We were in the studio when we got the phone call not long afterwards, cutting with Mick Taylor. There exists one minute and thirty seconds of us recording “I Don’t Know Why,” a Stevie Wonder song, interrupted by the phone call telling us of Brian’s death.
I knew Frank Thorogood, who made a “deathbed confession” that he’d killed Brian Jones by drowning him in the swimming pool, where Brian’s body was found some minutes after other people had seen him alive. But I’m always wary of deathbed confessions because the only person there is the person he’s supposed to have said it to, some uncle, daughter, or whatever. “On his deathbed he said he killed Brian.” Whether he did or not I don’t know. Brian had bad asthma and he was taking quaaludes and Tuinals, which are not the best things to dive under water on. Very easy to choke on that stuff. He was heavily sedated. He had a high tolerance for drugs, I’ll give him that. But weigh that against the coroner’s report, which showed that he was suffering from pleurisy, an enlarged heart and a diseased liver. Still, I can imagine the scenario of Brian being so obnoxious to Thorogood and the building crew he had working on Brian’s house that they were just pissing around with him. He went under and didn’t come up. But when somebody says, “I did Brian,” at the very most I’d put it down to manslaughter. All right, you may have pushed him under, but you weren’t there to murder him. He pissed off the builders, whining son of a bitch. It wouldn’t have mattered if the builders were there or not, he was at that point in his life when there wasn’t any.
Three days later, July 5, we performed our first concert in over two years, in Hyde Park, a free concert to which something like half a million people came, and it was an amazing show. The all-important thing for us was it was our first appearance for a long time and with a change of personnel. It was Mick Taylor’s first gig. We were going to do it anyway. Obviously a statement had to be made of one kind or another, so we turned it into a memorial for Brian. We wanted to see him off in grand style. The ups and downs with the guy are one thing, but when his time’s over, release the doves, or in this case the sackfuls of white butterflies.
* * *
We went touring in the USA in November ’69 with Mick Taylor. B.B. King and Ike and Tina Turner were opening acts, which was a hot show just by itself. Added to that, it was the first tour that the open-tuning riffs—the big new sound—were let loose on audiences. The most powerful effect was on Ike Turner. The open tuning fascinated him the way it had fascinated me. He dragged me into his dressing room basically at gunpoint, I believe in San Diego. “Show me that five-string shit.” And we were there for about forty-five minutes, and I showed him the basics of it. And the next thing was Come Together, that beautiful album that Ike and Tina did, and all of it was five-string. He got the hang of it in forty-five minutes, picked it up like that. But to me the amazing thing is, I’m showing Ike Turner shit? With musicians there’s this weird crossing over between awe and respect and being accepted. When other guys come to you and go, hey, man, show me that lick, and they’re guys that you’ve been listening to for years, that’s when you know that you’re amongst men now. OK, I can’t believe it, but I’m part of the front line, top hands. And the other great thing about musicians, or most of them, is the reciprocation, the generosity they show to one another. Have you got that little pop? Yeah, it goes like this. Mostly there are no secrets; everybody swaps ideas. How did you get that? And he shows you and you realize it’s really simple.
Oiled up and running hot, in early December we ended up at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Alabama, at tour’s end (or not quite end, since the Altamont Speedway track loomed in the distance, some days away). There we cut “Wild Horses,” “Brown Sugar” and “You Gotta Move.” Three tracks in three days, in that perfect eight-track recording studio. Muscle Shoals was a great room to work, very unpretentious. You could go in there and do a take, none of this fiddling about: “Oh, can we try the bass over there?” You just went in, hit it and there it was. It was the crème de la crème, except it was just a shack in the middle of nowhere. The people that put the studio together—great bunch of southern guys, Roger Hawkins and Jimmy Johnson and a couple of others owned it—were famed musicians, part of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section who had been in the house band at Rick Hall’s FAME Studios, previously situated in Muscle Shoals proper. That setup already had a legendary ring because some great soul records had been coming out of there for several years—Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman.” So to us, it was on a par with going to Chess Records, even though it was out of the way and we had wanted to record in Memphis. But you should hear the late Jim Dickinson, piano player on “Wild Horses,” tell what happened. He was a southern boy and a good storyteller.
