Blue Through and Through

The British blues revival is often regarded as one of the most pivotal events in the history of popular music, and rightly so: it offered escape from the BBC’s tightly regimented program of lightweight pop; it served as a training school for eager young players and songwriters at a time when any kind of formal training outside of classical music didn’t exist; and it positioned its members as heirs apparent to a venerated lineage that was distant in both geography, race, and culture. As such, American blues was embraced as quintessentially authentic, an “early” music that existed outside of mainstream society and overtly capitalist interests in the same way that American blues musicians, their cultural heritage, and attitudes railed against conservative white society. Admittedly, the relationship between British blues bands and their African-American heroes has had more than its share of problems, its rich history often overshadowed by accusations of cultural appropriation and riddled by legal battles over copyright infringement, with many cases continuing today. In post-WWII London, however, a growing contingent of youth raised on rationing and the clearly defined social strata of an antiquated British class system could easily identify with the plight of African Americans. In retrospect, their unsettled love affair seemed predestined.

On September 2, 1964 the Rolling Stones, along with Andrew Loog Oldham, gathered at Regent Sound Studio to record “Off the Hook,” an early Jagger/Richards original, the Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk,” and “Little Red Rooster,” which was inspired by Willie Dixon’s version of a traditional blues tune recorded by Howlin’ Wolf just three years earlier.⁴ A modest studio with humble facilities on Denmark Street (London’s equivalent of Tin Pan Alley), Regent typically catered to the production of demos and jingles. According to Richards, “it was just a little room full of egg boxes, and it had a Grundig tape recorder, and to make it look like a studio, the recorder was hung on the wall instead of put on a table … it made it easy for me to learn the bare bones of recording … One of the reasons we picked it was because it was mono, and what you hear is what you get.”⁵ Oldham recalled that it was “no larger than an average good-sized hotel room,” with the control room the size of the hotel’s bathroom, “but for us it was magic.”⁶ While the Stones had garnered considerable success over the past year with numerous performances at home and abroad, along with television appearances as well as recording sessions at legendary Chess Studios during their first US tour, they had yet to produce an LP or release any original music.⁷ Their insistent focus on blues and R&B covers (many of them B sides) is significant. Years later, Richards remembers the decision to cut “Little Red Rooster” as:

“Little Red Rooster” begins with a standard blues riff performed by Brian Jones on slide guitar with Bill Wyman delivering a more than credible simulation of Willie Dixon’s upright bass on his Framus Star electric. Richards doubles the riff on his single cutaway Framus Jumbo acoustic, replacing the piano and second electric guitar of Wolf’s recording while hearkening back to the Delta blues of Bukka White, Lead Belly, and the band’s recent discovery of the recordings of Robert Johnson.⁹ Watts, sitting far enough forward in the mix to suggest a club performance, gently applies brushes to his Ludwig kit, avoiding full snare in favor of rimshots, the bounce of his kick drum seemingly casual but tight. When Jagger enters at the first chord change of this subtly altered twelve-bar blues progression, the mild distortion that colors the edges of his voice conjures shades of the natural grit of Howlin’ Wolf’s earthy timbre. The vocal delivery and its spare accompaniment are restrained, punctuated by the occasional barnyard outburst of Jones’ slide guitar; the sparse texture, exaggerated by studio reverb, offers a perfect analog to the austerity of post-World War II Britain.

Despite the monaural mix, the performance is remarkably spacious, strangely resonant, atmospheric, and bleak, the generous use of reverb particularly arresting. As a sonic resource, reverberation is an especially powerful tool: it enhances and enlarges the signal it is applied to; it transports the listener into an imaginary performance space; and it can suggest boundaries – both physical and temporal – between performer and listener. Its presence is at least as old as rock and roll, and indispensable in communicating the power of its possessor. When describing the innovative use of slap-back echo and heavy reverb in 1950s recordings of Elvis at Sun Records and RCA Studios, Richard Middleton points out: “Elvis Presley’s early records, with their novel use of echo, may have represented a watershed in the abandoning of attempts to reproduce live performance in favor of a specifically studio sound; but the effect is used largely to intensify an old pop characteristic – ‘star presence’: Elvis becomes ‘larger than life’.”¹⁰

Mimed television performances of “Little Red Rooster” become particularly interesting in this context, where the auditory cues provided by Jagger’s reverb-soaked voice are completely at odds with the visuals of the performance: The singer and his band appear unaffected by the physical laws of reality.¹¹ Sexually charged, mysterious, and detached from the mundane, the Stones are cast in an image of power in the same way that their idols used the blues as an expression of personal and cultural empowerment.

Black and White

By 1966, popular music’s sonic landscape was rapidly changing, a transformation expedited by technological advances in the production, mediation, and reception of recorded music and encouraged by the ever-expanding psychedelic movement born of the London underground scene and its American counterpart, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. The increasing popularity of hi-fi stereo systems, the relatively new phenomenon of immersive personal listening enabled by John Koss’ invention of the stereo headphone a scant eight years earlier, and cutting-edge trends in the stereo transmission of popular music via FM radio in the United States dramatically altered the ways in which listeners engaged with recordings.¹³ Their significance notwithstanding, none of these industrial advances matched the cultural impact of The Psychedelic Experience, Timothy Leary’s hallucinogenic-assisted tour of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that became the manifesto of the counterculture. For pop musicians in the latter part of the sixties, it provided an impetus for unprecedented experimentation.

Recorded at RCA Studios in Los Angeles in early December of 1965 and early March of 1966, Aftermath marked a critical turning point for the Stones.¹⁴ Jagger described Aftermath as a landmark album, noting its eclecticism, sound quality, originality, and deliberate departure from blues covers:

Brian Jones had become increasingly interested in instruments other than the guitar and blues harp, performing dulcimer on “Lady Jane,” marimba on “Under My Thumb,” and sitar on “Paint It, Black,” the latter released in the UK as a mono single in May, 1966 and as the opening track for the US release of Aftermath later that year in stereo. The acquisition of his first sitar likely occurred within a few days of the release on December 3, 1965 of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, which contained George Harrison’s ground-breaking sitar-playing on “Norwegian Wood.” After initial experiments, Jones took lessons with a half-Welsh, half-Indian friend named Hari who had studied with Ravi Shankar for twelve years and was called in to coach Jones for the recording of “Paint It, Black.”¹⁶

The intentional shift away from the blues towards an eclectic style clearly illustrates the more cultural and historical inclusivity of pop music during the latter 1960s. The Stones’ songs now evoked images as diverse as Victorian England in “Lady Jane” to eastern pilgrimages along the hippie highway in “Paint It, Black,” at once demonstrating the band’s musical authority and versatility, while announcing their willingness to push forward and take stylistic risks rather than play it safe. The group’s predilection towards eclecticism takes on even greater significance when considering composer Luciano Berio’s observation that, “when instruments like the trumpet, the harpsichord, the string quartet, the recorder are used with electric guitars (or in place of them) … they seem to assume the estranged character of quotations of themselves … [and] develop into a sort of sound drama … in the form of a collage.”¹⁷ The end result of this interplay of styles and influences is the creation of a complex network of associations contained within the fabric of these songs. Building on Berio’s notion of “sound drama,” the song becomes the stage upon which a multiplicity of diverse musical characters interact, each one clothed in an immediately recognizable social/cultural/historical costume.

“Paint It, Black” certainly opens in dramatic fashion, the first iteration of its exotic minor melody heavily reverberant and in stark isolation, rhythmically unencumbered and panned far right in the stereo field. The calm, meditative pretense of its brief introduction is immediately shattered by Watts’ bellicose entrance on his four-piece Ludwig drum kit, the tom-toms cast as stand-in tablas panned far left. The full complement of players enters quickly, gathered around opposite sides of the soundstage: The sitar, overdubbed Gibson Hummingbird acoustic guitars played by Richards and Jones, as well as Richards’ performance on his Guild Freshman M-65 electric guitar, inhabit the right side of the stage; Wyman’s performance on his Vox Wyman bass along with doubling on the organ pedals of a Hammond B-3, added for weight, join Jack Nitzsche’s piano and Watts’ drums on the left;¹⁸ Jagger is the last to enter, the anti-hero in what quickly reveals itself to be an angry, menacing narrative, center stage amidst the propulsive syncopation of the instruments.

The timbre and ambience of the voice are essential elements of the ensuing drama, and clear indicators of the protagonist’s inner conflict; the abrupt changes between Jagger’s relaxed, sombre lower register and his choked, aggressive upper range that demarcate each half of the first four verses highlight his turmoil. The use of reverb, applied globally over the mix, adds an additional layer of meaning and invites several potential readings. Serge Lacasse points to the use of reverb in early French radio broadcasts and later, in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, as aural indicators of a perspective taken from within the character’s mind. Drawing on the observations of French cinema and radio theorist Étienne Fuzellier, he states, “the advent of electrical vocal staging [via reverb] … allowed [for the representation of] a psychological action directly from the interior, literally eavesdropping on a character’s mind, or to create parallel worlds …”¹⁹ Here, the presence of reverb, heavy in the first half and light in the second half of each verse, highlights Jagger’s torn emotional state and implies a continually shifting discourse. This effect is amplified by the width of the voice in the mix. For example, during the opening “I see a red door and I want it painted black,” the spectrum of Jagger’s voice is incredibly wide, covering the area roughly between 40 degrees (left) and 140 degrees (right) of the 180-degree stereo field. Conversely, during the second half of the verse beginning “I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes,” the sitar disappears and the stereo width of the voice suddenly collapses, suggesting the juxtaposition of internal monologue and external declamation.

Lacasse also explores pre-electronic vocal staging in past cultures and non-Western traditions, noting its universal association with ritual and spectacle, and that the diffuse quality of such resonant sounds creates the illusion of sound coming simultaneously from everywhere and nowhere, suggesting power and mystery.²⁰ If such is the case, then any aspirations toward transcendence evoked by the ambient quality of the mix and the allusion to non-Western music/spirituality are especially ironic. Superficially, many of the song’s musical attributes might parallel the music of the Beatles and their contemporaries; but for a counterculture that looked eastward for spiritual enlightenment and an alternative to their normative Judeo-Christian upbringing, the stark juxtaposition of “Paint It, Black”’s bleak narrative with sonic links to hippie idealism borders on satire.

As “anti-Beatles,” the Stones actively cultivated their image as outsiders, a contrarianism that was particularly glaring at the height of 1960s bohemianism. The nihilistic tone of “Paint It, Black,” or later works like “Midnight Rambler,” “Stray Cat Blues,” and “Sympathy for the Devil,” embraces themes far removed from the majority of their contemporaries while remaining central to those of the satirist: madness, violence, and apocalyptic chaos. As true satirists, the Stones enacted and performed madness through their recordings and live shows. Their representations of excess – violence, obsession, addiction, and sexual glut – shone a spotlight upon the ills of society.²¹

After Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), their first album without Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones – at the recommendation of engineer Glyn Johns – began their enormously successful (and as it turned out, regrettably short) partnership with Jimmy Miller, the American producer brought to England by Chris Blackwell to work with the Spencer Davis Group. Miller’s five-year tenure with the Stones, beginning with Beggars Banquet (1968), marked what is often regarded as their finest work.²² The album’s opening song, “Sympathy for the Devil,” left no doubt – if there ever was any – as to the color of hat the Stones wore.

Recorded at Olympic Studios’ relatively new home on Church Road in Barnes, the two-day evolution of “Sympathy for the Devil” from its folky, Dylanesque beginning as brought into the session by Jagger into its densely textured, frenetic samba, serves as the musical centrepiece to Jean-Luc Godard’s film One Plus One. Later retitled Sympathy for the Devil, against the director’s wishes, the film documents the song’s gradual transformation interspersed with scenes depicting contemporaneous revolutionary ideology (see Figure 6.1). Although band members remain grateful for its existence, their responses to the film as a whole are at best ambivalent: “Nobody, I think, has ever quite honestly been able to figure out what the hell he was aiming at … I’m glad he filmed that but Godard! … The film was a total load of crap …”²³ Issues of intelligibility aside, One Plus One offers valuable insights into the band’s characteristically free approach to recording in which seminal ideas are allowed to develop in an organic and largely spontaneous process.

Figure 6.1 Publicity shot with Mick Jagger for Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil [One Plus One], 1970.

