"Other incidents in the book are merely surreal: the appearance of Bob Dylan in a blue mohair suit..."

"... at [Brian] Jones’s hotel door in the middle of a Northeast blackout in 1965, bearing guitars and 'excellent weed'; a passing mention of future Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as one of the drug buddies who 'revived Keith’s appetite for coke and heroin' in the late 1970s; a young Harvey Weinstein, then a regional concert promoter, passing out Afro wigs to the band and crew during a raucous tour closer in Buffalo."

From "You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Unless It’s a New Rolling Stones Biography/The music journalist Bob Spitz, a keeper of numerous rock ’n’ roll flames, has turned out a colorful and authoritative new take on a much-documented band" (NYT).

Here's the book: "THE ROLLING STONES: The Biography," by Bob Spitz (commission earned). I might buy it. It wouldn't be the first book about The Rolling Stones for me. I read Keith Richards' autobiography. Somehow all I remember is him as a little kid keeping a mouse in his pocket. Blogged here.

But anyway, downloading the Kindle of the Spitz book just so I can do a word search on "mohair" is exactly the kind of thing I would do.

"For the last 22 years, The Verve haven't made a penny from Bitter Sweet Symphony, after forfeiting the royalties to The Rolling Stones."

"The song was embroiled in a legal battle shortly after its release, after The Verve sampled an orchestral version of The Stones' song The Last Time. As a result, writer Richard Ashcroft had to sign over his rights to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards - until now. Speaking as he received a lifetime achievement prize at the Ivor Novello Awards, Ashcroft announced: 'As of last month, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards signed over all their publishing for Bitter Sweet Symphony, which was a truly kind and magnanimous thing for them to do.' Ashcroft acknowledged that it was the Rolling Stones' late manager, Allen Klein, who had been responsible for the situation, rather than the musicians themselves," BBC reports. The Verve sought permission and agreed to pay the Stones 50% of the royalties, but the agreement was to use a 5-note part of the recording, and they used more than that, voiding the agreement, and, under the management of Allen Klein — you remember Allen Klein — there was a lawsuit and The Verve lost all the royalties.

Here's "Bitter Sweet Symphony":



Here's the symphonic version of "The Last Time" (from 1965), which I don't think I'd ever noticed before:



And here are the Stones doing "The Last Time" (I'm giving you the Ed Sullivan performance, in which Keith Richards doesn't seem to play the guitar so well):

"It’s a funny song for a play-out song ― a drowsy ballad about drugs in Chelsea! It’s kind of weird. He couldn’t be persuaded to use something else."

Said Mick Jagger about Trump's use of the old Stones song "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

That's quoted in a HuffPo article that forefronts something Keith Richards said, telling a tale that dates back to 1989, when Trump as the promoter of the Stones' Atlantic City concerts had put his own name in larger letters than band's name:

“I got out my trusty blade, stuck it in the table and said: ‘You have to get rid of this man!’ Now America has to get rid of him. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

How did it ever happen that Keith Richards became the attention-getter over Mick Jagger? But here we see it again. Let's talk about Keith and put Mick as the afterthought. And of course it's not surprising to see the violent ideation with the flashy knife gesture getting preference over the musing about the song.

But I'm more interested in the song and Mick's puzzlement about Trump's persistent use of it to end his raucous rallies. It's such an odd mood switch — to talk the way Trump does about bigness and greatness and to bring out such cheering and enthusiasm and then to play "You Can't Always Get What You Want," like it was all for nothing. He was just winding you up.

I keep expecting that one day, when Trump's accomplishments are listed and he's asked where all those great things you promised the people, he's going to say I always put it out there in plain sight for you.

A religion-flaunting speaker might have said — after all those visions of future greatness — "God willing." The pop-culture man had Mick Jagger singing it: You Can't Always Get What You Want.

The morning after the 50-year anniversary of the death of Otis Redding.

I put up a post last night, linking to a New Yorker tribute, with my own photograph from an airplane of the Madison lake where Redding's plane crashed. This morning, I'm clicking on my Otis Redding tag, because there's one thing I know is there and I want to find it. But I'm interested in all the old Otis Redding posts, and I'm going to list them here.

