| September 1st, 2005 03:31 AM |
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| UGot2Rollme |
reprinted from Detroit Free Press / RS.com:
Transcript of the Rolling Stones interview
The band's Keith Richards and Mick Jagger each talked last week with Free Press pop music writer Brian McCollum. They were fresh off a pair of shows at Boston's Fenway Park, opening nights on the Stones' latest U.S. tour.
KEITH RICHARDS
Free Press: I imagine there's got to be some moment at the start of a tour when it kind of hits you that, "Wow, here we are again, and here are all these people again." What's the feeling like when you're first getting back out there?
Richards: It's kind of strange. I've thought about this sometimes. Everybody has their own individual reaction to it, and at the same time there has to be also this collective reaction as well. So I can't talk for anybody else. But in a way, the tension builds up, which other people like to call butterflies -- I don't. Whatever you call it, mine builds up to the point where, "Come on, guys, time to let the tigers out of the cage. Open up, I'm ready to go, let's see what the world has to offer," so to speak. But that's still just a version of what people like to call butterflies. Although I've actually never felt that feeling, except in late nights in johns where I've taken something really bad for me, you know. (Laughs)
The first cut is the deepest; the first show is the hardest. That's where you find out if all the things you've put together -- the stage, the sound, the lighting, the actual songs -- this is the first time they all come together in one thing. So you feel like this could all fall apart like a paper moon! You're not expecting it to, but there is that whole (fear of), will all the bits work properly -- the new B stage, the new machinery. There's so many variables that have to come together in a couple of hours. Once that's gone down, well then, a sort of amazing well of confidence seems to exude. Not just from the band, but from the whole crew, from everybody -- the caterers and the wardrobe.
It's a circus we're traveling with. Even the bearded lady likes it! (Laughs)
Free Press: You've been doing this so long, so much of this has to be second nature to you at this point. But are there still things to discover in these songs, in terms of your guitar playing, in terms of the band's performance together?
Richards: It's exactly like that. The fact that you've done it many times before doesn't mean you can't make the next one better. And that's exactly what this band goes out there to do -- "If you thought that was good, we can do it better next time." And yeah, the fact that we've done it so many times only means the machinery is moving smooth. It gives you the opportunity to poke a little bit further into the song or try a different nuance and tempo -- that's exactly what it's about. I'd have never thought it in the early days, but we're actually dedicated, man. I can't put another word on it. If we're gonna do it, we'd better do it better than ever. And that's kind of the feeling that's rolling around right now.
Free Press: You talk about smooth-running machinery. But this is rock 'n' roll, where things have to get a little dirty, right?
Richards: Yeah, you've got to keep room for surprises. You can't over-rehearse. You can't do these sort of things of knowing exactly where every beat falls. Because, I mean, rock 'n' roll still is an offshoot of jazz as well. As you know, Charlie Watts is a fan. There's a lot of jazzers in our band, and quite honestly it's probably more of a jazz band than anyone would want to admit, in the fact that we do leave room for interpretation.
Nobody, I don't think, plays the same song twice the same. In efforts to try to get it better, you might overstretch yourself occasionally. But there's plenty of room to maneuver within these songs. I mean, I'm still finding notes in new places. "Jumping Jack Flash" -- I don't think I've ever exhausted. But I can exhaust me! (Laughs)
Free Press: Have there been points in the Stones' career when perhaps things did get a bit too smooth, too streamlined?
Richards: I know what you mean. I've no doubt there were in the '70s -- probably more in the '80s. We were sort of feeding a machine rather than controlling it. Stoking, rather than deciding what came out of the furnace.
It's just a feeling, because the thing keeps getting bigger. To us, this isn't just doing another big tour. Every time you do one, things have changed, technologies have changed, possibilities have changed, people have changed. It's really rolling with the changes and trying to put it all together.
We're just as bemused as most other people at a Rolling Stones show. "What's gonna happen next?" "Well, I can't tell you either -- hopefully it'll be good!" (Laughs)
You never stop learning. It's never the same thing. As I was saying to the guys the other day -- here we go, it's like Columbus again! It's another adventure, another trip into the unknown. Cast off!
Free Press: Looking back at your life as a guitar player, how have your technique and approach to the instrument changed -- say, 2005 next to 1965?
Richards: In '65, I was still trying to emulate. Coming up with some ideas, but basically I'm approaching every song like, "I'm gonna play like him, or him, or him" -- my heroes, the guys that you learn from and listen to. It was kind of fractured. ... You don't have time to think about that in 1965. They sort of bang on the door -- "Where's the next single?" And you're kind of struggling to keep up, because you weren't prepared for this pressure.
There was a certain point -- I don't know whether it was the late '70s, I guess somewhere in the middle '70s -- where I realized I was no longer thinking of approaching a song and saying, "Well, I'm going to borrow Chuck (Berry's) style, or Muddy Waters' style, or Bo Diddley's, or Otis Rush." I didn't call upon all my mentors all the time. I suddenly, without knowing it, sort of realized. ... And that happens if you play enough; you develop your own style. Now people talk about my style, but I'm still trying to find it! (Laughs) It's an evolving thing, that's what I'm trying to say, I guess.