Jim Dickinson: This is the part of the story nobody knows, because even in Stanley Booth’s book he for whatever reason chose not to tell it. But the way they got to Muscle Shoals was Stanley. He was traveling with them for the biography, and he called me in the middle of the night. My wife and I had met him down in Auburn and seen the show, thinking that would be it. And he calls maybe a week, week and a half later and says, is there anywhere in Memphis the Stones could record? They’ve got three days at the end of their tour, and they’ve been on the road playing together and they’re hot, they’ve got some new material. Now, at the time, from the American Federation of Musicians, you could get a touring permit or a recording permit as a foreign band, but you couldn’t get both. And they had been barred from recording in Los Angeles. The way I heard it, Leon Russell tried to set up a session for them in LA and was fined by the musicians union. Anyway, they were looking for a place that would be under the union radar. And they thought about Memphis. Well, the Beatles had tried to record in Memphis, at Stax, and had been refused for insurance reasons, or for whatever reason, and there really wasn’t anyplace in Memphis that they could have safely recorded anonymously. And I told Stanley that, and it made Stanley mad. He said, well, what the hell am I supposed to tell ’em? I said, tell them to go to Muscle Shoals; nobody will even know who they are, which in fact nobody did. And Stanley responded negatively. He said, well, I don’t know any of those rednecks down there. How am I supposed to… I said, call Jerry Wexler. He’ll set it up. But what I didn’t know, what nobody knew at that point, was that the Stones’ contract with EMI was run down. Well, you can bet Wexler knew it; he put it together in a heartbeat. And I didn’t hear any more about it for another week or ten days, and then Stanley calls in the middle of the night. He says, be in Muscle Shoals on Thursday. The Stones are going to record. And he says, don’t tell anybody. So I didn’t use my car; I took my wife’s car so nobody would recognize it. I drove down there, and the old studio was across the highway from the cemetery. The old studio had actually been a coffin factory. It was a real small building. So I go to the door, and Jimmy Johnson opens the door just a crack and he looks at me and says, Dickinson, what do you want? And I said, I’ve come down for the Stones session. And he says, oh hell, does everyone in Memphis know? I said, no, nobody knows, Jimmy. It’s cool, don’t worry. And nobody was there at this point, they hadn’t showed up yet. When they showed up, it was the biggest plane that ever landed in the Muscle Shoals airport. Because I was with Stanley, I got to stay. And you’ll hear different people claim they were there. There was no one there. I’ve been asked several times if Gram Parsons was there. Well, hell, if Gram Parsons had been there, I certainly would never have played the piano; it would have been him. So there was literally no one from the outside there. And Keith and I hit it off right away, and waiting for Jagger and whoever else, we started jamming. They still to this day think I’m a country piano player. I’m not sure why, because I can barely play country music. I had a couple of licks from Floyd Cramer’s stuff. But I think it was because of Gram Parsons. They had just got to be buddies with Gram, and I think Keith was kind of fascinated by country music. So we sat around that afternoon, playing Hank Williams songs and Jerry Lee Lewis so
ngs, and they let me stay.
And as Mick was singing “Brown Sugar,” the pickup line into the refrain was different in every verse. I was in the control room with Stanley, and I said, Stanley, he’s leaving out a great line. And right then, I heard this voice come from behind the console where there was a couch. Charlie Watts was sitting there, and I hadn’t seen him in the room or I wouldn’t have said it. And Charlie says, tell him! And I said, I’m not going to tell him! And Charlie reaches over to the console, punches the talk-back button and he says, tell him! So I said, OK… Mick, you’re leaving a line out. You were singing “hear him whip the women just around midnight” in the first verse. Which is a great line. And Jagger kind of halfway laughed and said, oh yeah, who said that, is that Booth? And Charlie Watts said, no, it’s Dickinson. And Jagger said, same thing. I’m not sure what he meant by that. I guess just another wise-ass southern guy. So if I have a footnote to rock-and-roll history, that’s it, because by God, “hear him whip the women” is in there because of me.
