Mick Taylor – 50th Music Anniversaries and Other Musings

I’m participating in an album draft with nine other bloggers, organized by Hanspostcard. There will be ten rounds, with draft order determined randomly by round. My fifth round selection is the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers.

It’s just that demon life has got me in its sway…

When it comes to filthy, gritty, living in the moment, above the law, unforgiving, unapologetic rock bands, the Rolling Stones are the original standard bearers. Within their unlikely and absurdly long life as a group – fast approaching 60 years – the stretch of albums loosely termed by many fans as the “Mick Taylor years” stand out for their return to basics, while at the same time cranking it up about 100 notches (I also include the pre-Taylor Beggars Banquet with these releases). For me, at the top of the heap, even if only by a few degrees, is Sticky Fingers. This is the one. This album represents everything I love about the Stones, Brian Jones’s unique contributions notwithstanding.

There were a couple of periods of recording beginning in early 1969, with the bulk of studio work taking place the following year, concluding in December 1970. It was released on April 23, 1971. The album, with its distinctive Andy Warhol Factory designed cover which included, on initial pressings, an actual functioning zipper, topped the charts worldwide soon after. Sticky Fingers was the band’s first album of the 1970’s, and the first on their Rolling Stones label featuring the iconic tongue and lips logo. But, as always, it’s about the MUSIC, maaaan.

And the vibe. To my ears, the vibe or tone of the album is actually set with the count in to the second track, Sway, and it never lets up. Chances are you know this album well, or are at least familiar with it, and you know what I mean. And let’s give major credit where it’s due right now: The session players on Sticky Fingers were an all-star band in themselves, and are just as important to this record as the principals. Bobby Keys and Jim Price brought crucial sax and trumpet contributions. They rocked on tracks like Bitch, and displayed soul on the Stax ballad inspired I Got the Blues along with Billy Preston on the organ. Price also added the beautiful piano part to Moonlight Mile, with only he and the two Micks on the main track.

Other major contributions include Ry Cooder’s slide guitar and Jack Nitzsche’s piano on Sister Morphine (co-credited to Marianne Faithfull), and Paul Buckmaster’s string arrangements on Sway and Moonlight Mile. Other session players included stalwarts Nicky Hopkins, Rocky Dijon, Jim Dickinson, and Ian Stewart, and though he didn’t play on the album, Sticky Fingers wouldn’t have been what it is without the influence of Gram Parsons. The evidence is on Wild Horses and Dead Flowers. If we’re to include alternate versions, Eric Clapton and Al Kooper can be heard on the looser 2015 bonus disc cut of Brown Sugar. But the core, as always, was Mick and Keith and the boys, now including Mick Taylor, and it’s Taylor’s lead guitar interacting with Richards’s and Jagger’s rhythm playing that took the band’s sound to a place it hadn’t been before his arrival and hasn’t returned to in the 46 years since his departure, with all due respect to Brian Jones and Ronnie Wood.

I don’t know why, but I’m fascinated by bands from that era that stretched and often broke the rules and not only kept it together but seemed to thrive on the chaos. Perhaps guys like Elvis, Hank, and others raised eyebrows earlier, but the Stones flaunted damn near every taboo in society’s face in these songs and said what of it, mate? These years found them defying not only the law, but the Grim Reaper as well, bless Keith’s heart (and veins), and they survived. Sticky Fingers is truly a fly on the wall album for anyone who wants to know what they were about without the visual horrors of watching the cinéma vérité documentary of their 1972 U.S. tour, Cocksucker Blues, that make one want to take a shower after viewing (just remember, I didn’t tell you to watch it). It’s not the first “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” album, but along with Let it Bleed, Exile on Main St. and the others, it’s about as extreme as it gets, especially considering when it came out. It’s an album that makes Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, and certainly latter day examples like the Gallagher and Robinson brothers of Oasis and the Black Crows, respectively – great rock artists that they all are – look like silly wannabes (and I like all of those bands, too). It’s a perfect rock album, and it’s on my island if you want to kayak over and listen some time.

Tracklist

Side One:

Brown Sugar
Sway
Wild Horses
Can’t You Hear Me Knocking
You Gotta Move

Side Two:

Bitch
I Got the Blues
Sister Morphine
Dead Flowers
Moonlight Mile

-Stephen

John Mayall – Blues from Laurel Canyon

It seems I’m in a Laurel Canyon state of mind. By 1968, an artistically idyllic diaspora had developed in L.A. which would shape much of the popular music world for the next decade or so. One name I wouldn’t normally associate with that scene is John Mayall, but he had visited L.A. earlier in the year and subsequently moved from his native England to Laurel Canyon the following year. Mayall lived there for ten years (a brush fire destroyed his home and much archival material in 1979). Fifty years ago this month he released his acclaimed Blues from Laurel Canyon, featuring 19-year-old guitarist Mick Taylor. It was his first album after the breakup of the Bluesbreakers earlier in the year.

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Mayall handles the vocals throughout. He also plays guitar, harmonica, and keyboards. Mick Taylor, who would soon join the Rolling Stones, plays some blistering lead guitar as well as pedal steel on the album. Steve Thompson, all of 18, plays bass, and Colin Allen is on drums. Peter Green, late of Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and at the time the leader of Fleetwood Mac, added guitar to the track First Time Alone.

The album is considered innovative in the blues genre, as songs segue into the next or otherwise stop on a chord just before the next song begins. We also hear a tabla – not an oft-employed instrument in blues music but one which fit well pretty much anywhere in the late ’60s. The tracks tell the story of Mayall’s visit to L.A. prior to his move there, which actually makes it a bit of a concept album. But there’s nothing to do with flower power or the burgeoning singer/songwriter genre on this record. It’s all blues, and it only took three days in August of ’68 to record. At the age of 35, Mayall was a senior citizen in the music world by that time and wasn’t going to be swayed much by what the younger musicians were doing.

There are some really good moments on this record. The opening track, Vacation, begins with the sound of a jet landing (like another opening track to a major album release that same month), i.e., Mayall’s arrival in L.A., and features a more-accomplished-than-his-years solo by Mick Taylor. Taylor also plays some tasty slide on 2401, which was inspired by Mayall’s visit with Frank (and daughter Moon Unit) Zappa and also features nice keyboard work by Mayall. Someone’s Acting like a child is a classic blues track with great guitar and harmonica. The Bear, with Mayall’s great boogie piano track, is based upon his meeting with Canned Heat (it opens with a riff from On the Road Again), and Taylor plays some outstanding improvisations on the song about Mayall mentally preparing to go home to England (before permanently moving to Laurel Canyon for the next decade) on the aptly titled Fly Tomorrow.

At a time when white blues guitar players like Clapton and Page were stretching their playing into heavier forms, Mayall stayed truer to traditional blues than most. It’s interesting to me that L.A. appealed to him at that point in his career. But then again, what wasn’t to like from a perch in Laurel Canyon, looking down over the Sunset Strip and its happening venues? Warm, sunny days, an exploding music scene in the late 1960s, etc. Good times.