Free Press: Another big difference now, it seems, is that the electric rock guitar has developed a kind of following, a mythology, that wasn't quite in place during the early '60s.
Richards: You're probably right, there. The whole thing just got a lot bigger. And I guess there's a lot more people now that have been at some point in their time -- even if just for fun or playing in the local bars -- who have been in rock 'n' roll bands. Nearly every bloke I meet is like, "I used to play drums, and then I played...," you know what I mean? It's sort of part of the thing of growing up. Whereas when I did it, you were either a musician or you weren't, and there was sort of a huge gap between.
I think maybe that's the joy of it. The joy of music is playing it. And it doesn't matter if anybody's listening even. It's just yourself. No doubt, most guitar players, like me, start off applauding themselves at the top of the stairs or in the basement or something -- "I thought I did that pretty good. Fortunately, nobody was here!" (Laughs)
To me, music is just an important thing in people's lives, and it's very nice. There are so many good musicians out there. I'd be running off 'til midnight talking about my favorite guitar players. So many good pickers, and some cats that nobody even knows.
There's an innate joy in playing music, and also in turning other people on, and it doesn't matter on what scale you do it. It should just be part of life, you know? That's what it is. We do it on a large scale -- that's just the way it panned out. But I've no doubt I'd be doing it if I was just doing it on the weekends down at the pub.
Free Press: Do you still feel any type of pressure at this point in being elevated by legions of people around the world?
Richards: I think we all try to ignore it, or learn to live with it in our own different ways, for guitar players or songwriters. Mick is incredibly equipped for dealing with it. Actually, he alerts me to most of the things going on that I don't know. Because most of that is related to the business end of it, all the possibilities. "I'll just stay in the workshop and write some songs -- and let me know if there's anything important, and we'll make up our mind." He's far more inquisitive about that, and after all we do have to split the jobs. Sometimes I'll find out things he doesn't know, which he really hates. (Laughs) "I didn't know about that, why didn't I know about it?!"
When you're in a band, especially when you get on the road, you become very insulated. You meet people you want to meet. Everybody has to sit around once in a while and say, "What do you think about this?" Whether it's a song, or how do we deal with the governor of California coming in. There's all those side trips coming in to deflect what you're doing. So you have to be ready to be on the ball, because you never know what the next incoming is going to bring.
Free Press: I know that when you were starting out, British bands like you and the Beatles often spoke of America as this kind of enormous place to be conquered. Sort of a blend of awe and intimidation. Is that sense still part of the emotional mix when you embark on a U.S. tour four decades later?
Richards: America is a great place, man. It's still a young country, it has to sort itself out. (Laughs). But yeah, it's fascinating. I live here. You're quite right -- before the Beatles and ourselves got to America, America was the source of promise. It really was the promised land, you know? And it was the place where our music came from. If you wanted to get close to what it is you were doing, the better thing than getting a record was to go there -- let alone play to America.
So I think that flipped us all. It certainly flipped the Beatles and us. You certainly thought you'd died and gone to the fairy land. And the chicks are amazing!
MICK JAGGER
Free Press: Every time you've toured for the past 15 years, it seems the press has stuck with the same old theme, so to speak: the band's age. So let's get it out of the way. What's the most common annoying question you have to keep fending off?
Jagger: "Is this gonna be your last tour?" I just started this one -- I can't even think about any other ones. (Laughs)
We still haven't done an indoor show yet (on this tour), so I'm working on the indoor show at the moment. The stage is a bit different, the prod is a bit different ... set lists, lighting plots, all that.
Free Press: OK, but before I veer away from the age thing: There's a great interview with you from the early '70s, a segment that ran on Dick Cavett's show and just released on a new DVD of his. He had specifically asked you if you could see yourself doing this at age 60, and you didn't even stop to think -- you immediately said yes. That's the earliest point in your career that I'd seen you so explicitly address that topic, which obviously has come to be a defining mark of the Stones.
Jagger: I think that by then the whole tour thing was a big thing already. It was already very organized and very similar to doing arena tours today -- you carried your own sound and lights, it was a production already, and all these things. And so you could see that working.
Before that, there wasn't really a touring business. But then it quickly organized itself into a business, I guess you'd say, an organized thing -- so now you could see, I guess, that this was one of those things that could run and run.
And I'd already probably learned not to say no to everything. (Laughs)
Free Press: In the sense that the old blues guys have never caught flak for playing on and on, it seems OK for the Stones to keep on and on. Keith has described the Stones today as something of pioneers, going into territory no big rock band has explored.
Jagger: Well, I don't really buy that. Yeah, we're doing it where no one's done it, but you're still doing the same thing you did. ... You're doing what you do best in your chosen venue and so on, in what's now become a traditional business. Doing the arena shows now is very similar to doing the arena shows in 1972. And there are the blues guys -- but the blues guys used to play in very small theaters and clubs, not huge stadiums. When blues people toured, it wasn't an event -- they toured permanently. And the thing about this that's different is it's an event, and you try to make it an event. You don't do it permanently.
