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British GQ revisits TATTOO YOU (with comments from Mick and Keith)

Posted by: Title5Take1 ()

Date: October 27, 2011 20:26

Tattoo You: anatomy of a classic
By Dylan Jones
Photos by Peter Corriston

Full article at link and also pasted below >>[www.gq-magazine.co.uk]

It's 30 years since the Rolling Stones recorded one of their best post-Exile LPs, the great forgotten album of the Eighties. GQ celebrates the Glimmer Twins' final coup de grace - the piecemeal beast that is Tattoo You - and retells the extraordinary story of its difficult birth.

When you reach a certain age - could be 18, could be 30, could be 45 - when you think you have found all the music you like, and when your computer and your shelves are heaving with your personal taste's greatest hits, you are often tempted to wander.

I know I am.

You get bored with the stuff you've got (the stuff you thought pretty much defined you) and start seeking out stuff you previously thought was naff, stuff that always felt a bit old, pedestrian, ordinary, odd. Or simply stuff you've never heard before. Hell, you might even start to like Nick Cave. This happens collectively as much as it does individually: how else can you explain the recent and decidedly curious veneration of Leonard Cohen? Had we really exhausted every other potential cult hero? And could it really be the turn of Kaiser Chiefs next?

And so, thinking back to a time when, say, you might have been passionately consuming Joy Division, the Human League, the B-52's and the Cramps (let's stamp it 1981), you begin looking around for other things you could have liked, another life you could have lived, searching for a parallel universe full of Bruce Springsteen, the Bee Gees, the Psychedelic Furs... the Rolling Stones. Say. Maybe Hi Infidelity by REO Speedwagon wasn't as bad as everyone assumed it was, maybe Yazoo weren't so rubbish after all. Uh-huh. And so you begin employing the same rationale you used at the age of 13: playing a record until you liked it, no matter how bad it was (in my case, I give you exhibit A: Ooh La La by the Faces). All those years you spent vacationing in Ibiza? Well, imagine instead you had gone to the Côte d'Azur instead.

In the summer of 1981, a new Rolling Stones album was released. Its title was Tattoo You. The album itself was a compilation of odds and sods from previous recording sessions, some from Some Girls, some from Emotional Rescue and some from the infamous Black And Blue sessions of the mid-Seventies - leftovers that had, as one critic would write, a "slovenly gait". And a rather wonderful one at that. The tracks selected covered the years since 1972 and featured such former contributors as Bobby Keys, Billy Preston and Mick Taylor (fact: the Stones were at their prime when Taylor was in the band). And they had been recorded everywhere from Paris and Rotterdam to Kingston, Jamaica and Compass Point in Nassau. Tattoo You was made possible by travel agents as much as anyone.

My sojourn with the record was kick-started by an article I read in Entertainment Weekly a few years ago, in which the director Greg Mottola (Superbad) described his efforts at authenticity in his film Adventureland. The movie is set in the Eighties and Mottola wanted a specific Stones song included on the soundtrack, "Tops", and he wasn't going to accept any substitutes. Intrigued (I'd never heard it), I sought it out and found it, right in the middle of Tattoo You.

Some Girls, from 1978, had been the perfect Stones album, containing one genuine worldwide smash - the disco-themed, four-to-the-floor "Miss You" - and various solid-gold classics such as "Respectable", "Beast Of Burden" and "Shattered". It felt old and new at the same time, both modern and venerable. Yet its follow-up, Emotional Rescue, was a ragbag of not very much at all, and those of us who felt we shouldn't have liked Some Girls in the first place felt vindicated. So by the time Tattoo You was released, those of us of a certain vintage with even a modicum of respect for the band simply ignored it, thinking it couldn't possibly be any good. But listening to it 30 years later, I realise how wrong we were, and although Some Girls is still considered primus inter pares, Tattoo You could be even better. I'm not holding it like a hymnal, but it currently gets more heavy rotation than any other non-current CD in the house. This record doesn't burn with intensity - and, in true Stones style, a lot of its high points you can imagine being the result of no more than a shrug of the shoulders - but it's a great, old-fashioned party album, a bachelor-pad staple, a classic of its kind.

