40 Year Itch: The Stones Play Hawaii

Big O's Roio website [for entire show]

One week after Elvis performed his worldwide concert from Hawaii via satellite, The Rolling Stones formally kicked off their Pacific Tour with three shows in the Aloha islands on January 21-22, 1973. Ben Fong-Torres and photographer Annie Leibowitz followed the band for a Rolling Stone magazine cover story. But I prefer the way local columnist Wayne Harada describes the first night:

Jagger at the beginning of  "Sweet Virginia"

Jagger made his entrance in pure stardust -- with glitter flowing from his hair, the lights reflecting his rhinestoned headband and matching bracelet, his eyelids painted a decadent silver, his clinging white bodysuit revealing a trim, feline frame.
  And it was a screeeeammm when he burst into "Brown Sugar"...

(Jagger) is both clown and adagio dancer, in a myriad of expressions. Sometimes he smiles a gentle smile: another moment, he is vulgar and even sexual in his caresses with his microphone...It was indeed the greatest show on earth.

The next stop was supposed to be Japan but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to let the band enter because of drug charges. The Pacific Tour resumed February 11th in New Zealand. The Hawaii shows were the last Rolling Stones concerts to feature Mick Taylor.

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40 Year Itch: Inside a Rolling Stones Rehearsal

 The Rolling Stones gather in a closed movie house in Montreux, Switzerland on May 21st to rehearse for the upcoming "Cocaine and Tequila Sunrise" North American tour.

   

 With a baby on the way, Keith and Anita decided to clean up their act . Going "cold turkey" in the US, England or France was not an option so they went to a clinic in Vevey, Switzerland, four miles from Montreux.

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 It is fucking awful. ..the whole body just sort of turns itself inside out and rejects itself for three days...your skin crawls, your guts churning, you can't stop your limbs from jerking and moving about, and you're throwing up and shitting at the same time.
  --Keith Richards on going cold turkey in his book LIFE

   It was while getting clean that Keith says he wrote "Angie".

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40 Year Itch : Basement Tapes

[Purchase]

 All rock records should be made in dank basements of old Nazi strongholds on the Cote d'Azur, with reliable heroin connections in Marseille and Gram Parsons hovering in the paneled hallways. That way they might sound half as good as Exile On Main St.
           -Barney Hoskyns, The Observer, 2004

Recorded in the cold and humid basement of tax exile  Keith Richards's villa in the South of France, Exile On Main Street is often hailed as the greatest rock album of all time. How it ever got recorded with all the drugs, the booze, the never-ending house party, with anywhere between twenty and thirty visitors making noises upstairs, is a tribute, to of all people, Keef himself. Sure he was strung out and sleeping the day away, but at the oddest hours, Keith was a self described task master churning out song after song:

  "Rocks Off", "Happy", "Ventilator Blues", "Tumbling Dice", "All Down The Line" --that's five string tuning to the max. I was starting to really fix my trademark; I wrote all that stuff within a few days. Suddenly, with the five-string, songs were just dripping off my fingers".

Keith might have a line or two in mind to go with these riffs but it was up to Mick to come up with the lyrics. As Keith wrote in his autobiography:

"Most of what I had to do was to come up with riffs and ideas that would turn Mick on. To write songs he could handle. They had to be good records but translatable to being played on stage. I was the butcher cutting the meat"

To this day Mick has referred to Exile as "a bit overrated"...with , again in his opinion, none of the great songs that made Sticky Fingers and Let It Bleed such classics. But Mick wasn't always around for Exile. He would occasionally disappear with his new very pregnant bride Bianca . Keith was living the album-- producing two songs a day on a heroin habit which he said helped him shut out all of the daily stuff and concentrate on the music. "Happy" wasn't even recorded with the Stones but with producer Jimmy Miller on drums, Bobby Keys on baritone and Keith doing everything else.

   Even when that legendary summer at Villa Nellcote ended, the Stones still spent four or five months in LA mixing and over dubbing, recording two new cuts ( "Torn And Frayed and "Loving Cup"), adding percussion in some places, backing vocals in others. Richards and Jagger were both at the monumental recording of Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace album at LA's New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, and were inspired to add gospel inflections to songs like "Let It Loose" and "Shine A Light".

