← A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
Song 176: “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones, Part One: A Man of Wealth and Taste
For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a multi-episode look at the song “Sympathy for the Devil” and the career of the Rolling Stones.
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- [00:03]
Andrew Hickey
A History of rock Music in 500 Songs by Andrew Hickey Song 176 Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones Part 1AMan of wealth and Taste this episode does not have many content warnings, just some minor mentions of drug use, bullying, and some misogynistic song lyrics. Part two, when it comes out in a couple of weeks, gets much, much darker. Alan Klein wanted the Beatles a long time before he got them. We've talked about Klein quite a bit in previous episodes, especially those on Sam Cooke, but he hasn't come up in a little while. So to refresh your memory, Klein had been a trainee accountant working for a company that audited companies in the music industry. He'd discovered that many of them were ripping their artists off and had started up his own company to find this stolen money. At first he'd just been auditing the record companies to find money that was contractually owed his artist on a basis of him getting 50% of any additional money that was found. But he'd soon discovered that while there were some labels, like those owned by Maurice Levy, that actually didn't pay artists what their contracts stated, many of them just had contracts that were so one sided that they were legally paying them almost nothing. He managed to seriously annoy Bobby Damin, for example, by promising him that he could find at least $100,000 his record company must surely owe him, but eventually finding out that they'd only underpaid him by $450. But this led Klein into another way of making money from the music business. If the contracts artists were signing were so bad, he could make money by renegotiating their contracts for them. At the time, most artists in the music business made most of their money from live performances, even as record sales were skyrocketing and they didn't really pay attention to the fact that their record contracts gave them 5 cents per single when the record sold for a dollar. Klein started negotiating with labels and getting deals which on paper seemed to benefit both the artist and the label more. But when you look more closely, benefited Klein more than any of them. Klein's first truly major artist to be represented this way was Sam Cooke, and the deal he made for Cook is a perfect example of his strategy. Cook's deal with RCA Records was coming to an end and Klein knew he could get a better deal and he could make a serious argument that he deserved a better deal. RCA's standard deal was set up on the basis that their artists would be looked after by A R men who would choose the Material, arrange session musicians, produce the session itself and all the rest. RCA normally also had to promote their artists a great deal in order to make them into hits. Cook, on the other hand, was a singer songwriter who came up with his own material. He did work with producers, but their job was much more minimal than most producers was, as Cook would direct the band in the studio. And he clearly didn't need promotion from the record company. He'd had hits on three different labels his records sold themselves. RCA were or claimed to be sympathetic to this argument, but they had an important counterpoint. Other artists had favoured nations clauses in their contracts, which meant that if they gave any other artist a better percentage, they'd have to give those other artists the same deal. And one of those was Elvis. And given that Elvis sold an order of magnitude more records than Cork, RCA could theoretically be out tens of millions of dollars if they gave Cook a good rate. So Klein came up with a solution which was actually rather similar to the one that had been hit on by a few people in the uk, notably Andrew Lou Goldham. He would start up a production company himself, which Cook would record for. RCA would license the recordings from the production company, but it would be a long license, 30 years. And after all, nobody was going to be interested in pop music recordings in 30 years, right? So from RCA's point of view, it was essentially the same as if they made the records themselves. The new company would pay the costs of making the recordings and pressing the records and RCA would distribute them, paying the company a dollar per album rather than the 25 cents per album cook had been getting. It would cost the new company about $0.65 or so per copy to make the records, but that would still leave the company about $0.35, $0.10 more than Cook would otherwise get. And Klein played his masterstroke. If the company was owned by Cook, he explained to Cook, it would be seen as Cook getting the income and he'd have to pay an enormous amount of tax. But if Klein owned the company, he could pay Cook all the money except Klein's commission as preferred stock. Cook would get dividends from the stock, but only get taxed if he sold it, and then only as capital gains tax rather than the higher income tax. And Klein did pay Cook the money in stock, every penny he made, minus the commission. But he'd set things up this way for a reason. As he'd often tell business associates, don't take 20% of their income, give them 80% of yours. And that's why, to this day, and until the Copyright runs out in a decade's time. The rights to A Change Is Going To Come are owned not by RCA Records, nor by the estate of Sam Cooke, but by abco, the Alan and Betty Klein Company.
