Mick Jagger has opened up about his friendly rivalry with David Bowie — and the period when he believes the late songwriter was at “his most Stones-y.”

The two artists emerged from the London rock scene in the mid-to-late 1960s, with the Rolling Stones scoring their first chart success in the wake of the Beatles’ breakthrough and Bowie launching into the mainstream with 1969’s “Space Oddity.”

They remained close throughout their careers, and Jagger says Bowie’s competitiveness brought out the best in both of them.

“We were competitive. David was so competitive,” Jagger tells Conan O’Brien. “I was made competitive by David — I had to be competitive back.”

Unlike Jagger, who has maintained the image of a swaggering, sharp-tongue blues rocker throughout his career, Bowie shed his skin constantly, changing personas from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke and many other incarnations.

But there was one period when Jagger felt Bowie was getting particularly close to the Stones’ sound.

“There isn’t one David Bowie. There’s kind of like a slowly evolving David Bowie, [and] there’s jump cuts,” Jagger says. “When he was doing ‘Jean Genie’ [from 1973’s Aladdin Sane], he was very Stones-y, you know? That was a very Stones-y period.

“So he would come over and play me ‘Jean Genie,’ like ‘Do you wanna listen?’”

Naturally, Jagger was keen to hear the track. And he immediately recognized some familiar influences, including Mick Ronson’s Keith Richards–inspired electric guitar riffing.

“I said, ‘God, you nicked all my things’” Jagger says with a laugh. “[And he said], ‘Yeah, I know, man. But it’s like an homage to you.’”

Bowie didn’t mention Jagger when discussing the song’s origins in his 2002 book, Moonage Daydream: The Life & Times of Ziggy Stardust; he cited Iggy Pop and American actress Cyrinda Foxe as inspirations. But he did acknowledge the Rolling Stones’ influence on the track.

“I wanted to get the same sound as the Stones had on their first album on the harmonica,” he said. “I didn’t get that near to it, but it had a feel that I wanted — that ’60s thing.”

And Bowie didn’t stop there. Aladdin Sane also featured his adrenalized take on the Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” further supporting Jagger’s contention that Bowie was in a particularly Stones-y phase.

More than a decade later, the pair would turn their friendly rivalry into an actual collaboration. In 1985, Jagger and Bowie recorded a cover of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” to raise money for Live Aid’s famine-relief efforts.

The song became a major hit, but the accompanying video captured something that the track itself couldn’t quite contain: two of rock’s biggest stars hamming it up, dancing through the streets and looking like they were having an absolute blast trying to outdo the other.

Mick Jagger says he was “stupid” to follow John Lennon’s advice — because it meant he never met his hero, Elvis Presley.

The Rolling Stones frontman has been busy promoting the band’s 25th album, Foreign Tongues, released last week. Their second record in three years sees the British rock legends reunite with producer Andrew Watt and Paul McCartney as they continue a remarkable late-career hot streak.

But during an appearance on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, O’Brien was just as interested in the past as the present, prompting a simple question: Did you ever meet Elvis?

“No, I never met Elvis,” Jagger replied. “You know why? The Daily Mirror, an English tabloid that still exists, always did publicity, and there was a journalist who took the Beatles to Los Angeles to visit Elvis.

“Afterward, I remember John saying, ‘You should never meet your heroes. I’d never meet Elvis if I were you.’

“So I didn’t. I took John’s advice, which is very stupid of me.”

The Beatles’ meeting with Elvis — reportedly arranged by manager Brian Epstein — took place on August 27, 1965, at the King’s Bel Air mansion. Although the Daily Mirror had hoped to cover the encounter, the press were ultimately barred after George Harrison pushed for the meeting to remain private.

The Fab Four idolized Elvis. Lennon drew direct inspiration from him for one of the band’s darkest songs, “Run for Your Life,” while Harrison later said Presley’s music had “an incredible impact” on him because he had “never heard anything like it.”

Despite the excitement surrounding the visit, Lennon ultimately came away disappointed.

According to the Beatles’ longtime press officer Tony Barrow, Lennon wasted little time getting to the point, asking Elvis: “Why do you do all these soft-centered ballads for the cinema these days? What happened to good old rock ’n’ roll?”

Conversation soon stalled until Elvis called for guitars to be brought in and a piano wheeled into the room.

“The boys found that they could make much better conversation with their guitars than they could with their spoken word,” Barrow later wrote. “Music was their natural meeting point, their most intelligent means of communication.”

Even so, the afternoon fell well short of Lennon’s expectations — explaining why he later warned Jagger against meeting his own musical heroes.

“I’d love to have met Elvis,” Jagger said with a wry smile. “Why did I take John’s advice? But at the time, it seemed to ring true.”

O’Brien noted that Lennon famously spent the Beatles’ first trip to America asking, “Where’s Elvis?” After finally meeting him, he was left asking much the same question.

“He told me that whole story more than once,” Jagger replied. “It put me off. I wanted to keep my version of Elvis to myself. I didn’t want my version of Elvis shattered like John’s was. Maybe my version of Elvis would have been different.”

Elsewhere during the Foreign Tongues press campaign, Jagger explained why the Stones have adopted a “bulldozer approach” in the studio, while also branding one of the band’s most beloved albums “lousy” — a view Keith Richards decidedly does not share.

Forty-one years ago this weekend, on July 13, the Live Aid concerts kicked off at London’s Wembley Stadium with the British rock group Status Quo. Armed with Telecasters and described by organizer Bob Geldof as “ordinary blokes with long hair and denims,” the group opened the day’s festivities with the 12-bar rock of John Fogerty’s “Rockin’ All Over the World.” It sent an unintentional but perceptible message that, even in the synth-saturated mid 1980s, “the boys and girls with guitars” — as Geldof described them — would rule the day.

Live Aid did rule, on that day (as well as 20 years for its follow-up event, Live 8). True to Fogerty’s anthem, the benefit for African famine relief was a global event, ping-ponging between Wembley and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, as well as locales in Europe, Australia and Japan. Styled as a “global jukebox,” Live Aid presented most of the biggest acts at the time to nearly two billion viewers in 169 countries. Along the way it raised about $140 million for the Band Aid Charitable Trust, which Geldof launched with the all-star “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” single released eight months prior.

Live Aid’s 20 or so hours of music played out as a day for guitar heroics that were at times notable, notorious, triumphant and tepid. The players came from the worlds of rock, metal, blues and jazz, and nearly three dozen of them went on to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Here we recall some of the most notable guitar stories from Live Aid.

Led Zeppelin: Like a Lead Balloon

Led Zeppelin grounded itself immediately after drummer John Bonham died in September 1980, with the three surviving members going their own ways. But with Jimmy Page’s the Firm and Robert Plant both on the road, circumstances dictated an ascent back up the stairway to heaven, if just for one day. Plant was the first to sign on and wanted Page to be involved — but not necessarily to get the Led out.

“The original idea was not to do a Robert Plant set as such, but something a little lighter — like the Honeydrippers,” Plant said at the time, referring to an ad hoc all-star band he’d put together to record an EP of rock and R&B oldies in 1984.

“As Jimmy was part of the Honeydrippers I phoned him and said, ‘Would you like to be part of it?’ He did, and as we got to talking about it, we said, ‘While we’re doing it, why not do two of our [Led Zeppelin] songs?’ The whole thing really evolved.”

It ultimately sounded better in discussion than onstage. With former Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones on keyboards rather than bass, Paul Martinez from Plant’s band on bass, and Chic’s Tony Thompson and Phil Collins on drums, the shambolic three-song set felt like a genuine moment for the euphoric crowd at JFK Stadium, but not beyond.

Collins, who had flown in on the Concorde to play at both the London and Philly shows, introduced Zeppelin after playing solo piano renditions of a couple of his hits. He hadn’t rehearsed, and it showed, as did any lack of plan between him and Thompson on songs — “Rock and Roll,” “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven” — that really weren’t made for two drummers.

Jones also had a small amount of rehearsal on the day of the show, Page — who busted out his Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck electric guitar for the occasion — sounded out of tune at times, and Plant was a bit hoarse from playing the night before in Detroit. To make matters worse, the stage monitors reportedly weren’t working properly. Plant later termed the performance “horrendous.”

The dissatisfaction was evident during a tense post-show interview with MTV’s Alan Hunter, which Collins dominated when the others proved truculent. The drummer later wrote in his 2016 memoir, Not Dead Yet, “If I’d known it was to be a two-drummer band, I would have removed myself from the proceedings long before I got anywhere near Philadelphia.”

Collins, who’d played on Plant’s first two solo albums and toured with him in 1983, also took exception to Page laying blame for the failure on him for “bashing away cluelessly and grinning.” Collins noted, “If you look at the video, you can see Jimmy dribbling [cocaine] onstage, Robert not hitting the notes and me miming, playing the air.”

Not surprisingly, Page, Plant and Jones refused to allow the performance to be included on Live Aid’s subsequent official DVD release. Led Zeppelin would have more satisfying reunions at the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Concert in 1986, its Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1995 and the 2007 Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert in London, which is, as of now, its final performance.

The Who: Before They Got Old

There are several tellings of how the Who came to be part of Live Aid’s London program, the group’s first time onstage since breaking up after a farewell tour in late 1982. In his memoir, Is That It?, Geldof says Townshend suggested it after he invited the guitarist to take part on his own. That led to a series of protracted negotiations with singer Roger Daltrey, who refused to play with drummer Kenney Jones, and bassist John Entwistle, who refused to not play with Jones.

Townshend, however, subsequently accused Geldof of blackmailing and bullying the band into being part of the show. In his memoir, Who I Am, Townshend wrote, “When Bob sensed I might refuse to appear, he took the gloves off...‘Every pound we make will save a life. Do the fucking math. And do the fucking show!’”

Geldof denies he blackmailed or bullied the guitarist but makes no secret of how important it was for the Who to be part of Live Aid.

“I live, die and swear by this band,” he explained recently. “I really minded that the Who reformed and did it, ’cause it’s significant. I felt that 20 million people would watch that; if five percent of them contribute, we’re home.”

Though Townshend contended that “the Who were out of practice and should probably have left it to Queen and George Michael, who stole the show,” the four-song evening set — part of a killer chain that included U2, Dire Straits, Queen and David Bowie — was one of the day’s most exciting, despite any flaws — and stage monitor issues. “My Generation,” “Pinball Wizard,” “Love Reign O’er Me” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” crackled with vintage Who energy. Townshend was in full, furious, windmilling form, while Daltrey opened his shirt, twirled his microphone and jogged around the stage like a marathoner in training.

Even Townshend would acknowledge, perhaps grudgingly, that “we all felt proud to be there” and happily helped Paul McCartney close the show with “Let It Be,” with the two rock icons hoisting Geldof on their shoulders at the end of the song.

Bob Dylan: Too Rolling Stoned

It was another Live Aid collaboration that probably looked good on paper.

Bob Dylan, who’d sung on USA for Africa’s famine relief single “We Are the World,” was chosen to close the show in Philadelphia and in turn recruited Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Ron Wood. The trio, along with Faces/occasional Rolling Stones keyboardist Ian McLagan, gathered at Wood’s New York home to rehearse, with Dylan ultimately choosing two deep cuts — “Ballad of Hollis Brown” and “When the Ship Comes In” — along with the iconic “Blowin’ in the Wind” to play on the night.

There was undoubtably tension in the air at JFK Stadium, not only because of the occasion but also because the trio was directly following Mick Jagger’s explosive performance — backed by Daryl Hall & John Oates, and with Tina Turner guesting — at a time when Jagger and Richards were on the outs.

What’s more, Dylan’s performance was followed by a group performance of the hit “We Are the World” that would close the event.

“The sound guys had no idea we were going on,” Richards recalled the following year. “Here’s three guys with acoustic guitars and they were getting ready for [sings] ‘We Are the World’ with 50 people behind us.

“They were tuning up and we were trying to play,” Richards explained a few years later. “It was like, ‘shut ’em up, Bill Graham, or we’ll shoot the lot of them!’ Bob and I kept looking at each other like, ‘Where’s the blindfolds and the last cigarettes?’ But it was all for a good cause, so what the hell?”

Their performance was plagued by problems. The stage curtain had fallen in front of the stage amplifiers, preventing Dylan, Richards and Wood from hearing each other and causing them to play out of sync. When, early on, a string broke on Dylan’s guitar, Wood gave him his and used a cheap instrument a crew member handed him. The new guitar was out of tune. Wood wound up playing slide on only one of the strings.

Dylan, meanwhile, caused a stir when he suggested that, “I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe one or two million, maybe, and use it...to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers here owe to banks.” While Live Aid did eventually spawn the charity Farm Aid, Dylan’s comment showed he had no grasp of the event’s purpose. “Something so simplistic and crowd-pleasing was beyond belief,” Geldof wrote. “[Dylan] displayed a complete lack of understanding of the issues raised by Live Aid.”

Seven other notable guitar moments...

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, on hiatus after his sophomore solo album About Face in 1984, played with Bryan Ferry’s band during the Roxy Music frontman’s four-song set in London.

Five of B.B. King’s songs from his set at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, including “Why I Sing the Blues” and “Rock Me Baby,” were carried as part of the global telecast.

Dire Straits, which was in the midst of its own 12-show run at Wembley Arena next door, was joined by Sting to recreate his guest vocal on “Money for Nothing.”

David Bowie tapped Kevin Armstrong, who had played on the Absolute Beginners soundtrack, as his guitarist for Wembley Stadium. Bowie subsequently asked Armstrong to be a fifth member in Tin Machine after he played on the group’s debut album (he turned it down), while Armstrong co-wrote the title track to Bowie’s Outside album in 1992.

Pat Metheny sat in with Santana for its five-song set in Philadelphia, which included “Brotherhood,” “Open Invitation” and “Right Now” (verify song title — may need clarification).

Chic was on hiatus but Nile Rodgers brought his guitar to Philadelphia to play with Madonna (“Love Makes the World Go Round”), and the two of them joined Thompson Twins for a rendition of the Beatles’ “Revolution.”

After landing in Philadelphia, Phil Collins first got onstage with Eric Clapton for his set, which included Cream’s “White Room,” Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” and “She’s Waiting” from the Collins-produced Behind the Sun album

Life in the studio hasn’t always been straightforward for the Rolling Stones. But as the band prepares to drop their second album in three years, having released two in the last 20 before that, it’s safe to say they’ve hit a late-career hot streak.

With Andrew Watt behind the desk once more, and Paul McCartney guesting on his second consecutive Stones record, the British blues rockers are in a rich vein of form, and it seems the writing of Foreign Tongues was in stark contrast to some of their most celebrated records, which, behind the scenes, were sometimes lethargic and drug-addled, at other times tempestuous, or quite possibly a cocktail involving all three.

“It was done pretty quickly,” Mick Jagger tells Zane Lowe of the process that has defined the Stones’ operation in the 2020s. “On the last album, Hackney Diamonds, Andrew and I had a plan. We used to be in the studio and spend ages in there, all night, trying to make up songs that weren’t written, and so we said ‘We’re going for the bulldozer approach’ so no one has too much of a chance to take a song to pieces and say, ‘I don’t really like this, I don’t think it’s going to work.’

“We wanted to do it as fast as possible, and then people get into it, and they put their own stamp on it, change it, and make it better,” he explains. “And we more or less did the same thing here. You hope to get one and a half songs done; to get one done, and everyone knows the next one sort of thing. There were good vibes in there.”

It’s an approach that, admittedly, wouldn’t have been possible when the band relocated to the south of France as tax exiles, as they turned an idyllic villa basement into their makeshift recording studio in the early 1970s.

Keith Richards, the story goes, was so deep into a drug haze at that time that he didn’t even make it into the basement some days, and it was a drug debt that is said to have seen Nellcôte raided, and a score of guitars stolen. However, one has recently and miraculously reappeared. Regardless, it’s no wonder that, as critically acclaimed as Exile on Main St. would prove to be, Jagger calls it “lousy”.