 Released on May 12, 1972, the album got mixed reviews. Naturally some critics compared it unfavorably to The Beatles double album. Lenny Kaye, writing for Rolling Stone, said "here are songs that are better, there are songs that are worse, and others you'll probably lift the needle for when the time is due."

To listen to Exile in its entirety --even the remastered 2010 deluxe version--is to immerse yourself in a thick stew of roots oriented rock n roll at its most ragged. For the most part, the songs don't sound over practiced ( though sounds can be deceiving-- "Tumbling Dice" was played more than 100 times before they captured that languid intensity we hear today). The bloom of inspiration shines on just about every cut. Still, I'll try to follow Lenny Kaye's lead and, at the risk of losing some of that claustrophobic basement funk, condense Exile into one epic ten song LP:

1 Rocks Off
2 Rip This Joint
3 Tumbling Dice
4 Sweet Virginia
5 Loving Cup
6 Happy
7 Let It Loose
8 All Down The Line
9 Shine A Light
10 Soul Survivor

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40 Years Ago Today; Tumbling Dice

When the Stones recorded "All Down the Line" at Nelcote, the sixteen room mansion Richards rented in the Summer of '71, engineer Andy Johns remembers Mick saying "This is a single. This is the single!" Johns thought Mick was out of his fucking mind:

And I went out and said to him "You're wrong about this. This is not a single?" And he went "Really? Do ya think so?" And that was the first time I realized "Jesus , he'll actually listen to me".

In the end it was "Tumbling Dice" that became the single. Johns recalls:

I think we may have spent two or three weeks just getting the track on that. That was just a performance thing. And the could play really badly,those guys. Most of the time, they were fucking terrible, There must have been some arrangement of it during the period but what I remember is just looking for a magical performance. But it went on and on and on. I had about thirty or forty or fifty reels of tape on that one song"--from Exile On Main St. by Robert Greenfield.
(Between 15 and 25 hours worth)

An early version of the song was recorded during the Sticky Fingers sessions as "Good Time Woman"



The single peaked at #5 in the US. #7 in the UK. But it topped Creem/ Rolling Stone critic Dave Marsh's list of the best singles of the year:


DAVE MARSH'S LIST OF THE 40 SINGLES OF 1972

 1. Rolling Stones Tumbling Dice
2. Derek And The Dominos Layla
3. Temptations Papa Was a Rollin' Stone
4. Curtis Mayfield  Freddie's Dead
5. Mott The Hoople All the Young Dudes
6. O'Jays Back Stabbers
7. Johnny Nash  I Can See Clearly Now
 8. Al Green  I'm Still in Love with You
 9. The Band  Don't Do It
10. Carly Simon You're So Vain
11. Al Green Look What You Done for Me
12. War Slippin' into Darkness
13. Harold Melvin And The Blue Notes If You Don't Know Me by Now
14. Mel And Tim Starting All Over Again
15. Paul Simon Mother and Child Reunion
16. Luther Ingram  (If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right
17. The Stylistics Betcha by Golly, Wow
18. Curtis Mayfield Super Fly
19. The Who Join Together
20. B J Thomas  Rock and Roll Lullaby
21. The Spinners Could It Be I'm Falling in Love
22. War The World Is a Ghetto
23. Michael Jackson I Wanna Be Where You Are
24. Rod Stewart You Wear It Well
25. Todd Rundgren I Saw the Light
26. The Chi-Lites Oh Girl!
27. Alice Cooper School's Out
28. The Spinners  I'll Be Around
29. The Faces Stay with Me
30. The Stylistics I'm Stone in love with You
31. The Hollies Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)
32. Elton John  Rocket Man
33. Michael Jackson Rockin' Robin
34. Timmy Thomas Why Can't We Live Together
35. Arlo Guthrie The City of New Orleans
36. Looking Glass Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)
37. Bread Diary
38. The Staple Sisters I'll Take You There
39. Rick Nelson Garden Party
40. Ringo Starr Back Off Boogaloo

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