Jeff Gold Collection, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

Olympic Studios is synonymous with British pop, its roster of employees and list of clients representing the most famous names in the industry. Originally located on Carlton Street near Piccadilly, it served as the location of the Stones’ first hit recording in 1963 of Chuck Berry’s “Come On.”²⁴ In 1966 an expiring lease forced Olympic to move, settling eventually on a former television studio in the Barnes area of Richmond. A once derelict building, massive renovations for the studio included the construction of walls with no parallel surfaces in Studio One, and the design of Studio Two as a completely floating box, suspended by rubber pads on seventeen tons of steel framework.²⁵ Revolutionary, ergonomic wrap-around mixing consoles for both rooms were conceived by studio manager and chief engineer Keith Grant, and were hand built by chief technician Dick Swettenham.²⁶ They featured Lustraphone transformers and germanium transistors, the resulting third-order harmonic distortion a vital component to the Olympic sound. Clearly, the Stones found the venue more than acceptable: From 1966 to 1972 they recorded the better part of six albums there. In 1969, Jagger was even recruited as interior designer and decorator for Studio Two.²⁷

“Sympathy for the Devil” is an absorbing passage through an evolving soundscape, where the music’s gradual thickening texture, its slowly increasing volume and pitch, and its increasingly harsh timbre coincide with the narrative’s path from prehistory to modernity. According to Jagger, the main character in “Sympathy for the Devil” is:

The introduction of “Sympathy for the Devil” opens on a primeval scene with Watts performing tablas on the far left of the stereo field, then joined by percussionist Rocky “Dijon” Dzidzomu playing congas on the far right. Jagger’s voice enters, a distant animalistic yowl panned slightly left that echoes into the far right. The setting is expansive, mysterious, even frightening. The successive layering of maracas, soft laughter, and grunts and groans positioned at various points across the soundscape quickly surround the listener, setting the stage for the following encounter and effectively foreshadowing the piece’s overall shape in miniature. The entrance of the anti-hero is startlingly abrupt, his voice dead center at the front of the mix, the complete lack of ambience suggesting an uncomfortable closeness: The devil is crooning in your ear, with carefully elongated sibilants of his prefatory, “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste,” unsettlingly serpentine. Flanked by Richards on bass guitar panned near-left and Nicky Hopkins on piano near-right, his importance is reinforced by their long, held chords in an ironic evocation of gospel music.²⁹

In the ensuing discourse, various musical elements accompany the character’s relentless passage through human history. At references to the Crucifixion during verse one, the bass (played by Richards) adopts the dance rhythms of the percussion ensemble. Far right, the brief chatter of the backing singers that frames the first statement of the song’s chorus signals their growing restlessness. In verse two the story moves forward through the bloodshed of the last Russian czar and the stench of mechanized Blitzkrieg, where the piano also becomes rhythmically infected by the samba’s irresistible allure, intensified by Watts’ cymbal splashes on the downbeat. In the following verse, we are drawn into the present by the carnivalesque “oo-oohs” of the now unconfined backing singers, co-celebrants in humanity’s shared guilt at the demise of the Kennedys. Appropriately, the next musical figure to enter the soundstage is Richards’ overdubbed electric guitar just past the midway point of the song, the first incontrovertibly modern sound to appear. Playing on his Les Paul through a highly overdriven Vox AC-30 tube amplifier, his center-panned guitar is distorted and abrasive, perfectly matching Jagger’s timbre and momentarily becoming the Devil’s voice as Jagger reverts to sporadic grunts and vocalizations further back in the mix. Not surprisingly, the riffs are unmistakeably blues based.

Jagger’s vocal trajectory matches that of the instrumental texture, gradually moving from low to high and from clear to rough. In verse one, the melody occupies a fairly narrow range situated closely around b. During the first chorus, the rising melodic line is centered around d♯ʹ, at times reaching eʹ. In the first half of the second verse, Jagger’s vocal grows increasingly forced, insistent, and agitated; at “I rode a tank at the general’s rank” the vocal suddenly jumps to eʹ, becoming mildly distorted and growly, and in the following chorus the range is higher yet, circling around f♯ʹ and getting as high as g♯ʹ before returning to eʹ. The melody of verse four begins where it was left on eʹ, but now with many blue notes reaching gʹ, and during the third chorus Jagger’s vocal is distorted further with even more time spent around g♯ʹ. Here the guitar solo begins, its first two licks ending on the same note where the vocals left off, then gradually climbing to settle a full octave higher. The following, final chorus is punctuated by Jagger’s frequent deployment of gʹ blue notes, conspicuously placed on strong beats or at the beginning of phrases, his ever-growing excitement signalled by an increasingly strained vocal timbre. The closing jam session over the final 1:46 of the song sees Jagger’s falsetto extend a full octave higher, sometimes screaming, bordering on caricature in a blues-like call and response with Richards’ guitar. As the music gradually fades, the vocal returns to its primal state, echoing from near-left to far-right, apparently unaffected by the passage of time and leaving the listener to wonder if the dance will ever end.

Streets Running Red

Although some may disagree, until their inevitable transition from angry young men of the 1960s into respected post-1980s rock royalty, the Rolling Stones epitomized rock’s subversive, rebellious image – and in many ways, they still do. While it’s true they rarely engaged in overt political activities as visibly as John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Montreal “bed-in,” one can’t overlook Jagger’s arrest for participating in the 1968 anti-Vietnam protest march on the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, whose violent culmination helped inspire “Street Fighting Man.”³¹ Jagger later sent the song’s handwritten lyrics to New Left leader Tariq Ali, who published them in the November 1968 issue of the radical Black Dwarf newspaper. Ali and many of his brothers-in-arms felt the song’s message was perfectly clear: “Well, I thought they [the lyrics] were very ultra-left actually, when we heard the song and tried to sing it we thought, ‘God, it’s a bit far out even for us.’ But it reflected the mood. This is a sleepy town, why aren’t we doing anything!”³² Later, Jagger attributed “Street Fighting Man” to the political turmoil at home and the violent upheavals in France that resulted in the near collapse of DeGaulle’s government.³³

“Street Fighting Man” opens the second side of Beggars Banquet and balances side one’s opening “Sympathy for the Devil,” the exposed positioning of both songs made all the more conspicuous on an album composed almost entirely of rural Americana. In March of 1968 the Stones, together with producer Jimmy Miller and engineer Eddie Kramer, began pre-production for the album at RG Studios in Morden where several demos were produced, including “Primo Grande,” which became “Did Everybody Pay Their Dues” and ultimately evolved into “Street Fighting Man.”³⁴ Sessions at Olympic Studios commenced in March and lasted until June 10.³⁵

By now, Richards was in a process of reinventing his playing style, adopting an open D-tuning (a standard open E-tuning lowered to D) following the example of blues players from the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to playing a Fender Precision bass for the song, Richards layered as many as eight acoustic guitar parts, a Gibson Hummingbird tuned variably in open D, in standard tuning, and in open five-string G-tuning using a capo in various positions. “There’s lots of guitars you don’t even hear. They’re just shadowing.”³⁶ Other instrumental overdubs included Watts’ Ludwig kit, Jones on sitar and tambura, Nicky Hopkins on piano, and Dave Mason on shenhai, an Indian double-reed instrument brought in by Jones.

The main instrumental bed was recorded with the group huddled around a Phillips EL3302 portable recorder and its stock dynamic microphone owned by Richards, an early model cassette recorder that had no built-in limiter to prevent distortion. The idea came from Richards, who used the machine to record rough drafts of the band in his home and thought it was a shame they couldn’t get the same sound for the finished song. Jimmy Miller suggested transferring the cassette to 4-track. The session saw Richards and Jones playing acoustic guitars, positioned behind Watts playing a portable, suitcase practice kit with Jagger on maracas. This was then piped through studio monitors to an Ampex 4-track tape machine and then transferred to 8-track tape.³⁷

It’s no wonder that “Street Fighting Man” caught the interest of Tariq Ali’s New Left. If visions of charging feet, fighting, and revolution set to a driving, hard-rock march weren’t enough to capture listeners’ attention, then the song’s powerful, rebellious sound surely would have. Aural representations of power abound, starting with Richards’ introductory cassette-recorded guitar riff, the heavy distortion of saturated tape completely subverting conventional hi-fi aesthetics and rendering its otherwise acoustic earthiness harsh, technological, and urban. Panned far-right, it begins in solitary isolation but is joined after two bars by Watts’ heavy tom-tom shots on the left. The two are soon augmented by hi-hats and a second, clean acoustic guitar on the left, Watts playing his cassette-recorded suitcase kit along with Jagger’s maracas panned right, followed by the driving ostinato of Richards’ overdubbed bass in the middle.

Jagger’s voice joins the fray, its heavily syncopated rhythm avoiding resolution until the final word of the line, “boy,” in a melodic setting clearly evoking the sound of a police siren. His track is doubled and the twin Jaggers are panned on opposite sides of the stereo field, lending additional weight to the text and suggesting strength in numbers. Upon reaching the chorus, the ranks swell further with more acoustic guitar “shadowing,” additional percussion, and the drone of Jones’ sitar highlighting the song’s hook and reinforcing its countercultural ties. This is further strengthened during the outro with the appearance of Dave Mason’s droning shenhai, surprisingly placed within the structure in a spot conventionally accorded to the guitar solo. As the principal musical forces begin to fade, Nicky Hopkins’ piano moves slowly forward in the mix performing a triplet pattern set in rhythmic opposition to the main beat and contradicting the harmonic stasis of the music. Has the fighting just begun?

Rock music has provided auditory symbols of rebellion, subversion, and empowerment for its participants since the beginning; this is nowhere more evident than in songs like “Street Fighting Man” and “Gimme Shelter,” the opening track to Beggars Banquet’s follow-up album, Let It Bleed. Of the many elements used to convey these symbols, distortion is one of the most essential. In his seminal book Running with the Devil, Robert Walser discussed its importance at length, noting its tendency to enlarge and empower the audio signal to which it is applied. Further, its subversion of hi-fi norms is an overt act of transgression and helps reinforce the music’s rebellious attitude. Finally, the sound of overdriven electronics is analogous to the sound of the overdriven, distorted cries of vocal screams and assists in communicating extreme agitation or uncontained, irrepressible emotion.³⁸

In February of 1969, the Stones reconvened at Olympic for a series of sessions that would ultimately produce the bulk of Let It Bleed. Brian Jones’ continual deterioration and eventual dismissal from the band meant that Richards carried the bulk of the guitar duties for the majority of the songs on the album (in truth, this had already been the case for some time) until Mick Taylor was brought in as Jones’ replacement late in May. Jagger also played guitar on several tracks.³⁹

Jagger remembered the period around the recording of Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed as a tumultuous one:

The bed tracks for “Gimme Shelter” were among the last completed for the album. Richards played an Australian-made slimline hollow-body electric Maton SE777 through a Triumph Silicon 100 amplifier whose built-in tremolo forms an integral part of the track’s sound. The guitar literally fell apart just as the last chords of the final take were struck, coming to its own apocalyptic end. Additional musicians included Nicky Hopkins on keyboards and Jimmy Miller on tambourine.⁴¹ Singer Merry Clayton was called in as a replacement for Bonnie Bramlett, originally slated for the job. According to engineer Glyn Johns, Clayton was late-term pregnant, unimpressed at being summoned from bed by a group she had never heard of, and only acquiesced to come to the late-night session to satisfy the pleas of her husband. Johns recounted, “none of us had ever heard anything quite like what she produced that night. I practically had to stand her in another room, her voice was so powerful. She did three amazing takes, standing there with her hair still in curlers, and went home.”⁴²

The sense of rising frustration and apocalyptic dread reflected in Jagger’s previous comment are apparent within the first few iterations of the song’s opening chord progression, initially performed on Richards’ solitary Maton electric and quickly joined by backing vocals, percussion, and Watts’ light accompaniment on kick, snare, and cymbals. Several additional guitars augment the gradually thickening texture, set against a single-note ostinato played on the bass immediately imitated on the lower keys of the piano. The general direction is one of descent, both in terms of the succession of instrumental registers and the downward C#–B–A of the chord progression. At around 0:40, two bullet shots on Watts’ snare shock the instrumental collective into a single, unified statement of the riff before settling in to a monochordal groove that serves as the verse’s bed. All of the instruments are placed unusually close to the center of the soundscape, with Richards’ pulsating guitar, fat and crunchy, occupying both sides of the stereo field simultaneously.⁴³ A final blues lick on a center-panned electric guitar, prominently forward in the mix, marks the end of the introduction and announces the arrival of Jagger’s vocal.