Keef, who has also been speaking to Zane Lowe, was asked how the room a band records in affects the music and its quality.

“It can be very important, and you never know until you get in there and start playing,” he notes. “You’ll always get something out of it, but some rooms you have to fight, and others, you realize that they’re welcoming you in.

“At the same time,” he counters, “you get some really good records out of rooms that initially you’re feeling you’re having to fight with. When you’ve fought, and you’ve made up, they’ve got their own character.”

Richards was one of the driving force during the making of Exile, and looks at the album more fondly.

“I think it was the first album where we didn’t have a 45 [rpm single] hit on it,” he told Guitar World in 2010. “It was an album album. All those musical styles were part of what we’d been picking up while touring America; we were soaking stuff up like sponges wherever we could find it.”

He admits that the cluster of material they took with them to France was “a work in progress,” with the band back then preferring to go the distance and thrash out the material on their own terms, and the “dusty” songs were, he says, very much a product of the environment.

With Jagger and Richards in their advancing years, it’s no surprise that the former is preferring a more wham-bam-thank-you-mam approach even if Richards is still spoiling for a fight.

“Nothing comes easy,” he says. “If it does, it’s not as good as it should be. There’s nothing like a tussle.”

The band has come a long way from the Beatles, who gifted them their first hit single. Watt is helping fuel the band’s latest resurgence, and he thinks he knows the recipe for a successful rock song.

When the Rolling Stones decamped to the south of France in 1971 to record what would become Exile on Main St., they created one of rock’s most celebrated albums. But while the record has since attained near-mythic status, Mick Jagger has never been quite as enamored with it as the critics and fans who helped turn it into a classic.

By June 10, 1972, Exile on Main St. had reached No. 1 in the U.K. and topped charts around the world. Over the decades, it came to be regarded as one of the Stones’ defining statements. Yet Jagger has long viewed the album through a different lens—one colored by memories of disorder, unfinished work and a recording process he felt largely fell on his shoulders.

“Exile is not one of my favorite albums, although I think the record does have a particular feeling,” Jagger said in 2003 (via Far Out).

“I’m not too sure how great the songs are,” he continued. “It has some of the worst mixes I’ve ever heard. I’d love to remix the record, not just because of the vocals, but because generally I think it sounds lousy. At the time, [producer] Jimmy Miller was not functioning properly. I had to finish the whole record myself, because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies.

“Of course I’m ultimately responsible for it, but it’s really not good, and there’s no concerted effort or intention.”

Those are striking comments about an album now widely considered a masterpiece. Yet they also reflect the reality of the sessions that produced it.

The Stones had begun work on some of the material at London’s Olympic Studios during the Sticky Fingers era before relocating, as tax exiles, to Villa Nellcôte on the French Riviera. There, they converted the villa’s basement into a makeshift recording space and worked in conditions that were anything but conventional.

For Jagger, who was preparing to become a father and frequently traveled to Paris to be with his wife, Bianca, the lack of structure proved frustrating. The villa became a revolving door of musicians, friends, dealers and celebrity visitors.

“There were a lot of people who came to visit that I don’t remember,” guitarist Mick Taylor later told Classic Rock. “I don’t remember John Lennon and Yoko coming, but apparently they did.”

Keith Richards, meanwhile, was battling a serious heroin addiction. According to the band’s lore, he was often absent from sessions taking place in Nellcôte’s basement studio. The chaos that Jagger viewed as an obstacle was, for Richards, simply part of the environment.

“We didn’t start off intending to make a double album,” Richards recalled in According to the Rolling Stones. “We just went down to the south of France to make an album, and by the time we’d finished, we said, ‘We want to put it all out.’”

“The Stones had reached a point where we no longer had to do what we were told to do,” he added. “I was no longer interested in hitting Number One in the charts every time.”

Richards would later tell Guitar World that Exile represented a conscious move away from the pursuit of singles. “It was made for what it was,” he said. “It was an album.”

That difference in outlook lies at the heart of the band’s conflicting memories of the record. Richards remembers freedom. Jagger remembers trying to impose order on a situation that often seemed determined to resist it.

“I think Keith was pretty out of it for some of that period, which shouldn’t have helped, but maybe it did,” Charlie Watts once observed. “Maybe that was where the creative energies came from.”

The sessions were plagued by practical problems as well. The summer heat played havoc with instrument tuning, recording schedules were inconsistent and songs often took far longer to complete than anyone anticipated. When Richards failed to pay the dealers providing him with heroin, they sent their henchmen to the house to steal several of the electric guitars used on the sessions, including Taylor’s 1959 Gibson Les Paul, which is said to be at the heart of a dispute with the New York City Met.

What emerged from the sessions was less a carefully executed plan than a collection of performances assembled amid confusion and constant interruption.

Richards embraced that unpredictability. Jagger struggled with it.

“Mick needs to know what he’s going to do tomorrow,” Richards said in the 2010 documentary Stones in Exile. “Me, I’m just happy to wake up and see who’s hanging around. Mick’s rock, I’m roll.”

That tension between discipline and spontaneity has always fueled the Stones. On Exile on Main St., it was amplified by circumstance, producing an album that still divides its creators even as it unites listeners.

For all of Jagger’s reservations, Richards has remained unequivocal in his assessment.

“For a year or two, it was considered a bomb,” he said in 2002. “This was an era where the music industry was full of these pristine sounds. We were going the other way. Yes, it is one of the [Stones’] best.”

More than 50 years later, Exile on Main St. remains a testament to the strange chemistry that powered the Rolling Stones at their peak: one songwriter trying to impose order, the other embracing disorder, and a classic album emerging somewhere between the two.

When the British rock scene exploded in the 1960s, the media were quick to manufacture rivalries — and few sold papers better than the supposed feud between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

But according to Paul McCartney, the reality was very different. Far from being enemies, the bands were part of a close-knit musical community that regularly crossed paths in London.

Speaking with Vernon Kay on BBC Radio 2 about the songs that shaped his life, McCartney reflected on the camaraderie shared by the era’s biggest acts while discussing “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks.

“It was a lot of fun,” McCartney recalled. “The thing I liked about it was that it was a community. Even though we’d all come from different parts of the U.K., we were all now in London, and so there was great camaraderie.

“I think the newspapers really played it up like there were terrible rivalries and we hated each other. It wasn’t true.”

McCartney then shared a story that illustrated the bond between the bands.

“John and I were down in Charing Cross Road, where our music publisher was, and we were looking enviously into the windows of all the guitar shops,” he said. “At some point, we heard, ‘Oi!’ and we looked out in the street. There’s a London taxi going along, and there’s Mick and Keith hanging out.”

The pair — Mick Jagger and Keith Richards — invited them into the cab, where the conversation soon turned to the Stones’ need for a new single.

“‘Well, we haven’t got a single,’” McCartney recalled Jagger saying. “‘We need a new single.’”

McCartney immediately thought of a song the Beatles had recorded but didn’t plan to release as a standalone single.

“Me being entrepreneurial or pushy, I said, ‘Well, we’ve got one that Ringo’s done on the album, and we’re not going to release it as a single,’” he said. “‘You guys would do it great, because it’s Bo Diddley style.’”

That song was “I Wanna to Be Your Man,” which the Rolling Stones released in November 1963. It became the band’s first U.K. Top 20 hit, reaching number 12.

“That just shows the camaraderie,” McCartney then says. “We gave them a song instead of jealously guarding it, not wanting them to do it.”

The Beatles would later release the song on their second album, making it the only song shared across their discographies.

The two groups continued to cross paths over the years, including in the studio. Brian Jones sang backing vocals on the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and played saxophone on the 1970 B-side “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number),” while Jagger sang background vocals on their 1967 recording “Baby You’re a Rich Man.”

Lennon and McCartney sang on the Stones’ 1967 single “We Love You,” and Lennon performed with Keith Richards in the group the Dirty Mac for The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus event in December 1968.

Decades later, in 2023, McCartney joined the Rolling Stones on record again when he played bass on the Hackney Diamonds track “Bite My Head Off” and “Covered in You,” the latter of which is on the group’s new album, Foreign Tongues.

“I showed up as a session player,” McCartney said. “It was a really good feeling, because I wasn’t a star, I was just the bass player.

“I’m standing there playing, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m playing with the Stones!’ I should be blasé and say, ‘I’ve known them for years,’ but it was special.

“You better believe when I got home that evening, I said, ‘I’ve just played with the Stones. I loved it!’”

When Mick Jagger walked into a London studio to record vocals for the new Rolling Stones album, he found an unexpected guest waiting for him.

“I turned up one day to do my vocals in London, and there's this bloke standing there, with his back to me, with this long gown on,” Jagger recalled during an invitation-only event on Tuesday, May 5. “And when he turned around, he was covered in lipstick.”

The man turned out to be Robert Smith of the Cure — someone Jagger had never met before.

“And I said, ‘You are Robert Smith from the Cure!’ And he said, ‘Yeah!’” Jagger told the crowd.

“So I said, ‘Well, while you're here, then you better go and do something.’”

The impromptu encounter led to a collaboration that will appear on the Stones’ upcoming album, Foreign Tongues, due July 10.

Jagger shared the story Tuesday during a conversation with Conan O'Brien in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he appeared alongside the Stones’ electric guitar tandem of Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood to discuss the new record and preview a few tracks.

O’Brien quickly imagined an alternate version of the moment.

“What if it hadn’t been Robert Smith,” he said, “and you said, ‘Let’s do a track,’ and you found out later he was there to fix the air conditioning?”

Foreign Tongues arrives less than three years after the Stones’ 2023 release, Hackney Diamonds, which topped charts worldwide, won a Grammy Award and achieved multi-Platinum status.

Like that record, the new album features several collaborations and previously developed recordings. Among them is a track featuring founding Stones drummer Charlie Watts, captured during one of his final recording sessions before his death in 2021, as well as a collaboration with Paul McCartney recorded during the Hackney Diamonds sessions.

The album will be introduced by the lead single, In the Stars, released digitally May 5 alongside the opening track, Rough and Twisted.

At the start of the Brooklyn event, O’Brien also shared an anecdote that illustrated Jagger’s enduring curiosity about audiences — even after decades of performing.

The two first met backstage at the 96th Academy Awards, where O’Brien was host and Jagger made a surprise appearance to present the Oscar for Best Original Song.

While waiting backstage, O’Brien recalled hearing someone behind him repeatedly ask, “How’s the crowd? How’s the crowd?”

“And I turned around, and it was you,” he told Jagger. “We had never met.

“And I said, ‘What the fuck do you care how the crowd is? You’re Mick Jagger! They’re just gonna urinate when they see you come out.’ Which they did.”

“But it was the Oscars,” Jagger replied with a laugh.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t matter,” O’Brien said. “I just loved that you were like, ‘How are they? How are they?’ I think you're gonna be okay. Something tells me they’re going to know you and be happy that you’re there.”

O’Brien added that the band’s attention to its audience can still be heard in the music of Foreign Tongues.

“I’m always trying to get people to understand that no one gets to the level that you guys are at. It’s an unheard-of situation,” he said. “But one of the components is — which you can hear on this record again and again and again — ‘We want to make this great.’”

The late 1980s were a busy time for Steve Stevens. While recording Whiplash Smile with Billy Idol in ’85, Stevens was also tapped to perform on “Top Gun Anthem,” written by Whiplash Smile keyboardist Harold Faltermeyer for the hit 1986 Top Gun film starring Tom Cruise.

“It was all part of the same family,” the guitarist says of the two projects.

His electric guitar stylings on the track earned him a Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance. It also launched a new chapter in his career after he and Idol parted ways for nearly two decades. In the years that followed, he worked with the Cars’ Ric Ocasek, Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil, Michael Jackson, Robert Palmer, Sebastian Bach, Steve Lukather, Thompson Twins, and numerous others.

“I’d get a lot of calls to work with people,” he says.

He recalls one particularly memorable day when he auditioned for David Lee Roth’s band, only to return home and find a message from Mick Jagger.

“It was the quintessential Mick Jagger,” Stevens says, affecting an accent. “‘Hello, Steve, it’s Mick Jagger, calling from the Caribbean. I’d love to talk to you about this solo tour I’m going on.’

“I was already booked, so I couldn’t do it. But I kept that tape.”

As Stevens explains, he had met Jagger once before, during the making of Whiplash Smile at Right Track Studios in New York City. The singer was recording his solo album Primitive Cool in another studio at the facility and stopped by to speak with Stevens about Staccato, a new guitar company founded by his brother Chris. Staccato guitars were unique for being made of magnesium alloy and boasted of having the backing of Mick and Rolling Stones bassist, Bill Wyman.

Jagger, unfortunately, chose a hectic day to visit.

“During Whiplash Smile, we were auditioning bass players to come in and play on a track,” Stevens recalls. “And Mick Jagger came in carrying this guitar case.

“Mick says, ‘Oh, my brother makes guitars. Maybe you guys would like to look at it.’

“And right on cue, our producer Keith Forsey walks into the room and, without hesitation, goes, ‘Right, bass amp’s in there. Plug in — we’ll be right with you.’

“And Mick goes, ‘No … I’m Mick Jagger.’”

He laughs at the memory of rock’s most famous frontman going unrecognized.

“That was really great.”

Stevens is currently working on music for what he hopes will be a new solo album. He and Idol are also discussing a follow-up to Dream Into It. Idol is presently promoting his documentary Billy Idol Should Be Dead, which was released February 27.

Long before they became rock legends, three teenagers absorbed the raw power of American blues — and carried it into history.

In 1962, a young Jimmy Page traveled to Manchester for the American Folk Blues Festival, a tour that brought Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and other blues legends from the U.S. to England. He wasn’t alone — future Rolling Stones frontmen Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were in the crowd too. For these teenagers, it wasn’t just a concert. It was a revelation.

“We could hardly believe that real blues artists were going to appear here in our country,” Page recalled in David Williams’ book The First Time We Met The Blues. “They were regarded somewhat like mystic gods within our circle.”

The American Folk Blues Festival was one of the first tours to showcase authentic American blues to European audiences. While folk revivalists explored acoustic traditions, this festival brought raw, electric energy that British teens had rarely experienced firsthand.

The 1962 event was the festival's inaugural run, and the lineup at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall read like a who’s who of blues royalty: T-Bone Walker, Memphis Slim, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, John Lee Hooker and Willie Dixon.

For Page, Jagger and Richards, it was a musical awakening. Page absorbed the tone and phrasing of blues guitarists. Jagger and Richards were captivated by the rhythm, storytelling and emotional intensity. More than inspiration, it was a blueprint for their future music careers.

At the time, Page was performing in Neil Christian and the Crusaders, whose setlists mixed R&B and Top 20 material.

“But I was really keen to play the blues,” Page told Guitar Player in 2024. “And when I say 'the blues,' definitely the Chess catalog, and it was in advance of everything that was going to come.”

Page described the festival as a pilgrimage for him and fellow young blues enthusiasts. It was also where he first met Jagger and Richards.

“At the Manchester festival, I met Mick and Keith,” Page said. “They didn’t have the Stones then; they were just blues enthusiasts on a pilgrimage, like all of us, and we were in a house where the guy had just got the Howlin’ Wolf album with the rocking chair on the cover.

”Nobody had heard it up until then, but we all heard it that day. So yes, that was one life-changing thing, but everything is changing your perspective on things, broadening your outlook and opening it out.”

For Richards, who had only known these artists through crackly imported records, seeing them perform live was a visceral shock. He speaks with particular reverence about T-Bone Walker, the suave showman of the electric guitar, and his large Gibson hollowbody.

“You wouldn't be able to get me out of that place,” Richards later remarked of his dedication to seeing every note.

