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  On some level, songs intended to be hit singles have to have the widest possible reach. It is somewhat bizarre then, yet totally in character, that the Stones’ first mass-appeal success of the new decade is also one of the group’s most controversial efforts. How many taboo subjects could the boys cram into one three-minute, forty-eight-second recording? Let’s see—miscegenation, rape, cunnilingus, slavery, racism, sexism, and for good measure, a veiled reference to heroin—all set against another one of the Stones’ top-ten riffs of all time!

  The only concession to potential outrage and censorship was the changing of the title from “Black Pussy” to “Brown Sugar.” It brings to mind a quote about the way rock ’n’ roll works:

  KEITH RICHARDS: Music isn’t something to think about, at least initially. Eventually it’s got to cover the spectrum, but especially with rock ’n’ roll, first it has to hit you somewhere else. It could be the groin; it could be the heart; it could be the guts; it could be the toes. It’ll get to the brain eventually. The last thing I’m worried about is the brain. You do enough thinking about everything else.

  “Brown Sugar” hit the bull’s-eye. Following its release on April 16, 1971, it zoomed up the charts, landing at number one on May 29—the sixth Stones single to do so.

  The promotional shoot for Sticky Fingers

  CHAPTER 25

  LIKE A ROLLING STONE

  IN 1970, THE Stones were dealing with massive issues financially. The problem was twofold. They were soon to discover that their deal with former manager Allen Klein kept them from owning their publishing rights. They also owed an awful lot of money in taxes.

  MICK JAGGER: I just didn’t think about [taxes]. And no manager I ever had thought about it, even though they said they were going to make sure my taxes were paid. So, after working for seven years, I discovered nothing had been paid and I owed a fortune.

  This would become a larger issue the next year. But for now, the more pressing matter was that after the Beggars Banquet cover fiasco, the Stones had reached the end of their rope in dealing with their record companies, Decca in the UK and London Records in the States. From an American perspective, it had never made much sense that the Stones were on London Records.

  CRAIG BRAUN: London Records were a very proper record label, they did things like Mantovani. Their most outlandish recording artist was Engelbert Humperdinck. They couldn’t relate to this bad boy image that the Stones had.

  BILL WYMAN: Henry Mancini, Boots Randolph. The only reason for that is that in England we were assigned to Decca and their parent company in America was London Records. And all the best records in the ’50s that came over to England from America were London Records on forty-fives, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, the Coasters, etc. All those things were on London in England and they were distributed through Decca. So London Records, in England, was quite big as an outside record company, an outside-England record company. It was the biggest rock ’n’ roll record company. But when we came to America we realized that it wasn’t quite the right record company to be with. I used to go to their vault to look for records to nick and there was nothing. When we went to Chess, you could find fifty of the greats.

  CHARLIE WATTS: With London Records there were always problems with everything you did, album covers, publicity photos.

  BILL WYMAN: With Decca we had one every month. And the horrible thing was Decca never really worked on selling our records.

  CHARLIE WATTS: They didn’t really care.

  BILL WYMAN: They just let them go out and sell. They put barriers in our way whatever we tried to do. They were against us.

  The time had come for a new solution: the birth of Rolling Stones Records, which would be distributed by Ahmet Ertegun and Atlantic Records. Before striking a deal with Atlantic, the Stones reached out to an old acquaintance. Designer Craig Braun is a lifelong friend of Marshall Chess. He picks up the story:

  CRAIG BRAUN: Chess was the roots of English rock ’n’ roll. That’s how the connection was made. Marshall was very involved in the label and he felt that when the time came, his father would pass the baton to him. He knew the whole business by the time he was in his mid to late twenties. The Chess brothers then got involved in owning a radio station and they sold the label. I guess it wasn’t unbeknownst to Marshall but he was certainly not happy about that sale. Even though he ended up being the president of Chess Records, he was now dealing with a very unsophisticated, industrial, duplicating company called GRT. There was a major showdown and Marshall got out of his contract, and that left the door open for other opportunities.

  MARSHALL CHESS: Then, completely unexpectedly, my father died of a heart attack. He was fifty-two. If he’d possessed a crystal ball, he’d never have sold Chess Records. He wasn’t to know how historically important and how valuable that music would become. No one knew.

  Everything unraveled at that point. Not only did I lose my dad but I also lost a fortune. I’d been promised a lot of money from the sale of Chess to start my own label. But my father died without signing his will and I never got the money. The problem with the will meant that 70 percent of the proceeds from the sale of Chess went in tax. The people who bought Chess had no idea how to run it. They made me president of the label after quite a struggle on my part. But it was never going to work out. These people didn’t know the first thing about music. The first indication of the nightmare to come was that they called me in to discuss forecasts. They expected me to predict the kind of profits the shareholders could expect in the next year. It had never worked like that. To us, it was simply a question of making the next hit record. So they sent me to management school in New York for a week. I hated it. During all my time at Chess it never felt like a job. It was a joy. Suddenly it was a different ball game. For the first time in my life I felt I was at work rather than doing what I enjoyed. It was drudgery. That was a tough time for me. There was a lot of psychological turmoil. I really didn’t know what I was going to do next.