Jagger enters nearly overwhelmed by the crowded instrumental texture; his melody occupies the same range as the proceeding guitar and his voice sounds similarly effected and compressed. Indeed, their sonic resemblance and ongoing exchange throughout the song identify them as co-narrators. The chorus is marked by Merry Clayton’s dramatic, emotionally charged entrance, soaring above Jagger’s warning: “Oh, children, it’s just a shot away, it’s just a shot away!” She is joined at around 2:00 by her own co-narrator, a blues harp whose severely distorted sound closely matches her intense vocal quality and emotional distress. During the song’s climax, Clayton reaches the threshold of her range and the limit of self-control: Her voice breaks repeatedly with her cries of, “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away, it’s just a shot away!” to the relentless accompaniment of the riff.

The release of Let It Bleed on December 5, 1969 just a day before the tragedy of Altamont was sadly prophetic: The deteriorating events culminating in the death of Meredith Hunter are often seen as a turning point away from the optimism of the late 1960s to the pessimism of the following decade. The gradual hardening of the Stones’ sound over the course of their first decade runs parallel with the growing frustration of the counterculture. Despite wishes to remain politically ambivalent (or at least aloof) the Stones found themselves front and center of politics. As generational spokesmen, the Stones challenged existing institutions and helped forge a new identity for youth without the need to be overtly political, bringing leftist ideology squarely into the center of mainstream consciousness.⁴⁴

Earth Tones

As hard-rocking as their sound and image often is, even the most casual listener could likely name a song or two by the Stones featuring acoustic instruments; it is an aspect of their sound as fundamental as their grounding in American folk, country, and Delta blues. For a counterculture emerging from the turmoil of the late 1960s and looking to the unfolding decade with growing mistrust, acoustic music hearkened nostalgically to the innocence of the movement’s early optimism and Dylan’s assertion that the times were a-changin’. A similar situation existed for British audiences still within earshot of the skiffle craze of the late 1950s and the Marxist leanings associated with their own folk revival in the 1960s.

By the early 1970s, however, the landscape of popular music was often dominated by technological sounds: overdriven electric guitars and basses, keyboards such as the Hammond B-3, the mellotron with its “canned” orchestral sounds, and the futuristic resonances of the synthesizer and studio processing that completely transformed the natural qualities of instruments and voices. For contemporaneous listeners, recourse to acoustic instruments and “natural” vocal performances signified a shedding of the trappings of technology in a romantic return to a simpler, more authentic experience.

The use of acoustic instruments and connotations of authenticity are completely embedded in music of the period. One need only look to Bob Dylan’s controversial performance on electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Jazz Festival, where the show was repeatedly interrupted by booing. The strong link between perceived authenticity and acoustic performances also extends to the British blues revival as experienced first-hand by Richards during a performance by Muddy Waters on electric guitar around 1961: “Muddy and the band were playing great. It was a knockout band … But for this audience, blues was only blues if somebody got up there in a pair of old blue dungarees and sang about how his old lady left him … What did electric have to do with it? … They wanted a frozen frame …”⁴⁶

As unfortunate as some of these perceptions were, the integration of acoustic elements by the Stones and their contemporaries fulfilled several important functions: Like their connection with the blues, it linked the Stones with earlier musical traditions, positing them as informed scholars of popular music’s greater history; it also allowed them to demonstrate their versatility and true skill as players without the benefit of modern technology (Richards’ “wee wee wah wah”); finally, it offered enormous potential for experimentation and dramatic tension, especially when acoustic and electric instruments were deliberately set against each other on an album or within a song.

In “Sister Morphine,” the Stones used the acoustic/electric dialectic to great effect. An early version of the song was released as a 1969 single sung by Marianne Faithfull with Mick Jagger on acoustic guitar, Ry Cooder on electric guitar, Charlie Watts on drums, and Jack Nitzsche on piano. Work on a Stones version began early in 1969 during the Olympic sessions for Let It Bleed and was completed for release on Sticky Fingers (1971).⁴⁷ The song begins in stark isolation, with Richards’ melancholic acoustic guitar accompanying Jagger’s soft vocal, “Here I lie in my hospital bed. Tell me, Sister Morphine, when are you coming ’round again?” The lack of ambience is disquieting, especially on an album where vocal enhancement via reverb, echo effects, console saturation, and augmentation by backing vocals is more evident. Here, the thin timbre and barren soundscape convey a sense of fragility and isolation unlike any other moment on the album.

As early as 1936, film theorist and perceptual psychologist Rudolph Arnheim described the impact of sounds recorded in deadened vs. resonant spaces, noting that sounds devoid of ambience imply that the recorded sound comes from the same space that the listener occupies, since it bears the same sonic footprint. Ambient sounds, on the other hand, create the sense of listening in on a foreign space.⁴⁸ In “Sister Morphine,” the protagonist is located squarely within the listener’s ambient space, narrow and focused in the center of the stereo field. Devoid of studio enhancement, accompanied by a solitary acoustic guitar, he is organic, natural, and vulnerable.

The unfolding narrative reveals an accident victim’s return to consciousness, accompanied by fleeting images of his ordeal, his growing understanding of his predicament, and the unavoidability of his approaching death.⁴⁹ Although Jagger has stated that the story is meant to be taken at face value, associations with drug addiction are surely viable, especially in light of the song’s auditory cues. The first figure to disturb Jagger’s space is Ry Cooder’s slide guitar on the far right; the generous use of reverb marks it as an outsider and its thick electric timbre throws the acoustic guitar’s woody naturalness in sharp relief while Jagger confides, “The scream of the ambulance is sounding in my ears.” As his voice rises in pitch and intensity, it also becomes lightly impacted by reverb, joined now by Wyman’s fretless bass encroaching on the left during the line, “What am I doing in this place?” The final word in the closing line of verse two is heavily soaked in reverb: “Can’t you see, Sister Morphine, I’m trying to score.” In the following verse, the instrumental texture is further thickened by the palpitating heartbeat of Watts’ bass drum, dry like Jagger’s vocal and sharing his placement in the center of the stereo field. This is suddenly followed by Nicky Hopkins’ angular piano flourishes: Significantly, the sound of the keyboard is so heavily treated with reverb as to render it almost unrecognizable and place it effectively behind the vocal. Watts’ pulse quickens as he engages more of his kit, his once dry, natural sound tainted by reverb and echo. The protagonist is caged in on all sides of the soundscape, his once natural acoustic presence slowly enclosed in sounds twisted by machinery. During the song’s long fade, his final shouts of “hey” become part of the ambient wash: Has the story teller shed his mortal coil or succumbed to his addiction?⁵⁰

Blues at the Crossroads

From their inception as green but passionate artists of a nascent 1960s British blues revival through to their most recent album Blue and Lonesome (2016), the Rolling Stones have been working on their canvas for well over half a century and show no signs of stopping. Convening at Mark Knopfler’s British Grove Studios in London, sessions for Blue and Lonesome marked the first time in over a decade that the band would begin work on a new album. According to Knopfler, the studio “is probably analog’s last great shout … But it also incorporates the best of the latest digital technology …”⁵² Knopfler’s long-time co-producer Chuck Ainlay described the facility as “a monument to past and future technology. The studio has an API Legacy in one of the rooms and a new 96-frame Neve 88R in the other room with a bunch of older Neve-style modules. There are also two old EMI consoles …”⁵³ After several days in British Grove with little new material to show for it, Richards suggested a new tack:

Over the course of five days, twelve tracks were recorded, and to their own surprise the Stones produced the first album comprised entirely of blues covers in their long history.

“Just Your Fool,” the raucous Buddy Johnson/Little Walter opener on Blue and Lonesome, perfectly encapsulates the Stones’ longstanding alignment with the blues. Within the first twelve bars, before Jagger has uttered a word, the band has told us everything we need to know about their roots: the harmonica, Jagger’s surrogate voice, moans and wails front and center amidst a soundscape bristling with energy, driven by Watts’ steadfast pulse, now as in the past always a calculated hair or two behind Richards’ lead. The electric guitar is distorted and crunchy as the bass throbs below, adding to the riff’s thickness and weight. Occasionally, distant snatches of honky-tonk piano evoke the ghost of Ian Stewart. Jagger’s voice enters with authority and swagger, its timbre as crunchy as the guitar, the distortion and heavy proximity effect signalling his insistence on being heard. The club-like ambience of the track envelopes the full collective of musicians and for a moment, against all we know to be true, we are transported to a small bar in Ealing or Richmond to reconnect with the past and reaffirm long-shared beliefs.

Just how long the Stones will be guiding listeners through the Crossroads remains an open question, but according to Richards there are no immediate plans to retire: “It’s what we do man – we enjoy doing it and there’s thousands of people out there and they enjoy it too. You can’t be a party pooper, right?!”⁵⁵

Country Learnin’

Preceding any outside influences, members of the band each brought their own familiarity with country music to the table. Jagger claimed that he and Keith Richards had listened to, written, and recorded country music long before Beggars Banquet:

A penchant for country music would not make Jagger or Richards unique among sixties British rockers (the Beatles had been penning Bakersfield-influenced songs since 1964: “I’m a Loser,” “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party”), but they had displayed only a little interest before Beggars Banquet. At least, not on any released material. On a trio of demo recordings from the summer of 1964, Stones manager Andrew Oldham enlisted a number of outside players (members of the “Oldham Orchestra”), including several guitarists who were already highly respected (Big Jim Sullivan) or destined to become major figures (Jimmy Page and John McLaughlin). Someone among them played pedal steel guitar to lend a country tinge to the songs.³ These tracks only surfaced a decade later on the UK LP Metamorphosis (only “Heart of Stone” appeared on the US release of the LP), but demonstrate an early curiosity about country sounds, at least on the part of Oldham: Mick Jagger may have been the only member of the band participating in one or more of these recordings. Of the songs in question (all Jaggers/Richards compositions), “Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind,” “We’re Wasting Time,” and “Heart of Stone,” only the latter was rerecorded and released a few months later as a single in the USA, with the pedal steel replaced by Keith Richards’ baritone guitar.

It would take a while for the group to air their country interests. A live cover of Hank Snow’s “Movin’ On” from late 1965 owes more to Ray Charles’ 1959 cover than to the original. Months later, on Aftermath, the Jagger/Richards song “High and Dry” does more to validate Jagger’s claims. As a country song it is a hodgepodge: Richards’ overdubbed acoustic guitars are as much a bow to folk music as country, while the relatively loose ensemble conjures an earlier era in country recordings. As in the more frequently referenced country songs in the Stones’ output (discussed below), neither Bill Wyman nor Charlie Watts display much affinity for country rhythms. The latter’s ringing hi-hat serves to avoid a rock back-beat, but fails to capture the terse simplicity of 1960s country drumming. “I love Hank Williams and Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, but the whole Nashville thing I’m not that enamoured of,” Watts commented years later. “I can enjoy Buck Owens and Bob Wills’s swing band and George Jones, but it’s not something I’m particularly good at.”⁴ At the same time, Wyman’s repeated notes in “High and Dry” oversimplify the root-fifth alternation of a typical country bassline. Both members would grow and adapt in the country songs of the coming years, but the rhythm section helped to mark these numbers as Rolling Stones tunes, no matter how deeply Richards delved into the world of “Three Chords and Truth” (a phrase widely attributed to legendary Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard) or how often Jagger affected a Southern drawl.

