Life (36 page)

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.

A
ltamont 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 that 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.

As the evening went dark and we went on stage, the atmosphere became very lurid and hairy. As Stu said—he was there—“Getting a bit hairy, Keith.” I said, “We’ve got to brass it out, Stu.” Such a big crowd, we could only see in front of our immediate circle, with lights, which are already in your eyes, because stage lights always are. So you’re virtually half blinded; you can’t see and judge everything that’s going on. You just keep your fingers crossed.

Well, what can you do? The Stones are playing, what can I threaten you with? “We’re not playing.” I said, “Calm down or we ain’t going to play no more.” What’s the point of traipsing your ass all the way out here and not seeing anything? But by then certain things were set.

It wasn’t long after that before the shit hit the fan. In the film you can see Meredith Hunter waving a pistol and you can see the stabbing. He had a pale lime green suit on and a hat. He was foaming at the mouth too; he was as nuts as the rest. To wave a shooter in front of the Angels was like, well, that’s what they’re waiting for! That’s the trigger. I doubt the thing was loaded, but he wanted to be flash. Wrong place, wrong time.

When it happened, nobody knew he’d been stabbed to death. The show went on. Gram was there too, he was playing that day with the Burritos. We all piled into this overloaded chopper. It was like getting back from any other gig. Thank God we got out of there, because it
was
hairy, though we were used to hairy escapes. This one was just on a bigger scale in a place we didn’t know. But it was no hairier than getting out of the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool. In actual fact, if it hadn’t been for the murder, we’d have thought it a very smooth gig by the skin of its fucking teeth. It was also the first time “Brown Sugar” was played to a live audience—a baptism from hell, in a confused rumble in the Californian night. Nobody knew what had happened until we’d gotten back to the hotel later or even the next morning.

M
ick
T
aylor
being in the band on that ’69 tour certainly sealed the Stones together again. So we did
Sticky Fingers
with him. And the music changed—almost unconsciously. You write with Mick Taylor in mind, maybe without realizing it, knowing he can come up with something different. You’ve got to give him something he’ll really enjoy. Not just the same old grind —which is what he was getting with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. So you keep looking for ways. Hopefully turning the musicians on translates into turning the audience on. Some of the
Sticky Fingers
compositions were rooted in the fact that I knew Taylor was going to pull something great. By the time we got back to England, we had “Sugar,” we had “Wild Horses” and “You Gotta Move.” The rest we recorded at Mick’s house, Stargroves, on our new “Mighty Mobile” recording studio, and some at Olympic Studios in March and April 1970. “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” came out flying—I just found the tuning and the riff and started to swing it and Charlie picked up on it just like that, and we’re thinking, hey, this is some groove. So it was smiles all around. For a guitar player it’s no big deal to play, the chopping, staccato bursts of chords, very direct and spare. Marianne had a lot to do with “Sister Morphine.” I know Mick’s writing, and he was living with Marianne at the time, and I know from the style of it there were a few Marianne lines in there. “Moonlight Mile” was all Mick’s. As far as I can remember, Mick came in with the whole idea of that, and the band just figured out how to play it. And Mick can write! It’s unbelievable how prolific he was. Sometimes you’d wonder how to turn the fucking tap off. The odd times he would come out with so many lyrics, you’re crowding the airwaves, boy. I’m not complaining. It’s a beautiful thing to be able to do. It’s not like writing poetry or just writing down lyrics. It’s got to fit what has already been created. That’s what a lyricist is—a guy that has been given a piece of music and then sets up how the vocals are going to go. And Mick is brilliant at that.

Around now we started to gather musicians to play on tracks, the so-called supersidemen, some of whom are still around. Nicky Hopkins had been there almost since the beginning; Ry Cooder had come and almost gone. On
Sticky Fingers
we linked up again with Bobby Keys, the great Texan saxophone player, and his partner Jim Price. We’d met Bobby very briefly, the first time since our first US tour, at Elektra Studios when he was recording with Delaney & Bonnie. Jimmy Miller was working there on
Let It Bleed
and called Bobby in to play a solo on “Live with Me.” The track was just raw, straight-ahead, balls-to-the-wall rock and roll, tailor-made for Bobby. A long collaboration was born. He and Price put some horns on the end of “Honky Tonk Women,” but they’re mixed down so low you can only hear them in the very last second and a half on the fade. Chuck Berry had a saxophone just for the very end of “Roll Over Beethoven.” We loved that idea of another instrument coming in just for the last second.

Keys and Price came over to England to play some sessions with Clapton and George Harrison, and Mick bumped into them in a nightclub. So it was get ’em while they’re here. They were a hot section and Mick felt that we needed a horn section, and it was all right with me. The Texan bulldog gave me a look. “We’ve played before,” he Texaned. “We have? Where?” “San Antonio Teen Fair.” “Oh, you were there?” “Damn fucking right.” Then and there I said, screw it, and let’s rock. A huge warm grin, a handshake to crush a rock. You’re a motherfucker! Bobby Keys! That was the session in December ’69 when Bobby blew his stuff on “Brown Sugar”—as much a blast for the times as anything else on the airwaves.

I
did a couple
of cleanups with Gram Parsons at this time—both unsuccessful. I’ve been through more cold turkeys than there are freezers. I took the fucking hell week as a matter of course. I took it as being a part of what I was into. But cold turkey, once is enough, and it should be, quite honestly. At the same time I felt totally invincible. And also I was a bit antsy about people telling me what I could put in my body.

I always felt that no matter how stoned I was, as far as I was concerned, I could cover what I was doing. And I was bigheaded in that I thought I could control heroin. I thought I could take it or leave it. But it is far more seductive than you think, because you can take it or leave it for a while, but every time you try and leave it, it gets a little harder. You can’t, unfortunately, decide the moment when you’ve got to leave it. The taking of it is easy, the leaving of it hard, and you never want to be in that position when suddenly someone bursts in and says, come with me, and you realize that you’ve got to leave it, and you’re in no condition to go to the police station and start cold turkey. You’ve got to think about that and say, hey, there’s one simple way of never being in that position. Don’t take it.