  Then there was some divine intervention—or something like that.

  CRAIG BRAUN: About 1969 I was with my girlfriend and Marshall was with his wife and we took a week’s holiday in the wintertime in Jamaica, and one of the things we did when we were there—I don’t know why—was to look for witch doctors. We wound up making a long and arduous trip up the side of a mountain there. He was in a state of flux at that point, not really working, looking for guidance. He was given this regimen by this very shaman-like, wise witch doctor where he’d light two yellow candles one day and one blue candle the following day and two red candles the day after that. He told me, “As soon as I get back to Chicago, I’m going to do it.” And he did it for about a week, and then he called me and said, “After I started doing this candle trip, I got a call from Mick Jagger and he wants me to run their label.” We were incredulous! And a few months after that we got together to work on Sticky Fingers, their first release.

  MARSHALL CHESS: He invited me round to his house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. It was a slightly bizarre meeting. I sat on the sofa and outlined my idea of running the Stones’ new label and Mick was dancing around the room to Clifton Chenier’s “Black Snake Blues.” Straight after that I walked up the road to meet Keith Richards. He was sitting at this big psychedelic yellow piano, jamming with Gram Parsons. First thing Keith does is remark how badly dressed I am. In the Chess days we were always sharply dressed because the artists respected that. I always wore a suit and tie, a ring on the little finger. Now I looked like Al Pacino in the Serpico movie—scruffy jeans, T-shirt, long hair. Anyway we shook hands on a deal and I was now the founding president of Rolling Stones Records.

  TONGUE LOGO

  The Rolling Stones’ tongue logo is the best-known and probably the most identifiable logo in rock ’n’ roll history. Ever wonder how it came about?

  MARSHALL CHESS: The Stones were in Amsterdam. I landed at Rotterdam airport. I was driving along to meet the band and saw a Shell petrol station with the classic yellow logo. It
was so beautifully simplistic. I mention this later when I’m sitting around with the Stones, saying that we should come up with a design that is totally recognizable without having the band’s name on it.

  MICK JAGGER: It’s a funny history, really, because lots of people think it was designed by Andy Warhol, which isn’t true. Andy would have loved to have designed it and we’d never be able to use it, probably. I was looking for a logo when we started Rolling Stones [Records] in 1970. I had this calendar on my wall, it was an Indian calendar which you’ll see in Indian grocery stores and things; and it’s the goddess Kali, which is the very serious goddess of carnage and so forth. And she has apart from her body, this tongue that sticks out—like that. So I took that tongue and I go into this designer called John Pasche, and he “modernized” it somewhat. And that’s how it started.

  The Warhol confusion arose because the Sticky Fingers cover was shot by Andy Warhol and the inner sleeve of that record was the first appearance of the tongue. But it was Pasche who was responsible for the design.

  JOHN PASCHE: At this time, I was in my final year of a graduate design course at the Royal College of Art in London. I was suggested as the most suitable student to take on the job.

  MARSHALL CHESS: As label manager it was my job to audition a variety of artists who came up with an extraordinary variety of tongues. As soon as we saw John Pasche’s now famous design, there was no doubt that was the one and we bought it outright.

  JOHN PASCHE: The design concept for the tongue was to represent the band’s antiauthoritarian attitude, Mick’s mouth, and the obvious sexual connotations. I was paid fifty pounds for the design which took me about a week to complete. In 1972, I was paid an additional two hundred pounds in recognition of the logo’s success.

  CRAIG BRAUN: Marshall gave me this little logo of this rubber stamp that John Pasche was working on, who was a kid in London in some kind of graphic arts studio.

  Braun didn’t know about Mick’s Indian calendar but he suggested another possible inspiration for Pasche’s illustration.

  CRAIG BRAUN: My contention is that John Pasche lifted this logo from an illustrator’s book, a guy named Alan Aldridge from a book called Beatles Illustrated. It’s on page 110. It’s not the same, but it’s very similar. It’s particularly applicable to the Stones and that’s why it resonated with such power. But it’s not a new concept; it’s been around for thousands of years.

  Other than branding the albums themselves, was there a larger vision for what to do with the logo?

  MICK JAGGER: I always took a bit of a strong slight to a lot of rock ’n’ roll merchandising, just basically ’cause it was the same thing over and over . . . “That’s very nice—black T-shirts with tongues on them. We have no real objections to them. It’s just that perhaps we should do something as well as that.”

  CRAIG BRAUN: We did a lot of different marketing things. I redrafted the logo that John Pasche had done. I refined the original because it was very rough and I needed to blow it up. It was a perfect logo.

  And what did that entail?

  CRAIG BRAUN: I basically outlined the highlights, the lips and the tongue, and made it reproducible in any way from silk screening to rubber stamping to letter press, offset, embroidery. I wanted to create a line of not only promotional items to help launch the label and the first record but also to create a line of merchandising items. It was the advent of licensed merchandising: T-shirts, canvas shoulder bags, pendants, key rings, etc. I called them Licks, based on the tongue and lips logo.