On Aftermath, “High and Dry” is one of several forays into new styles for the group, including the quasi-Elizabethan “Lady Jane,” the artsy “I Am Waiting,” and a smattering across the album of a variety of instruments from outside the rock band line-up.⁵ It shows less an interest in exploring country music than in exploring various styles beyond the band’s core blues sound. That impulse to widen their stylistic horizons led to the nearly obligatory diversion into the Summer of Love, culminating in the least Stones-like Rolling Stones album of the decade, Their Satanic Majesties Request. Though some elements of psychedelia lingered beyond Majesties, 1968 marked the band’s decisive turn, as noted above, back to the blues on Beggars Banquet. By the time the album was released at the end of that year, two critical outside influences had redirected the Stones’ stance toward country music: Gram Parsons and Ry Cooder. Their impact on and interaction with the group could hardly be more different. In May, the group encountered Parsons while he was on tour in the UK during his brief stint with the Byrds (indeed, his initial conversations with Jagger and Richards about the band’s upcoming tour of Apartheid South Africa convinced Parsons to drop out of the Byrds).

Although Parsons’ influence was more personal and more widely acknowledged, Cooder’s contribution must be considered for an understanding of what “country” meant to the Stones in the 1970s. Cooder was brought over from the USA by Jack Nitzsche in June of 1968 to jam with the Stones, in order to percolate ideas for a film project (The Performers) back in Los Angeles, for which Cooder was to write the soundtrack. While his most notable impact on the group was turning Richards onto the five-string open-G tuning (with which Richards claims he was already experimenting), Cooder also deserves credit for helping to steer the band towards pre-Chicago blues, an era when white and black “country” music were often indistinguishable, when Lesley Riddle could collaborate with the Carter family and Woody Guthrie could sing alongside Lead Belly.⁶ A number of the Stones’ songs, from Beggars Banquet onward, tap this earthier, organic vein of country music: “Sweet Virginia” from Exile on Main Street, and “No Expectations” from Beggars Banquet, for example. Nowadays, we might not think to label those songs country, but the concept of “country rock” was broad enough at the end of the sixties to encompass the loose Americana aura of The Band (touted on the cover of Time Magazine as “The New Sound of Country Rock”), the straight-ahead honky-tonk of the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and the tight-harmony and steel guitar-laden styles coming out of southern California from Poco, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, and others. By contrast, Cooder was himself a product of the late-sixties LA music culture, and his own albums around this time illustrate his interest in everything that scene had to offer, not just the emerging sound of hippie-twang. Through Nitzsche, a record company insider with his own eclectic tastes, Cooder was in contact with other roots-seekers in LA: Randy Newman, Leon Russell (who had already played on many recordings there as a member of the studio band, the Wrecking Crew), and Lowell George, to name a few.⁷ Some of that mix probably was conveyed to the Stones in London. Although they had little (documented) contact with those artists, echoes of all the aforementioned can be heard throughout their string of albums from 1968–72, and Russell actually first recorded the Stones’ gospel-influenced song “Shine a Light” a few years before it appeared on Exile, for his eponymous album of 1970.

Just how much of those influences were directly communicated through Cooder and how much was a matter of a shared musical language is hard to gauge. The relationship between him and the band soured a year later when he was once again brought in by Nitzsche, at the planning stages for the 1969 album Let It Bleed. Although he is credited on “Love in Vain” (mandolin) here, and later on “Sister Morphine” (slide guitar) from Sticky Fingers (1971), Cooder vented in a 1970 Rolling Stone interview about his presence during the Let It Bleed sessions, claiming that his riffs were copied by Richards and formed the core sound of the album:

For their part, the Rolling Stones have downplayed Cooder’s influence, allowing only as how he showed Richards many ways to utilize the open G-tuning that became a hallmark of Richards’ playing from that point on.

By contrast, Gram Parsons is often assumed to have given the Stones as much material as Ry Cooder complained that they took from him. Yet unlike Cooder, Parsons never claimed any credit or begrudged the band any bits and pieces they might have borrowed. In part, this speaks to the deep personal connection he felt to the band, and to Richards in particular, who spoke of Parsons as a “long-lost brother.”⁹ On three stints – the first at Richards’ Redlands estate in the summer of 1968 following Parsons’ decision to abandon the Byrds in July; the second in the fall of 1969 when the Stones took up residence in southern California to complete Let It Bleed and prepare for a US Tour; and the third in the summer of 1971 at Richards’ Villa Nellcôte in the south of France, where the Stones were recording what would become Exile – Parsons and Richards bonded in lengthy explorations of the country canon, with Parsons bringing Richards’ youthful familiarity with honky-tonk up to date. His Southern bona fides notwithstanding, Parsons himself had only warmed to country music when he arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts to attend Harvard in the fall of 1965. During his single (mostly truant) semester there, he fell in with a band that would move to the Bronx within a year and become the International Submarine Band. ISB guitarist John Nuese takes credit for immersing Parsons, along with the rest of the band, in the Bakersfield sounds of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens: “Gram knew nothing about what was going on with country music in the sixties and he quickly became an avid fan … He took on that music and made it his own.”¹⁰ Neuse recounts long nights singing through material that jibe with Parsons’ later marathon singing sessions with Richards as the latter recalls them:¹¹

By the time Parsons met Richards, he had cajoled the International Submarine Band into moving to Los Angeles, where they disbanded in 1968, shortly before Parsons and Neuse scored a record deal with Lee Hazelwood and produced one album (Safe at Home) with a hastily assembled new line-up. Over the next five years of his short life (he died of a drug overdose in 1973 at the age of twenty-six), Parsons established a pattern of gathering other musicians around him, only to lose interest, focus, or both, or to try the patience of his collaborators through his unreliability, which was largely fueled by his substance abuse. His fame and influence (almost entirely posthumous) are wildly disproportionate to the amount of music he wrote and recorded, and speak more to his vision of “Cosmic American Music,” in which the various strands of late 1960s popular music – country, R&B, and rock – could be harmoniously blended. Parsons recognized this quality in the Stones as he encountered them in 1968. Prompted by an interviewer’s leading comment (“‘Wild Horses’ is very unlike most of their writing”), Parsons calls the song “a logical combination between our music and their music.” As Parsons tried to explain in his ensuing remarks, the Stones had sent the original masters to Parsons’ band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, who actually released the first version of the song.¹³ This remark touches on a subtle but critical facet of his relationship with the Rolling Stones and on the very nature of the Stones’ country songs. For all the hours Parsons and Richards spent drilling down into the country songbook, from Hank Williams to Merle Haggard, the idea of replicating the style of those songs and the sound of those recordings was not Parsons’ agenda during the years he was close to the Stones. Rather, he was after a synthesis of various strands of American music, and it is that vision that ultimately influenced Richards and his bandmates. That, however, leaves a more nebulous mark, which makes it hard to pin down Parsons’ impact, on the one hand, and easy to imagine it everywhere, on the other. Richards says as much: “That country influence came through in the Stones. You can hear it in ‘Dead Flowers,’ ‘Torn and Frayed,’ ‘Sweet Virginia,’ and ‘Wild Horses,’ which we gave to Gram to put on the Flying Burrito Brothers record Burrito Deluxe before we put it out ourselves.”¹⁴

The fact that those four songs come across as quite different from one another stylistically speaks volumes about the Stones’ approach to country stylings in their own music. Whereas their early focus on rock and roll and R&B provided some unity to their sound through 1966, the diversity of their country-influenced numbers reflects the wide range of their country inspirations and the relative novelty of the genre for the group. Moreover, since the country influence of Ry Cooder leaned more towards what we would nowadays label “roots” music, a mix of vernacular styles from which both country and the blues would emerge, and because Gram Parsons – for all of the Nashville and Bakersfield tutorials he shared with Richards – interacted with the group while pursuing his own path of blending country, blues, and rock under the banner of Cosmic American Music, it is not surprising that Stones Country is an itinerary of disparate places that don’t connect along one road; there is no country route to replace the Highway 61 of the Stones’ blues background.

What follows, then, is a tour of an imaginary musical landscape. Each of the songs discussed below has to be taken on its own merits, considered for its unique representation of country within the Rolling Stones’ core style. To help navigate them, however, I have grouped some songs together, leading from those older primordial mixtures of country and blues (The Old Country), through numbers that wear country on their sleeve – maybe a little too overtly (Deep Country), to songs that incorporate country elements in a decidedly modern manner to produce something entirely at home at the turn of the decade (Stones Country). This list hardly exhausts the songs that display country influence – much less the influence of Parsons and Cooder – but represents rather a survey of significant landmarks. Well-known examples (“Wild Horses,” “Country Honk,” “Torn and Frayed”) will be bypassed in order to focus on a handful of songs that raise particular issues of the Rolling Stones’ engagement with country music styles.

The Old Country: “No Expectations” and “Sweet Virginia”

One of the obstacles to defining Stones Country is the inherent blending of country and blues once one looks back beyond the honky-tonk era of Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb. Country music was only defined as a type in the wake of the “Big Bang” at Bristol in 1927, when Ralph Peer recorded Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family (along with numerous other aspiring regional acts) for the Victor Talking Machine Company in the first week of August. Although many white Appalachian string bands were recorded in the 1920s and early 1930s, their repertoire and playing styles often overlapped considerably with African-American blues artists (their counterparts in the “race” catalogues of Victor and other early recording companies). No one better illustrates the cross-fertilization between hillbilly music and the blues (and Tin Pan Alley, for that matter) than Rodgers himself, whose “Blue Yodel” series of songs all follow the twelve-bar blues form while borrowing vocal inflections and lyrical clichés from the black side of the “race records” divide.

At least two Stones songs from the cluster of albums between 1968 and 1972 dwell in that interstice. “No Expectations” from Beggars Banquet (1968) would seem to derive from straight blues material. Commentators frequently point to Reverend Gary Davis’ “Meet Me at the Station,” and Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” – which Richards claims the band had only discovered in 1967. “No Expectations” has the distinction of being the last recording to include Brian Jones, whose Hawaiian-style acoustic slide guitar quickly conjures the country blues of the 1930s. But if the lyrics vaguely tap various stock lines from early rural blues recordings (for example, “I followed her to the station,” from Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” becomes “Take me to the station” in the Stones’ hands), details in the musical setting decenter the song’s blues identity. Most notably, the verses alternate three times between a pair of chords (A major and E major), launching each iteration with a softly altered version of A major as Keith Richards lets a note from the other chord in the pair ring through in his part. Pre-war guitarists certainly may have added notes to these chords, but they would be flatted and would have added a bite, not the melancholy tone struck here. Jones’ limpid slide guitar lines do little to sharpen the effect. The result is neither blues, nor the rootsy early country of Jimmie Rodgers, Charlie Poole, and the like, but rather a comfortable blending of the two that pays homage to their interconnectedness, while injecting just enough poetry (“Our love was like the water/That splashes on a stone/Our love is like our music/It’s here, and then it’s gone”) to render the song modern. Like some other songs in Stones Country, the country element in “No Expectations” is mostly latent, as evidenced by the stronger presence of country idioms in covers that range from bluegrass renditions by John Hartford and Bill Keith, to outlaw statements from Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, and a retro-roots version by Nancy Griffith and Son Volt.

“Sweet Virginia” (Exile on Main Street, 1972) similarly carries more country potential than it realizes (although in this case there is no bank of country covers to plead its case). The opening of the song seems as generically “country”-sounding as a song could get in 1972. Richards’ unadorned, jingle-jangle guitar could derive from any era in country music up to that time. But – as a country song – the track quickly loses its moorings. Although we could still hear “Sweet Virginia” as traditional country of one sort or another when Mick Jagger’s harmonica enters five bars in, followed in short order by Mick Taylor’s lead acoustic guitar, things start to take a right-angle turn when the drums and bass enter (0:47). A country vibe is maintained through the first verse but dissipates as the piano (Ian Stewart) and saxophone (Bobby Keys) enter with the chorus, and the entire ensemble morphs into something more like a Bayou blues jam than an Appalachian string band. In other words, “Sweet Virginia” crosses the same blurry boundary from country to blues that “No Expectations” had traversed, only here it occurs sequentially rather than simultaneously. Lost in the raucous romp into which the song extends from its mid-point on is a perfectly plausible modern country, 2/4 beat. To be sure, Charlie Watts’ snare shots are raspier and looser than one would expect from the average Nashville or Bakersfield drummer of the day (compare, for example, the drumming on Merle Haggard’s nearly contemporaneous [1971] cover of Roger Miller’s “Train of Life”); they might sound more at home in Memphis or New Orleans. Nevertheless, the underlying rhythm to Watts’ pattern can be traced back to any number of early country songs – again, Jimmie Rodgers provides a ready example in “Waiting for a Train,” in which the boom-chick of Watts’ pattern is ably represented by Rodgers’ guitar. If the drumming on “Sweet Virginia” leans towards blues or something more soulful than we tend to associate with country, it is merely a reminder of how interconnected country’s origins are with other “roots” genres.