This wasn't the 1964 vintage of elephant-cord hipsters, tab- collared shirts and Carnaby Street suede lace-ups. This was no Beggar's Banquet-era pageantry of death, no bohemian requiem. This was a serious acknowledgement of stadium rock, of which "Start Me Up" quickly became a quintessential example. By 1981, the Stones were a generic top-down, rock'n'roll-by-numbers outfit, delivering power-chord riff-rock for those in the cheap seats behind the stanchions, fans for whom nuance was a fancy French restaurant. We were entering a period when rock'n'roll was squeezing itself into a brand new pair of training shoes and rolling the sleeves of its pale-pink linen jacket up to the elbows, when there was little in the world that couldn't be solved by a Roland 808 and a 12" dance remix.

But although they had become an outfit committed to celebration rather than introspection, the burden of debauchery still sat lightly on their shoulders.

Tattoo You started inauspiciously, initially cobbled together in order for the band to have a new album to promote for their 1981 American tour; a record to go on the road with. By now, the band didn't need to make another mark on history, they simply needed content for their latest travelling carnival. This was pantechnicon rock.

According to the album's associate producer, Chris Kimsey, "Tattoo You really came about because Mick and Keith were going through a period of not getting on. There was a need to have an album out, and I told everyone I could make an album from what I knew was still there." The gossip surrounding the Stones at the time suggested that Jagger and Richards were getting on so badly that they couldn't be in the same room together, let alone write songs, and although Richards was still adjusting to a life without heroin, Ronnie Wood was apparently near-incapacitated from freebase cocaine (by the early Eighties he was rumoured to be spending $5,000 a day on his habit).

However Keith Richards begs to differ: "The thing with Tattoo You wasn't that we'd stopped writing new stuff, it was a question of time. We'd agreed we were going to go out on the road and we wanted to tour behind a record. There was no time to make a whole new album and make the start of the tour."

Maybe. One writer recalls visiting Richards' home in the early Eighties, and on entering the guitarist's pool room, seeing a hideous portrait of the owner with one hand holding a cigarette. On the other hand sat a glove puppet, a tiny Mick Jagger.

Either way, Kimsey spent three months with Jagger going through material that had been recorded for the previous five albums, finding stuff that had been either rejected or forgotten. Apart from two tracks, the songs were all written and recorded in the Seventies, and so were all of exquisite vintage.

"Tattoo You is basically an old record," says Jagger. "It's a lot of old tracks that I dug out. They're all from different periods. Then I had to write lyrics and melodies. A lot of them didn't have anything, which is why they weren't used at the time, because they weren't complete. And I put them all together in an incredibly cheap fashion. I recorded in this place in Paris in the middle of winter. And then I recorded some of it in a broom cupboard, literally, where we did the vocals. The rest of the band were hardly involved. Then I took it to Bob Clearmountain, who did a great job of mixing so that it didn't sound like it was from different periods."

"Some tracks weren't quite ready [for] Emotional Rescue," says Richards. "The music had to age just like good wine. Sometimes we write our songs in instalments - just get the melody and the music, and we'll cut the tracks and write the words later. That way, the actual tracks have matured, just like wine - you just leave it in the cellar for a bit, and it comes out a little better a few years later. It's stupid to leave all that great stuff just for want of finishing it off and getting it together."

The cover of the album was designed by Peter Corriston, who won a Grammy Award for it. This was just before the arrival of the CD, when album sleeves still meant something, before they became pauperised. The cover is striking for many reasons, not least because it is one of the few to only feature Jagger on the front. Their tattooed faces served to disguise the ageing process, maintaining the idea of Jagger and Richards as priapic rock gods. And just before the album was pressed, Jagger changed the title at the last minute from Tattoo to Tattoo You, causing Richards to publicly fume, claiming he had never been consulted about this.

Tops" and "Waiting On A Friend" were recorded in late 1972 during the Goats Head Soup sessions (and featuring Mick Taylor, not Ronnie Wood, on guitar; Taylor later demanded and received a share of the album's royalties); while the libidinous "Slave", with its elephantine riff, and the glorious "Worried About You", were recorded in 1975 during the Black And Blue sessions in Rotterdam. "Hang Fire" (originally recorded as "Lazy Bitch" ), "Start Me Up" and "Black Limousine" (possibly their most underrated song of the past 30 years) were originally recorded for Some Girls, and "Little T&A" and "No Use In Crying" came from the Emotional Rescue sessions.

"On most albums there's one duff track," said Ian Stewart, the band's unofficial sixth member, "but on Tattoo You they're all good."