1. April 30, 2005 — "Songs transformed with the sex of the singer."

What songs well-known as girl songs would take on intriguing meaning sung by a guy?... The obvious actual example of this is Aretha Franklin singing Otis Redding's "Respect."... The trouble with a man singing that song is that it's a bit ugly: I make the money, so you owe me. It's the conventional arrangement. The lyrics are a bit awkward in the female re-sing. Why was Aretha giving this guy "all my money"? But we ignored that. It was the remnant of the Otis version. She sang through that and pulled out the better, female meaning through sheer force.

2. June 4, 2006 — "Convergences."

... I put in my earphones and fired up Pandora and meant to type in "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" to get to some more music like that. Mixing in the movie title ["Coffee and Cigarettes"] and influenced by that coffee I was drinking, I typed in "Cigarettes and Coffee." Pandora turned up a song I'd never heard before called "Cigarettes and Coffee" -- by Otis Redding. I wasn't meaning to listen to that kind of music but I liked it well enough.... [T]he theme [of "Theme Time Radio With Bob Dylan"] this week is "Coffee," and one of the songs on the playlist was "Cigarettes and Coffee" by Otis Redding.... Bob mentions how Otis died, converging by airplane with a lake here in Madison, Wisconsin. And he plays a clip from the movie "Coffee and Cigarettes"...

3. March 4, 2007 — "It is [blank] that makes us human."

"[Stephen] Stills may be hobbled by arthritis—backstage he bumps fists rather than shakes hands with fans..."

"... he has carpal tunnel and residual pain from a long-ago broken hand, which affects his playing—and he is nearly deaf, but his performance life has continued. Drugs and alcohol may have dented him somewhat, forming a kind of carapace over the youthful sensitivity and cockiness one often saw in the face of the young Stills. Some might infer by looking at the spry James Taylor or Mick Jagger that heroin is less hard on the body than cocaine and booze, which perhaps tear down the infrastructure. ('Stills doesn’t know how to do drugs properly,' Keith Richards once said.) But one has to hand it to a rock veteran who still wants to get on stage and make music even when his youthful beauty and once-tender, husky baritone have dimmed. It shows allegiance to the craft, to the life, to the music. It risks a derisive sort of criticism as well as an assault on nostalgia."

The novelist Lorrie Moore writes a book review (NYRB) for a biography of Stephen Stills. 

I'm interested in reading the review because Lorrie Moore wrote it. I don't particularly care about Stephen Stills, but if Moore wants to describe him, I'm up for hearing about his carapace and his infrastructure. And I do love this one song...



... which I believe somebody brought up in one of the comments sections this morning. Let's see. Ah, yes. Here it is: pacwest said:

Things that have nothing to do with Keith Richards.

Drudge looks like this right now:



Great photograph of Keith Richards. I'm really enjoying it, but... robot rape? The link goes to The College Fix:

John Banzhaf, a well-known activist professor of public interest law at George Washington University Law School, says experts disagree on the consequences of allowing people to engage in mock acts of rape with humanoid dolls, and lawmakers should vet this issue as soon as possible....

“The obvious first step would be to have hearings and do studies to determine just how serious the threat is, whether there are any real benefits to having sexbots programmed to simulate being raped, and then what if any new laws, regulations, etc. might be appropriate,” he said....

Sexbots, already in use in European brothels, can be intentionally set to “frigid” mode in which the user must effectively rape the robot because it will resist advances....

Let me know when they make a robot in the image of Keith Richards and program it to "effectively rape" the customer who intentionally sets herself in "frigid" mode. 

The "In Defense of Cigarettes" piece at the link does feature a (different) photo of Keith Richards smoking and a text reference to him, but it's just the fusty Weekly Standard musing about whether it was better back in the good old days:

I liked the ceremony of the cigarette. The implicit danger of starting a fire near your face. The punctuation that talking while smoking affords, giving your words animation and shading: the stops and starts, the dramatic pauses, sitting still after exhaling while letting the smoke do all the work around you. It could make even some suburban hump drinking piss-water beer at the Greene Turtle on a Tuesday afternoon feel like Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past or like Keith Richards in life.