- [05:33]
Unknown Singer
In a little tent oh, and just like the river I've been running ever since it's been a long, A long time coming.
- [05:57]
Andrew Hickey
As soon as the Beatles hit America, Klein knew he had to be involved in their career. His first step was just to get a foothold in the British record business at all. And to do that, he started with The Dave Clark 5. The Dave Clark 5 were the first British band to capitalise on the Beatles success in the us, and for a short period of time, they were the only band who seemed like serious rivals to them. They, like the Beatles, appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, though they made many more appearances than the Beatles. And they were the first British Invasion band after the Beatles to have a hit in the US with Glad all over, the Dave Clark Five made a lot of money in the US, something like a quarter of a million dollars in $1964 from their first tour alone, according to some sources. And this was a problem, the kind of problem it's nice to have, definitely, but a problem nonetheless. Because the UK in the mid-60s had extremely high marginal tax rates. George Harrison wasn't exaggerating when a couple of years later he sang, it's one for you, 19 for me. The group could expect to pay about 90% tax on that money if they brought it back home. Klein came up with a solution for them. If they invested the money in preferred stocks with a guaranteed dividend, they could get the money paid out to them over 20 years and pay much less tax on it in the meantime. So they'd end up keeping nearly everything just paid out at regular intervals for decades. Klein, though, took his commission in full straight away, rather than waiting around like his clients had to. Klein was now the business manager of the second biggest British pop group. Now it was time for him to get his teeth into the first, and he was going to do it, of course, using other people's money rather than his own. Klein now had a good relationship with RTA Records, and when he discovered that the Beatles were interested in having Sam Cooke Tour as one of their support acts on the US tour, he decided this was a good opportunity to move in on them. He got RCA to send him over to London to meet with Brian Epstein. Epstein thought that Klein was coming to make arrangements for Cook to perform on the tour, but Klein had an offer from RCA in hand instead if Epstein would break the Beatles contract with capital in America, they could keep the EMI contract in Britain. That would be fine. RCA would give them $2 million cash upfront and a 10% royalty. This offer sounded too good to be true and it was. For a start, RCA had only authorised klein to offer 1 million and even that was staggering for the time 8 years earlier the same label had only paid $35,000 for Elvis contract and that had been a record breaking advance for the time. But Klein hadn't reckoned with one Brian Epstein was an actual honest man. Epstein has been criticized over the years for what people call a lack of business sense and it's true that a lot of the people who did business with the Beatles over the years got very rich indeed and the Beatles themselves only got a fraction of that money. But of course there were no precedents in the industry for the kind of success the Beatles had and Epstein was doing deals about things that had never been considerations before. But more importantly, Epstein was a man of his word. He made contracts that turned out more profitable for the other party than anyone would have expected and then he stuck to them. When the Beatles became the biggest band in the country, he he made sure they played every small venue gig they'd been booked for months earlier at the same small venue money. And when Beetlewigs and toy guitars and so on became a huge income source, he didn't try to renegotiate the license. He had made a deal and he was going to stick to that deal just like he expected the people on the other side to keep to their side of the bargain. Epstein explained this to Klein who took it in his stride. He was going to get the Beatles obviously, just not yet. In the meantime there were other fish to fry and while he was in London anyway there were other UK acts who were having big hits in the US.
- [10:39]
Unknown Singer
There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising sun.
- [10:51]
And.
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It'S been the ruin of many of.
