by Jeremy Reed
and carry on ripping into the dawn:
somewhere a black man bongos sexy beat.
Your restless arm resists my probing hand
and crumples lifelessly over my wrist.
You’ve a thief’s finger nails polished bright red
for lifting with a corkscrew’s spiral twist.
And in among the trees so many hands,
mine’s like a compacted burnt-out butt-end
and close up like a planet in your face,
a clumpy, useless, existential thing.
Shot by surprise a soldier smiled at me
from blood shattered over a limestone wall
a tattered discourse caught in the branches,
a severed hand and nearby gangrened toes.
‘Goldfinger
such a cold finger’
I’m talking of a country melted down,
France with its scented meadows and Iraq
torched by the psycho-killer Tony Blair,
his sticky shoes leak hot blood everywhere…
The sound comes up of twenty muffled drums,
they stretcher butchered bodies through the town,
an abject cortege, they go on through woods
and journey into saturated dark.
My broken hand, you leap like a green toad
into the grass. It’s blood again I trace
like red polka dots on the page; I’m choked
by loss, like ivy. Bassey rules my shattered heart.
My childhood by the sea, white dusted sands,
a turquoise surf collapsing on the beach:
and Bassey breaks my heart each time she sings
on such a torchy vampish overreach.
‘It’s the kiss of death
from Mr Goldfinger
such a cold finger’
I loved the lifeguard monitoring the sea.
his bricky torso, and the little girl
who kept beside him. When the night came on
the lighthouse showed a rayed-out garnet star.
You’re tough, but emulate a rose’s tricks,
the sharp tight petals packed a ruffled red.
You come to me, shedding clothes on the floor
and roll your naked body on my bed.
My lips remove the petals from your skin,
I track them like I’m entering a maze:
you come inside my throat propulsively
convulsed into an opalescent blaze…
Those thorny sea-fruits nick me with their spines,
it’s like that when I ram you with my tongue.
The evening comes on like a violet smear,
I hear the big pounce of my favourite song
‘Goldfinger
he’s the man with the Midas touch’
I’ve worn myself down walking Europe’s roads
the huge momentum got into my feet.
My heart turns gold: your cock tastes of anise.
I flake out grooved into the crumpled sheet.
I duck under the sea, you roll above
in stormy surges: the sky’s choked with storm.
I try to piggyback the fast current
pushing me out to the cloud-stacked skyline.
Now I prowl hopelessly around your house
a bull-whip slung around my neck. I watch
you through green shutters like a housebreaker.
The dense leaves shiver. What’s evening but loss?
GOLD
Strut like a hoodlum with cool attitude,
your iPod ear-buds in on rap or grime.
It’s April, the sky curved like a sea-shell
so clear, it’s a window marked for crime.
The almond tree points a white lace finger
of frothy blossom, and your back turns gold.
See that you voyage to the islands—go
and go fast, so I’ll never see you old.
NASTY HABITS: MICK TAYLOR’S ROLLING STONES
Nasty Habits: Mick Taylor’s Rolling Stones
Having been ignominiously fired by the Rolling Stones on June 9, ostensibly for an assumed indifference to the band’s directional thrust, but perhaps equally due to increasingly dysfunctional behaviour that had him intransigently avoid studio sessions, not to mention his coming up for drug convictions, which made it impossible for him to tour the States, Brian Jones was murdered at Cotchford Farm, Sussex, on July 2, 1969. In the year preceding this, the Stones were busy reclaiming their raw blues origins after a period of being drenched in the King’s Road psychedelics as part of a psychoactive aura that put a lysergic rainbow over Chelsea’s World’s End.
Off the road for nearly three years, and losing chart credibility with their dip into psychedelia, Their Satanic Majesties Request, the band had in 1968 roughed it back to roots with the driving blues aggro fuelling ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, as a smash hit, and the Thames-muddy trawl through blues and folk rock that inspired Beggars Banquet with its dystopian anthem ‘Sympathy For The Devil’, a slice of leftfield occult politics that, while it launches global terrorism as a theme, still smells of the Thames, the tidal reach at sticky Cheyne Walk down to the reconstructed ergonomics of Chelsea Harbour.