What's a suburban hump?  Is "hump" even a noun there? Suburban hump drinking piss-water beer... I'm just guessing that "hump" and "beer" are nouns, that there's a type of person called a "hump" who lives in suburbia and that beer needs to be compared to piss for the billionth time.

The OED does have 2 definitions of the noun "hump" that are a type of person. One is "hump-backed person." The other is "Sexual intercourse; (hence) a woman who makes herself available for sexual intercourse. coarse slang." So it's like calling somebody a "fuck." But is it special for women? Because I don't get the process of smoking making a woman feel like Robert Mitchum. I do, however, understand how a woman smoking might get into the feeling that she's like Keith Richards.

"In a way, it’s kept me probably more childlike. That’s what drugs do to people."

"They stop emotional growth. So when you come out of it, you’re kind of 17."

Said Anita Pallenberg, quoted in her obituary. Amazingly, she made it to the age of 73.

What an embodiment of the mod beauty we adored in the 1960s! Go to the link — it's to the NYT — to see the photographs of her that made us so envious — in the arms of Keith Richards in 1969 and drawing lipliner on Mick Jagger (in the movie "Performance") in 1970.

That movie "remains as hallucinogenically strange and disturbing as ever and Pallenberg will be for ever remembered as Pherber: sexually omnivorous, dangerous, sweetly amoral. The movie... captures the psychosis of the end of the 60s, where art, crime and sex open up the gates of social mobility but identity becomes fragmented."

Pallenberg spoke of drugs freezing her, so she did not grow emotionally. Faithfull has spoken of not being able to have sex without being semi-anaesthetised with drugs. Their stories remind us of what sexual liberation could mean for women in the 60s. These great beauties paid a huge price for being the “girlfriends” of rock stars. Both these clever, multilingual, arty women educated their boyfriends (Jagger and Richards) about culture and art and style. Pallenberg got the boys to wear her clothes. Everyone, Faithfull once told me, was in love with Keith, even Mick of course …

"I like a high-spirited woman. And with Anita, you knew you were taking on a Valkyrie — she who decides who dies in battle." — wrote Keith Richards.

"Like Dylan, he writes his own songs, so of course he will write a wonderful book."

Said the literary agent for Prince, whose book deal was just announced. The publisher was garrulous: "Prince is a towering figure blah blah blah..." The 5-foot-2 rock star was laconic: "You still read books, right?"

Rock memoirs have proved a lucrative niche for publishers as baby boomers snap up books by their favorite performers. The gold standards in terms of both sales and literary qualify include “Life” by Keith Richards (776,683 print copies sold, according to Nielsen), “Chronicles” by Bob Dylan (560,706) and “Just Kids” by Patti Smith (466,635).

I've read all 3 of those — and Eric Clapton's book too — so I guess I'm in the niche. And I love Prince. But the author needs to tell good stories on himself — like Richards, Smith, and Clapton — or have an endless assortment of interesting things — like Bob Dylan. I don't know if Prince is up for any of that. He seems so secretive and enigmatic. But it's surely not enough to "like Dylan" write ones own songs. Song lyrics are song lyrics for a reason. They go with singing and lots of instrumentation. When read, what seemed sublime is often stupid.

I did a chapter-by-chapter series of blog posts when I read Dylan's "Chronicles" in 2004. Sample:

Dylan seems to have gotten some ideas from Harry Truman, whom his parents took him to see when he was a kid: "Truman was gray hatted, a slight figure, spoke in the same kind of nasal twang and tone like a country singer. I was mesmerized by his slow drawl and sense of seriousness and how people hung on every word he was saying." Pp. 230-231....

A Bob Dylan political opinion: "I wasn't that comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble. It wasn't my particular feast of food. Even the current news made me nervous. I liked the old news better." P. 283.

UPDATE: Meade and I are discussing the meaning of "Just look for the purple banana til they put us in the truck." I say it was what was a typical Prince message: Live it up because you're going to die. The banana is obviously the man's penis and the truck is the hearse that takes you away. Meade says the truck is the vagina. He agreed about the banana. 

"I always thought it was a little unfair how much she was made fun of for her 'just say no' campaign against drugs."

"I actually think the reminder that you can always just say no can be pretty effective."

