Tag Archives: Brian Jones

The Rolling Stones in Five Easy Pieces

The Rolling Stones / 1965 / Fornebu Aiport Oslo Norway/ National Archive of Norway

A winter’s day in New York should be dark, cold, and frosty, but when the mercury soared into the 60s recently I took a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. The only plan for the next seven hours was to keep moving in solitary steps from the bottom of Manhattan to the top, with song after song pushed into my ears in digitized random fashion. With an audio gene pool of thousands of tunes from old to new, some were carefully curated but most just snatched from the mothership like a giant claw. As I detached myself from both obligation and responsibility, and carefully glided through a moving landscape with minimum interaction, the music expanded and contracted inside my head from background to forefront.

There was a brief moment this day when a random thought came to me and refused to budge, which brings us here and now. In the inexperience of youth without the benefit of context or time, I too often skimmed the surface and missed the depth, making it a luxurious privilege to circle back. So with that in mind, consider this a brief mutation of making amends and please allow me to introduce you to five songs the Rolling Stones recorded over 50 years ago.

The first was on the flip side of “The Last Time” single, featuring Mick on vocals and tambourine with Keith picking out the lead on acoustic guitar. Jack Nitzsche added harpsichord and tam-tam, with legendary producer and future convicted killer Phil Spector playing bass lines on a de-tuned electric guitar. The rest of the band are excluded, and it was recorded in January 1965 at the RCA Studio in Los Angeles, the night before they left for a string of tour dates in Australia.

From the December 1965 Aftermath sessions in England, this song didn’t make it onto the album and was given away to a singing duo known as Twice As Much who released it the following May only in the UK, where it barely made it into the Top 40. This version was included on the American-only Flowers compilation album, and features the full band with Brian Jones playing harpsichord.

Recorded four months later in Hollywood in March of 1966 and included on Aftermath, Brian Jones is playing an Appalachian mountain dulcimer and once again Jack Nitzsche is called upon to add harpsichord.

At the same Hollywood sessions mentioned above, this is the first of three versions that have been released by the Stones. It originally was only available on the UK’s Aftermath. It was a number-one hit single for Chris Farlowe, who covered it three months later with Mick Jagger producing. A second, shorter version came out in the US on the Flowers compilation, and the third time around, available on another compilation, titled Metamorphis, took Farlowe’s version and replaced it with Jagger’s vocals.

The final song of this quintet was again only available in the US on the Flowers album, but appeared in the UK on Between The Buttons. Recorded in the fall of 1966, I’m guessing it was recorded again in Hollywood, as Nitzsche plays harpsichord again and is joined by Nick de Caro on accordion. Brian Jones plays vibraphone, Keith on acoustic, Bill Wyman on bass, and Charlie Watts tambourine and claves. Along with his vocal, Jagger is credited with adding “finger snaps.”

So what caused me to look back over 50 years to these five particular songs? Consider this both the preamble and postscript. In March of 1995 the band re-recorded this song live in at a recording studio in Tokyo. It is a mostly acoustic deconstruction from the electric version released on Steel Wheels, featuring a rare lead vocal from Keith. You’ll find it most recently available on the June 2016 release of Totally Stripped. And on a winter’s day in New York that should have been dark, cold, and frosty but with the mercury soaring into the 60s, I traveled from Brooklyn to Harlem in seven hours, listening to this song almost a dozen times and recalling that once upon a time I loved this band but couldn’t remember why.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed at here my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com

Monterey Pop Festival: The Fifty Year Anniversary

Paul Kantner/Jefferson Airplane by Elaine Mayes

It happened in June of 1967, before the Woodstock music festival and Altamont concert. The Beatles were still a band that had four singles in the top ten. Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits was released and it landed on the charts behind the Monkees,  Doors, Stones, Aretha Franklin and Velvet Underground with Nico. Johnny Cash had yet to record at Folsom Prison and Gram Parsons was neither a Byrd nor a Burrito Brother. Townes Van Zandt was still playing at a club in Houston, Steve Earle was only 12, Jay Farrar turned seven months old, and Jeff Tweedy was yet to be born. There was no radio format called Americana, and it would be 28 years until Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden would publish the first issue of No Depression.