Within a few years, Page was experimenting in local bands, refining the riffs and textures that would eventually define Led Zeppelin. Jagger and Richards channeled that same energy into the Rolling Stones’ early blues covers, bridging the Atlantic in sound and style. The festival became a touchstone: an experience that informed every note these young musicians would play.

“I was seduced by the beauty of what a six-string instrument could do,” Page told Guitar Player.

That Manchester festival wasn’t just a show. It was a crossroads where three teenagers encountered the blues in its purest form and walked away changed. From Led Zeppelin’s heavy riffs to the Stones’ swaggering covers, traces of that night remain in every iconic lick.

Page, Jagger and Richards may have gone on to define rock music, but they never forgot the lesson the blues taught them: music is more than technique — it’s communication, connection and feeling. And it all started that night in Manchester.

English producer Steve Lillywhite has worked with some of the biggest bands on either side of the Atlantic, but he says nothing compares to the misery of making a record with the Rolling Stones in 1986.

Remarkably, it was a pretty good album: Dirty Work. Among its tracks were a pair of solid hits: “One Hit (To the Body)” and “Harlem Shuffle.” But tensions within the group were at a head. The animosity was so high that the Stones didn’t even tour for the album.

All of which points to just how bad the sessions were for Lillywhite, who was building an impressive portfolio as a producer. After early successes with the Psychedelic Furs, Peter Gabriel and U2’s breakthrough album, War, Lillywhite was recruited by Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and company to produce Dirty Work. It was the band’s first album for Columbia Records following a then-staggering $28 million, four-album deal.

From the outside, it looked like a major opportunity for an ascendant producer. In reality, it was anything but harmonious.

“I worked with Keith and Mick when they were not talking to each other at all,” Lillywhite tells the Word in Your Ear podcast. He estimates the longtime collaborators were together “maybe one hour out of the whole time that we were making the record.”

Although the Stones had already released three albums in the 1980s, this was a deeply fractured period in the band’s history. Jagger and Richards were locked in a power struggle over musical direction, while CBS — Columbia’s parent company—was actively encouraging solo projects, widening the rift between them.

Richards was still furious over Jagger’s decision to release She’s the Boss, his 1985 solo debut, which featured guest appearances by Pete Townshend and Jeff Beck. In his 2010 memoir Life, Richards memorably likened the album to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, quipping that “everybody had a copy, but nobody listened to it.”

It was hardly fertile ground for creativity. Still, the band pushed ahead with writing and recording what would become their 18th studio album, even as its two leaders remained openly hostile.

“It was hell,” Lillywhite says. “They literally weren’t in the same room. One would come up to me and say, ‘Blah blah blah,’ and then I’d go and repeat it to the other one. I was Henry Kissinger!” he adds, invoking the U.S. diplomat famed for negotiating détente and conflict resolution.

“I’m not the alpha male in any part of my life—except in a recording studio,” Lillywhite continues. “I’m very matter-of-fact. I’ve always said the role of a producer is to take responsibility for the quality of the end product. You have to know when to let things breathe and when to step in—and when there’s trouble ahead, cut it off before it becomes a real problem.”

Despite the dysfunction, Lillywhite held the line and delivered a record that eventually went platinum in three countries.

For Richards and Jagger, of course, conflict was nothing new. Speaking to Guitar Player, Richards once recalled being locked in a kitchen with Jagger until they’d written a song, as the band transitioned from covers to originals. Richards has also fallen out spectacularly with others over the years — most notably Elton John, after a particularly disastrous Stones gig. It wasn’t only Jagger who felt the chill.

Forty years ago on July 13, the Live Aid concerts kicked off at London’s Wembley Stadium with the British rock group Status Quo. Armed with Telecasters and described by organizer Bob Geldof as “ordinary blokes with long hair and denims,” the group opened the day’s festivities with the 12-bar rock of John Fogerty’s “Rockin’ All Over the World.” It sent an unintentional but perceptible message that, even in the synth-saturated mid 1980s, “the boys and girls with guitars” — as Geldof described them — would rule the day.

Live Aid did rule, on that day and through 40 years of memories (as well as 20 years for its follow-up event, Live 8). True to Fogerty’s anthem, the benefit for African famine relief was a global event, ping-ponging between Wembley and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, as well as locales in Europe, Australia and Japan. Styled as a “global jukebox,” Live Aid presented most of the biggest acts at the time to nearly two billion viewers in 169 countries. Along the way it raised about $140 million for the Band Aid Charitable Trust, which Geldof launched with the all-star “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” single released eight months prior.

Live Aid’s 20 or so hours of music played out as a day for guitar heroics that were at times notable, notorious, triumphant and tepid. The players came from the worlds of rock, metal, blues and jazz, and nearly three dozen of them went on to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Four decades later, we still remember these most notable guitar stories from Live Day.

Led Zeppelin: Like a Lead Balloon

Led Zeppelin grounded itself immediately after drummer John Bonham died in September 1980, with the three surviving members going their own ways. But with Jimmy Page’s the Firm and Robert Plant both on the road, circumstances dictated an ascent back up the stairway to heaven, if just for one day. Plant was the first to sign on and wanted Page to be involved — but not necessarily to get the Led out.

“The original idea was not to do a Robert Plant set as such, but something a little lighter — like the Honeydrippers,” Plant said at the time, referring to an ad hoc all-star band he’d put together to record an EP of rock and R&B oldies in 1984.

“As Jimmy was part of the Honeydrippers I phoned him and said, ‘Would you like to be part of it?’ He did, and as we got to talking about it, we said, ‘While we’re doing it, why not do two of our [Led Zeppelin] songs?’ The whole thing really evolved.”

It ultimately sounded better in discussion than onstage. With former Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones on keyboards rather than bass, Paul Martinez from Plant’s band on bass, and Chic’s Tony Thompson and Phil Collins on drums, the shambolic three-song set felt like a genuine moment for the euphoric crowd at JFK Stadium, but not beyond.

Collins, who had flown in on the Concorde to play at both the London and Philly shows, introduced Zeppelin after playing solo piano renditions of a couple of his hits. He hadn’t rehearsed, and it showed, as did any lack of plan between him and Thompson on songs — “Rock and Roll,” “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven” — that really weren’t made for two drummers.

Jones also had a small amount of rehearsal on the day of the show, Page — who busted out his Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck electric guitar for the occasion — sounded out of tune at times, and Plant was a bit hoarse from playing the night before in Detroit. To make matters worse, the stage monitors reportedly weren’t working properly. Plant later termed the performance “horrendous.”

The dissatisfaction was evident during a tense post-show interview with MTV’s Alan Hunter, which Collins dominated when the others proved truculent. The drummer later wrote in his 2016 memoir, Not Dead Yet, “If I’d known it was to be a two-drummer band, I would have removed myself from the proceedings long before I got anywhere near Philadelphia.”

Collins, who’d played on Plant’s first two solo albums and toured with him in 1983, also took exception to Page laying blame for the failure on him for “bashing away cluelessly and grinning.” Collins noted, “If you look at the video, you can see Jimmy dribbling [cocaine] onstage, Robert not hitting the notes and me miming, playing the air.”

Not surprisingly, Page, Plant and Jones refused to allow the performance to be included on Live Aid’s subsequent official DVD release. Led Zeppelin would have more satisfying reunions at the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Concert in 1986, its Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1995 and the 2007 Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert in London, which is, as of now, its final performance.

The Who: Before They Got Old

There are several tellings of how the Who came to be part of Live Aid’s London program, the group’s first time onstage since breaking up after a farewell tour in late 1982. In his memoir, Is That It?, Geldof says Townshend suggested it after he invited the guitarist to take part on his own. That led to a series of protracted negotiations with singer Roger Daltrey, who refused to play with drummer Kenney Jones, and bassist John Entwistle, who refused to not play with Jones.

Townshend, however, subsequently accused Geldof of blackmailing and bullying the band into being part of the show. In his memoir, Who I Am, Townshend wrote, “When Bob sensed I might refuse to appear, he took the gloves off...‘Every pound we make will save a life. Do the fucking math. And do the fucking show!’”

Geldof denies he blackmailed or bullied the guitarist but makes no secret of how important it was for the Who to be part of Live Aid.

“I live, die and swear by this band,” he explained recently. “I really minded that the Who reformed and did it, ’cause it’s significant. I felt that 20 million people would watch that; if five percent of them contribute, we’re home.”

Though Townshend contended that “the Who were out of practice and should probably have left it to Queen and George Michael, who stole the show,” the four-song evening set — part of a killer chain that included U2, Dire Straits, Queen and David Bowie — was one of the day’s most exciting, despite any flaws — and stage monitor issues. “My Generation,” “Pinball Wizard,” “Love Reign O’er Me” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” crackled with vintage Who energy. Townshend was in full, furious, windmilling form, while Daltrey opened his shirt, twirled his microphone and jogged around the stage like a marathoner in training.

Even Townshend would acknowledge, perhaps grudgingly, that “we all felt proud to be there” and happily helped Paul McCartney close the show with “Let It Be,” with the two rock icons hoisting Geldof on their shoulders at the end of the song.

Bob Dylan: Too Rolling Stoned

It was another Live Aid collaboration that probably looked good on paper.

Bob Dylan, who’d sung on USA for Africa’s famine relief single “We Are the World,” was chosen to close the show in Philadelphia and in turn recruited Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Ron Wood. The trio, along with Faces/occasional Rolling Stones keyboardist Ian McLagan, gathered at Wood’s New York home to rehearse, with Dylan ultimately choosing two deep cuts — “Ballad of Hollis Brown” and “When the Ship Comes In” — along with the iconic “Blowin’ in the Wind” to play on the night.

There was undoubtably tension in the air at JFK Stadium, not only because of the occasion but also because the trio was directly following Mick Jagger’s explosive performance — backed by Daryl Hall & John Oates, and with Tina Turner guesting — at a time when Jagger and Richards were on the outs.

What’s more, Dylan’s performance was followed by a group performance of the hit “We Are the World” that would close the event.

“The sound guys had no idea we were going on,” Richards recalled the following year. “Here’s three guys with acoustic guitars and they were getting ready for [sings] ‘We Are the World’ with 50 people behind us.

“They were tuning up and we were trying to play,” Richards explained a few years later. “It was like, ‘shut ’em up, Bill Graham, or we’ll shoot the lot of them!’ Bob and I kept looking at each other like, ‘Where’s the blindfolds and the last cigarettes?’ But it was all for a good cause, so what the hell?”

Their performance was plagued by problems. The stage curtain had fallen in front of the stage amplifiers, preventing Dylan, Richards and Wood from hearing each other and causing them to play out of sync. When, early on, a string broke on Dylan’s guitar, Wood gave him his and used a cheap instrument a crew member handed him. The new guitar was out of tune. Wood wound up playing slide on only one of the strings.

Dylan, meanwhile, caused a stir when he suggested that, “I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe one or two million, maybe, and use it...to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers here owe to banks.” While Live Aid did eventually spawn the charity Farm Aid, Dylan’s comment showed he had no grasp of the event’s purpose. “Something so simplistic and crowd-pleasing was beyond belief,” Geldof wrote. “[Dylan] displayed a complete lack of understanding of the issues raised by Live Aid.”

Seven other notable guitar moments...

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, on hiatus after his sophomore solo album About Face in 1984, played with Bryan Ferry’s band during the Roxy Music frontman’s four-song set in London.

Five of B.B. King’s songs from his set at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, including “Why I Sing the Blues” and “Rock Me Baby,” were carried as part of the global telecast.

Dire Straits, which was in the midst of its own 12-show run at Wembley Arena next door, was joined by Sting to recreate his guest vocal on “Money for Nothing.”

David Bowie tapped Kevin Armstrong, who had played on the Absolute Beginners soundtrack, as his guitarist for Wembley Stadium. Bowie subsequently asked Armstrong to be a fifth member in Tin Machine after he played on the group’s debut album (he turned it down), while Armstrong co-wrote the title track to Bowie’s Outside album in 1992.

Pat Metheny sat in with Santana for its five-song set in Philadelphia, which included “Brotherhood,” “Open Invitation” and “Right Now” (verify song title — may need clarification).

Chic was on hiatus but Nile Rodgers brought his guitar to Philadelphia to play with Madonna (“Love Makes the World Go Round”), and the two of them joined Thompson Twins for a rendition of the Beatles’ “Revolution.”

After landing in Philadelphia, Phil Collins first got onstage with Eric Clapton for his set, which included Cream’s “White Room,” Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” and “She’s Waiting” from the Collins-produced Behind the Sun album

Eddie Martinez had scored a few hot touring gigs during the late ‘70s — playing with LaBelle and then with Stanley Clarke and George Duke — but by the early ‘80s he set his sights on cracking the New York City session scene. “I probably couldn’t have picked a worse time,” he says. “All the hot players were in Manhattan, and everybody was out for the same jobs. I had a hell of a time getting noticed. Knocked on a lot of doors.”

It was at a particularly low point in 1982 when Martinez looked up an old friend: bassist and producer Bernard Edwards, famous for his groundbreaking work with the band Chic. The two met for lunch, and Martinez pitched himself as a guitarist for the solo album Edwards was cutting. “All at once, my life changed when Bernard said, ‘Come by the studio tomorrow and bring your guitar,’” Martinez recalls. “That was the real door opener for me. I can remember it so vividly.” He laughs. “I can even remember what Bernard was eating: fried flounder with chili sauce.”

Before long, Martinez, heretofore New York City’s best-kept guitar secret, would become the secret sauce on hit recordings by Run-DMC, Robert Palmer, Steve Winwood, Billy Ocean, Mick Jagger, David Lee Roth and a fleet of other music greats. During much of the ‘80s, his diverse playing — everything from earth-moving rhythms to silky grooves to face-melting leads — seemed omnipresent on both MTV and radio. “I waited so long for my day in the sun, so it felt like validation when things finally happened,” he says. “I had seen a lot of my buddies get the big gigs. After a while, you start to feel like you’re standing around at the prom waiting to be asked to dance. That’s what was so frustrating: I knew I could play. I just needed the shot.”

For many of those sessions, Martinez made his electric guitar of choice a red Hamer prototype. "I used that same guitar on all the Run-DMC and David Lee Roth stuff," he told Guitar Player in its February 2004 issue. "It had a triple-coil pickup, so I could get humbucker or single-coil sounds out of it. I plugged it into a non-master-volume Marshall from the late '70s, and a 4x12 cabinet loaded with 25-watt Celestion Greenbacks. I ran the volume at around eight or nine, because if you cranked that amp you'd lose a little definition, I didn't max out the bass — I let file mids handle the low end of the sound--and I ran the treble at just over halfway."

Now living in Portland, Oregon, Martinez hasn’t exactly retired, but he doesn’t work on the clock anymore. “I play around town and throughout the country, and I’m finishing up an EP with my band,” he says. “I’m content with what I’ve accomplished.

“I don’t look back too often, but occasionally I’ll sit back and reminisce. I feel very blessed to have worked with a lot of special people, some of whom aren’t here anymore, sadly. That’s the really beautiful thing about music — the friendships you forge.”

“ROCK BOX” — RUN-DMC

“I had played in bands with Larry Smith. He was a bassist who became a well-known producer of hip-hop and rap. One day he called and said, ‘Eddie, I want you to put some rock shit on this thing I'm doing for Run-DMC.’ I had vaguely heard of them, so I said sure and went down to Green Street Studios.

“I hadn’t heard the track before I got there. Larry had laid down a bassline over a DMX drum machine beat, and there was a little twinkling keyboard line. That was all they had. Larry knew my playing well, so I think he felt that whatever I was going to come up with would work. I just kind of went for it. I laid down a big fat rhythm as a foundation, and then I started to build an orchestra of harmony guitars. I did a lot of tracks, just layering and layering. There wasn’t any kind of structure to the song yet — there were no vocals — so it was kind of abstract. When I played the leads, I thought about Brian May’s guitar sound and how the tracks were stacked. The end result was this cool tape saturation that really came alive.