Acknowledging the crossover from an ostensibly country opening into something “other” also helps explain the frequent suggestions (beginning with the members of the Rolling Stones themselves) that “Sweet Virginia” reflects the influence of Gram Parsons.¹⁵ On the surface this is a curious claim, as there are no Parsons songs that come close to sounding like this. Only “Do You Know How it Feels,” included on both the International Submarine Band’s Safe at Home and Burrito’s Gilded Palace of Sin, has any resemblance, sharing the underlying drum pattern (though much closer to Jimmie Rodgers than Charlie Watts). But that lack of a specific match serves as a reminder that Parsons’ influence was as much a concept as a sound. In this case, the blending of country and soul leads backwards more than forwards, and thus Parsons’ Cosmic American Music is not the best label for what the Stones achieve in “Sweet Virginia”: we are still in the Old Country. As much as Parsons’ idea was predicated on the common roots from which country, R&B, and rock and roll had sprung, he was aiming towards a newer synthesis. Stones tunes making up a second group from the period in question fall short of that ideal by seizing solely on the country explorations that Parsons and Richards undertook at Redlands and Nellcôte. Perhaps it is no surprise that these songs feel less like Rolling Stones songs, and more like role-playing or parody.

Deep Country: “Dear Doctor” and “Far Away Eyes”

For all of Keith Richards’ and Mick Jagger’s legitimate interest in and knowledge of country before encountering Ry Cooder and Gram Parsons, they defined themselves first as Rolling Stones – as asserted at the beginning of the chapter – through the passion for R&B and blues that they shared with Brian Jones. With a nod to the Animals, the Stones were the “blackest” of the British Invasion bands. Reflecting on blackness as an attitude and ominous demeanor (rather than race) after Altamont, Robert Christgau posited that whereas the Stones and the Beatles shared an appreciation for the “tough, joyous physicality of their Afro-American music,” the Stones “came from a darker angrier place.” But Christgau takes issue with the idea that Jagger was trying to be black:

Christgau is speaking specifically of Jagger’s voice. While the adoption of black musical style might have harnessed the frustration of British youth in the post-war era, Jagger did not need to adopt black vocal mannerisms to get the point across. His verbal articulation may have been just as muddy as that of the Chicago bluesmen he studied as a teenager (Jagger claimed he would put his ear directly up to his record player’s speaker in order to decipher the lyrics of his favorite songs), but as Christgau avers, his was a different voice whose blurred diction was founded on “directness of feeling,” not verbal blackface.¹⁷ One glaring exception to this rule is Jagger’s rendition of Robert Wilkins’ “Prodigal Son” (a song that draws its refrain from Wilkins’ “That’s No Way to Get Along”) on Beggars Banquet. As the only song on that LP not penned by Jagger and Richards, Jagger could be heard to pay homage to Wilkins through his affected delivery.

Jagger’s vocal style in the Rolling Stones’ most overtly country songs is starkly different. In contrast with the avoidance of a black voice in the Stones’ generic rock style and blues numbers, Jagger falls into a mannered drawl in the two songs I have grouped under Deep Country. In both cases, his voice is only the most overt projection of the Stones’ parody of a specific country song type. Rather than absorbing country as a new facet of their identity, as one could argue they had in “Sweet Virginia,” these songs find the band holding country at arm’s length, something not only beyond their identity, but far enough removed from it to be an object of ridicule. In Jagger’s words: “The country songs, like ‘Factory Girl’ or ‘Dear Doctor’ on Beggars Banquet were really pastiche. There’s a sense of humor in country music, anyway, a way of looking at life in a humorous kind of way – and I think we were just acknowledging that element of the music.”¹⁸ “Dear Doctor” is nothing if not comedic. However, the humor lies not in the nature of the country music it parodies (per Jagger’s assertion), but rather in the exaggerated manner in which the Stones play up the stereotypes and clichés of the genre. At its core, “Dear Doctor” is a country waltz – a type with a rich tradition going back at least to the Carter Family. More often than not, country waltzes are wistful, either retelling a sad tale or recalling a tender moment. This offers a perfect context for the singer’s tale of woe, driven to drink “like a sponge” as he is pushed by his mother to marry a “bow-legged sow” – a far cry from the lost loves of Pee Wee King’s “Tennessee Waltz,” Bill Monroe’s “Kentucky Waltz,” Webb Pierce’s “The Last Waltz,” and from a few years later (1974), “As Soon As I Hang Up the Phone,” by Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty. Jagger makes sure to let the listener know they are intentionally missing the emotional mark of their models by tagging the rhyming words “jar,” “sour,” and “hour” (a little less so on “heart”). Richards’ harmony vocal doubles down on the spoof at those moments, slightly overshooting his note every time. The farcical falsetto with which Jagger delivers the lines in the missing bride’s letter to her jilted fiancé in the last verse ensures that no one will miss the send-up. At best, the Stones are providing some relief on an otherwise heavy album. More likely though, they are displaying their own discomfort: with the maudlin nature of those legitimate country waltzes, the oh-so-white character of the straight country-waltz beat, and the idea of representing straight country music in one of their own songs. The song was recorded in May of 1968, before Richards embarked on the first of his extended country music deep dives with Parsons, so the aura that country would soon take on for Richards and the group had not yet materialized.

That said, Jagger and Richards knew how a country song works, and they dialed up several stereotypical features of the genre in “Dear Doctor.” For example, the reiterative melodic beginning of the chorus (“Oh help me”/“Dear doctor”/“I’m damaged”) mimics a similar melodic profile in such country waltzes as Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and “Tennessee Waltz” (where the pattern breaks with the third iteration, moving the repeated phrase [“I was dancing”/“with my darling”] up an octave [“to the Tennessee Waltz”]). Harmonically, the Stones seize on a tendency for country waltzes to move directly from their opening I chord to firmly establish a higher one on IV (in the case of “Dear Doctor,” the move is from the tonic D major harmony to a G major harmony). That is hardly an unusual move, but it is ubiquitous in well-known country waltzes (“Tennessee Waltz,” “Alabama Waltz,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Waltz of the Angels”). Finally, the climbing dissonant harmonies that land in a higher range (from 1:32–1:39) tap a category of country songs that shift key for a portion of the song, following the same interval of a fourth, now at the level of key (not simply harmony). Unlike their genuine models (Willie Nelson’s “Family Bible,” Buck Owens’ “Sweet Rosie Jones,” Merle Haggard’s “House of Memories,” Conway Twitty’s “Next in Line”), in which the shift occurs briefly within the verse of the song or as a bridge, “Dear Doctor” never comes back down to its original key, and ends with the chromatic, dissonant climb: another comical gesture, perhaps.

Humor at the expense of country stylings in “Dear Doctor” is not subtle, but neither is it over the top. Partly that is because the basic make-up of the band is present. Bill Wyman strips down his bass line as one would expect of a country player, but he approaches the chord roots at the downbeat of each measure from a minor third above or a second below – sticking to rock conventions and belying any Nashville or Bakersfield authenticity. Accordingly, Richards’ acoustic guitar parts are still bluesy enough to remind us that this is not a country band, and Jagger delivers the lyrics with an unaffected British accent for enough of the song (when he isn’t exaggerating his “R”s) that we have no trouble making sense of it as part of Beggars Banquet.

Through the run of albums from Beggars Banquet to Exile on Main Street, any further forays into country would be delivered more deftly (and we will consider some of those cuts below). But the country parody returned with a bang on Some Girls in 1978. After a few LPs following Exile that garnered mixed reviews for their musical content as well as for the Stones’ apparent lack of direction, Some Girls was generally received as a return to form and, more importantly, relevance.¹⁹ The album proved that the group could still provoke a response, from its cover featuring the band members in drag (replacing the real faces of some celebrities who insisted their faces be removed), to the gendered and racial offenses of the title track.²⁰ At the same time, Some Girls also demonstrated that the Stones could adjust to current pop music trends: disco with “Miss You”; new wave with “Shattered”; and punk with “Lies.” The other clear “style” piece on the LP is “Far Away Eyes,” which goes far beyond “Dear Doctor” in evoking the sound and flavor of country music. Of course, a lot had changed in country music and with the Rolling Stones during the intervening decade (see Figure 7.1). In 1977, the top of the country charts was in mid stream, represented on the one hand by the classic styles of Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings, and Charley Pride, and on the other by the forerunners of the soon-to-crest Urban Cowboy movement: a revamped Dolly Parton, Ronnie Millsap, Glen Campbell, and Crystal Gale. (Ironically, much of the changing sound of country music by the late 1970s was a reaction to the blending of country and rock that Gram Parsons had helped initiate in the late 1960s.)

Figure 7.1 Mick Jagger and Dolly Parton following her performance at the Bottom Line, New York, May 14, 1977.

Jeff Gold Collection, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

For their part, the Stones had moved on from founding member Brian Jones, through Mick Taylor, to Ron Wood, their new guitarist. On “Far Away Eyes” and at least three other tracks that were recorded for the LP (two only emerging decades later on rereleases of Some Girls) Wood plays pedal steel guitar, the quickest way to mark a track as “country.” Although Wood never developed stellar technique on pedal steel (he added steel tracks to several later songs as well), the playing here is decidedly more in tune and passable than on the 1964 demos mentioned earlier. The bright sound of the steel guitar’s whine is matched by Richards’ brittle Fender Telecaster, a combination that supplied the core of the Bakersfield sound a decade earlier. And unlike the country-influenced tracks at the turn of the 1970s, “Far Away Eyes” features a very passable execution of a laconic country rhythm track from Watts and Wyman. The comparison with the earlier songs from Stones Country is driven home by the strong similarity in musical content and structure with “Sweet Virginia.” Where the earlier track ran amok, spiraling into a swampy blues number, this one maintains the initial country flavor throughout, despite the nearly identical harmonic structure (the chord progression is extremely similar, save for the second chord in each song’s pattern) and formal similarities.

But the straight country delivery in “Far Away Eyes” is overshadowed by the very specific subcategory to which the lyrics assign the song: the country talking-blues. Examples dot the history of country music, from Hank Williams’ preaching songs under the name Luke the Drifter, to numerous examples by Johnny Cash, to the narration songs of Red Sovine, most memorably the ghost-trucker song, “Phantom 309.” The most recent hit in the style also had been a trucking song, C. W. McCall’s 1975 “Convoy.” Jagger uses the built-in hokum of the genre as a license to expand the parody element he had explored in “Dear Doctor.” In place of the hillbilly saga there, Jagger invokes Bakersfield and radio preachers to drench “Far Away Eyes” in country bona fides. And whereas the earlier Stones country songs let an occasional drawn-out “R” punctuate a line, Jagger laces this track with an exaggerated drawl throughout, where rolled “R”s are no longer necessary to put the effect across. The straight country playing behind the vocal allows the joke to stay front and center throughout, as the protagonist recounts running ten straight red lights with God’s blessing (“Thank you Jesus; thank you Lord!”), and the preacher’s exhortation to send ten dollars “to the church of the Sacred Bleeding Heart of Jesus located somewhere in Los Angeles [pronounced Ange-leez], California.”

In a Rolling Stone interview several months after the song was released, Jagger cites the origins of “Far Away Eyes” in the real experience of driving through Bakersfield on a Sunday morning, specifying: “all the country-music radio stations start broadcasting live from L.A. black gospel services.” When prompted by the interviewer (Jonathan Cott), Jagger initially denies the influence of Gram Parsons, but then immediately circles back to him:

Since Jagger raises the tongue-in-cheek element, it is hard not to also hear an echo of the last song on the Flying Burrito Brothers’ Gilded Palace of Sin, the Parsons and Chris Hillman original “Hippie Boy,” and from there to trace “Far Away Eyes” back further and more specifically within its genre. In “Hippie Boy,” Parsons’ churchy organ chords and wild piano runs accompany Hillman’s spoken tale (partly based on real events) of intrigue and deception, leading to the death of an innocent hippie at the calamitous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, ending with a screeching choral allusion to “Peace in the Valley.”²² For Parsons and Hillman, one need look no further than their beloved Louvin Brothers for a precedent. “Satan is Real” (1959) supplies sonic elements (the church organ) to the Burritos’ song while presaging the religious trappings (a preacher’s reply to the call to warn the congregation about the realities of Satan) in the Stones’ later parody. For the Stones, all of this is fodder for a send-up of country music and one of its core values, evangelical religion.