Somewhere tied into the Brian Jones redundancy, the dandy in self-imposed exile from the Let It Bleed sessions at Olympic, this pretty boy arrives, a 21-year-old guitar maestro hardwired to extravagant virtuoso blues riffs, having played with the seminal John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, a Romantic melodist with a fluency that had a clear Andalusian-sounding start on any guitarist of his generation. An idealist born in Hertfordshire on January 17, 1948, his long blond wavy hair partially obscuring faded-denim blue eyes, his attitude appeared so refreshingly substance-free that he didn’t initially seem to fit with the band’s increasingly degenerative look via Jagger and Richards’ Quorum, Hung On You, Granny Takes A Trip and Chelsea Antiques Market clothes-grabs which formed the visual counterparts to increasingly customised mind-altering psychoactives.
Mick Taylor’s was a Stones-skinny 28” waist, he was maybe 140 lbs max, the turned-up nose lending an androgynous profile, reputedly vegetarian, acutely shy, but so constructively authoritative in his playing, it’s like he’s got blues genes, riffy chromosomes and a textural facility to colour that leaves Richards sounding raw, loud and seriously compromised; Taylor comes off instantly a great. What he remembers of his first rehearsal with the band, after being phoned by Jagger, absolutely out of the blue, was that they were ‘really ragged. I thought, how do these guys make such great records when they’re so sloppy and spontaneous? But it was because they had this great chemistry.’
That was in 1969, terminal hipster sixties, an idealistic, sexually ambiguous, liberated, fashion-, music- and drugs-drenched decade going into warp-drive—the amalgamated substrate of mod and period revival hippy, blues and psychedelia becoming power-pointed into the Stones as R&B aggressors with the look of bandit cross-dressing delinquents. Intro Mick Taylor: The Stones’ last explosively disruptive gig was Athens, April 17, 1967, Brian Jones’ penultimate live performance with the band, his final appearance wearing girlie pink lipstick and dressed in a purple velvet jacket, being a jittery, caked appearance at the Rock & Roll Circus jamboree filmed over three days, December 10–12, 1968, at InterTel studios in Wembley, where Brian bled inimitable slide into ‘No Expectations’, almost as a prescient self-obituary; a deeply elegiac confessional riff that was his last with the Stones.
And Mick, Mick Taylor (the first choice after Eric Clapton refused), his sumptuously fluent playing on Bare Wires (1968) with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, posting helium into arabesque figures, elevating blues into ethereal arpeggios, most of it self-taught from listening to B.B. King records, seemed to have it all, accomplishment matched with facility.
It wasn’t even that he was a Stones fan—he’d picked up on the raw energies of the aggressive ‘Street Fighting Man’ from Beggars Banquet, but he didn’t really rate Keith Richards’ overloud maver
ick playing or the band’s crudity and lack of technical proficiency. Mick was exoplanetary.
On 30 May, 1969—hawthorn flowering time—Mick Taylor, who’d recently left the Bluesbreakers, was completely thrown to get an importuning call from Mick Jagger asking him to join the Stones on the Let It Bleed recording sessions, exactly nine days before the radically destabilised Brian Jones was fired by the Stones as a drug habituated casualty, too physically debilitated and dependent to join the Stones’ upcoming American tour that for the first time targeted stadia and was due to net the band a million dollars as bankable incentive.
According to Mick Taylor, his being contacted by the Stones initially implied session work, and most certainly not band membership. ‘I was invited to do a session with the Stones, it puzzled me. I had never met Mick Jagger in my life and here he was phoning me. I went down and played on some tracks and thought little more about it. Then they asked me if I wanted to be a Stone. I was amazed. Brian Jones was leaving, I was told. The first song I worked on was called “Live With Me”, very appropriately named because, once I joined the Stones, it was like living with a family for the next five or six years. It was an interesting session, actually, because they were putting the finishing touches on Let It Bleed and the first track I played on was “Live With Me”. We did that live, and the second thing I did was I overdubbed my guitar part on “Honky Tonk Woman”.’