“People think I had this wall of Marshalls on that cut, but in reality it was an amp they had at the studio — a Music Man with two 12-inch speakers. My guitar was the red Hamer prototype that I would play on a lot of hits, and the only pedal I used was a Boss overdrive. That was it. The whole thing was rather serendipitous. The second I started playing, I had my sound.

“I had no idea what we were doing would be groundbreaking, and to be honest, when the Run-DMC guys heard what I did, they were a little taken aback. They thought the guitar would overpower their words. In the end, it opened up a new world for them, and they came around. Once the record sales started happening and the coins came in, everybody was happy.”

“ADDICTED TO LOVE” — ROBERT PALMER

“Robert Palmer had asked me to play on the Riptide album when he was doing the Power Station record. I went down to the Bahamas to work with him and Bernard Edwards. Robert played me a rough demo of ‘Addicted to Love,’ and I thought it was great, but it wasn’t a situation where the demo was so perfect that you had to beat what was on it. There was some guide guitar work on it, but Robert wasn’t beholden to anything. It was a collaborative project in the best sense of the word.

“We cut the track live, and I started to play what I felt. Robert and Bernard knew my playing, so they let me explore the song. Most of what I did is emblematic of my sound — big crunchy parts, bordering on an orchestral feel, but I also played these clean, classy parts during certain parts. You might hear that kind of thing in funk or pop, not rock. I liked the two extremes. It gave your ears a lot of nice contrasts.

“For the crunch stuff, I used my Hamer, a 50-watt Marshall and a Pro Co RAT distortion. On the classy B sections, I played a Strat into a Twin Reverb, and I added a little Boss chorus. I think we mixed in a little DI stuff, too. Later on, Andy Taylor from Duran Duran added some rhythm stuff in New York.

“The solo was something I ad-libbed on the spot. We were pretty much finished for the night, but Jason Corsaro, the engineer, and I stayed behind and worked on tones. I played the solo one time, and that was it. Instead of doing something fast and shreddy, I played slow and soulful, so each note really sticks out. It became a song within a song. I have to credit Jason for the sound — he pulled a lot of tricks to get it just right. When Robert heard what we’d done, he was floored. He really loved it. It was such a nice feeling when I could surprise him with something like that.”

“1/2 A LOAF” — MICK JAGGER

“I went to a guitar store in New York City, and a friend of mine said, ‘Hey, Eddie, I hear you’re playing on the Jagger album.’ ‘News to me,’ I said — I hadn’t heard anything about it. Then I went to a rehearsal, and I got a call from Bill Laswell, who wanted me in the Bahamas the next day to play on Jagger’s record. Apparently, I was the last to know.

“I worked on some tracks down there with a bunch of rhythm sections — there was a lot of stuff we cut that never came out. We came back to New York and did ‘1/2 a Loaf’ in New York at the Power Station. Nile Rodgers was producing this one. Generally, what would happen was, Mick would pick up a guitar and play us a song. Then we’d go about cutting it live. Nile and I played together in the same room. He’d do clean parts, and I’d play crunchy stuff. It was just natural the way we gravitated toward that arrangement. My parts are probably dominant, but Nile’s rhythm playing was very important. He laid down the foundation.

“The solo I played came to me instinctively, but there’s a motif to it. It’s big and crunchy, and it works with the song. It’s more like guitar parts than an unbridled solo. I had my red Hamer prototype with me, but I also had a similar model in gunmetal gray — I might have used that one. My amp was the 50-watt Marshall that I relied on for so many sessions. Jagger was there through the recordings. He was vibing and getting into it. You knew if Mick was dancing in the studio that shit was going right.”

“HIGHER LOVE” — STEVE WINWOOD

“Sometimes it’s hard to predict what will be a hit. Most of the time, I have no idea. But with ‘Higher Love,’ the minute I heard the track with Steve Winwood’s reference vocals, which were killer, I thought, Holy shit, this is going to be huge. And it was — it was a big seller, and it won Grammys for Record of the Year and Best Male Pop Vocal.

“Russ Titelman was producing. They had already cut a lot of the basics at the Power Station. Russ loved tight, clean rhythm stuff, so I knew going in that I would be pursuing that direction. He and Steve were very open to letting me explore what I heard, but I had to be very economical with my parts. There’s a little bit in the B section where I play some cool bits, and in the bridge I play some nice lines.

“This was a case of the small things doing a lot of heavy lifting. You might not hear everything in your face, but if you took the stuff away you’d notice that something was missing. I’m very proud of my playing here. I wasn’t trying to dominate the sound; I supported and serviced the song, and that’s what it’s all about.

“I didn’t use my Hamer on this track; instead, I played a guitar that was fashioned from a Schecter neck, a DiMarzio body and EMG pickups. It worked out great on the Winwood stuff as I was going direct. My other guitars — the Hamers and my Strats — they were cool most of the time, but sometimes I’d get buzz from them. As much as I loved those guitars, I had to be realistic.”

“SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE” — ROBERT PALMER

"This was a different process than what I’d done with Robert previously. We cut this track in Milan, Italy — Robert had moved to Switzerland for a variety of personal and professional reasons. When I got to Italy, a lot of tracks had already been cut, so we weren’t playing live. Robert was producing, and he’d had bass guitar, drums and keyboard parts laid down. But I’ll tell you, I had a blast. I had a big rig with me — I don’t know how many cabinets, it was just mondo — and I just went wild.

“I cut crunchy rhythm guitars first — there’s no clean guitars at all. I even put a 12-string Hamer on there to fatten up what was already fat. It was just beautiful excess. My solo is nuts. It opens up with these intervals, and in the middle there’s a quasi-bop blues lick, and then there’s a sonic effect with a whammy bar sliding all these double stops, and then it ends with a whole tone scale and some kind of arbitrary, manic riff. It’s almost like three sections in one solo. Robert loved it. He called it ‘Large Marge’ from those Pee Wee Herman movies. That’s what the song needed. It’s a very aggressive song, so it felt right to just go outside the box.

“In addition to that 12-string, my guitar was a Jackson Dinky Soloist. Grover Jackson had given it to me. It was one of three he made. I know Jeff Beck had one, and a friend of mine, John McCurry, had the other one. They were great guitars, and they really did the job.”

"So who does every kid that picks up a guitar want to be?” producer Andrew Watt asks. “You want to be Keith Richards, right? That’s the whole fucking thing! So making this record and working with the Rolling Stones, earning their trust, was the honor of my lifetime.” 

Watt, at 32, is still a little giddy from working with the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band on their new album, Hackney Diamonds, and who can blame him? 

Even though he’s arguably the music industry’s hottest producer, having collaborated with everyone from Ozzy Osbourne to Eddie Vedder to Miley Cyrus, the native New Yorker is still buzzing from his time producing the Stones and their legendary guitar duo of Richards and Ronnie Wood. 

“I’ve seen the Rolling Stones play countless times,” he continues. “I said to Keith, ‘It’s like you plucked a freak from behind the barricade and let him produce your album.’” 

Watt is a fanboy for sure, and his enthusiasm — not to mention his impressive collection of electric guitars and amps — resonates throughout Hackney Diamonds, arguably the Stones’ best work since 1978’s Some Girls. 

But despite his genuine love for the band, he was no pushover, prompting singer Mick Jagger to comment, “We got a producer called Andy Watt who kicked us up the ass.” 

Watt told Guitar Player just how hard he put the boot in...

How did this project come together? 

In our initial conversations, the band explained that they were facing some creative roadblocks. There was a lot of stop-and-start in their initial process, so it became my job to help facilitate slamming the ball in the end zone. 

It must’ve been intimidating to tell Keith Richards to get his ass in gear. 

I don’t think that ever happened. He’s armed with a knife at all times! [laughs] But the band had given me a clear directive, and in my line of work, results are what matter. So I didn’t waste time bullshitting. I just tried to make it clear that it was time to focus and get to work. 

How did you do that? 

I had a bass and just started playing with Keith. I was of the mind that if I could earn his respect as a player, then I could communicate with him musically and offer suggestions chord-wise or inversion-wise or tone-wise or whatever. And we just got into it. 

Then, when we started recording the basic rhythm tracks in L.A., I sat next to Keith in the live room across from Mick and Ronnie. That was an extremely important part of the process for me. I wanted to make sure the sounds were good, and as we were going through the takes, I was able to remember the performances, because I was right there. If we got a good take, we just moved on immediately. 

After we did the basic tracking of roughly 23 songs, we got into overdubs. I think it was during the overdub sessions that I really earned Keith’s respect and trust. It was very important to me that all of his parts were done before Mick added his final vocals, and we really worked hard together to accomplish that. 

What was it like to work with Keith and Ronnie? How prepared were they, or did you guys work out arrangements in the studio? 

Many of the songs had been developed over time. So after we listened to whatever the most recent demo was, everyone would start familiarizing themselves with the song, and we would play it a few times until everyone had it down cold. 

And this is where it gets interesting: Instead of using the final take, we would use the previous take, because it still had that spark of spontaneity — the take where people were still searching. 

The worst part of contemporary music is how producers often kill a performance in search of perfection. 

I make loop-based music with some of my other clients, but I don’t want to hear the Stones like that. No one wants to hear the Stones on some grid. 

Can you talk a bit more about how Keith and Ronnie work together? 

Listen to a classic Stones song like “Beast of Burden.” You can’t tell who’s playing lead and who’s playing rhythm, and if you muted one of them, it would sound sparse. They fill the holes together so beautifully, and that’s apparent on the whole record. 

Take a song like “Angry.” They pause to exchange licks, one handling the rhythm while the other responds. They watch, listen and engage in this incredible musical dialogue. If you want to really check it out for yourself, I purposely mixed it so 90 percent of Keith’s parts are on the left and Ronnie’s are on the right.

There are at least two tracks I’d love to know more about. The first is “Bite My Head Off,” featuring Paul McCartney on that gnarly fuzz bass. 

This is part of a much longer story, but essentially, I was working with both Paul and the Stones during roughly the same period. The Stones’ regular bassist, Darryl Jones, isn’t on the album at all because he was on tour, so everybody was taking turns playing bass, including me, Keith, Ronnie and Bill Wyman. 

One day, while speaking with Paul, I thought, Why not invite him to play bass on a song? I realized it was a significant request: Can we get someone from the Beatles to play in the Stones? But surprisingly, both Mick and Paul were like, Sure, no problem, sounds like fun. They were so nonchalant. 

I reviewed the list of songs slated for recording. The typical choice might have been to place him on one of the ballads, such as “Dreamy Skies.” However, I thought, how cool would it be to play on the most aggressive punk-rock track on the album? I knew Paul loved to rock, and they had a great time recording “Bite My Head Off.” They were all laughing like teenagers. 

How did Paul achieve that fantastic distortion on his bass? 

As Paul and I were becoming friends, I decided to get him a gift. I got him another lefty ’64 Hofner, similar to the one he played in the Beatles. However, I added a twist: my guitar tech installed a Univox Super Fuzz circuit on the Hofner that could be activated with a switch. 

When I gave it to Paul, he said, “This is an incredibly thoughtful gift, but why? I already have my Beatles Hofner — why another one?” I was like, “Just plug it in and give that extra switch a try.” Suddenly his eyes widened, and he just started ripping on it. I told him to bring it to the recording session, and he couldn’t stop laughing. 

I shared the song with Paul the day before, and when we entered the studio with the band, he brought out the bass. During the breakdown section of the song, he activated the Super Fuzz switch, and it was complete carnage! Everyone was like, “What the fuck was that?” It was hilarious and so cool. 

I think we recorded just three takes of that song, but almost immediately, Keith and Ronnie were on their feet, and Mick dragged the mic into the middle of the room and the roof left the building. 

I think Paul really enjoyed that he was just a guy in a band again with friends that he’s known for 60 years. It had been a long time since he was with equals, just plugging in his bass and doing a session. I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face for a very long time. 

Did Keith and Ronnie use any unexpected guitars or amps on the album? 

Keith brought in his usual amp rig, which consists of four amps that he’s been using for a long time — a setup that’s well documented. However, just to switch things up, I brought in five amps that had been worked on by the late and legendary Howard Dumble. Keith was particularly drawn to one of the Dumble-modified 1958 Fender Twins, which he used for a bunch of his overdubs. It just had a magical sound. 

Also, in addition to his ’54 Tele and Gibson ES-355, Keith also played a Dan Armstrong guitar on a few tracks. One of my all-time favorite performances by Keith is a version of “Midnight Rambler” at a gig at the Marquee Club in 1971. 

You can watch it online. He’s playing a Lucite Dan Armstrong guitar, and it sounds incredible. Unfortunately, it was stolen years ago, so I bought a ’69 just like it and brought it in, and he used it on some tracks. 

Keith also used a ’55 TV Yellow Gibson single-cut Les Paul Junior on “Angry” and “Mess It Up.” Ronnie used the Junior on “Bite My Head Off,” but most of the time he played his Strat, which is either a ’54 or ’55, and the Zemaitis he used on the Faces’ hit “Stay With Me.” It was pretty funny. 

Every time he plugged the Zemaitis in, we’d make him play “Stay With Me,” and everyone would sing along at the top their lungs.

One of the best tracks on the album is Mick and Keith’s powerful duet of Muddy Waters’ classic “Rollin’ Stone” [called “Rolling Stone Blues” on the album]. From what I understand, that was your idea. 

Yeah. During our overdub sessions, Keith and I started talking in a more personal way. One day I just asked him how he met Mick, and he told me the story. He said he saw this kid getting on the train in Dartford and under his arm were two albums: The Best of Muddy Waters and the first Chuck Berry album. 

Both were Chess Records imports, which were almost impossible to find in England at that time. Keith said, Mick “was either going to be my best friend or I was going to rob him.” [laughs] They, of course, wound up being best friends and started playing together. 

But The Best of Muddy Waters was important for another reason. One of the tracks on the album — “Rollin’ Stone” gave the band its name. The idea of asking them to play that song didn’t hit me right away, but the germ of the idea was there. 

So when did the idea of having Mick and Keith play “Rolling Stone Blues” click? 

It didn’t happen immediately. One day, while hanging out with Keith in New York, he was sitting with me talking. But I found it hard to focus on his words because he had an old Martin acoustic in hand, and he was playing the most primal blues I had ever heard in my life. 

Not many people can play blues like that. Robert Johnson could, Muddy Waters could, and Keith Richards certainly can. He seemed possessed by something, channeling the essence of the blues. 

It wasn’t about complexity; it was about having it in your soul, and Keith had it in spades. It was surprising. I never really thought of him playing a slow Robert Johnson blues, but it’s what he really loves. So I made a mental note of it. 

After that experience, I told Mick that I thought he and Keith should do a straight acoustic blues for the album. Mick found the idea intriguing but was initially noncommittal, given the many other songs we had to complete. 

But as the record started falling into place, I pushed him again on the idea. Sometimes that goes well, and other times it does not. [laughs] 

Suddenly, I heard a change in his voice, and he said firmly, “I have 23 songs I’m trying to write the lyrics for. I don’t have any blues lyrics.” So I retreated a little bit and didn’t push. That’s where things stood with Mick. 

So what led to the change? 

At one point, Keith began telling me the story about how the band got its name, and as he was telling me that, I just asked the dumbest question: Have you guys ever played “Rollin’ Stone” before? He thought for a second and said, no they hadn’t — which sorta surprised him. 

They had played every other Muddy Waters song, but ironically, never that song. And that’s when I pounced and asked whether he would consider playing it for this record. Keith said he knew it backwards and forward, but the decision ultimately rested with Mick. 

I said, “Give me a second and I’ll call him.” So I went in the other room, and I called him. I was excited and said, “You don’t have to write any blues lyrics because you can just tackle Muddy’s ‘Rollin’ Stone.’” 