Dickinson was a beautiful piano player. Probably at the time I did take him for a country player, just because he was a southern guy. I found out later he was far more wide-ranging. Playing with guys like that was a break because you got stuck in this “star” thing, and there were all these musicians you’d heard about and wanted to play with but you never got the chance to. So working with Dickinson, and just getting the feel, really, of the South, and the way we were automatically accepted down south, was wonderful. They’d say, you’re from London? How the hell do you play like that?
Jim Dickinson, who was the only other musician there apart from the Rolling Stones and Ian Stewart, was perplexed when on the third day we started running through “Wild Horses” and Ian Stewart took a backseat. “Wild Horses” started in a B-minor chord, and Stu didn’t play minor chords, “fucking Chinese music.” That’s how Dickinson got the gig of playing on the track.
“Wild Horses” almost wrote itself. It was really a lot to do with, once again, fucking around with the tunings. I found these chords, especially doing it on a twelve-string to start with, which gave the song this character and sound. There’s a certain forlornness that can come out of a twelve-string. I started off, I think, on a regular six-string open E, and it sounded very nice, but sometimes you just get these ideas. What if I open tuned a twelve-string? All it meant was translate what Mississippi Fred McDowell was doing—twelve-string slide—into five-string mode, which meant a ten-string guitar. I now have a couple custom built for that. It was one of those magical moments when things come together. It’s like “Satisfaction.” You just dream it, and suddenly it’s all in your hands. Once you’ve got the vision in your mind of wild horses, I mean, what’s the next phrase you’re going to use? It’s got to be “couldn’t drag me away.” That’s one of the great things about songwriting; it’s not an intellectual experience. One might have to apply the brain here and there, but basically it’s capturing moments. Jim Dickinson, bless him—he died August 15, 2009, while I was writing this book—will say later on what “Wild Horses” was “about.” I’m not sure. I never thought about songwriting as writing a diary, although sometimes in retrospect you realize that some of it is like that.
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 least 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. 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. Sometimes I think songwriting is about tightening the heartstrings as much as possible without bringing on a heart attack.
Dickinson reminded me of the speed with which we did things in those days. We were well rehearsed from being on the road. Nevertheless, he remembered that both “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” were done in two takes—unheard of later, when I would comb through forty or fifty versions of a song, looking for the spark. The thing about eight-track was it was punch in and go. And it was a perfect format for the Stones. You walk into that studio and you know where the drums are going to be and what they sound like. Soon after that, there were sixteen and then twenty-four tracks, and everyone was scrambling around these huge desks. It made it much more difficult to make records. The canvas becomes enormous, and it becomes much harder to focus. Eight-track is my preferable means of recording a four-, five-, six-piece band.
Here’s one last observation from Jim on that in some ways historic recording session, since we’re still playing those same songs:
Jim Dickinson: They started running down “Brown Sugar” the first night, but they didn’t get a take. I watched Mick write the lyrics. It took him maybe forty-five minutes; it was disgusting. He wrote it down as fast as he could move his hand. I’d never seen anything like it. He had one of those yellow legal pads, and he’d write a verse a page, just write a verse and then turn the page, and when he had three pages filled, they started to cut it. It was amazing!
If you listen to the lyrics, he says, “Skydog slaver” (though it’s always written “scarred old slaver”). What does that mean? Skydog is what they called Duane Allman in Muscle Shoals, because he was high all the time. And Jagger heard somebody say it and he thought it was a cool word so he used it. He was writing about literally being in the South. It was amazing to watch him do it. The same thing happened with “Wild Horses.” Keith had “Wild Horses” written as a lullaby. It was about Marlon, about not wanting to leave home because he’d just had a son. And Jagger rewrote it, and it’s, perceptibly, about Marianne Faithfull, and Jagger was like a high school kid about it and he wrote the song about her. He took a little more time with it, but not much more, maybe an hour.