- [11:01]
Andrew Hickey
Klein was a business associate of Jerry Brandt, the Animals booking agent in the US and through Brandt, before he left the US he'd had a meeting with Peter Grant, then an assistant to Mike Jeffrey, the co manager of the Animals. He told Grant that he could get the animals $10,000 for a day's work. The Dave Clark five were appearing in a quickie beach party film, Get Yourself a College Girl, which also featured Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto doing the Girl from Ipanema, the Standells doing a couple of R and B covers, Jimmy Smith And Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys. Grant had passed an offer for the Animals to appear onto Jeffrey, who had taken the offer. So now Klein was in the uk, he moved on to his next step. He was always interested in getting involved with the people who were actually responsible for making the records. The person who had the potential to be a big earner and who was also likely to be an artist rather than a businessman. In Sam Cooke's case, the person who made the records was Cook himself. But in the case of the Animals and of Herman's Hermit, another band who was soon to become huge in the us, though they hadn't at the time Klein first came over to the uk, the person with the most creative control over the records was producer Mickey Most. Most had heard from the Animals how this New York businessman had got them a film deal and a big pile of money for nothing. So when Klein got in touch with him, he was eager to have a meeting. Klein made him an offer that sounded too good to be true. If Most let Klein go over his books and contracts and renegotiate them, Klein would get him an extra million dollars. If he managed that, Most would make Klein his business manager. If not, Most would just get to keep whatever extra Klein found. Most agreed because a million dollars was a ridiculously huge amount of money, even more so then than today. Klein went to work. He renegotiated all Most's contracts to give him and his artists a higher royalty rate. And he did so by simply refusing to accept the terms that were already agreed to, essentially doing the opposite of what Brian Epstein did, using a phrase that would become something of a catchphrase for Klein, you may or may not have a contract. In particular, he did something very unusual and split the British and American contracts. Normally, when someone made a record in one country, they'd only get full royalties for the records sold in their home country. The record label would sub license the recordings to foreign companies who would pay the original label a fraction of what they made and the original label would then pay royalties only on that fraction. But Mickey Most, thanks to Klein, now had separate contracts for Britain and America, both paying him and his artists full royalties, which, given that their records sold better in America, especially those of Herman's Hermits, who were just starting to become successful by the time that Klein finished. The renegotiations meant that Klein soon had found Most that extra million. And of course, Klein once again set everything up so that Most money was paid into companies controlled by Klein, which then in turn sent most of the money on to Most so, by 1965, Alan Klein was making money from three of the four biggest British groups to be selling in America. He didn't have the Beatles yet, but he was making money from The Dave Clark 5 and the animals and Herman's Hermit. He soon got Donovan, the Kinks and Lulu as clients too, renegotiating deals for all of them and keeping their money in the US to protect it from the British tax system, where he would invest it for them, doling out the money over 20 years, just like with the Dave Clark 5 and making more money for himself. And so with all these British bands as clients, though not yet the Beatles, who he was still determined to get, he found himself spending a lot more time in London, especially after Sam Cooke's death meant his biggest US star no longer needed MARGING at home. Cook's catalogue did need marging, though, and on one trip to London, Klein came over with J.W. alexander, Cook's closest friend, who ran Cags, the publishing company that published Cook's songs. Klein was the administrator of Cook's estate and would eventually buy out both Alexander and Cook's widow, Barbara, after they found Klein's administration seemed to amount to little more than making sure they'd sell at whatever price he offered. Klein had also recently taken over the management of the Valentinos, newly renamed Bobby and the Valentinos, to emphasise the leader Bobby Womack, Sam Cooke's protege, who had married Barbara only months after Cook's death. The Valentinos were of course, published by cags, and as we heard in the episode on A Change Is Gonna Come, Womack's biggest success as a songwriter at this point had been a song he'd written for his group, It's All Over Now.
- [16:10]
Unknown Singer
I should have had my nose open that's no lie Tables turn and now it's her turn to cry.