There was a long pause on the phone. At first, I thought he was going be angry that I was pushing the blues idea again, but then he just said, “Okay, when do you want to do it?” We were finishing up our overdub session, so I suggested doing it that day. 

As Mick made his way to the studio, Keith began playing the song. And now the hairs were raising on everyone’s arms in the studio. They were finally going to record the song that inspired the band’s name. 

The sound of Keith’s guitar is so powerful on that track. How did you accomplish that mixture of acoustic resonance and electric distortion? It’s undeniably unique. 

I made the decision with Paul Lamalfa, my engineer, that we would record on tape, because there was no better way to capture the essence of the moment. The goal was to capture the magic of two musicians in a room. 

We aimed to re-create the vibe of Muddy’s original recording, and if there were ever two guys who could do it, it was Keith and Mick. 

Keith, along with his guitar tech, Pierre De Beauport, and I listened closely to Muddy’s original recording as a reference. We were like, “Is that an electric guitar?” It seemed unlikely; he was playing acoustic back then, yet the sound was so heavy because of the way he played and how it was recorded. 

So I said, “I have an acoustic 1930 Gibson L-4 with me,” which is like the L-1 guitar associated with Robert Johnson. Keith was like, “Oh, let me see it.” And so he started playing the song. He could play it beautifully, but it’s not an easy guitar to play. It was made before guitars had truss rods, so there was no way to really adjust the action. 

But this is when the universe does its thing. 

We started looking at these two pictures of Robert Johnson. There’s the one of him with a cigarette, and there’s the other one of him with the hat [shot from] further away. And we noticed in the photo of him with the cigarette that he had a capo on the second fret of his guitar. Keith caught that. So we all asked, Why is there a capo on the second fret? What does that mean?  

Most Robert Johnson songs are in the key of E and A. We theorized that maybe he tuned down the guitar a full step, to D, and put a capo on the second fret to bring the guitar back up to E so that the strings were looser and he could play and bend easier. So Pierre did exactly that with the L-4, then he handed it to Keith, who found it played effortlessly — like butter. 

Then we debated whether to record using an acoustic or an electric guitar. Meanwhile, Mick was on his way, and we needed a plan. Ultimately, we settled on trying it both ways and deciding later. We set up microphones for the L-4’s acoustic sound, and Pierre added a lipstick pickup to it, so we could rout a signal through all four amps in Keith’s setup, located in another room. 

The funny thing was, the volume was so loud from Keith’s amps that the electric sound from the other room began bleeding into the acoustic mic, creating a fantastic blend. 

Mick used a bullet microphone for his harmonica, that we routed through one of my Dumble-modified Fender Champs from the ’50s. He also used another mic for his vocals. However, as they played, Mick kept moving closer to Keith. Then Mick stood up, rendering the vocal mic unnecessary because he was right next to the room microphone that was capturing Keith’s guitar. 

Ultimately, the recording consisted primarily of this single room mic, along with a subtle mix of the four amps and a touch of the bullet microphone, which added an extra layer of edge to the harmonica. 

Neither of them wore headphones. It was simply the two of them, playing together. By the fourth take, they began to anticipate each other’s moves and complete each other’s musical sentences. While Keith crafted guitar licks, Mick responded on the harmonica, and they synchronized perfectly. It was an incredible demonstration of their yin-and-yang chemistry that had been developed over six decades. 

Without overstating it, I feel this recording encapsulates the essence of their enduring relationship. 

You were a witness to a genuine moment of music history. 

It was heavy. It’s probably the most important thing I’ll ever record.

Hackney Diamonds by the Rolling Stones is out now and available to buy or stream

It's been a long, long time since we last got a studio album of new material from the Rolling Stones – 18 years, to be exact.

The band returned to their blues roots on 2016's energetic covers LP, Blue & Lonesome – their last new release before the death of their long-serving drummer, Charlie Watts, in 2021 – but now, we finally have some new material to chew on in the form of "Angry."

The lead single from a new LP from the band called Hackney Diamonds, "Angry" is a feisty little tune that sneers in the face of all the cries of "hang it up already!" You can check out its music video below.

Once you get past the novelty of the Stones – all three of whom are either 80 or rapidly approaching 80 – releasing a new album in 2023, there's actually quite a bit to dig into on this song. 

Yes, there's all the riffwork and tasty Keith Richards/Ronnie Wood electric guitar weaving you could ask for, and yet another emphatic performance from the ever-ageless Mick Jagger, but what's especially interesting is that the band doesn't necessarily play everything safely.

There's a very 21st century sheen to “Angry“'s chorus, but, just as they did with disco on “Miss You“ 45 years ago, the Stones use only the modern spices they need, while refraining from blind trend-chasing, and remaining true to themselves. 

Hackney Diamonds is said to contain 12 tracks, though no details about the other 11 have been revealed by the band's representatives as of yet.

In another nod to modern times, Hackney Diamonds was produced by Andrew Watt, who – aside from his best-selling work with Post Malone – has worked with legends like Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop, and Elton John. The album is set for an October 20 release via Geffen, and can be pre-ordered here.

For more info on all things Rolling Stones, visit the band's website.

The mid-to-late ’60s psychedelic movement was a remarkable time when rock musicians began to see themselves as sonic pioneers, creating new sounds and developing innovative musical approaches.

The scene tends to be viewed, retrospectively, as limited to a few years of activity, mostly in London and on the U.S. West Coast. But in fact it was a much larger phenomenon that drove music, gear and production in innovative ways that are still relevant to this day.

But it had another impact, as well, in how it made us hear and think about sound.

I was born in the early 1960s and came of age, musically speaking, during the psych-rock boom. For my seventh birthday, I received a copy of the Doors’ Strange Days, an ambitious but odd record on which the band and their engineer, Bruce Botnick, experimented with electronics and new recording methods.

It joined my small but growing collection of albums, which included the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, a disc that gave the flowering psychedelic movement such gems as “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” and “In My Life,” with its baroque faux-harpsichord solo.

But I was about to go deeper into psychedelia’s ether.

About a year later, my collection came to include Their Satanic Majesties Request, one of the most reviled albums in the Rolling Stones’ catalog. Although it’s often dismissed as the group’s failed attempt to copy Sgt. Pepper’s, to my young ears it was a remarkable and even magical record.

Its wild sounds entranced me: bassist Bill Wyman’s heavily filtered vocals on “In Another Land,” the synthesizers that rendered wind effects and wild swoops on “2,000 Light Years From Home,” and the hammers and saws that popped up for no apparent reason on “She’s a Rainbow.”

But without a doubt, my favorite sound was Keith Richards’ distorted tremolo guitar tone on “Citadel,” one of the heaviest songs the Stones have ever written or recorded.

I don’t doubt for a second that Their Satanic Majesties Request molded and even warped my brain. It opened my mind to the magic of sound, which is how I’ve gravitated toward music, more than through stylistic choices.

It also made me question how those sounds were created, which sent me off on discoveries beyond the guitar and helped attune my ears to the intricacies of tone and frequency.

More than Sgt. Pepper’s, Satanic Majesties is the album that, for me, defines sonic experimentation and 1960s psychedelic music, with its indulgent and frequently headlong approach to songwriting, arranging and production.

It’s in that spirit of curiosity and discovery that we invite you to turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, beginning with the tripped out “Citadel” lyric video…

The Rolling Stones have announced the official digital release of their new (and improved) “2000 Light Years From Home” music video.

Appearing on the Stones' distinctly psychedelic 1967 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request and as the B-side of the “She’s a Rainbow” single, the Jagger/Richards-penned song was recorded at Olympic Studios in London.

The Summer of Love was a celebration of freedom for many, though Mick Jagger spent a small part of it banged up in Brixton prison on drugs charges where it is believed he wrote the song’s lyrics.

Having already dipped their toes in the psychedelic waters with the Between the Buttons LP earlier in the year, 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request saw the Stones fully immerse themselves in lysergic experimentation before swiftly returning to stripped-down roots rock with Beggars Banquet in 1968.

“The whole acid thing was a phenomenon,” recalled Keith Richards in a radio interview. “It hit with a bang. I don’t know what people really made of it. I still don’t, actually. Nobody knows what they made out of LSD…

“I tried it out, but I didn’t get carried away with it by myself, but a lot of people around me were definitely out there for quite an extended period of time. And probably didn’t come back.”

Directed by Peter Whitehead (1937-2019) – the notable filmmaker and author behind the Rolling Stones documentary Charlie Is My Darling: Ireland 1965 – the 1967 “2000 Light Years From Home” video has been resurrected in style.

Featuring staged performances by Jagger, Richards, Charlie Watts, Brian Jones and Bill Wyman, the A.V. Club describes “2000 Light Years From Home” as “one of the highlights of The Rolling Stones’ brief psychedelic phase.”

The new "2000 Light Years From Home" music video can be viewed on the Rolling Stones' popular YouTube channel and is just hours away from its premiere.

Be among the first to watch it by clicking the notification button...

Browse the Rolling Stones catalog here.

Released in 1968, the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” single was a top ten hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

Signaling a return to the band’s blues guitar roots, the track has remained a setlist staple for decades.

In spring ’68, just prior to the single’s release, two different music videos were shot in a day's work at London’s Olympic Studios with director Michael Lindsay-Hogg (The Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus, The Beatles' Let It Be.)

One of the films presents a makeup-free Rolling Stones along with a totally unique version of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” while the other (notable for the band’s warpaint) features an alternative vocal take dubbed over the single’s backing track.

“We shot the one without the makeup first,” explains Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who first encountered the Rolling Stones while working on the British music TV show Ready Steady Go!

“They were great. As we were doing it, I felt there was an ingredient missing, although at that point I didn’t know what it was. We had a small meal break and I saw Brian Jones sitting by the makeup table and sort of playing with the colors – putting it on his face and then wiping it off – and I thought, Huh. That’s a real interesting look.

“And so I said to Mick, Keith, Charlie and Bill, ‘Just go over there to the makeup table and see what it’s like if you put some stuff on your face – either stripes or eye makeup, or full-face glitter, whatever strikes you.’”

Today, the Rolling Stones and ABKCO Music & Records Inc. have released both versions restored in 4K resolution.

According to Lindsay-Hogg, only the most popular bands of the time were making “promo” videos such as this (effectively, the prototype of the music video format that exploded in the early ‘80s with the advent of MTV.) The idea being to provide promotional broadcast material in countries where there were “genuine security issues.”

Recalling his memories of shooting the second version, Lindsay-Hogg said, “The director of photography, Tony Richmond, and I thought there’s another way to light them as well, because it was kind of general performance lighting on the first one we shot in the early afternoon.

“In the second version, we shot them in these shadows. It was much more to do with shadows, and Mick coming in and out of light, and that whole little walk he does at the beginning.

“We put that together, and that’s the one they liked best because it had a slightly decadent feel to it.

“When I edited them and played them back, they loved the videos. I’d hate to think they didn’t, because then I went on to do their videos for 15 years.”

Browse the Rolling Stones catalog here.

On June 10, ABKCO Records – home to the entire catalog of the Rolling Stones from 1963 to early 1971 – will release a limited-edition set of the band’s first 18 7-inch vinyl singles and extended play records.

Remastered by legendary Grammy-winning engineer Bob Ludwig, the Rolling Stones Singles 1963-1966 includes such monumental classics as “Satisfaction,” “Get Off Of My Cloud” and “Time Is On My Side.”

Also included is a 32-page book, rare photographs, a set of five photo cards and a poster.

This release is due to be followed up next year by a second box set, The Rolling Stones Singles 1966-1971.

Charting their rise from young, blues-loving hopefuls to one of the most prominent songwriting powerhouses of the era, the Rolling Stones Singles 1963-1966 tracks the group’s shift away from covers in favor of original compositions.

Boasting tantalizing B-sides and rarities, this bumper release includes both U.K. and U.S. versions of key hit singles. Meanwhile, three U.K.-only 7-inch E.P. releases have been bundled in, namely 1964’s The Rolling Stones and Five by Five, and 1965’s Got Live If You Want It!

Titles included in The Rolling Stones Singles 1963-1966 collection are as follows:

• “Come On” single (*June 1963)
• “I Wanna Be Your Man” single (*November 1963)
• The Rolling Stones E.P. (*January 1964)
• “Not Fade Away” single (*February 1964)
• “Tell Me” single (*June 1964)
• “It’s All Over Now” single (*June 1964)
• Five by Five E.P. (*August 1964)
• “Time Is On My Side” single (*September 1964)
• “Little Red Rooster” single (*November 1964)
• “Heart Of Stone” single (*December 1964)
• “The Last Time” single (*February 1965)
• Got Live If You Want It! E.P. (*June 1965)
• “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” – US single version (*June 1965)
• “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction)” – UK single version (*August 1965)
• “Get Off Of My Cloud” – US single version (*September 1965)
• “Get Off Of My Cloud – UK single version (*October 1965)
• “As Tears Go By” single (*December 1965)
• “19th Nervous Breakdown” – US single version (*February 1966)

*Originally released

Pre-order The Rolling Stones Singles 1963-1966 here.

Penned by Willie Dixon and originally titled "I'm Your Hoochie Cooche Man,” this Chess Records classic was first recorded and released by blues guitar legend Muddy Waters in 1954.

Over the years, “Hoochie Coochie Man” has been recorded by numerous artists, including other heroes of the electric guitar such as Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy and Eric Clapton.

Seen by many as a ‘missing link’ between Delta blues and rock ‘n’ roll, the landmark Chicago blues masterpiece is also a touchstone for the Rolling Stones.

Keith Richards was (and probably still is) particularly in awe of Muddy Waters. Some 30 years ago, Guitar Player editors Jas Obrecht and Jesse Gress met with the Rolling Stones guitarist for an interview in New York where he spoke warmly of his musical hero…

Like Muddy Waters, you approach rhythm guitar with the primal energy of a sex drive.

"Well, that's a compliment. Thank you."

Do you feel that way?

"Yeah! He's my man. He's the guy I listened to. Maybe I just picked it up off of him. I recognized it. It was just the same as my drive. I felt an immediate affinity when I heard Muddy go [picks up guitar and plays the opening lick from "Rollin' Stone"]. You can't be harder than that, man. He said it all right there. So all I want to do is be able to do that.

“I have several memories of Muddy Waters. The weirdest one is when we first went into Chess Studios in '64, the first time we came here. Went to Chicago to record most of the second or third album at Chess, and we walked in. There's Phil Chess and there's Ron Malo, the engineer, and this guy in white overalls painting the ceiling.

“As we walked by into the studio, somebody said, "Oh, by the way, this is Muddy Waters, and he's painting the ceiling." He wasn't selling records at the time, and this is the way he got treated. My first meeting with Muddy Waters is over the paintbrush, dripping, covered in white paint.

"This is Muddy Waters." I'm dying, right? I get to meet the Man – he's my fucking god, right? – and he's painting the ceiling! And I'm gonna work in his studio. Ouch! Oh, this is the record business, right? Mmmmm. The highs with the lows! Ooh, boy.

“And the look in his eye was saying, "Well, you can be painting the ceiling next year!" Because he had no idea that we revered him or anything. We were just another bunch of creeps.”

But later on, he always credited the Rolling Stones.

“Ah, he did, yes. And bless him. When we started the Rolling Stones, we were just little kids, right? We felt we had some of the licks down, but our aim was to turn other people on to Muddy Waters.

“I mean, we were carrying flags, idealistic teenage sort of shit: "There's no way we think anybody is really going to seriously listen to us. As long as we can get a few people interested in listening to the shit we think they ought to listen to" – which is very elitist and arrogant, to think you can tell other people what to listen to, but that was our aim, to turn people onto the blues.

“If we could turn them on to Muddy and Jimmy Reed and Howlin' Wolf and John Lee Hooker, then our job was done. That was our aim. That's the way you start off.”