Free Press: Certainly by the time of that Dick Cavett interview, for instance, you were also on to a second generation of fans. Is there a particular moment you can recall when it struck you that the Stones really could keep going and going?
Jagger: No idea when that moment was when it did occur. Maybe in the '70s -- (the time) we just talked about, but I can't remember any sort of cathartic moment where that ... I mean, you shouldn't take too much for granted in any business, let alone show business. It's not a good thing to take too much for granted.
I mean, things could've gone either way. In the '70s, people were still very concentrated on records -- the whole thing was to do with records. You didn't make a lot of money out of touring; you promoted your record. But a whole lot of things, when you look back on it, started in the '70s -- sponsorship by commercial companies, which we started doing then. Selling merchandise, which had always happened but never made any money. It had been just a joke for fun, you know, "It'd be nice to have a T-shirt." So that (picked up) in the '70s.
The whole thing started moving away from just making money out of records. Which is great. Making records is wonderful, but the point was you were doing all this touring and you were losing money. It was an inefficient business. You'd play for six months and have a great time, and then come to the end of it and someone would say, "Well, you made this amount of money," and you'd go, "Whoa, that's very little." We worked very hard and had nothing to show for it.
It was a very ad hoc thing, where you'd get booked into a theater one minute and a stadium the next, and didn't know where you were going to play one day to the next. It was very disorganized -- some places filled up, some places completely empty. Very bizarre, so inefficient. It's not like you wanted to become zillionaires, but you just felt that it wasn't really worth it, almost, to do it so hard with so much aggression every night.
But then it all sort of changed -- it gradually evolved into something where it started to make money. When you started to make money it became a bit easier, because you could do it slightly more leisurely.
Free Press: Is it possible in this day and age for a band to attain that kind of larger-than-life status that a band like the Rolling Stones could achieve? So much has changed about the kind of availability fans have to stars now, in a sense, because of the media explosion and the rest of it. I just wonder if it's possible for a band today to build that kind of untouchable aura, because there are so many more ways for people to access their artists than when you hit big.
Jagger: No, there wasn't that much then. Obviously there was no Internet. But you never know what's going to happen to a band. There could be a band happening now that could achieve that, but you're not going to see it for a while. I don't see why that shouldn't happen again, just because people are more available. If you think about it, the Rolling Stones were pretty available in the '60s -- we used to do every kind of TV show. (Laughs) Ed Sullivan regularly, all these funny little TV shows. We used to do the equivalent of "Saturday Night Live." We did many, many things. So we were pretty available. We'd do every interview, more or less, that was asked of us. That's part of what you do when you're up and coming -- you don't say no to everything.
Free Press: There's been a lot of attention, particularly here in Detroit of course, on Eminem's recent issues, and perhaps a coming change for him career-wise. The whole burn-out-or-fade-away thing is a long argument in rock 'n' roll. The Stones obviously chose at some point to keep on going, and your legacy hasn't necessarily been harmed by that.
Jagger: There do come points, especially early in your career, where you do feel burned out because you work so much. We used to do the recording studio for two weeks, than the road for four weeks, one show every night, TV shows the same night as the live show. It's pretty desperate. And there's people pushing you, pushing you. You just go on the roller coaster, really. You come to the end of this stuff and you just go, like, "Wow." You don't feel like you're in control anymore, and you really need to step back. The Rolling Stones, a few times, were pretty burned a few times -- it's just from overwork. And that's not particularly surprising at this point in anyone's career, to be honest. And you just have to step back and take some months off and regroup.
Free Press: Now that you've opened the tour -- is there some aspect to being onstage that you sort of forget about when you're away, that comes back and hits you as soon as you're up there again?
Jagger: I think, for me, you just have to tune yourself into the audience. There are certain points in the show where you sort of have to encourage them and get them more involved. Whether it's call and response -- you can't forget that they want to do that.
And some audiences just don't want to respond, so there's no point in keep banging them over the head. They're just enjoying themselves doing what they're doing. Last night (in Boston), the audience loved to shout and holler, so every time I went "Whoo whoo!" they'd go "Whooo" forever. So I thought, "OK, that's what you want to do, so we'll do it." And you forget that kind of thing, that each audience is slightly different. There's nothing more boring than watching some performer try to get the audience to clap and join in when they don't really want to. You've been to shows like that, I'm sure -- they really get on your nerves.
But then some love it, and they can't get enough of it. It's those kind of audience feelings, to try and feel that out in a very wide open stadium like Fenway, that's kind of tricky to get attuned to. But you adapt pretty quick
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| September 1st, 2005 11:34 AM |
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| The Wick |
Thanks a lot for posting it. A great read. |
| September 1st, 2005 10:12 PM |
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| Soldatti |
Thanks, great reading. |
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