Life (35 page)

So Marlon had his first car crash two months before he was born. No wonder he has never driven, never obtained a driving license. Marlon’s full name is Marlon Leon Sundeep. Brando called up while Anita was in hospital, to compliment her on
Performance
. “Marlon, that’s a good name. Why don’t we call him Marlon?” The poor kid was forced through this religious ceremony when he arrived home in Cheyne Walk, the rice and the flower petals and the chanting and all of that shit. Well, Anita’s the mother, right? Who am I to say no? Anything you like, Mother. You’ve just given birth to our son. So the Bauls of Bengal came, courtesy of Robert Fraser. And Robert had a crib made, beautiful little one that rocked. So that’s his full name, Marlon Leon Sundeep Richards. Which is the most important bit. The rest is mere pretext.

I
t’s strange, given the fact
that we’d had to pull the plug on Brian in the studio three years earlier, when he was lying in a coma beside his buzzing amp, to be reminded that he was still playing on tracks early in 1969, the year of his death. Autoharp on “You Got the Silver,” percussion on “Midnight Rambler.” Where did that come from? A last flare from the shipwreck.

By May we were playing in his replacement, Mick Taylor, at Olympic Studios—playing him in on “Honky Tonk Women,” on which his overdub is there for posterity. No surprise to us, how good he was. He seemed just to step in naturally at the time. We had all heard Mick, and we knew him because he’d played with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers. Everybody was looking at me, because I was the other guitar player, but my position was, I’d play with anybody. We could only find out by playing together. And we did the most brilliant stuff together, some of the most brilliant stuff the Stones ever did. Everything was there in his playing—the melodic touch, a beautiful sustain and a way of reading a song. He had a lovely sound, some very soulful stuff. He’d get where I was going even before I did. I was in awe sometimes listening to Mick Taylor, especially on that slide—try it on “Love in Vain.” Sometimes just jamming, warming up with him, I’d go, whoa. I guess that’s where the emotion came out. I loved the guy, I loved to work with him, but he was very shy and very distant. I’d get close to him when we were working out stuff and playing, and when he let his hair down he was extremely funny. But I always found it very difficult to find any more than the Mick Taylor I’d met the first time. You can see it on the screen in
Gimme Shelter
—his face has no animation. He was fighting himself somewhere inside. There’s not a lot you can do about that, with guys like that; you can’t bring them out. They’ve got to fight their own demons. You’d bring him out for an hour or two, for an evening or a night, but the next day he was brooding again. Not a barrel of laughs, let’s put it like that. Well, you give certain people their space. You realize, some guys you can spend a day with them and basically you’ve learned all you’re ever going to know about them. Like Mick Jagger in exact reverse.

W
e’d already fired
Brian two or three weeks before he died. It had come to a head and Mick and I had been down to Winnie-the-Pooh’s house. (Cotchford Farm had belonged to author A. A. Milne, and Brian had recently bought it.) Mick and I didn’t fancy the gig, but we drove down together and said, “Hey, Brian… It’s all over, pal.”

We were in the studio when we got the phone call not long afterwards, cutting with Mick Taylor. There exists one minute and thirty seconds of us recording “I Don’t Know Why,” a Stevie Wonder song, interrupted by the phone call telling us of Brian’s death.

I knew Frank Thorogood, who made a “deathbed confession” that he’d killed Brian Jones by drowning him in the swimming pool, where Brian’s body was found some minutes after other people had seen him alive. But I’m always wary of deathbed confessions because the only person there is the person he’s supposed to have said it to, some uncle, daughter, or whatever. “On his deathbed he said he killed Brian.” Whether he did or not I don’t know. Brian had bad asthma and he was taking quaaludes and Tuinals, which are not the best things to dive under water on. Very easy to choke on that stuff. He was heavily sedated. He had a high tolerance for drugs, I’ll give him that. But weigh that against the coroner’s report, which showed that he was suffering from pleurisy, an enlarged heart and a diseased liver. Still, I can imagine the scenario of Brian being so obnoxious to Thorogood and the building crew he had working on Brian’s house that they were just pissing around with him. He went under and didn’t come up. But when somebody says, “I did Brian,” at the very most I’d put it down to manslaughter. All right, you may have pushed him under, but you weren’t there to murder him. He pissed off the builders, whining son of a bitch. It wouldn’t have mattered if the builders were there or not, he was at that point in his life when there wasn’t any.