Browse the Muddy Waters catalog here.

The Rolling Stones' 1969 U.S. Tour might have been the first rock 'n' roll tour of any real consequence.

“In 1969, they listened,” the former Stones bassist Bill Wyman says. “It was the first time that the audiences had actually listened to us.” 

Woodstock may be the musical event of 1969 that defined a generation, but the Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour set the standard for the future of rock 'n' roll concerts.

On November 27, 1969, the Stones played a show at New York’s Madison Square Garden, followed by two more the next day. Recordings curated from all three concerts soon made their way onto the band’s 1970 release, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert.

This classic album was the first live LP to reach the number one spot in the Stones’ native U.K. and is rumored to have been released in response to the popular Live'r Than You'll Ever Be bootleg recorded just weeks earlier in Oakland, California.

While ABKCO Records released a Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! box set containing 3 CDs and 1 DVD back in 2009, many Rolling Stones fans feel that this remastered version along with five previously unreleased tracks (including footage) from the second evening concert, plus performances by opening acts simply isn’t enough.

Consequently, super-fan Scott Sigel has organized an online petition requesting recordings from all three Madison Square Garden concerts be released.

A statement written by Sigel reads:

“We in the Stones fan-base community have longed to hear all three MSG shows (minus the excessive vocal/instrumental overdubs & extraneous editing) released in excellent quality in order to experience a true representation of being at a Rolling Stones concert in 1969!”

Meanwhile, rumors abound concerning the availability of video footage from all three concerts, with bootleg audio recordings promising distinctive performances from each.

“In conclusion,” continues Sigel, “what a better time to honor the 60th anniversary of the Rolling Stones as a working band by releasing the Madison Square Garden shows in their entirety when the band was playing at its zenith.”

If you want to jump onboard and sign the petition then simply head on over to change.org

Buy Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert here.

“I love the song for obvious reasons,” Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid says of “Cult of Personality,” the Grammy-winning alt-metal smash from the band’s 1988 debut, Vivid. “Sure, it’s our most popular song. What it did for our career is incalculable. And it’s had a lasting impact on the public. The lyric has a catchphrase that, while we didn’t coin it, has become more relevant over the years.

“But there’s another reason why I love it so much,” he adds. “When we wrote it, it was the best day in our collective life. As a group, we got out of our way and allowed ourselves to create. That’s why it’s special to me.”

“Look In My Eyes”

During their pre-label days in 1987, Living Colour – Reid, singer Corey Glover, drummer Will Calhoun and then-bassist Muzz Skillings – spent most days writing and rehearsing in a loft space in Bushwick, Brooklyn. One day, Glover started to sing a riff idea to Reid. “I really couldn’t get what he was doing,” Reid says, “but Muzz and I tried playing it, and we worked something up. Then we said to Will, ‘Can you put a beat to this?’ And in an eerie sort of way, the tune wrote itself.”

Once the band had a general framework for the song, Reid pulled out a notebook in which he wrote poems and lyric ideas. “I had this section: ‘Look in my eyes. What do you see? The cult of personality.’ It was musings on the amoral nature of leadership. Whether these people are good or bad, why are we drawn to larger-than-life personalities?”

As Reid recalls, Living Colour didn’t record demos for the song, but they field-tested it nine days later at a gig. “The arrangement wasn’t like it is on the record,” he says. “The bridge started the song, and the riff came in later. But something was there. The crowd definitely responded well. When I played the riff, you could see people got excited.”

The Producer Is Right

Mick Jagger was an early supporter of the band. Thanks to a demo tape he produced, Living Colour snagged a deal with Epic. A short time later, the group recorded at Skyline Studios with producer Ed Stasium, celebrated for his work with big-time New York bands like the Ramones and Talking Heads, among others. (Jagger produced two album cuts: “Glamour Boys” and “Which Way to America?”)

Reid credits Stasium with helping to untangle the song’s unruly arrangement. “Ed said, ‘Start out with the riff and don’t give the bridge away too soon,’” he says. “People hate to admit when the producer is right, but Ed definitely made the correct calls.”

The band only needed two or three takes to nail the basics, after which Reid set out to overdub a solo. “I didn’t have anything worked out,” he says. “Whenever we played the song live, I always improvised.” Using his main multi-colored ESP Mirage electric guitar through a Marshall JCM tube amp, he laid down a barnstorming first take that Stasium called “a keeper.” But Reid wasn’t satisfied, so he insisted on one more pass. “And that’s the solo everybody knows,” he says. “To this day, I hear people say, ‘It’s whack. It’s weird.’ Whatever. Personally, I love it.”

Sudden Fame

During mixing sessions, Reid had a sense that the song had hit potential. “Something just told me,” he says. “That’s why I pushed for it to open the album. It grabbed you.” Vivid was a slow builder, and after a first single, “Middle Man,” failed to ignite radio, the label released “Cult of Personality.”

As if flicking a light switch, everything changed: The song reached number nine on Billboard’s Hot 100, and the music video became a heavy-rotation MTV mainstay. Sales for Vivid soon exceeded double Platinum. “Nothing can prepare you for that kind of sudden rush of fame,” Reid says. “What you had previously imagined about success turns out to be totally different. I didn’t have anything to compare it to. It was like I was having an out-of-body experience.”

Through the years, “Cult of Personality” has been a staple of every Living Colour show, and Reid can’t fathom playing a gig without performing it. “Why would I?” he says. “It’s a great song, and I love playing it.” He laughs. “There’s a special place in hell for musicians who have a hit song that they despise, but you won’t find me there.”

Pick up a copy of Vivid here.

The great Keith Richards, electric guitar anchor for The Rolling Stones for 60 years now, turned 78 this past weekend (December 18).

Though legendary for his loose, rootsy guitar style and laid-back persona, Richards is a no-nonsense professional onstage, as one overzealous fan found out the hard way during the Stones' December 18, 1981 performance at the Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia.

During their high-energy rendition of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," a fan rushed the stage, making a beeline for the flag-clad Jagger. With balloons tumbling all around the stage, Richards saw the stage invader, immediately took off his Telecaster, and used it as a baseball bat to fend the fan off before the arrival of security. 

As you can see in the video below (the action starts at 1:10), Richards, amazingly, misses only a handful of bars before dutifully resuming his playing.

Coming on the heels of the band's chart-topping 1981 album, Tattoo You, the Stones' 1981 US tour grossed over $50 million, and was the most successful concert tour of that year.

Back in October, the Stones reissued Tattoo You with eight previously unreleased tracks that the band recorded in the months and years leading up to the album – newly completed and enhanced with additional vocals and guitar.

One of these songs, a cover of the Chi-Lites' "Troubles A’ Comin," was played live by the band for the first time at a September 20, 2021 private party organized by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. Notably, that concert was the group's first performance of any kind following the death of their longtime drummer, Charlie Watts. 

When Gibson launched the Hummingbird acoustic guitar during the folk revival in the early ‘60s it was aimed squarely at singer-songwriters. “Gibson’s Sensational New Flat Top Guitar… For those interested in owning one of the finest guitars ever made for voice accompaniment” reads the firm’s New ’61 Gibson Guitars & Amplifiers brochure.

By this stage, Gibson were a leading brand in the world of large-bodied flat-top acoustics. Competing with Martin’s Dreadnought design developed earlier in 1916 they had gone from strength to strength ever since their debut round-shouldered ‘dreadnought’ Jumbo appeared in 1934. “This greater body size produces a heavy, booming tone so popular today with many players,” reads Gibson’s 1934 catalog.

Developed in 1960, the Hummingbird was Gibson’s first square-shouldered dreadnought (although their Kalamazoo factory had been manufacturing the square-shouldered maple-bodied Epiphone Frontier dreadnought since 1958.)

While some rare 'Hummingdove' examples were made with maple backs and sides Gibson Hummingbirds are normally constructed using mahogany (neck/back/sides) and spruce (top). They are perhaps one of the more easily identifiable Gibson flat-tops on account of their L-7/ES-175/Southern Jumbo-style double-parallelogram fingerboard inlays and unique engraved pickguard depicting a hovering hummingbird.

Along with a striking cherry sunburst and gold hardware the Hummingbird was one of the fanciest flat-tops in the Gibson catalog – a guitar fit for rock royalty, no less. And in this clip from Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil filmed in 1968 at Olympic Studios, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger can both be seen playing this iconic guitar while they write the equally iconic Rolling Stones song.

Gibson currently offer the Hummingbird Standard in Vintage Sunburst as part of their Modern Acoustic range. Priced $3,849.00 this guitar is constructed with the traditional specifications of mahogany back & sides, spruce top, and mahogany neck with rosewood fingerboard, while an LR Baggs VTC pickup & preamp bring the design up to date.

The 4K restoration of Sympathy for the Devil is available now on DVD, Blu-ray and digital services here.

Last night, September 26, The Rolling Stones played in public for the first time since the death of their longtime drummer, Charlie Watts, last month. 

Taking the stage at The Dome at America's Center in St. Louis, Missouri with Steve Jordan (who has worked with Stones electric guitar legend Keith Richards for decades in the X-Pensive Winos) behind the kit, the band delighted the assembled masses with a 19-song set packed with hits, some new material, and a deep cut or two.

Before things kicked off though, the band – with the stage lights down – showed a tribute video celebrating Watts, who played with the band for 58 years, and was beloved for his cool, no-nonsense playing and demeanor. 

Before the band's third song of the night – the Exile on Main St. classic "Tumbling Dice" – frontman Mick Jagger, hand-in-hand with Richards and guitarist Ronnie Wood, offered another tribute to Watts. 

"This is our first tour we’ve done without him," Jagger said. "All the reaction from you guys, and all the things that you’ve said, have been really touching and we want to thank you all very much.

“We’ll miss Charlie so much both on the stage and off the stage.”

Prior to last night's show, The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World played a private, 14-song set as part of a party last week organized by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

That evening, the band covered The Chi-Lites' "Troubles a Comin'" for the first time ever, and played "19th Nervous Breakdown" live for the first time since 2005. 

The band also played their 2020 single, "Living in a Ghost Town," that evening, before giving the song its live-to-the-public debut in St. Louis. Other setlist highlights from the St. Louis show included a by-special-request performance of the classic ballad, "Wild Horses," and a rendition of Steel Wheels' "Slipping Away" with Richards on vocals. 

You can check out some fan-filmed footage of those songs below.

Watching this clip of Mick Taylor performing “Sympathy for the Devil” at Hyde Park – filmed 52 years ago today – evokes infinitely more sympathy for him than it does for the fallen angel himself. Complete with diabolic tuning and a supporting cast of Hells Angels, all hell breaks loose when hysterical fans begin invading the stage. Taylor, having now officially joined The Rolling Stones, was out of the proverbial frying pan and into the fire.

Barely in his 20s when he was recruited to replace The Rolling Stones’ ailing guitarist Brian Jones, this performance at Hyde Park was to be Taylor’s live debut with the band. It was, however, overshadowed by founding member Jones’ death just three days prior. 

Nevertheless, it was decided the show must go on, and as a tribute to their fallen comrade, a vast number of white butterflies were ‘released’ on stage. Unfortunately, rather than joyously fluttering from the confines of their boxes, many of those poor creatures simply flopped to the ground overcome by heat and exhaustion. 

It was not a good omen...

Added to the pressure of this being Taylor’s first public performance with The Rolling Stones was the fact that he found “the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world” to be shockingly under-rehearsed. “They sounded like a typical bunch of guys in a garage playing out of tune and too loudly,” he once remarked. Indeed, they had not performed in public for over two years. The estimated 250,000-500,000 attendees at Hyde Park probably did little to settle his nerves. 

Us guitar nerds will notice Taylor’s Bigsby-equipped Cherry Red SG-style early-‘60s Gibson Les Paul Standard. Taylor used the guitar on The Rolling Stones’ American tour later in the year before it was stolen in the early-'70s from the band's house in France.

Several other electric guitars disappeared during the theft, including this Gibson Flying V belonging to Keith Richards.

52 years after the event, this highly repeatable film shows a turning point in the band’s historical career, while its "Sympathy for the Devil" climax seems to distil the organised chaos of The Rolling Stones into one hugely entertaining clip. Despite everything, it’s hard to look away.

Rent and purchase the full-length film on DVD and Blue-ray here

It might have been the first rock and roll tour of any real consequence. Today, if it’s remembered at all, it’s usually for the body count left in its wake.  

But Bill Wyman recalls the Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour for a different reason. “In 1969, they listened,” the former Stones bassist says. “It was the first time that the audiences had actually listened to us.” 

Woodstock may be the musical event of 1969 that defined a generation, but the Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour set the standard for the future of rock and roll concerts. Launched in November of that year, a little more than two months after Woodstock, the cross-country jaunt isn’t regarded with the same reverence as the festival. 

Fans know it as the tour captured on the 1970 release Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, the Stones’ second live album and a favorite concert album among those who have sunk a needle into its grooves. 

But the group’s U.S. hitch not only changed how rock and roll shows were presented – it also showed a new way to finance them and make a profit, opening the door to the barnstorming extravaganzas launched by artists like Led Zeppelin, Yes, Elton John and others in the 1970s and the decades that followed.

It was, as Wyman notes, the start of a new time, when the fans stopped screaming and began to listen, as well as turn on and become immersed in the live-music experience.

Anyone who witnessed the British Invasion first-hand knows all too well how awful rock and roll concerts could be in the mid 1960s, when primitive sound systems were unable to project a band’s music above the noise of the crowd.

As a budding guitarist looking forward to a show from your favorite players, you’d have strained to hear their instruments, whose frequency range was well matched to that of the screaming girls.

You’d probably have trouble seeing the band too. Under the glare of stage lights or spots, acts played with little to no staging – no set, no props, no lighting effects. As performances went, it was as rudimentary as it could be.

After sitting through three or four opening acts, the band you’d shelled out your hard-earned allowance to see came onstage and played its hits for 20 to 30 minutes before abruptly departing. The Rolling Stones certainly knew the drill.

Their previous U.S. tour, in 1966, in support of their album Aftermath, opened in Lynn, Massachusetts, where 17,000 fans packed the Manning Bowl for the evening’s entertainment.

The outdoor show opened with the Mods, a local act who had won their spot through the promoter of a battle of the bands contest. They were followed by the McCoys, then riding high on their hit “Hang on Sloopy” and the Standells, the L.A. act whose breakthrough hit, “Dirty Water,” celebrated Boston, Lynn’s neighbor to the south.

The Stones’ set, consisting of a mere 10 songs, lasted just over 30 minutes. That was short enough, but the Manning Bowl show ended early when a rainstorm broke out. Teens stormed the stage, and the police responded with tear gas.

The Stones escaped to their limos and fled. “It was a bit of an outdoor crazy,” Mick Jagger recalls. ”It wasn’t well secured. A few people got a bit drunk. There were a few cops, and that was the end of it.”

“Things got a little blurry in the ’60s,” Keith Richards says. “Tear gas – that was the other continuous smell of the ’60s. I can’t say I miss it.”

But by the decade’s end, much had changed in music and the youth movement. Those screaming teens had grown up. Many were now out on their own, burning their draft cards, marching to protest the Vietnam War, experimenting with drugs and defining their own place in society.

Rock and roll had evolved as well, with bands like the Beatles introducing elements of spirituality in their music, while groups like the Stones met social and political issues head on.

Their 1968 hit “Street Fighting Man” had been embraced by youths in France, who fought in the streets of Paris that May for social reforms, and by young Americans protesting the Vietnam War at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August. Older and radicalized, rock and roll fans went to shows, smoked weed, or took something stronger, and actually listened to the music.

Unfortunately, the new arenas and civic auditoriums that began dotting the U.S. landscape in the latter half of the 1960s weren’t suited to rock shows. Vast, with seating for 10 to 20 thousand attendees, they were ill-equipped to handle musical events, their underpowered public-address systems designed for sporting events rather than sold-out concerts.

