Jagger. When the Stones first hit the big time, the girls were just as frenzied as they were for the Beatles, "Nothing like ... three thousand teenage chicks throwing themselves at you. Or being carried out on stretchers. All the bouffants awry. Skirts up to their waists, sweating, red, eyes rolling. That's the spirit, girl. That's how we like 'em." Where Jagger may have taken advantage of the endless stream of women, Keith wanted companionship, but sometimes not much more, "I've never been able to go to bed with a woman just for sex. I've no interest in that." He didn't lack for companionship - he had a long-term relationship with Pallenberg, but when he was on the road, he was apparently drawn to a more motherly kind of gal, as he writes about the positive aspects of groupies, "Flo, who I've already mentioned, was one of my favorites ... we slept together many times, never fucked, or very rarely. We just crashed out or stayed up and listened to music. A lot of it was to do with music."

There are many times in the book when Richards refers to women as chicks or bitches, but it never seems misogynistic. He talks in the vernacular of life on the road, where the sheer numbers of women must have been staggering. And so many had one agenda - to screw a rock star. In his private life he had two very long-term relationships, first with Pallenberg, with whom he had three kids (one died in infancy) and later with Patti Hansen, who he married and had two daughters.

As he slid into songwriting, so did he slide into drugs, following the inevitable road from grass to cocaine (pharmaceutical-grade only he stresses) to heroin. Richards' drug intake was prodigious. He was hardly a junkie on his own, as heroin usage is usually a shared experience and is dependent on others. But he managed to use it for a decade, and then, finally to kick it. He never glorifies his drug use, but he doesn't apologize for it, either. He's always the rock star, always the artist, always observant, “I never particularly liked being that famous ... I could face people easier on the stuff, but I could do that with booze too. It isn’t really the whole answer. I also felt I was doing it not to be a ‘pop star.’ There was something I didn’t really like about that end of what I was doing, the blah blah blah. That was very difficult to handle, and I could handle it better on smack. Mick chose flattery, which is very like junk — a departure from reality. I chose junk.”

Jagger is mostly in the background throughout the 547 page book, until the penultimate chapter, which begins, "It was the beginning of the '80s when Mick started to become unbearable." The rest of the book is occasionally peppered with his irritation with his "best mate," ... Do you know Mick Jagger? ...Yeah, which one? He's a nice bunch of guys." At times their rivalry got downright juvenile, but then, they were boys together. Richards can't resist a jibe about a retaliatory fling he had with Jagger's long-time girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, "While you were doing that, I was knocking Marianne, man. While you're missing it, I'm kissing it." Funny for a 60-something year-old man to still feel hurt and pissed enough about Jagger sleeping with his "old lady" Pallenberg in 1968. Tell us how you really feel, Keef.

Reading between the lines, a lot of the problems between Jagger and Richards can probably be traced back to Richards' drug use. When Keith was a junkie it was probably very difficult for Jagger in the beginning, and then he began to pick up the slack, handling the business of the band. Richards refers many times to Jagger suffering from L.V.S., Lead Vocalist Syndrome. Surely Jagger's ego is enormous, but to be fair, how must he have felt, after being essentially in charge and picking up the slack for over a decade, when Keith cleaned up and suddenly expected to take over?

Keith's drug use and dependency was a constant. He'd go through withdrawal and then immediately go right back on the stuff. Some of his strategies to ensure a fix are downright hilarious, especially a story he told about ensuring he could shoot up as soon as he got off a transatlantic flight and arrived in New York, "When I traveled I would wear a hat and use a needle to fix a little feather to the hatband, so it was just a hat pin. ... I'd go down to FAO Schwarz, the toy shop right across Fifth Avenue from the Plaza. ...  buy a doctor and nurse play set, a little plastic box with a red cross on it. That had the barrel and the syringe that fitted the needle that I'd brought. I'd go round, 'I'll have three teddy bears, I'll have that remote-control car, oh, and give me two doctor and nurse kits!'"

Keith, as much as anyone, is amazed at his experience with drugs, "How was all that music produced - two songs a day written on a heroin habit, on what appeared to be high energy?" But Richards also talks a lot about rock and roll, and his writing about music is fascinating. Even though he explained it in great detail, I'm not sure I completely understand his five-string open tuning and its impact on music and musicians, but I do recognize that the songs he talks about using that technique sound unique. He also explains why he prefers to play with another guitarist, their playing "weaving" together. He makes me want to start downloading not just Stones' tunes, but things he has done solo and with other artists, and to listen more closely again to one of my favorite albums, Tom Waits' Rain Dogs, where he played guitar and sang backing vocals (I didn't realize or remember he was even on it.)

