Tag Archives: Rolling Stones

Hanging Out Backstage With The Dead

Photo courtesy of Pixabay License.

When I first began working in the mailroom of a record distributor back in the early ’70s, one of the perks of the job was going backstage either before or after a concert. Documented in films such as Spinal Tap and One Trick Pony, the infamous music business “meet and greet” is a staple at virtually every concert. Usually, it’s simply a casual opportunity to say hi to the musicians, tell them how much you like their latest album and then finish it off by posing for a photo. I did hundreds of these over the decades and while often it was a blast, eventually I grew weary of this ritualistic and orchestrated event..

I can recall my baptismal “behind the curtain” invitation in September 1973 to a Grateful Dead show at Philadelphia’s Spectrum, a large hockey arena and a major concert venue of the day. My wife and I had spent all week hanging out with their advance man, legendary promoter Augie Bloom. We helped him contact local members of their fan club which predated and morphed into Deadhead culture, drovehim to radio stations, and smoked the best weed we’d ever tasted. On the night of the show he led us through the hallways deep inside the venue and then left us in a room overflowing with food and drink, not without warning us not to sip anything liquid unless it came from a bottle we’d opened ourselves.

That particular evening we never got a chance to chat with the band as they were busy with a crowd that could have easily come out of Hollywood central casting. Groupies, bikers, DJs, wives, girlfriends, a few kids, smarmy record label execs, retailers, wholesalers, hipsters, artists, local scene makers, and bored beefy security men who ignored the smells and snorting going on all around them. I suppose it sounds as if it was a great party, but on this particular night I witnessed an incident that has always stuck with me.

One member of the band was absolutely strung out, with his eyes rolling back into his head. He was being held up on his feet by his wife, who gingerly attempted to get him to walk back and forth in preparation for soon going out onstage. When he became loud and rude, roughly shoving her away from him, some of the roadies stepped in to drag him away and we left to find our own way out. Whatever thoughts of rock and roll idolatry I’d had quickly dissipated. Loved the music, hated the scene.

The lights came down just as we got to our seats. With the smoke around us rising up to form one giant mushroom cloud, the band took the stage. The dude who was barely able to stand up just a few minutes earlier played his ass off for the next several hours. Looking back, I suppose it was my first introduction to the principle of “the show must go on” and so it did, likely with pharmaceutical assistance.

I have a box in my closet stuffed with pictures of me taken backstage while standing next to lots of different musicians, almost all of them having no clue who I was or why I was there. A fast intro, a shake of the hand, maybe a quick chat, and then turn, pose, smile, snap, and move on. One of my favorites is of me and a few people from my office posing with The Rolling Stones. They preferred to do group shots rather than with individuals, and I recall that our brief intro came right after a group of Pepsi executives and was followed by employees of the local Budweiser brewery. As they say, it’s only rock and roll.

Easy Ed (far right) with The Rolling Stones at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Oct. 15, 1994.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website. 

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

The Rolling Stones in Five Easy Pieces

The Rolling Stones / 1965 / Fornebu Aiport Oslo Norway/ National Archive of Norway

A winter’s day in New York should be dark, cold, and frosty, but when the mercury soared into the 60s recently I took a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. The only plan for the next seven hours was to keep moving in solitary steps from the bottom of Manhattan to the top, with song after song pushed into my ears in digitized random fashion. With an audio gene pool of thousands of tunes from old to new, some were carefully curated but most just snatched from the mothership like a giant claw. As I detached myself from both obligation and responsibility, and carefully glided through a moving landscape with minimum interaction, the music expanded and contracted inside my head from background to forefront.

There was a brief moment this day when a random thought came to me and refused to budge, which brings us here and now. In the inexperience of youth without the benefit of context or time, I too often skimmed the surface and missed the depth, making it a luxurious privilege to circle back. So with that in mind, consider this a brief mutation of making amends and please allow me to introduce you to five songs the Rolling Stones recorded over 50 years ago.

The first was on the flip side of “The Last Time” single, featuring Mick on vocals and tambourine with Keith picking out the lead on acoustic guitar. Jack Nitzsche added harpsichord and tam-tam, with legendary producer and future convicted killer Phil Spector playing bass lines on a de-tuned electric guitar. The rest of the band are excluded, and it was recorded in January 1965 at the RCA Studio in Los Angeles, the night before they left for a string of tour dates in Australia.

From the December 1965 Aftermath sessions in England, this song didn’t make it onto the album and was given away to a singing duo known as Twice As Much who released it the following May only in the UK, where it barely made it into the Top 40. This version was included on the American-only Flowers compilation album, and features the full band with Brian Jones playing harpsichord.

Recorded four months later in Hollywood in March of 1966 and included on Aftermath, Brian Jones is playing an Appalachian mountain dulcimer and once again Jack Nitzsche is called upon to add harpsichord.

At the same Hollywood sessions mentioned above, this is the first of three versions that have been released by the Stones. It originally was only available on the UK’s Aftermath. It was a number-one hit single for Chris Farlowe, who covered it three months later with Mick Jagger producing. A second, shorter version came out in the US on the Flowers compilation, and the third time around, available on another compilation, titled Metamorphis, took Farlowe’s version and replaced it with Jagger’s vocals.

The final song of this quintet was again only available in the US on the Flowers album, but appeared in the UK on Between The Buttons. Recorded in the fall of 1966, I’m guessing it was recorded again in Hollywood, as Nitzsche plays harpsichord again and is joined by Nick de Caro on accordion. Brian Jones plays vibraphone, Keith on acoustic, Bill Wyman on bass, and Charlie Watts tambourine and claves. Along with his vocal, Jagger is credited with adding “finger snaps.”

So what caused me to look back over 50 years to these five particular songs? Consider this both the preamble and postscript. In March of 1995 the band re-recorded this song live in at a recording studio in Tokyo. It is a mostly acoustic deconstruction from the electric version released on Steel Wheels, featuring a rare lead vocal from Keith. You’ll find it most recently available on the June 2016 release of Totally Stripped. And on a winter’s day in New York that should have been dark, cold, and frosty but with the mercury soaring into the 60s, I traveled from Brooklyn to Harlem in seven hours, listening to this song almost a dozen times and recalling that once upon a time I loved this band but couldn’t remember why.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed at here my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com