- [16:30]
Andrew Hickey
The group had been annoyed, though, that their chance to have a hit with that had been missed, because it had been covered by one of those new British bands and they'd had the hit with it instead. Not even one of the big ones like Herman's Hermits or The Dave Clark 5. Some nobodies called the Rolling Stones. Yes, they were big in the UK, but they'd only just made the top 30 with it in the US. The Rolling Stones had had a few more US hits since then, one even making the top 10, but they were one of those bands like the Kinks or the who, who were big in the UK but not yet huge in America. And that was the situation when the Stones manager asked to meet up with Klein and Alexander while they were in London. Different books give different dates for this meeting. Some say it was in spring 1965, others in July, still others August. And a sad truth about the Rolling Stones is that when compared to the Beatles, where every move is chronicled almost to the second, the information about what the Stones and their management did when is rather limited. Apart from sessions and tour dates where Bill Wyman was present, as Wyman kept a diary. And often in these episodes on them, I have to give the most plausible of several conflicting accounts. But the Stones were just starting to get big in America by this point. The most likely date is early July, just after Satisfaction had been released, but just before it made number one in the States. The Stones, as we've discussed in previous episodes on them, were managed by a two man team. Andrew Lou Goldham, who did all the group's publicity, produced their records and was in effect their artistic director, making decisions about the image they projected and what records they would make. And Derek Easton, a much older man whose primary responsibility was to look after the money. Klein initially assumed that his meeting was going to be with Easton and was rather surprised when Oldham turned up. Instead, Oldham had a cheeky request for Do I think that the way the story is always told is subtly wrong. I could be wrong. So I'll tell you what everyone else says and then I'll tell you what seems more likely to me, though I have little evidence for it. The story, as told everywhere, is that Oldham wanted to have a meeting about the rights to It's All over now to persuade Klein to do what publishers always did for Elvis Presley and give the Rolling Stones a cut of the songwriting royalties for having made it a hit. Now, this is a fairly common request, but the way it normally happens is for the manager to approach the publisher before releasing the record and say, we'll only put this out if you give us a cut, because that gives real leverage. But the Stones version of It's All over now had already been out for nearly a year. It had already been a hit. What possible reason could Klein and Alexander have for agreeing to take a massive cut of the money they were already making? It makes no sense. Now, admittedly, they did say no, but I think people are likely misremembering that meeting as being about the wrong song. At the session in May 1965, where they'd finished Satisfaction, the Stones had recorded three other tracks, a blues called the Spider and the Fly, which in the UK was the B side to Satisfaction and was stuck on the US version of the next album, Out Of Our Heads, and two cover versions for the album Cry To Me, the song Burt Burns had written for Solomon Burke, and Good Times.
- [19:48]
Unknown Singer
All night long the evening sun is sinking low the clock on the wall says it's time to go I got my plans I don't know about you I tell you exactly what I'm gonna do get in the groove and let.
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Andrew Hickey
The good times roll Good Times was a Sam Cooke song, one at least inspired by the Shirley and Lee RB classic Let the Good Times Roll, but credited to Cook alone. And it makes far more sense to me, at least, that Holden was actually asking for the Stones to get a chunk of the publishing for that, which, depending on the exact timing of the meeting, was just about to be released. Out Of Our Heads came out at the end of July in the US and the UK version at the end of September. Whatever the reason for the meeting, once Klein had told Oldham that there was no way he was going to be making any concessions about the publishing, he got interested in Oldham and in particular why Oldham was there rather than Easton, who he'd expected to be the one to do business with him. Oldham explained that he and Easton were on bad terms and he didn't want to work with Easton anymore. Klein, at first played things a little bit cool to start with, he offered to help Oldham with the new indie record label he was setting up, Immediate Records, which, depending on when the meeting took place, had either just released or was about to release its initial batch of singles, like Nico's I'm Not Saying, produced by immediate house producer Jimmy Page.
- [21:26]
Unknown Singer
I'm not saying that I love you I'm not saying that I care if you love me I I'm not saying that I care I'm not saying I'd be there when you want me.
- [21:48]
Andrew Hickey
But very soon Klein had become Oldham's business manager and had pushed Derek Easton out of the organisation he had founded and been a partner in. Easton sued, of course, but lawsuits meant almost as little to Klein as contracts did handily for Kline, he became Oldham's business manager at a particularly turbulent time in the Stones career. The group were getting a lot of bad publicity in the uk. After an arrest in March, which came to trial in July, the group had pulled up at a service station and asked to use the toilet, and when they were refused use of it, depending on whose story you believe, because it was out of order or because of their long hair, Wyman, who was desperate, had urinated on the wall while Jagger and Jones had mocked the attendant, Jones responding, get off my foreskin when the attendant yelled, get off my fore coat. As an example, the group had just released a live EP titled Got Live if youf Want It. Not the