Stones Country: “Dead Flowers”

Ironically, in “Far Away Eyes,” the Rolling Stones sound the most convincingly country when they are distancing themselves from it most strongly. Jagger and Richards back up their various claims of having known and appreciated country music before Cooder and Parsons arrived on the scene, but they don’t want to be tied directly to it. Despite the cachet of numerous country-rockers, “outlaws” (Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, etc.), and progressive singer-songwriters by 1978, the Stones did not feel they could treat country music as simply as the newer styles represented on Some Girls. But they could have. A 2011 CD reissue included eleven previously unreleased tracks, mostly from the original recording sessions for the album from October 1977 through March 1978. Among those (and two from slightly later sessions) are two country covers that might have situated the Stones very differently in relation to country. Their recording of Hank Williams’ classic “You Win Again” uses much the same line-up and basic core sound (with a touch of slap-back echo added) as “Far Away Eyes,” but there is no trace of parody or distance; it is as sympathetic a reading as they gave any of the R&B songs they had ever covered. Jagger injects a heavy dose of blues inflection to the vocals, befitting a serious Rolling Stones track. Most surprising is how deftly Wood handles the pedal steel guitar. Whereas his licks on “Far Away Eyes” were limited (the sort of pedal mashing any guitarist might engage in when dabbling), he strings phrases together on this track passably and he shows more feeling for the idiomatic use of the instrument. Wood also deserves kudos for his pedal steel playing on “Shattered,” which required more imagination since there is nothing remotely country about the song, and thus no models to fall back on. (Nevertheless, he is probably not the first to use pedal steel on a New Wave or punk track; that distinction likely goes to Walt Andrews of Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band, whose eponymous LP débuted in June, 1978, but who had been performing in the Washington, D.C. area for a few years before that.) Another cover, “We Had It All,” was captured in the wash of material the Stones recorded in 1978, but included the same line-up heard on Some Girls. Written by established country songwriters Troy Seals and Donnie Fritts, the song had been previously recorded by Waylon Jennings and Dobie Gray (among others); Richards – who, according to Jagger, heard it off the Jennings album Honky Tonk Heroes²³ – gives a haunting version singing and accompanying himself on piano. By now, Watts and Wyman have assimilated country rhythm playing and can apply it without the audible eye roll (confirmed by the official music video) that seeps through on “Far Away Eyes.” Whereas the latter could have been taken as an affront by a generation of alt-country artists who would emerge a decade later, Richards’ gripping rendition of “We Had It All,” along with the band’s gritty but subdued instrumental tracks, could have been held up as a road map for later pioneers like Jay Farrar and Ryan Adams. Reversing roles from earlier country-influenced tracks, Watts and Wyman lay down a country beat, and Richards and Wood move beyond that into a place that is neither country, rock, nor blues.

“Dear Doctor” and “Far Away Eyes” demonstrated that the Rolling Stones could never feel at home in Deep Country. They had to maintain their distance by playing the fool; the Stones’ parody of country idioms clearly pegs them as outsiders. However, this is not to say that they couldn’t incorporate country music into their sound, which is why “You Win Again” and “We Had It All” are so important for demonstrating that, by 1978, the Stones had figured out what they could do with country music. Several songs from the core LPs from 1968–72 chronicle their gradual assimilation of country. The high-water mark among these is “Dead Flowers,” recorded in 1969–70 and released in 1971 on Sticky Fingers. Perhaps more than any other track discussed here, “Dead Flowers” is widely recognized as the Stones’ most direct country song, even though it falls short on many country style points. All of the exaggerations of the earlier “Dear Doctor” are toned down and delivered with more finesse, starting with the lyrics. What had been a redneck romance is replaced by an uptown/downtown relationship gone wrong. And whereas the substance of choice in the earlier song was corn whiskey (“She plied me with bourbon so sour”), “Dead Flowers” makes a veiled (albeit thinly) reference to heroin use in the second verse: “I’ll be in my basement room with a needle and a spoon/And another girl to take my pain away.” Indeed, the title of the song itself and its addressee, “Little Susie,” may even allude to heroin. These codenames may be more urban legend than reality: they are mostly discussed in internet chat rooms rather than in any authoritative sources.²⁴ Given the group’s well-publicized troubles with heroin and any number of other controlled substances by this time, “Dead Flowers” brings the story closer to home. It is not autobiographical, however; Jagger and Richards’ lyric locates the protagonists in the South with a reference to “Kentucky Derby Day.”

Just as tellingly, they also tie the song to some heavy Southern class symbolism: the pink Cadillac. As an icon, the pink Cadillac goes back to Elvis Presley. In his 1955 recording of Arthur Gunter’s “Baby, Let’s Play House,” Presley alters Gunter’s first verse:

Elvis changes the opening of the second line to “You may drive a pink Cadillac.” Shortly after recording the song for Sun Records, Presley bought himself a custom pink 1954 Cadillac sedan – the first of several pink cars he would own. Greil Marcus recognizes the pink Cadillac as central to Elvis’ rags-and-resentment-to-riches story, even tying it to some of Jagger’s earlier songs:

Jagger’s protagonist has contempt less for the social class that separates him from his ex than for her hypocrisy: holding forth with her rich friends while supplying his heroin (she is, after all, the “queen of the underground”). Situating her in her pink Cadillac, in contrast to his heroin-tainted basement room, marks her as a social climber – someone who, like the singer, does not belong with her rich friends. Some, all, or none of this may derive from actual relationships the Stones found themselves in through their rise to stardom in the preceding decade, but all of the dynamics at play (drugs, class conflict, bitter break-ups) are plausible and relatable aspects of the band members’ lives. Right off the bat, then, before even turning one’s attention to the music to which the lyric is set, this is a more legitimate country song than anything the Stones had done before, since it relates a “real” story.

As with the lyrics, the excesses of “Dear Doctor” are tamed in the musical setting of “Dead Flowers.” Richards’ sprawling acoustic guitar parts are replaced by a more organized trio of Jagger on acoustic and Richards and Taylor with terse, intertwined electric riffs. Charlie Watts’ drumming, barely present on “Dear Doctor,” now supplies a tight, steady pulse through the verses, and Wyman reins in his bass line to include primarily rhythmic repeated-note interjections. But the song’s country flavor derives from a host of details, not its basic instrumental features. Among those details are things that are not there. For one, nearly all blue notes and seventh chords have been eliminated from the standard Rolling Stones musical language. Likewise, the chord patterns, while not necessarily “country” harmonic progressions per se, are dominated by root position major chords, which are the stuff of standard country music. In fact, only the “Three Chords and Truth” trio of harmonies are employed here: I, IV, and V (or D, G, and A). Significantly, the tell-tale VII chord is completely absent, stripping the harmony of a standard blues and rock marker. (The VII chord is ubiquitous in the Stones’ music. Some notable appearances in songs discussed so far include: “High and Dry” [“High and dry, well I’m up here with no warning”]; “No Expectations” [“I’ve got no expectations to pass through here again”]; and “Dear Doctor” [“It’s sleeping, it’s beating, can’t you please tear it out”]). Finally, the overdriven sound of the electric guitar is missing as well, as both Taylor and Richards maintain a clean signal in their respective channels. While not de rigueur for a rock guitar sound, overdrive and distortion were a base-line sound of rock by 1971. Their absence makes it that much easier to assign “Dead Flowers” to another style.

Perhaps the clean guitar sounds only point specifically to country due to Taylor’s many pedal-steel-like string bends, one of two country details that were added to the mix. More significant is Jagger’s vocal delivery. By now it may seem redundant to raise the issue of an affected Southern accent, after the observation of hard “R”s and other drawled words in “Dear Doctor” and “Far Away Eyes.” However, Jagger’s Southern persona in “Dead Flowers” is entirely different. Just as the drug-riddled back story accords with the Stones’ reality at that time, Jagger pulls punches in the delivery here to remove the comic edge that pervaded the songs of Deep Country. To be sure, final “R”s are hit hard, and some “L”s are drawn out (“You know I could never be a-Lone”; “Rose pink cadi-LL-ac”) so as to highlight the drawl of the ensuing vowel. Yet at no point does the song sound like a parody. In some ways it foreshadows Jagger’s much later solo recording, “Evening Gown” (1993), with its even more subtle hint of a Southern accent to fit the song’s country styling. In some ways, the more sincere he makes his Southern accent, the more unambiguously Jagger can turn a Rolling Stones song into a “country” song. Perhaps this is why songs like “Torn and Frayed” from Exile on Main Street (despite its use of pedal steel guitar) and Let It Bleed’s “Country Honk,” with its aggressive fiddle, make less of a claim. As anyone who has witnessed the rise of Bro country can attest, sometimes all that connects a song to a country claim is the singer’s Southern accent. We might not notice when the singer identifies as an American Southerner and dons a cowboy hat or boots, or a plaid flannel shirt, but it is to some degree the very essence of country. When the scarf-adorned poster boy for British rock puts on the accent, however, we are forced to take notice and contemplate the country identity of his song. Our attention is drawn even more compellingly when that singer and his band are so strongly identified with decidedly African-American musical styles, and, most critically, when that core association is achieved without an overreliance on a parallel affectation of black vocal idioms. The Southern accent is the strongest relic of the Old Country and Deep Country that imprints its sound on Stones Country, precisely because it reminds us how these songs draw a distinction from the Rolling Stones’ core sound and identity.

Assemblage and Deleuzean Philosophy

Deleuze uses the image of a breath or gust of air to refer to the invigorating impact of philosophers he admired, such as Spinoza, Foucault, and Sartre,⁵ and this idea is useful to illuminate the musical contributions of Brian Jones to the Rolling Stones. Here we can distinguish three levels of inspiration at work: (1) philosophical influences as a courant d’air for Deleuze; (2) Deleuze as a courant d’air for my exploration of Brian Jones; and (3) Brian Jones as a courant d’air for the Rolling Stones and through their work as an influence on blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll in general. In his construction of philosophical concepts, Deleuze was concerned with the fundamental consequence of “events” over time, rather than an accumulation of things, and with the idea that an individual might be characterized “as a flow of events and not as a person.”⁶ In other words, the individual (in this case, Jones) is characterized by his or her actions, not his or her attributes.⁷ In my characterization of Jones within the context of the Rolling Stones I will focus on the flow of events that gradually introduced certain musical instruments and associations to Jones, as a means of constructing a concept of his life.⁸ This flow of events becomes the assemblage, indicating the emergent and heterogeneous world music interests of Jones in his ever-shifting incorporation of non-Western, or at least non-standard, sounds into the Stones’ music. “The assemblage is productive of difference (non-repetition). It is the ground and primary expression of all qualitative difference.”⁹ Assemblage enables a combination of diverse components, thus allowing something different to emerge. Deleuze replaces the idea of content with an arrangement or “assemblage” (agencement) of relations.¹⁰

Jones as Harbinger and Casualty of the Stones’ First Decade

Jones was a harbinger of the musical path the Stones would take in his founding passion for American blues and his vision to incorporate rhythm and blues into the British rock scene. Jones also anticipated the interest among pop musicians in different traditions of world music, an influence already present in George Harrison’s use of the sitar in “Norwegian Wood” of 1965 (which predates Jones’ use of the instrument in “Paint It, Black” by almost six months), but one that would be more deeply explored by such artists as Paul Simon, Sting, and Peter Gabriel, to give just a few famous or infamous examples. Simon and Sting incorporated not just influences, but world music singers into their own songs – consider the significant role of Joseph Shabalala from Ladysmith Black Mambazo on Simon’s Graceland album of 1986, or Sting’s song “Desert Rose” with Algerian singer Cheb Mami of 1999 – and Gabriel organized world music festivals and concerts, such as his WOMAD festivals (World of Music, Arts and Dance) begun in 1980.¹¹ Jones’ idea to combine his own music not only with American blues and soul, but even distant “Elizabethan” idioms, and more importantly, his fascination with recording the Master Musicians of Joujouka in Morocco (1967–68), were visionary for their time.¹² Jones had an almost ethnomusicological leaning in his desire to make field recordings of the Joujouka musicians’ ritual music in its authentic location and to share at least portions of these recordings along with information about the musical rite with audiences beyond its borders. He also reveals an early interest in mastering and ultimately combining diverse instruments, which became perhaps his most original and key contribution to the Stones.