Fans furthest from the stage weren’t only deprived of the music – the performance itself looked like a distant skirmish under the floodlights.

Remarkably, England’s Rolling Stones would provide the solution to this uniquely American problem. By 1969, nearly three years had passed since the group’s 1966 tour, their last in the United States. At that time, they, along with the Beatles and Bob Dylan, made up pop music’s Big Three.

But the Beatles had stopped performing and were in the midst of breaking up, while Dylan was a recluse in Woodstock. Somehow, the Rolling Stones were still standing, and with a new guitarist in tow – John Mayall’s young blues protégé Mick Taylor – they were ready to claim the field for themselves.

This time they wanted a spectacle – a show that was bigger and louder than before, with proper sound reinforcement and set design. 

They hired lighting designer Chip Monck – who lit Monterey Pop and as Woodstock’s emcee warned the festival’s flower children away from the “brown acid” – to create a set that they would haul from stage to stage. They brought their own P.A. system and mixing board, and drafted recording engineer Glyn Johns to run sound and record the shows.

They didn’t trust local promoters, so they chose their own opening acts, bringing along English guitarist and vocalist Terry Reid, and booking a trio of show-stopping American acts: the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, B.B. King and, a guitarist who was like a god to them, Chuck Berry. Significantly, the Stones booked every show themselves, eliminating middlemen and ensuring themselves maximum profits.

Above all, they wanted to perform. No more 30 minutes of hits. The 1969 American tour saw the Rolling Stones play for an average of 75 minutes each show, with many concerts lasting past midnight. 

Everything was designed to draw the audience into the act. Monck designed a proscenium stage backlit with lights that changed color to suit the songs’ moods, and concealed the speaker towers by draping them in grey cloth. 

At the center of it all, on a purple carpet with a white starburst center, Mick Jagger led the Rolling Stones – Richards, Taylor, Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts – through the set like a ringmaster, dressed in black trousers with silver buttons down the legs, a metal-studded belt, a black scoop-necked jersey with a white Leo glyph on the chest, a flowing red scarf, and a red, white and blue Uncle Sam top hat.

The 1969 American tour didn’t just reassert the Rolling Stones as a powerhouse rock and roll band – it also changed expectations of what a rock and roll show should be, how it should be run, and the production standards required. 

It’s here that the modern music concert tour began. And it’s here that the Rolling Stones’ legend as “the greatest rock and roll band in the world” – as tour manager Sam Cutler introduced them each night – begins. 

But getting to this point wasn’t easy. By the time the tour launched on November 7, in Fort Collins, Colorado, one of the Stones’ own would be in the grave. The jaunt itself would see Jagger and Richards slip further into hard-drug use. And when it was over in early December, a cloud of death hung over what should have been a celebration. 

The Rolling Stones had always been one of rock and roll’s most exciting live acts, but by 1969, they were rarely seen onstage anymore. Since the group’s 1967 European tour, they had made one public appearance, at the 1968 NME Poll Winners Concert, not including their own Rock and Roll Circus concert from December 1968 before an invitation-only audience. The reason was down to drugs.

Jagger, Richards and Stones co-founder Brian Jones had all been charged with offenses. But whereas Jagger’s three-month sentence for possession of amphetamine tablets was reduced to a conditional discharge – essentially an order to “keep your nose clean” – and Richards’ conviction for allowing pot to be smoked on his property was overturned on appeal, Jones was not nearly so lucky.

Police had discovered cannabis and hard drugs at the multi-instrumentalist’s home during a raid in May 1967.

The following May, while still on probation, he was arrested again after a second raid at his flat turned up hash. Jones was found guilty, but the judge, believing the jury prejudiced, refused to jail the guitarist and instead fined him £50, about $890 today.

Though Jones had avoided jail, his second drug bust made it impossible for him to get a U.S. work visa, dashing the Stones’ hopes of touring in America. But his days with the group were already numbered. 

Though he had been the band’s original leader, Jones’ authority diminished once Jagger and Richards became a successful songwriting duo. As his drug use increased and his mental state became more fragile, Jones missed gigs and recording dates.

A few years earlier, he and Richards had been among the tightest of guitar tandems.

“Brian and Keith had this guitar thing like you wouldn’t believe,” Ian “Stu” Stewart, the band’s co-founder and behind-the-scenes keyboardist, told Stanley Booth, author of The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. “There was never any suggestion of a lead and a rhythm guitar player. They were two guitar players that were like somebody’s right and left hands.” 

But at least since the Stones’ psychedelic-rock opus, 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request, Jones had played guitar less frequently.

On the group’s followup, 1968’s Beggar’s Banquet, he contributed slide and acoustic guitar, Mellotron, tambura and sitar, leaving Richards to perform all the other guitar parts. By the time the Stones began recording 1969’s Let It Bleed, they didn’t even expect Jones to attend the sessions.

He showed up for the recording of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” asking Jagger, “What can I play?” “I don’t know, Brian,” Jagger replied. “What can you play?” “I enjoyed his company, and I tried incredibly hard, in 1966, to pull him back into the group,” Richards told Rolling Stone in 2010. “He was flying off. But my attempts to bring Brian back into focus were a total failure.” 

While the Stones could work around Jones in the studio, they couldn’t do without a second guitarist onstage. They briefly considered replacing him for the U.S. tour with Eric Clapton, but in the end, the Stones faced up to the inevitable.

On June 8, Jagger, Richards and Watts drove to Jones’ home, Cotchford Farm, the former estate of Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne, to deliver the news. “Mick and I didn’t fancy the gig,” Richards wrote in his 2010 memoir, Life. “But we drove down together and said, ‘Hey, Brian… It’s all over, pal.’”

By then, the Stones had found his replacement: 20-year-old Mick Taylor. Despite his youth, Taylor had already distinguished himself in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, taking over from Peter Green, Clapton’s successor, in 1967, at the tender age of 18. A fine blues guitarist, Taylor was blessed with a jazzman’s sensibilities, his remarkably melodic lead work streaked with shades of modal playing.

It was Mayall and Ian Stewart who suggested Taylor to Jagger and Richards. Certainly, Richards knew Taylor – he’d sold him his 1959 Les Paul Standard back in 1967 when Taylor had joined the Bluesbreakers.

The Stones had taken the young guitarist onboard even before they let Jones go: Though many sources pin the date to June 1969, Taylor’s first recording with the Stones was on “Live With Me,” which was recorded May 24, two weeks before Jones was fired.

“‘Live With Me’ was the very first track I ever played on,” Taylor recalls, “when they were putting the finishing touches to Let It Bleed. We actually recorded that the night I went for my audition at Olympic Studios, or maybe the night after.

“I remember [producer] Jimmy Miller jumping up and down in the control room and getting all excited about how good it sounded, having two guitars playing off each other. Because I think they’d missed that with Brian Jones in the two-year hiatus since their last live performance.

“The Stones actually hadn’t played together for a long time, so when I joined them it was like a new beginning. It was a new phase in their career. A new chapter.”

To kick it off, the Stones had agreed to play a free concert in London’s Hyde Park on July 5. The timing was good: Their new single, “Honky Tonk Women,” featuring the lead guitar work of both Richards and Taylor, was scheduled to be released the day before.

The Hyde Park concert would be an opportunity to show off their new lineup and put some publicity behind the song. But the Stones’ previous chapter was still being written.

Sometime around midnight on July 2-3, Brian Jones was found dead in the swimming pool at Cotchford Farm. Before the sun had risen, the news made its way through the Stones’ camp and into the morning news. Richards recalls that the band members were in the studio when they heard about it.

“There exists one minute and 30 seconds of us recording ‘I Don’t Know Why,’ a Stevie Wonder song, interrupted by the phone call telling us of Brian’s death,” he wrote.

Mick Taylor’s arrival in the Stones marked the start of a new era and sound for the Rolling Stones. Though Jones was a talented guitarist, soloist and multi-instrumentalist, Taylor was in a different league.

His muscular lead-guitar style fit their new blues-rock direction and brought a level of bravura to their ranks at a time when guitar virtuosity was on the rise in rock and roll. 

“I was in awe sometimes, listening to Mick Taylor,” Richards wrote. “Everything was there in his playing – the melodic touch, a beautiful sustain and a way of reading a song.” Taylor’s melodicism proved a perfect counterpoint to Richards’ own recently adopted style. 

In March 1969, during the making of Let It Bleed, the group had recorded “Sister Morphine,” a track destined for 1971’s Sticky Fingers, with Ry Cooder playing slide. Richards was taken with Cooder’s use of open-G tuning and adopted it as standard for his guitar work, eliminating his low E string in the process.

“I met Ry in 1968, when he was hanging around with Taj Mahal and Jesse Ed Davis,” Richards told Guitar. “Ry was using open G for slide. I saw him and thought, That’s a really nice tuning. It restricts you so much: five strings, three notes, two fingers… one asshole!”

With their reconstituted lineup and tough new guitar sound, the Stones were eager to get back onstage. The fans were clamoring for it. Seven years into their career, the Stones sounded better than ever. Just as important, they were still relevant.

As rock and roll’s bad boys, they had always had an element of danger about them, but it was more overt on their newer material, like “Sympathy for the Devil,” the Beggars Banquet opener, on which Jagger adopted Satan’s persona to implicate humanity in the world’s sins, placing the weight of social responsibility on the shoulders of the Stones’ young radicalized listeners. 

On the album’s flipside, “Street Fighting Man” offered a model for how to effect the change necessary to liberate a world stuck in the ways of the past and running headlong to its own destruction.

The Stones had won the love of politically minded youths with those songs, but Jagger glimpsed what was to come as early as 1967, when they played Warsaw, Poland, bringing rock and roll to Communist Eastern Europe.

“Teenagers are not screaming over pop music anymore,” he told Stanley Booth. “They’re screaming for much deeper reasons. When I’m onstage, I sense that the teenagers are trying to communicate to me, like by telepathy, a message of some urgency. Not about me or about our music, but about the world and the way they live. And I see a lot of trouble coming in the dawn.”

In September, the Stones began making plans for their month-long jaunt across America. Following an off-circuit gig on November 7 at Colorado State University’s 8,745-seat Moby Gymnasium, the tour would commence in earnest.

The itinerary would take the show from Los Angeles up to Oakland, across to Phoenix, down to Dallas and over to Alabama, before heading north to Chicago and east to Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York City and Boston, the final stop.

As shows sold out in the larger cities, the Stones added second shows, though Mick Jagger, ever cautious about the cost, warned, “We won’t play if there’s a single empty seat.”

The Rolling Stones wanted to control everything, from signing up and paying the opening acts to designing the production. “There was one minor problem, though,” said Ronnie Schneider, the tour’s manager. “We had no money, nothing.”

The William Morris Agency had signed on to book the tour, but the Stones’ preeminence made its role moot. In the end, William Morris put up just $15,000 “to finance a half-million-dollar tour,” Schneider says. “To pay for the construction of the set, the stage, the lights, to guarantee the acts, to do everything. It was a very funny moment.”

But Schneider came up with a solution that was revolutionary. In his scheme, the Stones – or rather, their new company, Rolling Stones Promotions – would receive, upfront, 50 percent of each venue’s gross box-office receipts, which would be used to fund the tour.

Jagger’s insistence on sold-out shows wasn’t about ego but to generate demand for future shows to keep the tour running. For the scheme to work, they’d need to sell out the first five dates. “Any problem with any of them and the shit was hitting the fan,” Schneider said.

Not only did the gambit work – it changed how bands financed tours, allowing them to launch ever-greater spectacles. Schneider also led the way by taking over managing rights related to all aspects of the tour, including posters, T-shirts and programs, eliminating freelance merchandisers and greatly improving the Stones’ finances.

But all was not well in this new world of mega shows. Soon after the tour was announced, fans began to complain about the size of the venues and ticket prices. Rolling Stone noted that tickets for the Los Angeles Forum show ranged in price from $5.50 to $8.50, whereas the same arena had charged $3.50 to $7.50 for Blind Faith and $3.50 to $6.50 for the Doors.

Writing in The San Francisco Chronicle, Rolling Stone founding editor Ralph Gleason took the Stones to task for asking fans to pay more to see them perform in less-intimate settings. 

“Paying five, six and seven dollars for a Stones concert at the Oakland Coliseum for, say, an hour of the Stones seen a quarter of a mile away...says a very bad thing to me about the artists’ attitude towards the public,” Gleason wrote. “It says they despise their own audience.” 

Gleason’s words stung the band. Confronted about the matter at the tour’s first U.S. press conference, Jagger left the door open to playing a free concert when the jaunt was over. 

Weeks later, in New York City, he confirmed the group would headline a free show in the San Francisco area. Why San Francisco? 

“Because there’s a scene there,” Jagger replied. “And the weather’s nice.” 

From London, the group flew to Los Angeles in October to begin rehearsing and preparing for the tour. Immediately, the members split into different residences. 

Bill Wyman and his wife rented a home, while Charlie Watts, with his wife and child in tow, stayed in a large hotel-like home on Oriole Street – dubbed Oriole House – where the group’s entourage of staff members and handlers oversaw preparations for the tour. Jagger, Richards and Taylor found privacy at Stephen Stills’ house in Laurel Canyon.

The abode gave Jagger and Richards a place to work on tunes for the group’s next album, and afforded Richards and Taylor a chance to work out their arrangements for the songs selected for the tour. The home’s cramped coffin-shaped basement also doubled as the band’s practice space.

“We did some rehearsals,” Wyman recalls. “We didn’t do a lot. You know what the Stones are like. It was mostly party time.” Mick Taylor, new to this world, was shocked to find the Stones’ sound so “ragged.”

“I thought, How do these guys make such great records when they’re so sloppy and spontaneous? But it was because they had this great chemistry.”

Developing the set list proved more difficult than they’d imagined. While the stylistic differences between the new guitar duo made for some great interplay – Richard’s jagged double-stop riffing against Taylor’s sinewy blues lines – it made playing most of the old hits impossible without some degree of reinterpretation.

From the Stones’ deep back catalog, only three songs – “Under My Thumb,” “I’m Free” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” – were dusted off and recalibrated for the new lineup. Mostly, the band focused on their latest hit singles – “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Honky Tonk Women” – and cuts from Beggar’s Banquet and the still-unreleased Let It Bleed.

The bluesier country stylings of those albums gave Taylor plenty of room to stretch out and play bottleneck slide, something Jones was also adept at, though not with the same burning intensity. 

For good measure, they tossed in a couple of Chuck Berry standards – “Carol” and “Little Queenie” – to showcase Keith’s driving double-stop riffs. Unfortunately, Stills’ basement was too small to hold rehearsals with full gear.

Through their connections, the Stones secured an unused soundstage at Warner Bros. studio lot. The building chosen for them had served as the main set for director Sydney Pollack’s 1969 Depression-era drama They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, starring Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin as a couple who compete in a grueling dance marathon for the chance to win $1,500. 

Though filming had been completed, the film’s elegant 1930s-style ballroom set was still up when the Stones arrived. Above it hung a large scoreboard that, in the film, shows how many hours have elapsed in the marathon and the number of couples still standing. 

“How Long Will They Last?” read a legend at the top of the board. For the Stones, binging on drugs and rushing headlong into a tour for which they were unprepared, the question was perversely appropriate.

For the short tour, Richards and Taylor were well equipped with guitars and amps. According to gear expert Andy Babiuk, Richards’ main guitars were his prototype Ampeg Dan Armstrong Plexiglas and a 1958 Gibson Les Paul Custom he’d purchased earlier that year. His other guitars on the tour included his 1969 Gibson ES-355TD-SV stereo electric and the 1959 Les Paul Standard he’d sold to Mick Taylor in early 1967.