Life is a wonderful read, a real glimpse into what it was like to become a rock and roll star, in a way and a world that can never be repeated. It's also about a true artist, a man who loves music more than anything.  Keith Richards is someone who has had a very unusual life, out of the mainstream, and lived to tell the tale. And he's witty and intelligent. Rock on, Keef.

like a rolling stone

You know when you have that moment of recognition, when the meaning in a song's lyrics, which you have been singing along to for quite some time, becomes clear? I can picture the exact moment, when I got what Mick Jagger was singing about in Brown Sugar. It wasn't a life-changing moment or anything. The song isn't particularly deep and it's quite misogynist, but I was suddenly not just mindlessly singing along to the chorus anymore.

It was a raining, and I was sitting in the back seat of my dad's car, rolling up newspapers. He owned and ran a local weekly newspaper and Wednesday was publication day. I sat there, stuffing them into plastic bags, so when he tossed them out the window to deliver them, they wouldn't get soaked in the rain. Because no one likes a wet newspaper. My dad's paper was The Hometown News, where he was not only the editor and publisher, but chief reporter, photographer, and frequently, delivery man. I was in junior high and bored with having to help out. I would have much rather been over a friend's house after school watching Match Game on television than stuck here in the car driving through suburban South Jersey developments with Dad. And then Mick started singing about black girls and I grew up, woke up, a little.

Our house was always a Beatles house. My mom was a huge fan. She used to play Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds from Sgt. Pepper to lull us to sleep at bedtime. I wasn't really familiar with the Stones, who I lumped in with my mom's music. We heard them on the radio—Ruby Tuesday, As Tears Go By—but Mom didn't have any of their albums. When I was old enough to start buying my own records I was into a later British invasion— the Clash, the Police, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson. I did become familiar with a few Stones songs that were popular when my bands were ruling the airwaves—all from their Some Girls album, which was apparently a bit of a comeback for the band at the time—Miss You, Beast of Burden, Shattered.



When I moved to New York to go to art school the first place I lived, the Parsons dorm, was a high-rise off Union Square Park. My dad was the opposite of thrilled and kept referencing Pacino in The Panic in Needle Park. I was a little scared to be out of the house and on my own for the first time in my life, but mostly thrilled. Andy Warhol's studio was a few buildings up from the dorm and I used to see him walking around the neighborhood quite often, always flanked by two tall blonde young men. Our building was also the home to the fashion illustrator Antonio, who frequently had celebrity visitors. The only way to get upstairs was by the elevator, so one day some bedraggled freshmen art students got to ride a few floors with Mick Jagger, who got off at Antonio's floor. I thought at the time that Jagger was visiting on a professional assignment, but apparently Antonio was a great friend of Jagger's long-term companion and eventual wife, Jerry Hall.

Antonio discovered Jessica Lange in 1974. He discovered Jerry Hall and lived with her in Paris at the beginning of her modeling career. ... [he] also discovered Grace Jones and Tina Chow.—Wikipedia

The other evening our local PBS station was featuring the 90s Julien Temple documentary, Rolling Stones: Live at the Max, apparently the first IMAX concert film, as part of its end-of-year pledge drive.

One of the first attempts at presenting an entertainment film in the IMAX format was The Rolling Stones: Live at the Max (1991), an 85-minute compilation of concert footage filmed in IMAX during the band's 1990 Steel Wheels tour, edited to give the impression of a single concert.—Wikipedia

I had never seen the film before, or the Stones in concert. Jagger was 48 when the film was made. He and Keith seemed pretty congenial, more so than they might be these days. There were so many songs in the film that made me realize I need to spend some iTunes dough. Even though I may not have been fed a steady diet of their music as I was growing up, somehow they must have infiltrated my subconscious—Tumbling Dice, Paint It, Black, Gimme Shelter, Sympathy for the Devil—are still fabulous and just as outrageous as ever.

O.K., I've got to track this down.

Brown Sugar is in no way my favorite Stones song, but it did wake me up to the fact that not all of the music from mom's era was bright and sunny. The Stones are the ultimate bar band. While I was watching the concert, even with all the pyrotechnics and Mick's larger-than-life posturing and stage crawling, I could still picture them in a smoky, dirty, bluesy little dive, just playing, playing, playing. Letting their gritty, wonderful songs come through. As Keith Richards says in his recent biography Life,

To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart, is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart. 

The Stones have definitely managed to give us some wonderful stabs to the heart. What more could poor boy do?

Related articles

• Listen: The Rolling Stones 'Gimme Shelter' Deconstructed (rollingstone.com)
• Mick Jagger or Keith Richards? (telegraph.co.uk)