same record as the later US album of the same name, their first live recordings. That was the first recording the group had done with Glyn Johns engineering since their very first demo session several years earlier. For the moment, Dave Hassinger was still going to be the engineer on all their studio recordings, as they continued to prefer recording in the us. But Johns would soon become a vital part of the group's team. The EP seems to have been released, at least in part as a contractual obligation, as the group's contract with Decca was up for renewal. Oldham and Easton had been in the process of negotiating what they thought was a pretty decent new deal with the label. But Klein knew he could get better. First he had to win over the group, or at least the important members of the group. He had Oldham arrange a meeting at a nightclub with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Once he'd met them, he asked Oldham which one makes the records, and Oldham had pointed to Richards and said that one. Klein had quickly got to work at impressing Jagger, and especially Richards, who at first meeting thought him a ridiculous figure because of his unstylish clothes and New York attitude. By the end of the meeting, Jagger and Richards were on board. Two days later, they told the other three members of the group that they had a new business manager who was going to be replacing Eric Easton. This caused some consternation, as Brian Jones still, despite all the evidence, thought of himself as the group's leader, while Bill Wyman had always rather liked Easton and took an instant dislike to Klein. But it had been decided by Mick and Keith it was going to be happening. Keith won the rest of them round by insisting that they had to trust somebody, and why not this bloke who had done so well for all these other bands? The next step was for Clyne to renegotiate the group's contracts. He went to a meeting with Sir Edward Lewis, the head of Decca, who was expecting Easton and at first didn't want to deal with Clyne. He brought along Oldham and all five members of the group, to whom he gave simple instructions. They were to stand behind him in a row, wearing sunglasses, looking angry, and not say a word. The new agreement, arranged by Klein, saw the group on a 9% royalty and paid a one and a quarter million dollars advance for a contract that would only last a single year. If Decca wanted to Keep the Stones after that, they'd have to renegotiate again. Word of this soon got Back to Paul McCartney, who started to wonder to himself why the Beatles weren't getting anything like that. Which was of course, part of Klein's plan that one and a quarter million dollars was to be paid to Nankerfelge Music Ltd. The Stones own company. Except that when the cheques were actually made out, they weren't made out to Nankerfelge Music Ltd. But to Nankerfeldge Music USA, a company owned by Alan Klein. With the contract sorted, the group could get on with recording their next single.
- [26:09]
Unknown Singer
Out the Window. Imagining the world outside when it flies the guys all dress up the side the Union.
- [26:36]
Andrew Hickey
Get Off Of My Cloud has a couple of clear inspirations. Its simple chord sequence is based on the same one that Bert Burns used in most of his songs, and notably in Hang On Sloopy, which had been one of the first records released by Immediate Records shortly before this recording.
- [27:00]
Unknown Singer
Hang On Stupid, stupid Hang On.
- [27:20]
Andrew Hickey
While lyrically the tumbling, elusive lyrics are even more clearly inspired by Bob Dylan than those of Satisfaction, though there's one possible influence I've not seen anyone point to the line a voice says, hi, hello, how are you? Well, I guess I'm doing fine. Can't help but remind me of the opening to Willie Nelson's country classic Funny How Time Slips Away. While the group would soon, under the influence of Graham Parsons, start going in a country direction, they hadn't really done so at this time, though. We just heard them covering Hank Snow's classic country song and Moving On. And Jagger, who wrote these lyrics, was never a country music person. But Funny How Time Slips Away was also a favourite with various soul performers. And it's possible that Jagger had heard Stevie Wonder's live version of the song, and it's almost certain that he was aware of Arthur Alexander's version, which was on Alexander's first album, you Better Move on, whose title track the Stones had obviously previously covered.
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Unknown Singer
My it's been a Long, long time how am I doing? Oh, I guess that I'm doing fine it's been so long now and it seems that it was only yesterday night.
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Andrew Hickey
More tenuously, could the title Get Off Of My Cloud have been inspired by the shouting of Get Off My Forecourt? Probably not, but it would be remiss to not mention it. Certainly plenty of people have made bigger stretches when talking about this song. I've seen multiple people stating as fact that the man dressed up just like the Union Jack who says, I've won £5 if I have. His kind of detergent pack is a reference to Screaming Lord Such, the minor British rock n roller who had recently founded the National Teenage Party to stand as a joke candidate in elections to promote his music, and who had later found the Munster Raving Loony Party Such did for a time start wearing red, white and blue and driving a car with a union flag painted on it. But that was, by all accounts after this record came out. And more to the point, it's clearly a continuation of Jagger's anti advertising lyrics from Satisfaction. Anyone in Britain at the time would have recognised the Daz Doorstep Challenge, a long running series of commercials in which someone knocked on a stranger's door and if they had a packet of Daz laundry detergent, they won money. In later decades, it would be celebrities offering large amounts of money. But in the 60s it was the Daz White Knights. People dressed up as nights and they were offering five pounds.