Three days later, July 5, we performed our first concert in over two years, in Hyde Park, a free concert to which something like half a million people came, and it was an amazing show. The all-important thing for us was it was our first appearance for a long time and with a change of personnel. It was Mick Taylor’s first gig. We were going to do it anyway. Obviously a statement had to be made of one kind or another, so we turned it into a memorial for Brian. We wanted to see him off in grand style. The ups and downs with the guy are one thing, but when his time’s over, release the doves, or in this case the sackfuls of white butterflies.

*   *   *

W
e went touring
in the USA in November ’69 with Mick Taylor. B.B. King and Ike and Tina Turner were opening acts, which was a hot show just by itself. Added to that, it was the first tour that the open-tuning riffs—the big new sound—were let loose on audiences. The most powerful effect was on Ike Turner. The open tuning fascinated him the way it had fascinated me. He dragged me into his dressing room basically at gunpoint, I believe in San Diego. “Show me that five-string shit.” And we were there for about forty-five minutes, and I showed him the basics of it. And the next thing was
Come Together,
that beautiful album that Ike and Tina did, and all of it was five-string. He got the hang of it in forty-five minutes, picked it up like that. But to me the amazing thing is, I’m showing Ike Turner shit? With musicians there’s this weird crossing over between awe and respect and being accepted. When other guys come to you and go, hey, man, show me that lick, and they’re guys that you’ve been listening to for years, that’s when you know that you’re amongst men now. OK, I can’t believe it, but I’m part of the front line, top hands. And the other great thing about musicians, or most of them, is the reciprocation, the generosity they show to one another. Have you got that little pop? Yeah, it goes like this. Mostly there are no secrets; everybody swaps ideas. How did you get that? And he shows you and you realize it’s really simple.

Oiled up and running hot, in early December we ended up at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Alabama, at tour’s end (or not quite end, since the Altamont Speedway track loomed in the distance, some days away). There we cut “Wild Horses,” “Brown Sugar” and “You Gotta Move.” Three tracks in three days, in that perfect eight-track recording studio. Muscle Shoals was a great room to work, very unpretentious. You could go in there and do a take, none of this fiddling about: “Oh, can we try the bass over there?” You just went in, hit it and there it was. It was the crème de la crème, except it was just a shack in the middle of nowhere. The people that put the studio together—great bunch of southern guys, Roger Hawkins and Jimmy Johnson and a couple of others owned it—were famed musicians, part of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section who had been in the house band at Rick Hall’s FAME Studios, previously situated in Muscle Shoals proper. That setup already had a legendary ring because some great soul records had been coming out of there for several years—Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman.” So to us, it was on a par with going to Chess Records, even though it was out of the way and we had wanted to record in Memphis. But you should hear the late Jim Dickinson, piano player on “Wild Horses,” tell what happened. He was a southern boy and a good storyteller.

Jim Dickinson:
This is the part of the story nobody knows, because even in Stanley Booth’s book he for whatever reason chose not to tell it. But the way they got to Muscle Shoals was Stanley. He was traveling with them for the biography, and he called me in the middle of the night. My wife and I had met him down in Auburn and seen the show, thinking that would be it. And he calls maybe a week, week and a half later and says, is there anywhere in Memphis the Stones could record? They’ve got three days at the end of their tour, and they’ve been on the road playing together and they’re hot, they’ve got some new material. Now, at the time, from the American Federation of Musicians, you could get a touring permit or a recording permit as a foreign band, but you couldn’t get both. And they had been barred from recording in Los Angeles. The way I heard it, Leon Russell tried to set up a session for them in LA and was fined by the musicians union. Anyway, they were looking for a place that would be under the union radar. And they thought about Memphis. Well, the Beatles had tried to record in Memphis, at Stax, and had been refused for insurance reasons, or for whatever reason, and there really wasn’t anyplace in Memphis that they could have safely recorded anonymously. And I told Stanley that, and it made Stanley mad. He said, well, what the hell am I supposed to tell ’em? I said, tell them to go to Muscle Shoals; nobody will even know who they are, which in fact nobody did. And Stanley responded negatively. He said, well, I don’t know any of those rednecks down there. How am I supposed to… I said, call Jerry Wexler. He’ll set it up. But what I didn’t know, what nobody knew at that point, was that the Stones’ contract with EMI was run down. Well, you can bet Wexler knew it; he put it together in a heartbeat. And I didn’t hear any more about it for another week or ten days, and then Stanley calls in the middle of the night. He says, be in Muscle Shoals on Thursday. The Stones are going to record. And he says, don’t tell anybody. So I didn’t use my car; I took my wife’s car so nobody would recognize it. I drove down there, and the old studio was across the highway from the cemetery. The old studio had actually been a coffin factory. It was a real small building. So I go to the door, and Jimmy Johnson opens the door just a crack and he looks at me and says, Dickinson, what do you want? And I said, I’ve come down for the Stones session. And he says, oh hell, does everyone in Memphis know? I said, no, nobody knows, Jimmy. It’s cool, don’t worry. And nobody was there at this point, they hadn’t showed up yet. When they showed up, it was the biggest plane that ever landed in the Muscle Shoals airport. Because I was with Stanley, I got to stay. And you’ll hear different people claim they were there. There was no one there. I’ve been asked several times if Gram Parsons was there. Well, hell, if Gram Parsons had been there, I certainly would never have played the piano; it would have been him. So there was literally no one from the outside there. And Keith and I hit it off right away, and waiting for Jagger and whoever else, we started jamming. They still to this day think I’m a country piano player. I’m not sure why, because I can barely play country music. I had a couple of licks from Floyd Cramer’s stuff. But I think it was because of Gram Parsons. They had just got to be buddies with Gram, and I think Keith was kind of fascinated by country music. So we sat around that afternoon, playing Hank Williams songs and Jerry Lee Lewis songs, and they let me stay.