I know, I'd been thinking about that myself, just last Saturday, the day before hearing that Nancy Reagan had died. I was blogging about a NYT column telling about women leaving the field of science because they'd received email expressing desire for an intimate relationship and couldn't figure out what to do about it.

These women had never, as far as I could tell, just said no — I'm not interested. The NYT author wrote of the women deciding "[p]erhaps... to ignore the first email," then getting further efforts at closeness from the man, after which "any objection on her part... would seem heartless." I said: "Why isn't it also 'heartless' to deprive this man of the basic information that he is not experiencing a successful response to his attempt to go on a date?" The column author spins out a nightmare: "On and on it goes, and slowly she realizes that he’s not going to stop because he doesn’t have to." I said: "Why is this smart woman so absurdly slow?"

There are, I'm afraid, a lot of people out there who need to be bonked over the head on a regular basis with the stunningly simple advice, "Just say no." It sounds crushingly stupid, but an awful lot of people — including very smart people — become stupid in social situations. These days, there's an effort to pick up the slack left by those who've forgotten the magic of "no," and they'd like to institute a system in which the failure to say "yes" counts as a "no" (and a silent sexual encounter becomes rape).

We wouldn't need such an oppressive, twisted regime if people kept in the front of their head the go-to advice: Just say no.

Nancy was, of course, speaking specifically about drugs...



... and the message looked really ridiculous to those who were already into drugs. I remember some comedian — perhaps Bob Goldthwait — doing a routine about the idea of Keith Richards attempting the "just say no" solution to his all-out addiction. But Nancy was — like most First Ladies — talking to children, and "no" is most effective when you say it early on — to drugs, to sex, to whatever it is you have a right to decline.

Which reminds me of my old motto. Nancy had hers. I have mine: Nothing is a high standard.

I couldn't find the old Keith Richards joke, so here's William S. Burroughs, "Just Say No To Drug Hysteria":

"What rap did that was impressive was to show there are so many tone-deaf people out there."

"All they need is a drum beat and somebody yelling over it and they’re happy. There’s an enormous market for people who can’t tell one note from another."

Said Keith Richards.

Also: "For most bands, getting the syncopation is beyond them. It’s endless thudding away, with no bounce, no lift, no syncopation.... Millions are in love with Metallica and Black Sabbath. I just thought they were great jokes."

"The Beatles... got carried away. Why not? If you're the Beatles in the Sixties, you just get carried away..."

"... you forget what it is you wanted to do. You're starting to do Sgt. Pepper. Some people think it's a genius album, but I think it's a mishmash of rubbish, kind of like Satanic Majesties – 'Oh, if you can make a load of shit, so can we.'"

Said Keith Richards.

SPEAKING OF THE BEATLES: I was walking down the lake path the other day, listening to my "Jennifer Juniper" channel on Pandora, and a song began that I was sure was Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." It turned out to be George Harrison's "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)." He lost a lawsuit over his excessive use of "He's So Fine" in his "My Sweet Lord," but I'd never noticed this other borrowing before. "Give Me Love" is a pretty nice recording, and the "rip off" of Dylan is quite short. Interestingly, at 0:46 in the song, it gets very like "MacArthur Park."

"[T]here's no pong involved, it's not squidgy or anything like that."

I love this passage from Keith Richards's autobiography about keeping a pet  mouse in his pocket:

For companionship I kept pets. I had a cat and a mouse, Gladys. I would bring her to school and have a chat in the French lesson when it got boring. I'd feed her my dinner and lunch, and I'd come home with a pocketful of mouse shit. Mouse shit doesn't matter. It comes out in hardened pellets, there's no pong involved, it's not squidgy or anything like that. You just empty you pockets and out come these pellets. Gladys was true and trusted. She very rarely poked her head out of the pocket and exposed herself to instant death. But Doris had Gladys and my cat knocked off. She killed all my pets when I was a kid. She didn't like animals, she'd threatened to do it and she did it. I put a note on her bedroom door, with a drawing of a cat, that said "Murderer." I never forgave her for that. Doris's reaction was the usual: "Shut up. Don't be so soft. It was pissing all over the place."