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Unknown Singer
The Daz White Nights are coming your way with big cash prizes we're hurrying on our way with purses full of prize money Our first stop could be at your house. We're off. If we call, just show us a large Daz packet. Answer a simple question correctly and you win five pounds. If you have two large or one giant size, you can win ten pounds. Daz White Knights will be traveling far and wide, including Winchester, Eastbourne, Chichester. The Daz White Knights are coming your way. And here's another exciting thing to look out for. Our squires are already putting this leaflet through almost every door. It gives you an extra chance of winning the same big prizes. Don't miss this great chance to win big prizes. Buy Daz tomorrow because we may call on you. And remember, Daz Wash is so white.
- [31:12]
Andrew Hickey
The worst Satisfaction had been about a mixture of dissatisfaction with commercialism and sexual frustration, while the actual lyrics to Get Off Of My Cloud are another rant against commercialism and oppressive conformity. The initial inspiration was one that might be less relatable to most, though most professional, creative people will relate and it would definitely be relatable to anyone else on the treadmill that was 1960s pop stardom. It was the need to produce more records. As Richards puts it in his autobiography, satisfaction is suddenly number one all over the world. And Mick and I are looking at each other saying, this is nice. Then bang, bang, bang at the door. Where's the follow up? We need it in four weeks. And we were on the road doing two shows a day. You needed a new single every two months. You had to have another one all ready to shoot and you needed a new sound. If we'd come along with another Fuzz riff after Satisfaction, we'd have been dead in the water repeating with the law of diminishing returns. Many a band has faltered and foundered on that rock. Get Off Of My Cloud was a reaction to the record company's demands for more Leave Me Alone and it was an attack from another direction. What Richards doesn't say there, but has been made clear elsewhere, is that the pressure wasn't just coming from the record companies, but from Oldham. And the group were beginning to resent that pressure as well as other decisions Oldham was making. Richards has said that the group originally wanted to do this song as a slow R and B track in the style of Lee Dorsey. Most of Dorsey's most well known songs were released after get off of My Cloud and Richards may even be misremembering, having been inspired by his later get out of My Life Woman. But it's possible Richards was thinking of Ride your Pony, which had been a minor hit earlier that year. But Richards disliked the finished version where he followed Oldham's direction, saying it's true, I never dug it as a record. The chorus was a nice idea, but we rushed it as the follow up to Satisfaction. We were in LA and it was time for another single. But how do you follow Satisfaction? I wanted to do it slow, like a Lee Dorsey thing. We rocked it up and I thought it was one of Andrew's worst productions. That didn't stop the song from becoming a transatlantic number one though. This was the second time that Richards had been unhappy with the production decision decision made by Oldham, and the second time that Oldham's decision had proved at least to be a commercial success. Things were growing more strained between Oldham and the group, but there was a bigger problem starting to make itself known. Brian Jones was becoming ever more insecure about his place in the group. When they'd started, he'd been the leader and everyone had agreed that even when they'd made their earliest records, Jones was still the lead guitarist and the group's biggest sex symbol. But now the others were starting to see him more as a liability than anything else. The big hits were now all songs written by Jagger and Richards, and while Jones tried desperately to write his own songs, he simply couldn't. Even when Oldham did to him what he'd done to the other two and locked him in a room and told him he couldn't come out until he had finished a song, he just couldn't do Wasn't that he was lacking in musical ideas, he was full of them. He just couldn't turn anything into an actual song. Wyman and Watts were both entirely ok, for the most part, with being non writing members of the band. They both had hobbies outside the band and didn't have their identities totally invested in being Rolling Stones. But Jones was starting to see that he was dispensable in the studio. With multi tracking now available to them, Richards could often play Jones part, and he was increasingly doing so as Jones was turning up to sessions drunk or not turning up at all. Richards would sometimes play the bass part as well, but Wyman's attitude to that was very different. If Richards wanted a specific sound or feel that Wyman wasn't quite getting, he was happy enough to just hand the bass over and say, why don't you have a go? But Jones felt incredibly