On the first day of the Monterey International Pop Music Festival I had just finished up tenth grade, and was living 3,000 miles away in Philadelphia. Throughout the spring and summer I was hanging out at the Guitar Workshop, downtown near Rittenhouse Square, where I’d dust off the Martins and run errands. It was around the corner from The 2nd Fret, a coffeehouse where you’d see old blues men, young folkies and local bands. On July 23, my friend Carol Drucker asked if I wanted to go with her to see the Mamas and the Papas at Convention Hall. On the bill were the Blues Magoos, Moby Grape, and a guy named Scott McKenzie. That night was the first time we heard news about this festival they had in California.

The three days and nights of the Monterey Pop Festival were put together in just seven weeks as a nonprofit event. It has been written that the idea first came out of a discussion at Cass Elliot’s house with Paul McCartney, John and Michelle Phillips, and producer Lou Adler. Alan Pariser and promoter Ben Shapiro approached John and Lou about staging it in Monterey and a number of people jumped onboard, including Peter Pilaflan, Chip Monck, Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Tom Wilkes, and David Wheeler.

It’s that Canned Heat performance from Saturday afternoon that was on my mind this week and prompted me to troll YouTube. I was researching ’60s “white boy” blues bands and remembered seeing it years ago. What I had forgotten about was how much of the festival was caught on film by D.A. Pennbacker. Although it was released the following year as a 79-minute film, in 2002 a three-disc high definition DVD set with a super clean 5.1 mix was brought out and is still available from The Criterion Collection.

The performances that are most known from the original release included The Who, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Big Brother and The Holding Company with Janis Joplin, the Mamas and the Papas, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar, and Jefferson Airplane. The full collection also has the “outtakes,” with the Blues Project, the Byrds, Country Joe and the Fish, the Electric Flag, Al Kooper, Laura Nyro, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Simon & Garfunkel, and more.

Here’s Pennbacker on how the film was shot:

The music performances would be recorded on eight track recorders, which had only recently been invented and were quite rare. The real complication was getting the film we shot to sync with the sound. The cameras we were going to use weighed heavily on my mind as we had made them ourselves. There were no commercial cameras we could handhold that would run the film in real time and sync to the sound. And the syncing was not always perfect.

We knew that there was going to be much more music than we could fit into a ninety minute film, so Bobby Neuwirth tended a red light at the edge of the stage which would be on for the songs we had chosen so all the cameras would know what to shoot. But when Jimi Hendrix or Otis Redding or The Who got going, the red light never went off.

That’s Booker T. and The M.G.’s with the Mar-Keys’ horn section backing Otis Redding, who six months later would die in a plane crash. He was the closing act on Saturday night and up until then he had performed mainly for black audiences. According to Booker T. Jones, “I think we did one of our best shows, Otis and the M.G.’s. That we were included in that was also something of a phenomenon. That we were there? With those people? They were accepting us and that was one of the things that really moved Otis. He was happy to be included and it brought him a new audience. It was greatly expanded in Monterey.”

The festival was indeed a nonprofit event, with every artist playing for free, with the exception of Ravi Shankar, who was paid $3,000. Country Joe and The Fish earned $5,000 from the film but all other funds went to The Foundation, which describes itself as “a nonprofit charitable and educational foundation empowering music-related personal development, creativity, and mental and physical health. In the spirit of the Monterey International Pop Festival, and on behalf of the artists who took part, the Foundation awards grants to qualified organizations and individuals with identifiable needs in those areas.”

Brian Wilson, who was on the board of directors for the festival, and the Beach Boys were scheduled to headline one night but cancelled. The Kinks, Donovan, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards couldn’t secure visas into the country. Brian Jones attended and introduced Hendrix. Invited but declining to appear were the Beatles, Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, Dionne Warwick, and several Motown artists. Moby Grape’s film and audio remain unreleased as their manager Matthew Katz demanded $1,000,000 for the rights. (Of course, this being 2017, the audio has been found and posted on You Tube…hail hail rock n’ roll.)

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression dot com.