And as Mick was singing “Brown Sugar,” the pickup line into the refrain was different in every verse. I was in the control room with Stanley, and I said, Stanley, he’s leaving out a great line. And right then, I heard this voice come from behind the console where there was a couch. Charlie Watts was sitting there, and I hadn’t seen him in the room or I wouldn’t have said it. And Charlie says, tell him! And I said, I’m not going to tell him! And Charlie reaches over to the console, punches the talk-back button and he says, tell him! So I said, OK… Mick, you’re leaving a line out. You were singing “hear him whip the women just around midnight” in the first verse. Which is a great line. And Jagger kind of halfway laughed and said, oh yeah, who said that, is that Booth? And Charlie Watts said, no, it’s Dickinson. And Jagger said, same thing. I’m not sure what he meant by that. I guess just another wise-ass southern guy. So if I have a footnote to rock-and-roll history, that’s it, because by God, “hear him whip the women” is in there because of me.

Dickinson was a beautiful piano player. Probably at the time I did take him for a country player, just because he was a southern guy. I found out later he was far more wide-ranging. Playing with guys like that was a break because you got stuck in this “star” thing, and there were all these musicians you’d heard about and wanted to play with but you never got the chance to. So working with Dickinson, and just getting the feel, really, of the South, and the way we were automatically accepted down south, was wonderful. They’d say, you’re from London? How the hell do you play like that?

Jim Dickinson, who was the only other musician there apart from the Rolling Stones and Ian Stewart, was perplexed when on the third day we started running through “Wild Horses” and Ian Stewart took a backseat. “Wild Horses” started in a B-minor chord, and Stu didn’t play minor chords, “fucking Chinese music.” That’s how Dickinson got the gig of playing on the track.

“Wild Horses” almost wrote itself. It was really a lot to do with, once again, fucking around with the tunings. I found these chords, especially doing it on a twelve-string to start with, which gave the song this character and sound. There’s a certain forlornness that can come out of a twelve-string. I started off, I think, on a regular six-string open E, and it sounded very nice, but sometimes you just get these ideas. What if I open tuned a twelve-string? All it meant was translate what Mississippi Fred McDowell was doing—twelve-string slide—into five-string mode, which meant a ten-string guitar. I now have a couple custom built for that. It was one of those magical moments when things come together. It’s like “Satisfaction.” You just dream it, and suddenly it’s all in your hands. Once you’ve got the vision in your mind of wild horses, I mean, what’s the next phrase you’re going to use? It’s got to be “couldn’t drag me away.” That’s one of the great things about songwriting; it’s not an intellectual experience. One might have to apply the brain here and there, but basically it’s capturing moments. Jim Dickinson, bless him—he died August 15, 2009, while I was writing this book—will say later on what “Wild Horses” was “about.” I’m not sure. I never thought about songwriting as writing a diary, although sometimes in retrospect you realize that some of it is like that.