threatened and was desperately looking for a way to make himself important to the band. To remain indispensable, he tried two main tactics. The first was to try to disrupt the Jagger Richards relationship, at the time, the strongest friendship in the group. He would latch onto one or other of the duo and try to be their best friend while disdaining the other, then switch a few weeks later when that didn't work. The other tactic he tried was to become the group's resident multi instrumentalist, to try to provide a similar function to the group that George Harrison brought to the Beatles by bringing in Indian sounds. But while Harrison was a serious student of the sitar and spent years intensely trying to learn the instrument, Jones would pick up a variety of instruments and try them for a few weeks, but discard them for much of the rest of his time in the group. In fact, Jones would rarely play guitar in the studio at all. But Jones was being made to feel like an outsider in all sorts of ways. He was a potential major publicity liability for the group. As if his treatment of women, and in particular the huge number of babies he'd had with women he'd abandoned, ever became public knowledge, it could have destroyed their career. He was the founder of the group. They all felt like they owed him a great deal. But at the same time, he was a liability. And they let him know it in the way that only arrogant men in their 20s can. On tour in Germany after the recording of Get Off Of My Cloud, Jones met for the first time a woman named Anita Pallenberg, who. Who would become the closest thing to a love of his life. The first time he met her, he just cried in her arms all night. About how badly Mick and Keith were treating him at the time. He didn't feel any better when, on their return to the uk, Mick and Keith recorded a track for the next album without any of the other Stones present. Engineered once again by Glyn Johns As Tears Go by was the Stones own version of the song the duo had written for Marianne Faithful before starting to write material for the group, and featured just Mick Keith on acoustic guitar and a string section arranged by Mike Leander.
- [38:33]
Unknown Singer
All I hear is the sound of rain falling on the ground.
- [38:53]
Andrew Hickey
That recording was of course, Oldham's idea as a way to emulate the Beatles yesterday, and it proved the point that John Lennon would always make, that the Stones would do whatever the Beatles did. Six months later, though, Keith Richards, while acknowledging that there's some truth to that, would also point out that the way the Stones worked at this point was to cut odd tracks in breaks from touring and stick them out when they had enough for an album either in the US or the uk. Those albums would sometimes have the same name, but rarely the same track lists, with the US albums cutting out some tracks and replacing them with non album singles and then creating in between new albums from offcut. This would sometimes mean that they and the Beatles would cut a track at around the same time because they were both reacting to the same thing in the general culture. But the Beatles track would get released first. After the German tour in which the group caused riots by goose stepping, drawing satisfaction at one stop on the tour, it was onto a UK theatre tour, then over to the US for yet another American tour in which they immersed themselves in the growing American counterculture, including apparently a brief meeting with Lou Reed and Stirling Morrison, whose Velvet Underground was only just starting up, but would be a surprising influence on the group in future years. Brian also jammed with Bob Dylan and Bob Neuwirth during a power cut in New York, but that ended up making things worse. Dylan and Neuwirth were both at that point behaving as they did in the famous footage in Don't Look Back, filmed a few months earlier, and trying to hurt people verbally. Dylan was very good at finding people's weak points and he soon started telling Jones that he was the weak link in the band, that the group were right not to let him sing, and that his image was all wrong and they should just kick him out. Jones broke down in tears and his reaction was so extreme that Dylan eventually softened and half jokingly told him he could always join Dylan's band in California. Jones and Richards went to the Second of Ken Kesey's acid tests, which is apparently where Richards tried acid for the first time. Apparently Jones had tried it with Lou Reed in New York, and this was also the debut of the Grateful Dead under that name. It was in California as well that they recorded their next single. 19th nervous breakdown was one of the few songs from this period with Jones playing guitar. And while it's in Every Way a 1965 rock record, it reaches back to the R and B that had inspired Brian early on. In particular, it's very clearly inspired by Diddley Daddy by Bo Diddley. Compare the intro of the Stones track to that of the Bo Diddley song.
- [42:31]
Unknown Singer
I Found her right here in the Windy City.
