Richards’s appetite for narcotics and apparent indestructibility fed the band’s bad-boy image, but he’s also the key songwriter and arranger of their best records. “The sex and drugs is just something that happened to me along the way.” Swinging London “The rock ’n’ roll is important,” he says. Cheap rents and a youthful sense of entitlement led Jagger and Richards to set up camp at 102 Edith Grove, a squalid Chelsea flat where the two students could listen to blues records and hatch plans with a flamboyant musician from Cheltenham calling himself Elmo Lewis, AKA… Brian Jones They might have hailed from the provinces, but the heart of the big city is where the Stones were truly born. In the beginning, Jones was the band’s self-appointed leader. Blond, baby-faced and ludicrously stylish, he is all over the early records, playing harmonica, slide guitar, recorder, organ, saxophone, autoharp and singing backing vocals right up to 1968’s Sympathy for the Devil. Jealous of the songwriting partnership of Jagger and Richards, he obliterated his creativity with drugs, and was kicked out of the band in June 1969. He drowned in his swimming pool less than a month later, at the age of 27. The original trio fixated on this raw and marginalised American genre, playing it with near-religious conviction. Richards’s first hero was Elvis Presley’s guitarist Scotty Moore, and from their earliest shows, the sheer energy of the Stones put them at odds with London’s purist blues scene. As Jagger would one day sing: “It’s only rock ’n’ roll… but I like it!” Chuck BerryĪ version of Berry’s Come On became the Stones’ debut single in June 1963 and they have covered a dozen more of his tracks since. At the Hollywood Palladium in 1972, he ordered Richards off stage because he didn’t like his playing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |