Life by Keith Richards;James Fox (Contributor)

Author:Keith Richards;James Fox (Contributor)
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Europe, BIO004000, Political, Entertainment & Performing Arts, General, Great Britain, Music, Rock, Biography & Autobiography, Genres & Styles, Composers & Musicians, Rich & Famous, History
ISBN: 9780316034388
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2010-10-14T07:00:00+00:00

Robert Altman / altmanphoto.com

Chapter Seven

In which, in the late 1960s, I discover open tuning, and heroin. Meet Gram Parsons. Sail to South America. Become a father. Record “Wild Horses” and “Brown Sugar” in Muscle Shoals. Survive Altamont, and re-meet a saxophonist named Bobby Keys.

We’d run out of gas. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but that was a period where we could have foundered—a natural end to a hit-making band. It came soon after Satanic Majesties, which was all a bit of flimflam to me. And this is where Jimmy Miller comes into the picture as our new producer. What a great collaboration. Out of the drift we extracted Beggars Banquet and helped take the Stones to a different level. This is where we had to pull out the good stuff. And we did.

I remember our first meeting with Jimmy. Mick was instrumental in getting him involved. Jimmy came from Brooklyn originally, grew up in the West—his father was entertainment director of the Vegas gambling hotels the Sahara, the Dunes, the Flamingo. We turned up at Olympic Studios and said, we’ll have a run-through and see how things go. We just played—anything. We weren’t trying to make a track that day. We were feeling the room, feeling Jimmy out; and Jimmy was feeling us out. I’d like to go back and be a fly on that wall. All I remember is having a very, very good feeling about him when we left the session, about twelve hours later. I was playing the stuff, going into the control room, the usual old trek, and actually hearing on the playback what was going on in the room. Sometimes what you’re playing in the room is totally different from what you hear in the control room. But Jimmy was hearing the room, hearing the band. So I had a very strong thing with him from that first day. He had a natural feel for the band because of what he’d been doing, working with English guys. He’d produced things like “I’m a Man” and “Gimme Some Lovin’ ” by the Spencer Davis Group; he’d worked with Traffic, Blind Faith. He’d worked a lot with black guys. But most of all it was because Jimmy Miller was a damn good drummer. He understood groove. He’s the drummer on “Happy”; he was the original drummer on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” He made it very easy for me to work, mainly for me to set the groove, set the tempos, and at the same time, Mick and Jimmy were communicating well. It gave Mick confidence to go along with him too.

Our thing was playing Chicago blues; that was where we took everything that we knew, that was our kickoff point, Chicago. Look at that Mississippi River. Where does it come from? Where does it go? Follow that river all the way up and you’ll end up in Chicago. Also follow the way those artists were recorded. There were no rules. If you looked at the regular way of recording things, everything was recorded totally wrong.

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