- [42:36]
Andrew Hickey
19Th nervous breakdown was written on the American tour and reflected Jagger's increasing annoyance at the fragility both of Jones and of his then girlfriend, Chrissie Shrimpton. Shrimpton was the sister of Jean Shrimpton, the world famous supermodel, and when Jagger had started dating her in 1963, she had been very much out of his league. But now Jagger was hanging out with two groups of people, neither of which she really fit into the new rock underground scene and increasingly the aristocracy. And he was very aware that Jones new girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, was herself a model and was far more sophisticated and culturally aware than any other woman he knew. He was looking round for someone more like that. And Chrissie was about the only one who didn't realise it, though even though she thought they were still in love, she was perceptive enough to realise that the increasing misogyny in Jagger's lyrics and their increasingly personal nature didn't say anything good about the relationship's future. The album that they started working on in the same set of sessions as 19th nervous breakdown and completed in a further set of Sessions in March 1966. Aftermath was the first Stones album to be made up entirely of originals, and those originals had a distinctly misogynistic tone. The album started with Mother's Little Helper, a song that stylistically seems to be modelled on the Kink's then recent well Respected man, the first of Ray Davis series of bouncy acoustic social satires, which came out as a single in the US shortly before Mother's Little Helper was recorded. The song also features the use of electric guitars to imitate the sound of sitars, something that had again been done by the Kinks earlier that year on See My Friend, though it's likely the group also were thinking of the Beatles Norwegian Wood, which had come out the week before.
- [45:08]
Unknown Singer
Mother say Mother Needs something today to calm her down and though she's not really ill There's a little yellow pill she goes running for the shelter of her mother's little helper and it helps her and her way gets her through.
- [45:26]
Andrew Hickey
Her busy day that was released as a US Only single a few months later and made the top 10 on its own. Mother's Little Helper is not entirely unsympathetic to its female object, who is also clearly nothing like Shrimpton. But then the second track on the album is titled Stupid Girl, whose title makes the subject clear and about which Jagger later said obviously I was having a bit of trouble. I wasn't in a good relationship or I was in too many bad relationships. I had so many girlfriends at that point, none of them seemed to care. They weren't pleasing me very much. Song four is Under My Thumb, a song celebrating exerting dominance over a woman. And while song three, Lady Jane may seem a ballad of courtly love, it's probably no coincidence that Lady Jane was also the nickname used for Lady Chatterley's genitals in Lady Chatterley's Lover, the novel which had been the subject of a famous obscenity trial a couple of years earlier and which everyone who thought themselves cultured in Britain had read. The album also contained a version of out of Time, yet another dig at Shrimpton, which soon after the album's release, Jagger would produce as a single on Immediate Records for Chris Farlow. Farlow's version, featuring Jimmy Page and Joe Moretti on guitars and Andy White, the drummer who played on Love Me do on drums, went to number one.
- [46:58]
Unknown Singer
Well, baby, baby, baby, baby, you're out of time.
- [47:17]
Andrew Hickey
Putting aside the lyrical content, about which the very best one can say is that it's not aged well, Aftermath is as a whole the group's first album as statement and musically it's leaps ahead of anything the group had done before, and their first album that sounds like a coherent piece of work. It's far more inventive than their previous albums, and that's largely down to Brian Jones multi instrumental ability on Aftermath. Jones had essentially told the other members of the band he had given up playing the guitar, though he does play guitar on several tracks, at least according to official credit, though Richards has often claimed that he played nearly all the guitars in overdubs. But as well as whatever small amount of guitar is by Jones, he also plays bells, dulcimer, harmonica, harpsichord, koto, marimba, organ and vibraphone. The UK version of Aftermath came out in April 1966, a month before Pet Sounds and a couple of months before Blonde on Blonde, and it was regarded at the time and still to this day as roughly on a par with those albums. Along with the Beatles Rubber Soul, which had come out a little before and had inspired a lot of the records of 1966, it was one of the first things to make the album, rather than the single, the main artistic form in pop music. Which isn't to say that the Stones weren't doing singles too. The US Version of the album, rather than opening with Mother's Little Helper, opened with the group's next single, Paint It Black, a song that once again saw Jones turn into another instrument, this time the sitar and providing the record's unique hook. By the middle of 1966, it seemed like Brian Jones had found a new role in the Rolling Stones and was now more relevant than ever. He was the sound of Aftermath and Paint It Black. As much as anyone, he seemed utterly secure in the band for the first time in years. But as we'll find out in Part two in a couple of weeks, nothing could be further from the truth. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week Patreon backers will get a 10 minute bonus podcast. This week's is on Amen Brother by the Winstons. Visit patreon.com andrewhickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, From Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers is now available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 songs on your favorite online bookstore or visit the links in the show Notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariza. Visit 500songs.com that's 500-the-nuts songs.com to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you liked this podcast. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works, get noticed, and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for listening.