  CHAPTER 26

  STICKY FINGERS

  CHARLIE WATTS describes the first of the Sticky Fingers sessions, which are captured as part of Gimme Shelter:

  CHARLIE WATTS: During the tour of the States we went to Alabama and played at the Muscle Shoals studio. That was a fantastic week. We cut some great tracks, which appeared on Sticky Fingers—“You Gotta Move,” “Brown Sugar,” and “Wild Horses”—and we did them without Jimmy Miller, which was equally amazing. It worked very well: it’s one of Keith’s things to go in and record while you’re in the middle of a tour and your playing is in good shape. The Muscle Shoals studio was very special, though—a great studio to work in, a very hip studio, where the drums were on a riser high up in the air; plus you wanted to be there because of all the guys who had worked in the same studio.

  Other sessions for Sticky Fingers took place in the UK.

  ANDY JOHNS: We set up at Mick’s house, Stargroves, and they were using these really cool amps. It was ideally suited because it was a big mansion. I put Mick Taylor in the fireplace and stuck a mic up the chimney—it was kind of a baronial hall—I put Charlie in the bay window and it worked. I remember when we were doing “Bitch” and Keith is yet to show up . . . I go out to the hall and there’s Keith leaning up against the wall eating a bowl of cornflakes. With “Moonlight Mile” you can tell by the vibe on the track that it was about five o’clock in the morning. Everyone was either drunk or tired or stoned or whatever. It was a five o’clock in the morning track. You can hear that coming through . . .

  As with Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed, the Stones were looking for new sonic elements to add to their portfolio.

  CHARLIE WATTS: Sticky Fingers was the first time we added horns—that was the influence of people like Otis Redding and James Brown, and also Delaney and Bonnie, who Bobby Keys and Jim Price played with. It was to add an extra dimension, a different color, not to make the band sound any different.

  BOBBY KEYS: I was staying with Mick for a brief period of time, and they were working on Sticky Fingers. I think Otis Redding and the Memphis sound was big on everybody’s minds at the time and the Stones wanted to do something that had horns on it. Jim Price and I were available; we did a couple tracks, then they said, “Let’s do a couple more.” One thing led to another and forty-some years later here I am.

  Keith acknowledges being “out of it” during a lot of that period.

  ROBERT GREENFIELD: Keith had been relatively impossible during the recording of Sticky Fingers. The reason he’s not on “Moonlight Mile”: he never showed up. He would come ten, twelve hours late.

  MICK JAGGER: We made [tracks] with just Mick Taylor, which are very good and everyone loves, where Keith wasn’t there for whatever reasons . . . People don’t know that Keith wasn’t there making it. All the stuff like “Moonlight Mile,” “Sway.” These tracks are a bit obscure, but they are liked by people that like the Rolling Stones. It’s me and [Mick Taylor] playing off each other—another feeling completely, because he’s following my vocal lines and then extemporizing on them during the solos.

  Marshall Chess was now a member of the Stones inner circle. How was his transition into that group?

  MARSHALL CHESS: It happened straightaway. They accepted me immediately because of my connection with Chess Records. For a time I lived with Keith at Cheyne Walk. I had the servant’s quarters at the top of the house. Keith wasn’t your typical housemate. He would stay up for three days, then sleep for three days. He always did have a unique physiology. I’d always been a morning person. At Chess, it was a case of start working at nine A.M., finish at seven P.M. It was a very structured life. Working with the Stones played havoc with my body clock. Meetings would start at eleven P.M., one A.M., whenever. Working with the Stones becomes your life. It’s not like a job at all. The only way to survive it was to live it.

  What was his main contribution to the band in the studio?

  MARSHALL CHESS: Attitude. Of course, the Stones already had plenty of that, but I definitely added to it. It was a case of “Fuck everybody, fuck the label, fuck the cost, because we’re going to make the greatest music and nothing is gonna get in the way of that.” In the seven years with the Stones, I spent more time in the studio than anybody with the exception of Mick and Keith. I’ve always loved recording studios. For me it’s like entering a church or a temple. I love the mood of those places. I love sitting behind that mixing-desk, watching events unfold. I find it complete
ly fascinating.

  Also I’d learned so much from watching my dad and uncle work with the Chess musicians. They knew exactly how to push their artists so they got the best out of them. There were times when my father would take over on the drums during Muddy Waters sessions to get the exact sound he wanted. The thing with the Stones was that they were surrounded by people who were completely enamored of them. So everything was great all the time. But I used to push them and push them some more. Doing Sticky Fingers, Mick would be laying down the vocal on “Moonlight Mile” and I’d be screaming, “Come on you motherfucker, another one.” Because I thought it could be improved.

  The critics, evidently, appreciated the extra effort.

  BARNEY HOSKYNS: Sticky Fingers has always been taken for granted. Fans and critics alike have drooled for decades over Let It Bleed and Exile on Main St., but Fingers is surely the Rolling Stones’ greatest single long-player. It captures the group at the absolute top of their game—imperiously sexy, decadently jet-setting, above all passionate. (If Mick Jagger has never moved you, listen again to the line “You know I can’t let you/Slide thru my hands,” on “Wild Horses.”) All this and a brilliantly homoerotic Andy Warhol sleeve—complete with real zip.