While the crunching buccaneering riffs on ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ were created by Keith Richards’ idiosyncratic open-G tuning, a technique copied in part from Ry Cooder, Taylor’s magical colouring was to contribute a country-style inflection on the rock licks between the polysexual bar-room verses phrased by Jagger, not only with misogynistic contempt, but also with disrespect for all preconceived gender frontiers. While it’s the vocal attitude that carries the song, Taylor’s apprentice decoration transforms the basic rock riff into layered artistry, as though his contribution can’t be learnt, and can’t be bettered either; like all his work, you don’t go higher.
Mick Taylor’s never told his Stones story or how he inwardly reacted to being the band’s choice at a time when he was simply a session musician, his potential hardly realised, and when it was assumed in the industry that Eric Clapton would substitute for Brian Jones’ chaotically imploded talents. But Clapton would have majorly reduced Richards’ playing, would have overshadowed it completely with his stratospheric riffs that also hacked into cerebrally tooled psychedelia with a purchase that, amongst his contemporaries, only Jimi Hendrix could match.
Taylor proved to be, by the Stones’ own admission, too musically proficient for their playing, his undemonstrative stage presence and total absorption into the music being in stark contrast to the hyperactive Jagger/Richards interactive showman strut with its demands for optimal audience attention. While Mick Taylor looked cute, wore the right clothes and eye makeup, and was the prettiest Stone, on live footage he mostly appears dissociated, diminished by the Jagger/Richards ostentatious effrontery, as if wanting almost to dematerialise into the music at the expense of image. For five crucial years Mick Taylor’s propulsive, maverick, virtuous riff-driven—almost gypsified—playing, both in the studio and live, piloted a bandit rock style so blues-colourfully defined and redefined on Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street, and so inimitably cool, that it remains to purists the quintessence of Stones decadence, never bettered and instantly identifiable with the period 1969–1972 in which they peaked musically with arrogant conquistadorial firepower. Of that period in a recent Mojo interview, in January 2012, Mick Taylor commented: ‘Those years in the mid-70s were manic. We were either in the studio or on the road, always doing something. You neglect other parts of your life, but I don’t think it matters when you’re in your youth, as we were. You should be doing what you’re best at: making music and having fun and making some money—and we managed all three in that period.’
Taylor joined the Stones provisionally on a salary of £150 a week, before becoming an integrated band member by the close of the 1969 US tour; but neither celebrity nor money appear to have been motivations to Taylor’s visibly submerged personality. It’s part of Stones mythology (apocryphal or otherwise) that Richards was instrumental to getting Taylor habituated to heroin, a serious drug problem that seems, according to Taylor, continued well into the nineties. His own ambiguity on his habit suggests he may already have been a recreational user at the time he joined the band, not uncommon amongst sixties musicians to whom drugs were readily available currency. At the photo call in Hyde Park on June 13, 1969, when the band announced Mick Taylor as the replacement for Brain Jones, Taylor isn’t looking at the camera, his eyes are downturned shyly, and he’s dressed casually in an ivory cotton jacket, a lipstick red and cornflower blue T shirt, and black trousers, a throwback to structurally casual mod, rather than the hippy or fusion period revival Granny Takes A Trip look adopted by the majority of the sun-drenched half a million crowd saturating the park from every angle. The crowd were predominantly stoned, navigating altered states under the dense oak and plane trees, throwing colours, and Mick Taylor’s a rogue gene under intense critical scrutiny, but too stunningly proficient a player to be nervous. Already he’s not only incorporated into the Stones’ organism, but enhances the sound by stratospheric blues licks:
cyan
cobalt
turquoise
laps lazuli
ultramarine
navy blue
foggy blue
missing from the band’s palette before. On June 30, 1969, Taylor had contributed to the exhaustive Olympic session for ‘I Don’t Know Why’, an agonised Stevie Wonder, Paul Riser, Don Hunter and Lula Hardaway-written song that never made it on to Let It Bleed, to which he supplied elegiac licks that sound like chords pinched to the sonic equivalent of grief. Mick Taylor contributed significantly to two other songs recorded at the time, ‘Jiving Sister Fanny’ and the scorching ‘I’m Going Down’, an upbeat driver featuring Rocky Dijon on bass and Bobby Keyes on sax, the number fuelled by the full-on firepower of Taylor’s urgently menacing guitar. Taylor was given a song writing credit for ‘I’m Going Down’, but the number was considered too inchoate for inclusion on Let It Bleed, and instead ended up on Metamorphosis (1971), a compendium of sixties outtakes and demos considered by their record company worthy of reappraisal for Stones’ completists.
