…and now, back to music…

…I figure this is a (mostly) music blog, so enough about baseball for the time being.

While in high school, there were few bigger influences on me than the Stones and Faces. Imagine my delight when, in late ’73, news came across the pond that the bands’ respective guitar players, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, had teamed up to work on Woody’s first solo album! It seemed almost too good to be true.

The genesis of the project, according to Keith, was that he was out on the town one night and bumped into Ronnie’s first wife, Krissie. She mentioned to Keith that Ronnie was up at their house in Richmond, working on a solo project, and why didn’t he drop by? Keith did, and wound up literally moving in until the album was finished; “I’ve Got My Own Album To Do” quietly became one of the best albums of the mid-70’s.

The title, of course, was a gentle dig at their respective bandmates; Rod Stewart, at the time, was recording his solo effort, “Smiler“, Ronnie Lane had just finished his first solo project, “Anymore for Anymore” , and even Stones’ bassist Bill Wyman had ventured into that territory with “Monkey Grip“. All this gave Keith and Ronnie the necessary time to themselves. Of course, both Rod and Mick Jagger eventually wound up contributing to Ronnie’s album.

In order to create some buzz around the album’s release, the musicians that recorded most of the album (Ronnie & Keith, with Face Ian Maclagan (keys), ex-Sly & the Family Stone Andy Newmark (drums), and veteran session bassist Willie Weeks) played a series of gigs at Kilburn Polytechnic (now part of the College of North West London). This band, though it was only together for the few weeks that the rehearsals and gigs took, is now sometimes referred to as “the First Barbarians” , in reference to Ronnie & Keith’s side project of the 80’s, the New Barbarians.

My impetus for this post is that I remember reading at the time that the gigs were filmed; I wondered if any footage had survived. Youtube, as usual, came through. To whit:

 

A few fun facts about the recording of the album and those shows:

• Keith’s decision to move into Ronnie’s house may have been motivated by considerations other than creativity; Scotland Yard was looking for any excuse to bust him (he’d walked away from some firearms charges when police badly botched the investigation) and had his own London home in Cheyne Walk under 24-hour surveillance.
• The house where the album was recorded, the Wick, is  an English Heritage Grade 1 listed building. Constructed in in 1775, one of the previous occupants was actor John Mills. While there, Keith stayed in daughter Hayley’s former bedroom.
• Before this all took place, Keith and Ronnie were nodding acquaintances. After a few weeks they were bosom buddies, then semi-permanent guest stars in each other’s projects. By 1975, Ronnie had replaced the departing Mick Taylor as the “touring” second guitarist in the Stones and, though other people were auditioned (Wayne Perkins, Ry Cooder) became the last “official” member of the Stones in 1976. Everyone who’s played with them since (Darryl Jones, Chuck Leavell, Ian Mclagan, Blondie Chaplin) has been an employee.
• Like the Pirates’ gigs at Dingwall’s, Woody’s concerts in the fall of 1974 seemed to be one of those touchstone moments for the nascent punk movement in the UK. Nick Kent relates how he was at one of  the concerts with Malcolm McLaren when Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock and first Sex Pistols guitarist Wally Nightingale suddenly appeared out of nowhere; not having the money for tickets, they had used their skills as second-story men and climbed in through a skylight in the roof!

Most Influential Album

Whenever you go to see Rick these days he does a long preamble to “Saw Her Standing There” about how the first couple of Beatle albums (specifically, The Beatles’ Second Album, as it was called in North America) were probably the largest single musical influence in his life, and how he really learned guitar by learning those tunes.
It led me to a little self-examination, to see if I had somehow had a similar watershed moment of my own. And it didn’t take too long to find. The single most influential record I have ever heard in my life is…”Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert“.
Recorded on the 1969 tour of America, yeah, it does contain the definitive versions of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, “Midnight Rambler” and “Sympathy for the Devil” (and a darned good “Honky Tonk Women”, although probably not the definitive version), but that’s not what really affected me. The three songs that are contained on that album that literally changed my life are “Carol”, “Love in Vain” and “Little Queenie”.
Hearing Keith Richards play Chuck Berry was an epiphany to me. It is some indication of how they felt about Chuck that they included TWO of his songs on an eight-song live album.
Some time later, I bought the first couple of Stones albums, and there, you’d listen them studiously wrestle with a Jimmy Reed or Howlin’ Wolf song, but when they got to that obligatory Chuck Berry number (there was at least one on each of the first three records), it was like recess, man!

Going back to “Ya-Ya’s”, I cannot imagine how much different my life would’ve been without that record. When I took guitar lessons (I had already been playing bass for a number of years), the first thing I asked the teacher to teach me was Keith’s opening to “Carol”. I still remember how hearing Jagger leering “I got the lumps in my throat when I saw her comin’ down the aisle/I got the wiggles in my knees when she looked at me and squeezed a smile” on “Little Queenie” made me recognize the powerful sexual energy of the music, probably for the first time. And I remember how vividly Mick Taylor’s soaring slide soloing on Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” evoked the train imagery on that song. In fact, my general impatience with guitarists who don’t have a sweet, musical vibrato, or are unable to bend notes in tune, may well come from that.