Looking through my boxes of transcripts recently, I realised how many people over the years had talked to me about the Rolling Stones. Other than the interviews with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, these were not chats about the Stones, but their name would come up and often a memorable or insightful quote followed. Because they were essentially asides, I wasn't able to use them in whatever I was writing, but I remembered them. Brought together for the first time, they reveal an interesting collection of perspectives.
Eric Clapton, speaking in 1973
"The Yardbirds came in to the Crawdaddy Club a week after the Stones finished their Sunday night residency. They had done it for almost a year, I think, and then we did it for a year. It was better when they were playing there because when they went they took half the crowd with them and it took us quite a while to build up our own following."
Keith Richards, 1974
"We do what we want to do. We write songs. We try not to repeat ourselves too much. We have our own sound and our own way of doing things. Up until now it has always been enjoyable. None of the members have ever got to the point where they don't want to be involved in it … It's not entirely possible for me to stand back and look at the Rolling Stones because being a part of it you can't. I wish that I could just sit in the audience for one night and see the show. Everyone in the band has said that at some point. But then you wouldn't be seeing the whole band. And that's the problem with that."
Wilfrid Mellers, musicologist, 1980
"If you compare the Beatles with the Rolling Stones, who were their contemporaries, the Beatles remained innocent but the Rolling Stones didn't. The Stones used dark elements in a very savage way. The rhythms were much more ferocious and their vocal techniques were much more violent. Of course, it all had the might of decibels behind it. Partly, I suppose it's a matter of industrial exploitation. The thing is put over in vast arenas for vast numbers of people. But also I think the sheer decibel content is part of the 'blowing of the mind' effect. One no longer listens to variations of tone or timbre. They are not really relevant. One is simply engulfed by it."
Mickie Most, record producer, 1983
"I was managed in America by Allen Klein, who took over [managing] the Stones. The band was recording at Olympic in Barnes, and things weren't going too well, so Klein called me and told me they wanted me to come down. I told him I wasn't in to it. I'm not against the Stones in any way. The only reason I said it was because I knew they were living a certain lifestyle and it wasn't my lifestyle. I'd been on the road with them and had shared digs with them. My lifestyle isn't working from midnight until eight in the morning and all the things that go with that. I'd have felt unnatural doing it. I decided it wasn't my gig."
Allen Ginsberg, poet, 1984
"The Rolling Stones were an inkling towards an appreciation of the unity of music, dance and words. Any of the black R&B people who had a stage show that involved dancing, music and words did the same thing, except that I thought Jagger's words were good, his music was good and his dancing was good. I spoke to him about Blake and tried to get him to sing [William] Blake's The Grey Monk, to use his words as lyrics. He didn't do it. In the end, I did it myself."
Kenneth Anger, film-maker, 1985
"I'll say one thing for Mick: he has a private side. He knows how to sing old English ballads beautifully for one or two friends. He's done it for Marianne [Faithfull] and for Robert Fraser after being up all night. He'll start strumming and singing. I once told him he should do an album of them, but he said: 'I have to keep something for myself.' That's exactly his attitude. It shows a very poetic and spiritual side and also a love for his country. He does love England in spite of the fact that he spends so much time in New York."
William Burroughs, novelist, 1986
"I met Brian Jones after he returned from the village of Jajouka in Morocco having made some recordings there. As a musician he seemed to be extremely interested in what they were doing with music. The rest of the Stones I met in, I believe, London and later in New York. I've seen the Stones in concert several times. I saw their farewell performance when they left England for the south of France. I think Mick Jagger is a magnificent performer, and about any performer there is something of the shaman."
Mick Jagger, 1987
"What originally established the band was cover songs like Not Fade Away. Then, later on, we got more well-known ones like Satisfaction, which you might say echoed the thinking of, well, any generation you care to name, including the present one. But we didn't set out on bits of paper that we were going to be the voice of a generation. The original aim of the Rolling Stones was to play blues. It wasn't even to play rock music."
Marianne Faithfull, 1988
"I've made a contribution to my time and my generation through being myself, not through what I shared with the Rolling Stones. It's very bad for me and very dangerous to see myself as someone who had an influence on this song or that song. It immediately puts me in the position where my worth is dependent on how much of my soul I shared with Mick Jagger, and it's just not valid. You can use the gossip you've heard. You're not getting it from me."
Bono, 1988
"Peter Wolf [of the J Geils Band] took me to meet the Rolling Stones in New York. I'd heard the blues played badly. Every bar band on Baggot Street in Dublin played the blues, but this time I was hearing the real thing and it got through to me in a way it had never got through to me before. They were playing this stuff and some 50s stuff. Keith can play the piano well and I really love the sound of his voice. He has a great country voice. So he'd sing a lot of country songs and then we went into his room and he played a few records. John Lee Hooker was the one that made me realise there was something about the blues that I felt close to. The words got through to me and I thought I could write these words. So I wrote Silver and Gold in an hour."
Christopher Gibbs, antique dealer and friend, 1989
"I think Mick's got a very considerable intelligence and a very inquiring mind. It's a great pity that so much of his energy goes towards amassing even more money, but that's also bound up with holding his group together instead of letting it fall apart."
Anthony Burgess, author, 1990
"The rock and pop implications of A Clockwork Orange began in 1964 when it was proposed to film it. It was going to be done by the Rolling Stones, who had just become popular, but the time wasn't right because we weren't ready for full-frontal nudity, rape and all the rest of it on screen. The point is that the film never had any kind of pop music associations. Just the opposite, in fact. The young hero is a fan of Beethoven and Bach. But the idea got around that the Rolling Stones were going to do it with their own kind of music."
Robert Plant, 1990
"I know Keith and Mick really tried to put their troubles behind them. They went to Barbados for quite a while … But I don't know why, because if the personalities aren't working, should you actually spend that time trying to make them work?"
Cliff Richard, 1992
"I liked the Beatles but I wasn't mad on the Stones. I always thought they were a slight rip-off of Chuck Berry and some of the old blues people, and they never seemed to change. If people compare me to Jagger and the Stones I would be the one to be put down … I've been far more progressive than any of them."
Paul McCartney, 2009
"The Stones are a great group and I love them. I love what they do. But when I look at their history, they always did what the Beatles did, a year later. When we started writing our own songs, you started to see everyone else doing that. The Stones had always been a blues cover band, but then they realised they had to write their own. You had Sgt Pepper and then Satanic Majesties; our initial tour of America and then, six months later, the Stones tour of America. Even people who don't admit to it, and who found their roots in other types of music, couldn't help but be influenced by the success of the Beatles."