"Start Me Up" had the sort of riff that, when you first hear it, will wake you up in the morning, competing with your heartbeat. It was released in August 1981 and was so infectious it reached the Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic, helping carry Tattoo You to No.1 for nine weeks in the States; the album was certified quadruple platinum in America alone. The song had originally been rehearsed during the Black And Blue sessions as a reggae song called "Never Stop", but was completely overhauled for its single release, a raunch-by-rote construction that would eventually become their most famous song. The infectious "thump" to the song was achieved using mixer Bob Clearmountain's famed "bathroom reverb", a process involving the recording of some of the song's vocal and drum tracks with a miked speaker in the bathroom of the Power Station recording studio in New York.

"Start Me Up" was recorded at the Pathé Marconi Studio - Paris' Abbey Road - in December 1977, the same day they laid down the rhythm track for "Miss You" (proving to be one of the most profitable days in their entire career). At the time it was little more than a Keith Richards ad-libbed riff with a reggae pulse, and there are innumerable "an-ting" takes languishing in the vaults.

"It came together very quickly," says Jagger. They considered pursuing the song for Some Girls, but when Richards listened to the playback, as well as worrying that it was just a new version of "Brown Sugar", he thought it sounded too similar to something he'd heard on the radio. And so Chris Kimsey, the engineer, was told to dump it. Luckily Kimsey didn't wipe the tape and the band took another stab at it during the 1979 Emotional Rescue sessions. Once more it was consigned to the shelf. Two years later they tried again.

"[The song] was just buried in there," says Jagger. "Nobody remembered cutting it... it was like a gift."

For the lyrics, Jagger used a glove compartment full of car metaphors ("My hands are greasy, she's a mean, mean machine" etc), while the line about the woman being able to make a dead man "cum" no doubt originated from Lucille Bogan's old blues number, "Shave 'em Dry" ("I got something between my legs'll make a dead man come" ), which Richards had been listening to for years.

And when Jagger started dancing to the song on stage, you could still see the vestiges of the innate irreverence that made him famous in the first place. As the Guardian writer Richard Williams once observed, "Where Paul McCartney grinned, shook his head and went 'Wooooo!', Mick Jagger did a sinuous, lithe Nureyev-goes-to-Harlem dance and shook his quadruple maracas like voodoo implements, a portrait of self-absorption." Oh, yes please. The ten-week, 30-city tour grossed £25m, at the time it was the highest-grossing tour in history. It was said that the 1981 tour divided America into two camps: the three million people who saw one of their 51 concerts, and the 223 million who wished they had.

Whenever I think of Jagger I think of Jessica Mitford's brilliant quote: "I don't think I could ever take myself seriously enough to go grubbing about looking for my soul - that is, I couldn't get interested in it, hence religion, psychiatry, consciousness-raising and the like are all totally beyond my ken." John Lahr said that style, "it seems to me", is metabolism, and that if you can find the pulse of the artist, you can find the pulse of the art. With Jagger, the pulse had, for some time, been about little but showing off, which was why Tattoo You was a perfect Rolling Stones record: it was all about showing off.

Anyway, Tattoo You is there to be rediscovered, and if you like the Stones, this is probably the last great record they made, probably the last great record they will make, and it deserves to be cherished.

Searching the internet late one night for reviews of the album, I came across a blog full of comments about the album, many of which were full of praise ("This is an excellent buy for any age group to slam on at a party to get everyone rockin', or quietly sit back in a dim light with a joint and a bourbon on the rocks, and let the evening drift away!" ), many of which were just statements of fact ("Tattoo You is a rather good album. It sort of 'Starts Me Up' and tries to bring me to 'Heaven'. It kind of rocks" ), while an equal amount were fairly disparaging. To wit: "I took Tattoo You to my friend Brubaker's house because we were all gonna drink and watch the movie Neighbors with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi," wrote one Shawn Kilroy. "They both came out at the same time and I associate them. Tattoo You is the last great Stones album as much as Neighbors is the last great Aykroyd/Belushi movie. My plan was to put the song 'Neighbours' on as soon as [the] credits [rolled], however when I got up to get it, seems that Bru had put my LP in the oven and melted it into a shrinky dink. I was horrified and asked them why they would do such a thing.

"'Don't you love the Stones?' I shrieked.

"Bru said, 'Yeah, but not that disco bullshit.'"

Kilroy's passion was undiminished: 'It's still my favourite Stones album," he wrote.

He's not alone, and there isn't a disco song in sight.

Originally published in the July 2011 issue of British GQ.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2011-10-27 20:29 by Title5Take1.

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