Bobby Keys and Jim Price put some horns on the end of “Honky Tonk Women” mixed down so low you can only hear them in the very last second and half on the fade. Chuck Berry had a saxophone just for the very end of “Roll Over Beethoven.” We loved that idea of another instrument coming in just for the last second. Keith Richards, Life
“Nothing On Me”—a track on Richards new(ish) solo CD, Crosseyed Heart, has a fade worthy of rock ‘n’ roll classics. After Richards sings his last, bottom line—“I’m gonna plead the Fifth”—guitars weave on—chords rubbing up against fluid lines of single notes—as an organ fills in some (but not all) space in the mix. What’s missing is…the whole song. Which you’ll want to hear again right away.
When I got locked on “Nothing On Me,” my 12-year old wondered at my little obsession And—what the hey—I’ll admit there was some method in it. I was hoping my son might pick up on the song-craft in Richards’ track since it underscores what’s absent from most pop hits today—constructs that don’t meld or build but reduce to a succession of discrete hooks. “Nothing On Me,” by contrast, lives up to Richards’ sense of telos:
What you’re looking for is where the sounds just melt into one another and you’ve got the beat behind it and the rest of it just has to squirm and roll its way through, if you have it all separated, it’s insipid. What you’re looking for is power and force without volume—an inner power. A way to bring together what everyone is doing and make one sound. So it’s not two guitars, piano, bass and drums, it’s one thing, not five. You’re here to create one thing.
“Nothing on Me” is a serious hoot like most of the Stones’ ballsiest hits. The content is heavy—the song evokes Richards’ many brushes with the law—but there are touches of wit throughout as when Richards assumes a genteel Brit’s tone—“I don’t resist arrest/I think it’s for the best”—that proves to be a tease since he’s anticipating cops’ comeuppance: “Cos they got nothing on me.”
Humor is its own justification, but I don’t mean to imply the hard guy side of Richards’ persona has been my cup of tea. I’m skeptical when he revels in his autobiography about his hometown’s bent toward crime: “Everyone from Dartford is a thief. It runs in the blood. The old rhyme characterizes the unchanging character of the place: ‘Sutton for mutton, Kirkby for beef, South Darne for Gingerbread. Dartford for a thief.’” Thankfully, Richards is capable of deeper moral reflections. While his ghosted Life isn’t an advance on that score over his testimony in oral biographical sections of Stanley Booth’s Keith (1995), I was glad to note a passage where he recalls advising his daughter (upon her arrest for pot possession) to avoid his own faux-heroic, piratical path.
I wouldn’t want my kid to be too impressed by Richards’ above-the-law poses. Yet there’s an aspect of his moral code that always moves me. I can’t get enough of his devotion to his muses. As he explained to Booth:
We were missionaries, disciples, Jesuits…that’s what Muddy did to me, that’s what Chuck and Howlin’ Wolf did to me, what they all—Elvis, Buddy, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee, Little Richard—all of those cats did to me. They fired me up to the point where it wasn’t a matter of conscious decision, it was just—that’s what I want to do. I’m only eighteen, already people ain’t hearing this music anymore, and it lit my life up. Now I’ve got to one way or another keep the flame alive.
Richards’ brother from another mother, Mick Jagger, felt the fire before him. When he was a teenager, Jagger had Chess Records sending him R&B albums nobody else had in the U.K. His sense of mission may not have been as strong as Richards’ over the years, but his recent work on the James Brown bio pic, Get On Up, and documentary, Mr. Dynamite, hint he’s never lost his groove for the music that got him lit. (OTOH, in re his collaboration with Scorsese on that new HBO series about 70s rock, one must be silent.)
The passion Jagger shares with Richards lives on in this unreleased cover of “For Your Precious Love,” which the Stones recorded during sessions for the less than sterling Steel Wheels (1989) album. From the moment Jagger sings—“For your precious love means more to me/than any love could ever be”—he sounds like he’s gone back to a time when music was an end in itself not a means to a mogul’s life-style (or a Casanova’s). The song, originally cut by Jerry Butler and the Impressions in 1958, has been done by great soul singers like Otis Redding, Garnett Mimms and James Brown whose version (without the usual key-change) probably provided a template for the Stones’. Brown turned the song into a celebration of R&B lives with shout-outs to Jackie Wilson, Chuck Jackson and a felt evocation of his own odyssey. After recalling how he played “the Apollo, the Regal, the Royal, and the Howard (in Washington)” he ended with a moving affirmation of what lay ahead for the hardest working man in show business: “Look out for me cos I’m coming to your town…and your town…and your town…” The Stones may not have imagined they’d do it to death themselves back in 1989 but their cover of “For Your Precious Love” seems suffused by a Brownian emotion, though the Stones are properly more modest about their place in the tradition. Jagger’s restraint is particularly striking. He lets back-up singers come upfront and sings under them. He puts a roots aesthete’s stamp on the lyric: “They say our love will never grow. But I want to tell them it ain’t so…Our love will grow wider-deeper than any sea.” Then he eases out of the mix entirely as the band flows on. The unchained melody is their mistress. As they ride its waves, their playing brings home this tribute to music that once gave the Stones their vocation.
I first heard their version of “For Your Precious Love” last summer. But its waves of emotion took on another, more personal meaning once I learned my ninety-two year mother might not have the strength to stay in the struggle. After she died last week the song’s first verse slipped back into my mind; her love surely meant “more to me than any love will ever be.” Not that I rate beloveds. When it comes to love, it’s all one thing. Yet it’s also true my attachment to my Mom was the first thing.
In one of my earliest memories—it dates back to when I was two and my family was coming back on a ferry from Portugal to England—my mom is singing to me as I fade out:
My Bonnie lies over the ocean
My Bonnie lies over the sea
Bring back, bring back, bring back my Bonnie to me
In my beginning is our end? It’s consoling at least to think my mommy wasn’t scared when she crossed over. My brother had my late dad’s homemade CD playing down low—the sound was faint but I believe my mom could hear it—so daddy seemed to be leading her on…
My dad was my mom’s favorite musician. She didn’t need other players in the way her kids did. (That may have been a limitation in my Austen-loving mom’s sensibility but it was also a sign of her self-sufficiency.) Not to say there wasn’t music other than my pop’s that got to her. She dug Billie Holiday, Sinatra, Camelot, the love scene in Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette, Mozart’s Flute and Harp Concerto, Ben Webster’s “Danny Boy,” and I’m recalling just now her singular responsiveness to Norah Jones’ version of “The Nearness of You”…
When my brother gathered my mom up from his side of the hospital bed to give her a last hug and blessed her for giving her children good lives, I thanked him (silently) from my side for saying it out loud for all of us. Peggy DeMott was a natural-born mother—a genius with infants who knew how to cultivate their instincts for play. She was a homemaker/handywoman/gardener/knitter/reader who never seemed bored. (She didn’t require mother’s little helpers, though she savored a glass of Sancerre.) She taught her children by example (without being a scold) nobody needs shopping sprees or the insane world of entertainment if they learn early what might be done with crayons or blocks or balls or dolls or toy soldiers or siblings…
My love for my brother and sisters and their families will grow wider and deeper (as my mom would’ve wished). And there will always be more music to hear with my son and my wife. Though I don’t know when I’ll be able to relish the next paradisal song. For now, and for who knows how long, I’m stuck on that too far gone singer.