Taylor, as the undecoded black box of Stones’ secret data, during arguably their most decadent, rootsy period—1969–1973—has told us little or nothing of those singularly compressed times in which his individual playing won into a bandit-riffy, smacked out, river-muddy rocky blues, the live personification of it captured on Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! from Madison Square, December 1969. He’s there too on the seminal Stones bootleg Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be, an audience recording from the Oakland Coliseum, November 9, 1969, 2nd show, recorded on a Sennheiser 805 shotgun microphone and a Uher 4000 reel-to-reel tape recorder, and released in December 1969 on the Lurch label, the recording produced and manufactured by Trade Mark of Quality TMOQ to ensure professional grading and the primal depth of the illegally grabbed recording, which finds Taylor and the band at their optimal primitive-nasty. What’s immediately signature on this recording is Taylor’s shattering virtuoso facility to stand out from the Stones’ raw drenched power as loud, rampaging desperados burning a drug-fuelled trail across a lysergically hallucinated and turbulent USA.
The 2010 expanded reissue of Exile on Main Street, with ten previously unreleased tracks, even with the abundance of unofficially released outtakes over the years, provides further evidence of Taylor’s superlative gift as virtuoso expressionist, particularly on tracks like ‘So Divine (Aladdin’s Story)’. An even more comprehensive assemblage of his Stones’ duration material is to be found on The Rolling Stones Genuine Black Box Volume 3 1969–74 (the Taylor years), which throws up blue diamonds like ‘Hillside Blues’ and ‘Travelling Man’, six minutes of sensational blues rock flourishes on Taylor’s part,
recorded October 1970 at Olympic, as a live-in-the-studio energised declaration of nasty habits.
Mick Taylor’s reluctance to detail the seminal role he played in consolidating the Stones’ transitional early seventies vitally bankable bad boys brand is somehow typical of the habituated off-world personality that led to his incredible walking out on the Stones at a time when his already virtuoso playing was at its peak and indispensably incorporated into the Stones’ virulent tropical diseases sound—a focus lost when he was replaced with the significantly less talented Ronnie Wood. Taylor abdicated from unique riffdom: if his fired predecessor Brian Jones was an eclectic instrumental maverick, who wasn’t physically up to the demands of playing heavy stadium rock, then Mick Taylor directed his arpeggios with the same dynamic authority as Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and the unparalleled licks-voodooist Jimi Hendrix. What Taylor seems to have lacked was any motivation to form an individual image within the band, preferring instead to be incorporated into the sound rather than projected personality. Nor, it seems, was Taylor’s essentially off-message introspection any deliberate attempt on his part to cultivate exclusive mystique, rather it seems his innate shyness kept him unattached to the celebrity so consciously brokered by Jagger and Richards, and he was left conspicuously backgrounded from PR despite his prettiness and enviable focus as the Stones’ lead guitarist. Taylor, notwithstanding the centrality of his role both live and in the studio on Let It Bleed, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street, Goat’s Head Soup and It’s Only Rock’n’Roll, remains the inaccessible enigmatic Stone, a superlative player in all the right patterned shirts, who appeared elusively exoplanetary or un-Stoned in commitment to the idea of the band as early seventies family.
VOODOO