Jones, however, was a casualty in his devastation both by the perverse attempts by some in the band to share each other’s women – something that he also participated in over time, but which cost him the opportunity to be a father to his son Julian with Pat Andrews – and by his fraught relationship with Anita Pallenberg.¹³ Jones was furthermore a casualty of the Stones’ first decade – and to some extent the broader countercultural movement – in his succumbing to the drugs and alcohol that ultimately consumed and claimed his life. Jones’ bandmates reflected on his tragic demise and their role in it. Charlie Watts recalled: “He got much nicer just before he died – in the last few years of his life. But I felt even sorrier for him for what we did to him then. We took his one thing away, which was being in a band. That’s my opinion.”¹⁴

Jones drowned in his own pool late at night in 1969 after celebrating too heavily the promise of incoming funds to his account, but he was also perhaps bemoaning the loss of his place in the band he was so instrumental in founding.

Overview: Jones’ Musical Impulses

Almost all writings about Jones cite his abundant creative impulse to search for broad and meaningful musical influences. From his “hauntingly beautiful” recorder melody – generally reminiscent of early music – in the ballad “Ruby Tuesday” and blues harp and slide guitar playing, to the marimba riff in “Under My Thumb” and his fascination with Indian sitar timbres and technique, Jones combined diverse elements into a cohesive whole.¹⁵ As in the philosophy of Deleuze – who coincidentally began writing just after WWII, not long after the most dominant Rolling Stones members were all born (Jones, 1942; Jagger and Richards, 1943) – Jones achieves difference through diverse musical influences and a wide range of instruments he played on various songs and albums. In the process, Jones developed an assemblage of style uniquely his own. Despite constant comparisons to the Beatles, whose stylistic breadth and technological innovations pushed other groups to follow suit, the Stones struck a path that veered away from the love and peace message of the Beatles, toward a darker representation of sex and power with a strong American blues influence.

Blues Influences

Jones was unquestionably the most versatile, unconventional, and exploratory musician in the Rolling Stones, and he founded the band with his passion for black R&B in mind; he instigated the core passion that fueled the formation of the Rolling Stones and their ongoing fascination with black American blues artists and culture. Of course, Jagger and Richards shared this fascination, and that is what brought them all together at the Crawdaddy (blues) Club, but Jones had been diligently practicing and imitating the American blues style and performing numerous gigs prior to this meeting. Jones’ mastery of the pitch-bending style of American blues harp playing was already evident when the Beatles came to see the Stones playing at the Crawdaddy Club by invitation of the owner, Giorgio Gomelsky; John Lennon’s response to Jones is described as “something like hero-worship. ‘You really play [emphasis mine] that harmonica, don’t you,’ he said. ‘I can’t really play – I just blow and suck.’”¹⁶

The degree to which the Stones introduced vast American television audiences to Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters is telling of the influence the band had on bringing great American blues musicians in the twilight of their careers into the limelight of music on television.¹⁷

The British rockers’ admiration for these longstanding American blues artists became an indelible part of the long-term image of the band.

Jones learned to play cross harp and taught blues-style harmonica to Jagger as well.¹⁹ In addition, concerning the focus on “roots” (blues) music, Trynka is emphatic that

In terms of rhythm and blues, however, it was Richards who taught Jones more about Chuck Berry.²¹

The Stones’ early recorded sound became distinctive through the impact of several renowned American studios: RCA studios (where post-Memphis Elvis recorded), marking the beginning of Jack Nitzsche’s important relationship to the band, and the famous Chess Records studios in Chicago, whose records of artists Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Willie Dixon, and Sonny Boy Williamson were at the root of the formation of the band itself. “Did we hit it off? [recounts Richards concerning his encounter with Jagger on a train] You get in a carriage with a guy that’s got Rockin’ at the Hops by Chuck Berry on Chess Records and The Best of Muddy Waters also under his arm, you are gonna hit it off.”²²

At Chess Studios, they met Muddy Waters and began work on a soul song by Bobby Womack, “It’s All Over Now,” under the expert supervision of house engineer Ron Malo, famous for his work with Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. They also met some of the great legends of the blues and talked to them at Chess. Richards described recording at Chess and receiving support from the artists they admired so much as “a shortcut to heaven.”

The Rolling Stones and Race

The Stones acknowledged their rhythm and blues influences and the African-American artists they revered, but they also could not deny their own significant impact and charged reception. In an article for Melody Maker in 1964, quoted by Jack Hamilton, Jagger acknowledged that

implying that “the singer recognized that the Stones’ skin color had given them an undue advantage among audiences.”²⁴ Despite their varied backgrounds and appearances, the Stones emulated the timbres and vocal style of black American music along with the actual genres and specific compositional styles. Notably, in the BBC’s initial rejection of the Stones, one key criticism was that “the singer sounds too coloured.”²⁵ Jagger’s vocal and gestural swagger, whoops and growls drew a great deal on the vocal style and dance moves of James Brown and other soul and blues artists. Yet even beyond musical style, there were social associations. Hamilton connects British blues with the “perceived danger and subversive liminality” of the Southern American blues tradition, which was steeped in the violence and racial terror of the American South. “Fantasies of the blues’ ‘threatening’ capacity for social rebellion … took on uniquely powerful imaginative dimensions in England, where black American bodies were generally absent.”²⁶

Jones, Jagger, and the Image of the Rolling Stones

Another play with authenticity developed by the Stones was through the cultivation of their image. Brian Jones was one of the first (if not the first) of the group to master a grand, theatrical appearance. Jones was well dressed, well spoken, well educated, and “obsessed with music.”²⁸ His mother recalls that he started piano lessons when he was six or seven, and when he was twelve he joined his school orchestra and learned clarinet.²⁹ His father notes his penchant for listening to Modern Jazz Quartet records for hours on end. “The reverberations used to drive me crazy,” Mr. Jones says, “These records were playing morning, noon, and night.”³⁰

In addition to diligent musical studies, Jones had a distinctive rock star image.

As the sixties progressed, the Stones quickly shifted from suit and tie to more stylish clothing. Numerous photographs show Jones in colorful and dramatic attire. He wears red corduroy pants with a black turtleneck sweater, white blouses, pinstripe suits and polka dot shirts, all kinds of striped or plaid pants and furry or silken vests, fur coats, white hats, velvet jackets, colorful scarves, and occasionally all-white outfits. His hair is carefully coiffed, another obsession of his. Jones exhibited a heightened awareness about his clothing and appearance within the band, but he was not the only one who stood out. On their American tour, Tom Wolfe described the excitement at their appearance:

Jagger was aware of the central importance of his image and his fashion, saying:

On the Ed Sullivan show, a program that is central in the history of rock and roll for exposing prime-time audiences to rock groups of the 1960s, and in many other videos of the Stones’ performances, Jagger’s style as evident in his clothing gives off an operatic theatricality. In a 1966 performance of “Paint It, Black” he wears a tangerine silk shirt with a black patterned jacket; and in his famous 1967 performance of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” – which Jagger sings (in high camp) as “let’s spend some time together” to comply with the show’s prudish censors – he wears a white frilly shirt underneath a shiny golden jacket. Much later, he simplifies his sex appeal to the more masculine white undershirt with crossed straps in back, flexing his biceps and waving his arms. In these later years, he moves from the bisexual theatricality of silk and stars to jeans and a white undershirt, betraying his father’s longstanding influence in teaching him to stay fit, exercise, and lift weights from his childhood days onward. Whatever the outfit, when Andrew Loog Oldham first saw the Stones, he believed their image and marketability could be summed up in one word: sex. Oldham saw the Stones as representing sex, musically and metaphorically, and he quickly arranged to represent them.³³ Over time, the Stones came to stand for the British countercultural movement of the 1960s: long hair, fashionable stylishness, and ultimately drugs, sex, and rock and roll.

In the language of assemblage, these traits are not important for what they are, but for what they do.³⁴ Thus the sexy and fashionable image manifested by the Rolling Stones – combined with their music – creates the powerful effect of the band on stage, and their lingering presence.

Jones as Sound Artist

“I love the SOUNDS. I like to experiment. I think that is the real reason I prefer harmonica to guitar. I can wail on harmonica.”³⁵ Jones taught Gordon Waller (of Peter and Gordon) to play the harmonica, he showed others how to bend the notes to play blues harp, and in general his passion for blues harp was longstanding. In 1965, Jones met folksingers Richard and Mimi Fariña – the latter, Joan Baez’s sister – several times during his visits to Los Angeles, and their “explorations of stripped-down Appalachian music” led directly to Jones’ purchase of a dulcimer.³⁶ Subsequently, when recording the song “Lady Jane” during the Aftermath sessions at RCA Studios in Hollywood, Jones created a counter-melody on the dulcimer, which, along with Jack Nitzsche’s contributions on harpsichord, provides the “Elizabethan” melancholy that is unique to this piece, and, according to Elliott, “confirmed Andrew Oldham’s belief that the band’s mid-60s musical success was due to [Jones’] instrumental elaboration.”³⁷

Aftermath

The fourth (in America, the sixth) Rolling Stones album, Aftermath, released in April 1966, represents perhaps the artistic high point of Brian Jones within the group. Although all of the songs are credited to the writing partnership of Jagger/Richards, it clearly reveals the pronounced compositional stamp of Jones and his “virtuoso playing … on a range of instruments seldom seen before in a pop recording studio” along with a corresponding “lack of interest” in the electric guitar.³⁸ The origins of Jones’ use of the marimba in “Under My Thumb” are found in the 1966 Aftermath sessions at RCA Studios in Hollywood. As luck would have it, the Mexican Baja Marimba band

Kramer believes Jones was unique in his understanding of tone color. “His sense of tone colour was magnificent, that’s how he’d think out of the box, to put a different tone colour on something to make it speak. That’s exactly what he did with the marimba part.”⁴⁰ In the song, Jones plays a fluid, expressive melody on the marimba, which develops and repeats over time. The interplay of an instrumental melody that supports Jagger’s vocal line but also adds a counter-melody in between the verses encapsulates a key aspect of Jones’ musical contributions to the Stones generally, and to this album specifically, as represented by an array of varied instruments and world music components he introduced in different songs.

Jones acquired his first sitar during the RCA recording sessions from December 8–10, 1965. His response to what the sitar had to offer again demonstrates his desire to experiment with diverse musical sounds. “I love the instrument,” he told the Melody Maker, “it gives you a new range if you use an instrument like that. It has completely different principals [i.e. harmonics] from the guitar and opens up new fields for a group in harmonics and everything.”⁴¹ Jones experimented with the sitar on his own and later found a teacher in a former student of Ravi Shankar named Hari whom he met in New York. Like George Harrison, Jones studied the sitar with serious intent for some time.

Bill Wyman recalls his own messing around on the pedals of an organ in the creation of “Paint It, Black,” and the subsequent collaborative development of the piece: “Charlie immediately took up the rhythm and Brian played the melody line on sitar … Funnily enough, it was never credited as a Nanker Phelge composition – I can’t think why.”⁴² Whatever the exact development of this piece, it is clear that Jones’ melody and the distinctive sound of the sitar formed an important part of this powerful synthesis.

When the Stones performed “Paint It, Black” on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1966 as well as for Ready Steady Go (see Figure 8.1), Jones plays the instrumental equivalent of the Other in his performance on the sitar. For the Ed Sullivan Show Jones is dressed all in white and sits in a circumscribed white circle as if in a world apart from the others (who stand separately in white circles of their own); still, he contributes closely to the song and more broadly represents an important part of the sixties exploration of the East: Indian music, fashion, and yogic philosophies as witnessed in the transformation of the Beatles in this regard.

Figure 8.1 Brian Jones playing sitar on Ready Steady Go, 1966.

Jan Olofsson/Redferns/Getty Images.