The way he did it, Keith had some words and then he grunted and he groaned. And somebody asked Mick, do you understand that? And Jagger looked at him and said, of course. It was like he was translating, you know?
They were unbelievable, the raw vocals. They both stood at the microphone together with the fifth of bourbon, passing it back and forth, and sang the lead and the harmony into one microphone on all three songs, pretty much as quick as they could do it on the last night.
And so we went from Muscle Shoals to the Altamont Speedway, from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Altamont was strange, particularly because we were pretty laid back after touring and cutting tracks. Sure, we’ll do a free concert, why not? Thank you very much, everybody. And then the Grateful Dead got involved; we invited them in because they were the ones that did this all the time. We just hooked into their pipeline and said, do you think we could put one together in the next two or three weeks? Thing is that Altamont wouldn’t have been at Altamont at all if it wasn’t for the absolute stupidity of the boneheaded, hard-nosed San Francisco council. We were going to put it on in their version of Central Park. They’d put the stage up, and then they’d withdrawn the license, the permits, and they’d torn it down. And then it was, oh, you can have this joint. And we were in Alabama somewhere, cutting records, so we said, well, we’ll leave it to you guys and we’ll turn up and play.
So it ended up that the only place left was this speedway track in Altamont, which is way, way beyond the boondocks. No security whatsoever except for the Hells Angels, if you can call that secure. But it was ’69 and there was a lot of rampant anarchy. Policemen were very thin on the ground. I think I saw three cops for half a million people. I’ve no doubt there were a few more, but their presence was minimal.
Basically it was one huge commune that sprang out of the ground for two days. It was very medieval in look and feel, guys with bells on, chanting, “Hashish, peyote.” You can see it all in Gimme Shelter. A culmination of hippie commune and what can happen when it goes wrong. I was amazed that things didn’t go more wrong than they did.
Meredith Hunter was murdered. Three others died accidentally. With a show t
hat size sometimes the body count is four or five people trampled or suffocated. Look at the Who, playing a totally legit gig, and eleven people died. But at Altamont it was the dark side of human nature, what could happen in the heart of darkness, a descent to caveman level within a few hours, thanks to Sonny Barger and his lot, the Angels. And bad red wine. It was Thunderbird and Ripple, the worst fucking rotgut wines there are, and bad acid. It was the end of the dream as far as I was concerned. There was such a thing as flower power, not that we saw much of it, but the drive for it was there. And I’ve no doubt that living in Haight-Ashbury from ’66 to ’70, and even beyond, was pretty cool. Everybody got along and it was a different way of doing things. But America was so extreme, veering between Quaker and the next minute free love, and it’s still like that. And now the mood was antiwar, and basically leave us alone, we just want to get high.
When Stanley Booth and Mick went back to the hotel after we’d walked the grounds at Altamont, I stayed. It was an interesting environment. I’m not going to go back to the Sheraton and then come back here tomorrow. I’m here for the duration; that’s the way I felt. I’ve got how many hours to tune in to what’s happening here. It was fascinating. You could feel it in the air, that anything could happen. California being what it is, it was pretty nice during the day. But once the sun went down it got really cold. And then a Dante’s hell began to stir. There were people, hippies, trying desperately to be nice. There was almost a desperation about love and “come on,” trying to make it work, trying to make it feel right.
That was where the Angels certainly didn’t help. They had their own agenda, which was basically to get as out of it as possible. Hardly an organized security force. Some of those guys, their eyes are rolling, they’re chewing their lips. And the deliberate provocation of parking their choppers in front of the stage. Because you can’t touch an Angel’s chopper, apparently. It’s absolutely verboten. They put up a barrier of their Harleys and defied people to touch them. And with the crowd pressing forward it was unavoidable. If you watch Gimme Shelter, one Angel face says it all. He’s basically foaming at the mouth, he’s got tattoos, the leathers and the ponytail, and he’s just waiting for somebody to touch his chopper so he can go to work. They were pretty tooled up—the cut-off pool sticks, and they were all carrying knives, of course, but then so was I. But whether you pull it out and use it is another thing. It’s the last resort.
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