Doris was (obviously) his mother.  And I'm copying this paragraph out not to do another post about "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" — some English version of the maternal character — but a propos of the discussion of football we we're having in the previous post, which linked to a column that went on about the "pocket" —"Aaron and Ben are pocket-driven passers, with the extra element of being able to create once the pocket is no longer their friend" — and got garage "garaji" mahal to say "Little Ben will have plenty of opportunities to show how he can evade pass rushers. Because that pocket WILL be collapsing." That got me to say:

By the way, the "pocket" is another one of those feminine things in football... along with touching and tossing down a hankie. It's so adorable: a man in a pocket. It's like Keith Richards's pet mouse Gladys.

My football commentary is (pretty much) all about finding the hints of the feminine in the hyper-manly game. I hope you like it!

"In 'Satisfaction' I was imagining horns, trying to imitate their sound to put on the track later when we recorded."

"I'd already heard the riff in my head the way Otis Redding did it later, thinking, this is gonna be in the horn line. But we didn't have any horns, and I was only going to lay down a dub. The fuzz tone came in handy so I could give a shape to what the horns were supposed to do. But the fuzz tone had never been heard before anywhere, and that's the sound that caught everybody's imagination. Next thing I know, we're listening to ourselves in Minnesota somewhere on the radio, 'Hit of the Week,' and we didn't even know Andrew had put the fucking thing out! At first I was mortified. As far as I was concerned that was just the dub.... And I learned that lesson — sometimes you can overwork things."

That's Keith Richards, in his autobiography, "Life," learning a lesson about spontaneity and minimalism. (Page 177.)

Here's the Otis Redding version, with the horns as Richards had originally intended. Speaking of intent, I don't think Richards intended to imply a criticism of Redding's version, only to tell the story of how he produced the sound we hear on the Rolling Stones original recording. He's essentially giving himself a double compliment: 1. I imagined the full orchestration that the best soul music people of the time produced, and 2. I ingeniously used the guitar (with a Gibson fuzz tone pedal) to produce that sound and outdid them by cranking it all out quickly.

But Richards did, backhandedly, put down Otis Redding. You can overwork things. 

"It's not only the high quality of drugs I had that I attribute my survival to."

"I was very meticulous about how much I took. I'd never put more in to get a little higher. That's where most people f**k up on drugs."

ADDED: To buy the book.

"Create an ‘aura of insufferable tension’ and ‘if they’re interested, they’ll make the first move.'"

The Keith Richards approach to getting women. Aura of insufferable tension. I love that. What does it even mean? Be Keith Richards, and...

"Her Majesty. Brenda."

How Keith Richards referred to Mick Jagger, who, he writes, became "unbearable," beginning in the early 80s.

In other celebrity tidbits... Richards was in the presence of Johnny Depp — a friend of his son's — for 2 years before he recognized that the guy was Johnny Depp. One night, he looked across the dinner table and suddenly thought "Whoa! Scissorhands!"

"Trust a pro."

Keith Richards really is a pro as becomes clear over the course of what seems to be only a humorously inept attempt to record a promo for MTV



This was back in the early days when we were being enlisted to demand that the cable companies give us MTV:



(And thanks to the reader who sent me a link to that first video after reading the post yesterday in which Keith made a cameo appearance.)

"Botox is becoming the new face of beauty and it’s unfortunate because it makes everybody look like Satan’s children."

Said Stevie Nicks, who had Botox and hated it: "For four long months, I looked like a different person. It almost brought down the whole production of the last tour. It was so bad, I would look into the mirror and burst into tears."

That's the appropriate reaction, and I wish more people would have it. By the way, do you think Botox might be the explanation for the strangely blank face Janet Napolitano presented to the world last Sunday?



At the time, I said: "That bland half-smile — that numb mask — those unblinking, wide eyes ... the visual is weirdly incongruent with the audio." That wouldn't explain the slurred speech, though, which I'm surprised didn't draw more commentary in a week when lots of people focused on the slurred speech of Senator Baucus.

In sum: Everybody stop with the Botox. As for slurred speech, it works for some.



If you aren't someone it works for... enunciate.

Mouths-for-eyes pictures.

Example:



View all: here.