The transformation of the Beatles, the Stones, and the sixties decade can be traced in performances by both bands. When the Beatles appeared on Ready Steady Go in 1964, their hair was short and tidy, and they all wore matching white-collared shirts, dark ties, and suit jackets, as people danced around their lip-synced performance. When the Stones performed “Under My Thumb” semi-live on the same show a few years later, girls are screaming in the audience, and bouncers are struggling to hold the crowd back, away from the band. Despite the overall trajectory of transformation, one element that was already at a feverish pitch in the mid-sixties was the mania of the fans for both the Beatles and the Stones. There are numerous accounts of Rolling Stones concerts being disturbed by riots and fans trying to grab them on stage or tear apart the hall (see Figure 8.2).

Figure 8.2 Rolling Stones concert at the Berlin Waldbühne, September 15, 1965.

From l–r: Bill Wyman, Brian Jones, Mick Jagger. Photo: Alexander Enger, Preußischer Kulturbesitz; bpk Bildagentur/Art Resource, NY.

Marianne Faithfull recalled the long creative process of “Ruby Tuesday,” a song that underlines the assemblage process in Jones’ desire to combine his interests in two genres at opposite ends of the stylistic and historical spectrum, Elizabethan lute music and Delta blues.

Described as a “cross between Thomas Dowland’s ‘Air on the Late Lord Essex’ and a Skip James blues,” “Ruby Tuesday” evolved from Jones’ recorder melody spun out of this unlikely stylistic pairing, and is an example of one of the closest collaborations between Richards and Jones, with no musical contribution by Jagger other than the vocals.⁴⁴ Faithfull remembers that for several weeks it remained as just an instrumental track: “just this beautiful melody … Brian’s recorder dominates that song. It’s a second vocal, a plaintive gull hovering over the song. It was Brian and Keith’s song.”⁴⁵ Despite Jones’ compositional involvement in this song, the Jones/Richards partnership was never acknowledged; instead, all the Stones songs were credited to the Jagger/Richards duo with obvious financial consequences for Jones. According to Trynka, “Stan Blackbourne, the Stones’ accountant from 1965, was one of many who thought this completely inequitable. ‘I used to say to Jones, “What on earth are you doing? You write some of these songs and you give the name over as if Mick Jagger has done it. Do you understand, you’re giving ’em thousands of pounds!”’”⁴⁶

The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, 1968

The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus of 1968 – a TV project, eventually abandoned, featuring the Rolling Stones and other groups along with real circus acts – begins with Jethro Tull, the Who, and John Lennon with Eric Clapton, then features Yoko Ono performing with a classical violinist, and finally the Rolling Stones. Jones, clearly in physical distress, plays guitar on some songs and begins the circus performing on a dark wooden flute. He stands relatively still, almost sedated, in a purple jacket, ivory pants, and his shaggy blonde hair, sincerely adding chords, slide guitar, or a specific maracas rhythm to fill in and enhance the sound, with an effect that is neatly woven together yet propulsively electric. Jones’ musical modus operandi delineates another key definition for assemblage: the act or an instance of fitting together, or, an object made of pieces fitted together.

Jagger is unquestionably the most charismatic by this time, with his clear blue, big expressive eyes and large singing mouth, dancing lithely all the time and propelling his waist in a Latin pelvic thrust over and over, drawing the audience in to what appears to be his circus event. He talks with John Lennon in one scene before introducing the Dirty Mac supergroup, then later Lennon silently introduces the Rolling Stones with sign language. By now, Jagger is the central focus, with the long stories of “Sympathy for the Devil” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” expressed with a theatrical flair, inviting the audience into his world. His dark auburn hair framing his light sparkling eyes is a memorable sight.

Jones is understated but musically adept, contributing to the overall sound without a need to be the center of attention. He is musically a core member but has been almost entirely removed from the action. One exception in the later sixties period is the “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” promotional video, where, “wearing bug-eye alien specs, silver lipstick and an ice-blue Telecaster, Brian dominated the visuals alongside Mick,”⁴⁷ yet even in this instance Jones appears alienated and removed, in a world of his own. Concerning Jones’ increasing isolation from the core members of the band, Faithfull remembers that the composition of “Ruby Tuesday” had

After Jethro Tull – Ian Anderson with his long frizzy hair, an unhinged stare directly into the camera, and his frequent placing of his left foot on his right knee like a yogic posture or court jester – and the perhaps founding primal-scream sound artist in Yoko Ono who wails into the microphone on and off key for minutes, the Rolling Stones seem positively cool and collected, like a well-seasoned rock band. For all the previous acts the audience listened and stood up to clap enthusiastically at the end, but for the Rolling Stones, audience members, now garbed in variously colored cloaks, immediately started to dance. The percussive groove the Stones create, using Latin rhythms combined with drum kit, invites the collective bodies to move, illustrated first and foremost by Jagger’s ever-fluctuating arms, legs, feet, and body gesturing for all to join in. When they conclude with “Salt of the Earth” (“Let’s drink to the lowly of birth”), Marianne Faithfull conceals her face under her light brown suede hat, possibly because she is the daughter of a baroness from Austria, not of “common birth” at all.

Morocco and an Ethnomusicologist’s Bent

In Morocco (March, 1967) Jones was introduced to the sounds of the Master Musicians of Joujouka by Brion Gysin and the owner of the 1001 Nights restaurant, Mohamed Hamri, whose uncle was leader of the musical group. Gysin described a ceremony intended to contact Pan, the goat God, considered to represent “sexuality itself,” wherein the protagonist had to wear a goat skin newly removed from a sacrificed animal. Trynka describes the importance of this iconic image of Pan for Jones both musically and sexually: “Pan had brought syncopated, dangerous sounds into our world, was the ultimate progenitor of what some righteous people called the Devil’s music, and was the god of fertility.” Studio engineer George Chkiantz went to Morocco with Jones in August of 1968 to record Pipes of Pan of Joujouka. The week-long festival was not taking place at that time but they did go and record for a long evening until dawn.

The recording did not appear until October 1971, several years after Jones’ death, on the Rolling Stones’ own label. Bob Palmer wrote in Rolling Stone (October 14, 1971):

Jones added some electronic effects, “a backward drum track here, a backward melody there,” and drew on the unusual stereo effects of the recording, since the recording engineer “stood with his Uher 4400 in the center of the musicians, crossing his two microphones in one hand while they marched around him in a revolving figure 8.”⁵¹

The CD liner notes end with Jones’ description of the project:

A memo from Andy Wickham to Mo Ostin of Warner Bros delineates their concerns that the release of this album not be seen as “exploitation of a dead man’s myth and so on.” Ultimately, they believed the audience could be convinced that “Brian would have wanted it this way.” Wickham concludes: “No matter what anyone says, it is a finished recording, Jones would probably have released it had he lived and in no way can we fairly be accused of extortion. An official Rolling Stones endorsement would, of course, be advantageous in all this.” (See Figure 8.3.)

Figure 8.3 Inter-Office Memo from Andy Wickham to Mo Ostin, December 19, 1969.

Mo Ostin Collection, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

Devil Imagery and the Dark Side

The Stones highlight devil imagery in the title for Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) and in the 1968 recording of “Sympathy for the Devil.” ⁵³ In the 1968 film of The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, Jagger dances and sings right into the camera, while Jones plays two maracas in each hand, standing near Rocky Dijon (b. Kwasi Dzidzornu, an African percussionist from Ghana) on congas.⁵⁴ The song ends with Jagger taking his shirt off and repeating “What’s My Name?” over and over with tattoos of the Devil on his chest and arms answering that question.⁵⁵ In the June 1968 recording, Bill Wyman plays maracas, and Jones is part of the “devil’s chorus” (also comprising Richards, Wyman, Pallenberg, and others) singing vocal “whoo-whoo”s inspired by Jimmy Miller.⁵⁶ When Robert F. Kennedy was tragically shot on June 5, 1968, Jagger changed his original line from “Who killed John Kennedy?” to “Who killed the Kennedys?” – suggesting the Devil was behind these and other killings.⁵⁷

Within black American culture, the myth of the crossroads of Robert Johnson – who it was said made a deal with the Devil for prowess playing guitar – may have also inspired the theme of the Devil and satanic elements in several of the Stones’ lyrics and titles, and obliquely resonated with the now-iconic lapping tongue logo, though John Pasche has indicated that the Hindu goddess Kali was actually the inspiration for this logo (Exhibitionism, “Iconic Logo”). Lust, sex, and drugs were countercultural and widely celebrated in the sixties, but may have retained some dark associations in Christian communities, especially of the older generation. Several drug busts throughout the decade furthered the image of the Stones as the “bad boys” of the British rock scene, an intentional and iconic image for them.

While Trynka portrays Mick Jagger as cold and calculating, pushing Jones out of the Stones for competitive or financial reasons, Norman offers some counter-images of Jagger (and Richards) supporting Jones, attending the court after his second drug bust and offering some money and a way out of the band that would maintain his pride. The Trynka and Norman biographies both depict a world of fame, greed, drugs, indulgence, and attempts to take the other lead band members’ women, all of which causes the downfall of Jones and disintegration of his original vision of the band. In a telling response, when Jones saw the white goat being led to the sacrifice in Morocco, he said, “That’s me. That’s me”; and the others agreed.⁵⁸

Still, Jones had his own dark side, clearly evident in his tendency to get lost in drugs and alcohol – even if it was prescription drugs, LSD, and alcohol and not heroin – and in his conflicted love and attachment to women countered by occasional bouts of devastating violence towards them that is also detailed in these biographies and no doubt played a significant role in his downfall as well.

In conclusion, vast audiences over many decades have recognized the creative contributions of Jagger and Richards. Jagger’s creative lyrics, melodic style, charismatic dance moves, and expressive performances, and Richards’ incisive melodies and guitar riffs, are emblematic of the Stones’ output. Jones’ distinct contribution was a subtle, sophisticated instrumental ability to add unusual sounds to the mix and fill gaps in the music with unexpected resonances and beautiful countermelodies on a significant range of instruments with varied historical and cultural associations. Beyond his early and extensive mastery of guitar, slide guitar, and blues-style harmonica, this assemblage of world music sounds constitutes the most distinctive musical contribution of Jones to the Rolling Stones.

From the founding of the band to the present, many fans of the Stones still express their love and appreciation for Brian Jones, often as their favorite in the first decade (see, for example, the piece on Stones fans in this volume by Philippe Puicouyoul, 194–205). YouTube videos such as “The Rolling Stones on the Ed Sullivan Show” include comments by these diehard Jones fans. One comment, by Kathy O’Neil from c. 2014, states, “Fact is, without Brian Jones, there wouldn’t have been a Rolling Stones.” A video tribute to Jones entitled “Brian Jones – The first Stone” offers a concluding statement by Dave Davies of the Kinks: “I’m not putting down anyone else in the Stones, but Brian was the true artist in that band … A lot of their early creativity was down to him.”

I have discussed the assemblage aspects of Jones in both individual works and the musical events that traced some of the key world music influences and contributions of his life, as well as some of the challenges he faced. These musical events demonstrate the life of Jones as an assemblage of distinctive musical sounds and influences from diverse locations, cultures, epochs, genres, and instruments that he worked hard to master over decades, beginning with the guitar, slide guitar, and blues harmonica, and moving to his experiments with the dulcimer, marimba, sitar, and recorder. In the end, Jones’ tragic downfall resulted from the emotional and physical consequences of the sex and drugs part of the equation, not the rock and roll and world music possibilities, which formed the basis for his extraordinary musical inspirations: his courant d’air.⁵⁹ Here, I have chosen to focus primarily on the musical events that contributed to the assemblage of Brian Jones in his relation to the Rolling Stones, but I have also indicated some of the other facets or life events that had an impact on the assemblage of his life. The last Rolling Stones concert with Brian Jones was on May 12, 1968, the New Musical Express concert for the Poll Winners Show.

This chapter demonstrates the three core pillars of ethnomusicology as defined in my book published in 2015, these being: musical content or sound, various forms of context (historical, biographical, conceptual, and/or cultural), and a broader theoretical framework.⁶⁰ While one can choose to focus solely on musical elements in a given investigation, it is always more than just music that makes up the assemblage of “a life,” a core interest of Deleuzean philosophy. Consequently, I have elected to include significant life events as well as the impact of musical events in this assemblage of Jones during his decade-long interactions with key players in the influential sphere of the Rolling Stones.