In addition, Richards brought a 1930s National Style O resonator, which he used when performing “Prodigal Son” and “You Gotta Move” with Jagger in the show’s short acoustic set, and a Martin D12-20, a dreadnought-sized 12-string, fitted with a DeArmond soundhole pickup.

As for Taylor, he mainly used his Cherry Red 1961 Gibson Les Paul SG, whose “sideways” tremolo unit he’d replaced with a Bigsby B-5. He also occasionally used the ES-355TD-SV and his ’59 ’Burst for slide, as well as his 1958 Les Paul Standard. For amps, both guitarists were provided an arsenal of Ampeg’s new prototype SVT – Solid Vacuum Tube – amps. 

The Stones had shipped their Hiwatts from England, but the amps were damaged after they arrived stateside. Ian Stewart, who recalled that the group had used an Ampeg B-15 Porta-flex “flip-top” amp in its early recording sessions, contacted the manufacturer in New Jersey, and the company quickly sent along a truckfull of SVT prototypes, along with some ST-42 4x12 guitar cabinets from Ampeg’s solid-state line.

Designed as bass amps, the SVTs put out a whopping 300 watts, prompting Ampeg to place a warning label on early models. A dozen prototypes were built, most of which were loaned to the Stones.

The Ampegs were first used when the group moved to the Warner Bros. soundstage, although photos from those sessions show Taylor using several Fender Twin Reverbs. On tour, he, like Richards, performed before an impressive wall of SVTs.

Unfortunately, the prototype SVTs hadn’t been field tested, making Richards and Taylor unwitting guinea pigs in the amp’s development. Ampeg sent a pair of techs to maintain them, along with five additional backup units.

Not only were the amps not designed for electric guitar but Richards and Taylor were using two or three simultaneously. The techs would sit onstage, behind the amps, and watch the tube plates for signs of overheating, then swap out an amp before it blew. They weren’t always successful.

At the Oakland Coliseum on November 9, the second date of the tour, Richards’ amp failed during the intro to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the second song of the show.

He and Jagger quickly switched to the acoustic portion of the set while the situation was remedied, but when Richards plugged back into the amp, it blew again, causing him to smash his Les Paul Custom in anger.

The Grateful Dead, who were working with the Stones on arranging the free concert in San Francisco, came to the rescue by loaning their amps for the remainder of the show.

The tour was well received by fans and the press throughout its run, although critics noted early on that the opening acts – particularly B.B. King and the Ike & Tina Turner Revue – were remarkably more polished than the Stones.

“At the beginning of the tour, the band was rusty,” Sam Cutler told photographer Ethan Russell for Let It Bleed, Russell’s photobook of the tour. “When I first called them ‘the greatest rock and roll band in the world,’ I meant it sarcastically. In a way, the slogan made them work harder right from the start.”

By the time the circus rolled into New York City’s Madison Square Garden for the November 27 and 28 dates, the Stones were deadly. It’s from these performances that the group culled the tracks for Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, with one song – their affecting cover of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” – taken from the November 26 show at Baltimore’s Civic Center.

The Stones’ tough new sound and attitude are evident right from the album’s opening cut. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was the hot hit the band would have toured on had they been on the road when it was released in the summer of 1968. More than a year later, it was a hard-wearing fan favorite.

The band plays it faster on the live album, and in the key of B, whereas the single sounds slightly flat of the key of B flat. And while, on the studio version, Bill Wyman holds down a pedal point on the verses, he plays along with the guitar riff on the live cut, eliminating the single’s hip-swinging groove and making the song a foot-stomping blues-rock number, a genre shift underscored by Taylor’s delicious climbing lead lines on the song’s chorus.

Taylor mostly lays back on the next track, Berry’s “Carol,” giving Richards room to display his classic rock and roll chops. Though he mostly shadows Richards’ rhythm work, the young guitarist steps out on the song’s signature riff, playing bluesy descending lead lines that add interest. 

He gets a chance to show his stuff on “Stray Cat Blues,” squeezing fast, stinging lead lines from his guitar during the song’s numerous instrumental breaks. This funky Beggar’s Banquet cut gets new life here. 

Taken at a slower and bluesier pace, and with a less busy arrangement, the live version draws much of its power from Jagger’s sexually charged vocals. His singing on the studio version is loose and strung out, but on the live album he taunts, pleads, threatens and reprimands as he expounds on his proposition, imbuing it with a menacing authenticity the studio version lacks. 

The fact that the song is about seducing a child – 15 years old on Beggar’s Banquet, reduced to 13 in concert – makes his aggressive performance all the more disturbing. Taylor’s first big moment in the spotlight comes on “Love in Vain,” where he switches to his 1959 ’Burst and takes up his slide.

The Stones recorded this Robert Johnson track for Let It Bleed earlier that year, adapting it as a country blues, complete with mandolin, but here it takes on a worn-in urban melancholy, demonstrating how far they’d already progressed as interpreters of classic blues. 

The sessions for that album were not far behind them, but on this November 26 evening in Baltimore, they sound like they’ve endured miles of hard road.

The next night, backstage at Madison Square Garden, Jagger would learn that his girlfriend was leaving him and his lover was pregnant with his child, but in Baltimore he sings the tune as if he’s had a vision of the trouble ahead.

Richards’ lovely, arpeggiating guitar work sets the mood for the singer’s lament, but it’s Taylor who expresses the song’s loss and anguish in his slide work, each perfectly chosen and articulated note dancing along its nerve. Simply stellar, “Love in Vain” is one of the best representations of the Rolling Stones’ power as a live act at this stage in their career.

From there, it’s on to what has to be the definitive version of “Midnight Rambler.” The song was unknown to audiences at the time, but at Madison Square Garden they responded reflexively to its shifting moods and momentum, demonstrating how completely the Stones had them in their hands. 

Mid-song, the band breaks down the beat, giving Richards and Taylor an opportunity to trade-off licks while Jagger scats. The crowd is amped up, howling, needing an outlet for its agitation. 

And it comes: “Well, you’ve heard about the Boston,” Jagger snarls, and the band slams the downbeat, prompting one amazed fan to cry out, “God-damn!”

During the song, Jagger would take off his studded belt and use it to whip the stage, “The moment you saw the belt fall, you could actually hear the crowd go, ‘Ahhh!’” Chip Monck recalls. “That’s when you know you got it. That’s when it’s real.” The song rides out on Taylor’s insistent riffing, and by the time it’s over, nine minutes after it began, the exhausted audience is roaring for more.

As with “Midnight Rambler,” a crowd member gets a cameo on “Sympathy for the Devil,” with a stoned female fan calling insistently for an oldie but goodie. “‘Paint It Black’! ‘Paint It Black,’ you devil!” she demands in vain as the Stones kick into their Beggar’s Banquet hit. 

The sinewy Latin feel of the original is abandoned for a boogie-rock rhythm that’s more in keeping with the show’s road-worn vibe. Richards plays his lead lines with a cocaine-fueled itch, relying on nerves and muscle memory as he builds the song to its first peak. 

From there, Taylor steals the show, testing the water with country-blues riffs before cutting loose, to the obvious satisfaction of Jagger, who yells his approval and relinquishes the spotlight to the young guitarist. Taylor has one of his finest moments on “Sympathy for the Devil,” lifting the song to new heights.

Richards turns in his signature riffing and lead work on “Live With Me,” the standout Let It Bleed track that marked Taylor’s debut with the group. The Stones attack the song with fury and efficiency, driving its irresistible rhythm with a solid performance that goes straight for the jugular. 

From there, it’s onto the second Chuck Berry song of the night, “Little Queenie,” a fun, midtempo rocker that the Stones dispatch with druggy punk attitude. Watts has trouble finding the “one,” and Richards’ can’t seem to shake off the riff nagging in his fret hand. 

Ian Stewart’s boogie-woogie piano lines and Jagger’s playful delivery carry the song aloft, but it’s an otherwise uninspired turn. Likewise, “Honky Tonk Women,” the Stones’ most recent hit and certainly a standout moment in the band’s 1969 set, is played too strictly to the original recording, and too slow at that. 

The same can’t be said of the album’s thunderous closing track, “Street Fighting Man.” Like “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” it’s stripped of its pop pretensions and flayed with proto-punk fury, the Stones riding it like a tank over enemy lines and flattening everything in its path.

Throughout the show, Glyn Johns sat in a rented Hertz truck three floors below Madison Square Garden, at ground level, capturing every moment of the shows on tape. 

“I was in the truck,” he recalls, “and at one point – probably at the end of the show – I thought there were people stomping on the roof, because the whole bloody truck was bouncing up and down. “So I jump out and I look around. But there’s nobody on top of the truck. The whole building, all of Madison Square Garden above me, was moving. I was petrified.”

Had the Rolling Stones headed home after the tour wrapped in Boston, the furor over ticket prices likely would have died down, snuffed out by the release of Let It Bleed one week later, on December 5. Instead, they spent their last week in America making nice with their fans and recording tracks for their next album at Muscle Shoals. 

The first stop was the West Palm Beach International Music and Arts Festival, on November 30, in Jupiter, Florida. The Sunshine State’s attempt at a Woodstock-style event, the festival featured Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, the Byrds and several other rock groups, with the Stones scheduled as the closing act.

Rain and a badly timed cold front made the event uncomfortable for fans, and transportation issues delayed the Stones’ arrival by 11 hours. They finally took the stage at 4 a.m. From Florida, the group headed to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, hoping to capture some of their newfound fire on tape. 

Over three days, they cut three tracks – their new songs “Wild Horses” and “Brown Sugar,” along with the traditional Black spiritual “You Gotta Move” – all of which were destined for their next studio album, 1971’s Sticky Fingers. And then it was onward to San Francisco and the Saturday, December 6 free concert they’d been railroaded into headlining. 

From the start, the organizers had trouble finding a location. San Jose State University’s practice field, the site of an earlier three-day free festival, was selected, but the city, still reeling from that event, refused to issue the necessary permits. 

Golden Gate Park was up for consideration, but an NFL football game at Kezar Stadium, situated in the park, on the same day made the location unsuitable. 

Sears Point Raceway, in Sonoma, was selected, but the venue’s owner, the television and film production company Filmways, Inc., wanted the Stones to put up $300,000 cash as a deposit. The company also demanded distribution rights for a concert film of the event.

On December 4, with just two days to spare, the Altamont Raceway, in Tracy, 70 miles east of San Francisco, was selected. The festival would open with West Coast groups – Santana, Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Grateful Dead and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – while the Stones served as the closing act.

With memories of Woodstock still fresh, the organizers anticipated a peaceful concert, which is perhaps why no one thought it a bad idea to hire members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club to help out.

The Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead had suggested having them on hand, and the Stones concurred. It probably helped that they had enlisted a British group of motorbike fans called the Hells Angels to provide security the previous June at their Hyde Park show, where Mick Taylor made his official debut as a member of the band. 

For the promise of $500 in beer, the Hells Angels agreed to keep fans from climbing onto the Altamont’s makeshift stage, which was just one meter high, and provide assistance to attendees, such as giving directions to bathrooms and medical tents. 

The concert started out fine, with Santana turning in an inspired set. But as the day progressed, the Angels got drunker, while the young attendees grew more stoned and unruly. The bikers frequently waded into the throng, swinging fists, pool cues and motorcycle chains, to drive back fans or take down flailing, strung-out revelers.

When Jefferson Airplane’s Marty Balin attempted to break up a scuffle, one of the Angels punched the singer, knocking him out. The Grateful Dead had been scheduled to play between CSN&Y and the Stones, but when they arrived and learned what had happened to Balin, they panicked and fled.

By the time the Stones went on, darkness had fallen and some 5,000 fans were swarming the front of the stage. Jagger, who’d been punched in the face by an attendee when he first arrived, implored the crowd to “cool out.”

They began playing “Sympathy for the Devil” but stopped when the Angels launched another skirmish. “The violence was incredible,” Richards recalls. “I thought the show would have been stopped, but hardly anybody wanted to take any notice.”

The Stones continued to play, having little recourse and hoping the performance would keep the crowd from becoming more chaotic. They launched into “Under My Thumb,” but as Jagger began singing, another fight broke out. 

A young man in a lime-green suit was seen tangling with some Hells Angels, when he suddenly pulled a revolver from his jacket. The bikers descended. Hells Angel Alan Passaro reportedly stabbed the man five times with a large knife, while the others stomped him and left him to die. 

Attendees carried his limp body to a medical tent, but 18-year-old Meredith Hunter succumbed to his injuries, one of four people who died that day at Altamont.

After the shock of Altamont, the Rolling Stones had given little thought to releasing an album from their U.S. jaunt. But in December, shortly after the tour’s conclusion, a bootleg of their troubled November 9 Oakland Coliseum show began making the rounds at head shops and independent record stores. 

Titled Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be, it was one of the earliest commercially sold bootleg albums, along with Kum Back, featuring session recordings from the Beatles’ yet-unreleased Let It Be project, and Great White Wonder, offering uncollected recordings of Dylan’s performances from 1961 through his 1967 sessions with the Band. 

The Stones’ bootleg sold very well, which may have influenced the group to release a concert record of its own. Ethan Russell, the tour’s trusted photographer, was hired to shoot its cover. 

He created a still life consisting of Jagger’s Uncle Sam top hat and various other elements of his stage costume, along with his passport and odds and ends. Prominently positioned on the hat’s brim was a fat white joint. Jagger, still smarting from the band’s drug busts, looked at the photo in disbelief. “Didn’t you shoot any without the joint?” he asked. Russell had not.

In early February, Charlie Watts was dispatched to a section of the M6 motorway in Birmingham, England, along with a donkey and pieces of the Stones’ gear, including Keith Richards’ Ampeg Dan Armstrong guitar and Mick Taylor’s 1958 Les Paul ’Burst.

He was photographed in his white stage clothes, wearing Mick Jagger’s top hat, and leaping into the air while holding the guitars aloft. Shot by David Bailey, the photo was inspired by the line “Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule,” from Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna.”

On Watts’ T-shirt, an image of a woman’s bare breasts provided a visual reference for the album’s title, itself derived from the Blind Boy Fuller tune “Get Your Ya Yas Out,” though in Fuller’s song, ya yas is a euphemism for ass. 

The Stones, as always, had no qualms about pushing the limits. Released on September 4, 1970, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! quickly became a hit, reaching Number One in the U.K. and Number Six in the U.S., where it eventually went Platinum.

Critics praised it, with Rolling Stones’ Lester Bangs saying, “I have no doubt that it’s the best rock concert ever put on record.” 

But for all its success, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, along with the tour that gave birth to it and the innovations the Rolling Stones brought to rock and roll’s live music scene, lie in the shadow of what Keith Richards called “the terrible murder going on in front of us.”“Altamont,” he said in 1971. “It could only happen to the Stones.”

The Rolling Stones have premiered a new song, "Living In A Ghost Town." The all-too-timely track is the band's first new, original song since 2012.

"Living In A Ghost Town" is said to date back over a year, with the band recently deciding to revisit, update and flesh out the track, given its themes and their correlation with our current reality.

You can check out the song's eerie music video below.

"It wasn't written for now but it was written about being in a place which was full of life. And then now there's all bereft of life, so to speak," Mick Jagger told Zane Lowe on Apple Music. 

"And when I went back to what I'd written originally lyrically, it was all full of, well I didn't use them in the lyrics, it was all full of plague terms and things like that. I never actually used that, but it was all there. It was very close to the times that we're living through now.

"It's a strange thing, you know what I mean?" added Richards. "But it's just something that happens between Mick and me without us having to really think about it. 

"Mick had come up with a song and we recorded it over a year ago, I think last February in LA. It's sort of eerie when suddenly it's coming to life, I mean the ghost comes to life."

The Rolling Stones' last album of original material came all the way back in 2005, with A Bigger Bang. They released an album of blues covers, Blue & Lonesome, in 2016.