Life

martinets,

The only one I missed and that Mick Jagger got was “Brown Sugar,” and I’ll tip my hat there. There he got me. I mean, I did tidy it up a bit, but that was his, words and music.

Hallsands, which had fallen into the sea,

What made us like it was when Otis Redding covered it. With that and Aretha Franklin’s version, which Jerry Wexler produced, we heard what we’d tried to write in the first place. We

“The Last Time” and looked at each other and said, let’s try this with the boys. The song has the first recognizable Stones riff or guitar figure on it; the chorus is from the Staple Singers’ version, “This May Be the Last Time.” We could work this hook; now we had to find the verse. It had a Stones twist to it, one that maybe couldn’t have been wr

There is a parable on film of the changeover of power between jazz and rock and roll, in Jazz on a Summer’s Day—a hugely important film for aspiring rock musicians at the time, mostly because it featured Chuck Berry at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, playing “Sweet Little Sixteen.” The film had Jimmy Giuffre, Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, bu

Basically you go: Fender or Gibson? In “Satisfaction” I was imagining horns, trying to imitate their sound to put on the track later when we recorded. I’d already heard the riff in my head the way Otis Redding did it later, thinking, this is gonna be the horn line. But we didn’t have any horns, and I was only going to lay down a dub. The fuzz tone

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.

Galahad