(...Story Continued from Previous Page) On the last album, I played the drums
myself because Charlie [Watts] wasn't well -- Keith found that really amusing -- but
I got better as I went along.
What were some of the different approaches taken on these
songs?
When I wrote with Lenny Kravitz, I turned up at his house -- I've known Lenny
for ages -- and he had a track completely finished, but no lyrics and no melody.
And that's not my favorite way of writing. I said to Lenny, "Jeez, I used to do
this for Rolling Stones songs," where the track would get done, but there's
nothing, no melody, and I hated that. So I said, I better go in the corner and
write the rest of the song, which is quite important -- the lyrics and the
melody, you know. It was just a lot of guitars, very nice groove, and you're
like, "Yes? And then?"
Some people like to just sit down with acoustic guitars, like Dave Stewart. Dave likes to write the video while he writes
the song, he likes to see it all visually, which is a really interesting way to
do it. Don Was does that, too -- "What are you seeing?" Everything is
visualized, so there's nothing left too vague.
Tell me about the session for "Too Many Cooks" with John
Lennon.
During this time, which is like 1973, when I would go to Los Angeles, for
work or whatever, John was there also, and we used to go on Sundays to the
Record Plant. They used to donate [studio time] -- as if we couldn't afford it
-- but they used to encourage musicians to come in on Sundays, when no one would
work in L.A. much, and we would all jam.
I don't really know what real songs were done, but this one was an actual,
real song that someone came up with. I think John had heard it on the radio and
said, "Let's do this." So we got the record -- in the old-fashioned way we used
to do -- got the record, wrote the lyrics down, the musicians learned the song
in like 10 minutes, and I did two takes and that was it. It was really a great
group of musicians on it. I remember someone saying at the time, "Oh, the bass
is too busy," but now it sounds fantastic. It's Jack Bruce.
Is there more?
From those sessions? I have no idea. I'm sure the engineer has some of the
tapes, because some were kept; some were lost.
There really was a special bond between the Beatles and the Stones,
wasn't there? Turning up on each other's sessions, all the way back to them
writing "I Wanna Be Your Man" for you. Now it seems like whenever two stars get
together, it's kind of just for the photo op.
Yeah, there was a definite thing. I just remembered, which I'd completely
forgotten, that when we did this song "We Love You" [released initially as a
B-side, and included on 1967's "Their Satanic Majesties Request"], they sang on that session.
John and I didn't really play that much together when we used to hang out in
New York, at his apartment at the Dakota, or when he used to come to my house in
London. I think this is one of the few times we really played a lot. It was a
good time -- John was going through some pretty crazy times, but he did some
interesting things, as well. People think of it as John being particularly
crazy, but he wasn't all the time. Around this time, there are also some
pictures of John and I at the Oscars together, which was considerably more
relaxed than it is now.
"Memo From Turner" is on this collection, which is taken from the
movie "Performance." That was really your first time stepping out as Mick Jagger
away from the band.
This is when I first met Ry Cooder, who was playing a lot of this slide guitar stuff.
He taught Keith and myself to play in these different tunings, which we'd never
done before. Well, Brian [Jones] had done some to play slide guitar, but I never
had, and Keith never had really much. Ry played this kind of haunting slide
guitar on the soundtrack, the use of which in movies became a sort of hackneyed
cliché later on.
I had this one scene where I sang, kind of a proto-video thing. I wrote this
song and we recorded it with various people -- I think it's Jim Capaldi playing drums, maybe Steve Winwood is on it, I can't remember who else. I was
quite surprised when I listened to the thing being mastered at how good it
sounded. I was expecting it to sound really dated, and actually the beat of it
is very modern, the way the beat is broken up.
What do you remember about the sessions with this blues band,
the Red Devils? The Sonny Boy Williamson song "Checkin'
Up on My Baby" is on this album, but there was more recorded, right?
When we were making the "Wandering Spirit" record, I used to go and watch
them on Mondays at this club in L.A., and I used to sit in with them sometimes.
[Producer] Rick Rubin said we should go and do a record, and I said, "Jeez,
while we're doing this record, we're going to do another one? Rick, you're a
hard guy to work with!"
So he prepped the band and we went through the song list, and he said we'll
do these familiar blues and these less-familiar blues. We did, I don't know how
many, a dozen or more tracks. I just picked this one; I think it's
representative of what we were doing at the time.
Did you consider releasing that as an album on its own?
I could have put it out. Ahmet [Ertegun, co-founder of Atlantic Records]
wanted to put it out for ages, and I just left it for a while. I kept meaning to
put it out, meaning to put it out ... whatever. So here we are, putting one
song out!
Do you have a favorite from the solo albums?
They all have nice things on them. I wouldn't be putting them out if they
didn't. They all have really good songs. I think that "Wandering Spirit" is
probably the most consistent.
What do you think you took from these projects and brought back into
your work with the Stones?
More or less all of it. I mean, everything. You always learn from the
projects you do. You take the Stones into your other work, and you take the
other work into the Stones -- and not only music. You take what you do in film
back into music, and you take music into film, and so on. I think that doing
these solo projects really helped me a lot in writing for the Rolling Stones,
writing more easily and in more interesting ways. You just learn how to work
better.
Alan Light is the former editor-in-chief of Spin, Vibe and Tracks
magazines and a former senior writer at Rolling Stone. His writing has also
appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, GQ and Entertainment Weekly. His
book "The Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie Boys" was published
in 2006. Alan is a two-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for
excellence in music writing.
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