Life

to son. He is now growing oak trees and

What is it that makes you want to write songs? In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you’re playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people. To write a song that is remembered and taken

We exist on a rhythm of seventy-two beats a minute.

The beauty, the majesty of the five-string open G tuning for an electric guitar is that you’ve only got three notes—the other two are repetitions of each other an octave apart. It’s tuned GDGBD. Certain strings run through the whole song, so you get a drone going all the time, and because it’s electric they reverberate. Only three notes, but becaus

“Flash!” Shit, what a record! All my stuff came together and all done on a cassette player. With “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Street Fighting Man” I’d discovered a new sound I could get out of an acoustic guitar. That grinding, dirty sound came out of these crummy little motels where the only thing you had to record with was this new invention called

You can’t say apart from “Sympathy” or “Street Fighting Man” that there’s rock and roll on Beggars Banquet at all. “Stray Cat” is a bit of funk, but the rest of them are folk songs. We were incapable of writing to order, to say, we need a rock-and-roll track.

There was a lot of country and blues on Beggars Banquet: “No Expectations,” “Dear Doctor,” even “Jigsaw Puzzle.” “Parachute Woman,” “Prodigal Son,” “Stray Cat Blues,” “Factory Girl,” they’re all either blues or folk music. By then we were thinking, hey, give us a good song, we can do it. We’ve got the sound and we know we can find it one way or ano

Jimmy produced Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers—every Stones record through Goats Head Soup in 1973, the backbone stuff. But the best thing we ever did with Jimmy Miller was “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” That song and “Street Fighting Man” came out of the very first sessions with Jimmy at Olympic Studios for what would become Beggars Banquet,

Galahad