Composers: Mick
Jagger & Keith Richards
Recording date: April-December
1985
Recording locations: Pathé
Marconi Studios, Paris, France; RPM Studios & Right Track Studios,
New York City, USA
Producers: Steve
Lillywhite & The Glimmer Twins
Chief engineer:
Dave Jerden
Never performed onstage
Probable line-up:
Drums: Ron Wood
Bass: Keith Richards
Acoustic guitar: Keith
Richards
Electric guitars: Keith
Richards
Lead vocal: Keith
Richards
Background vocals: Keith
Richards, Ron Wood, Bobby
Womack & Don Covay
Piano: Keith
Richards
Synthesizer: Chuck
Leavell
I wish you, baby, all the best
You better get some sleep tonight, oh brother
You better get some sleep tonight - warn all your friends
You better get them out of sight - baby
You better get some sleep tonight (sleep)
TrackTalk
I wrote that one at the piano when there was nobody else there except Woody and me - Woody plays drums on that one. So he was sitting at the kit, I was stitting at the piano, and I got this sequence together. I mean, it's one of those songs that I write occasionally where I say, Hey, I didn't write this, this is memory playing tricks with me, this is somebody else's song (laughs). It's happened to me before, with All About You, which I kept in the can for four or five years while I kept playing it for everybody I knew with a grounding in songwriting, because I kept thinking, This sequence does NOT come from me, this is NOT my shit... Sleep is like that for me because of all the weird modulations. The chorus is virtually a doo-wop chorus in C, but then the verses modulate quite naturally into another key. I had to wait for other people to convince me to go ahead with it; for a while I was saying, This is all good fun but we're wasting time, because I'm SURE this is somebody else's song (laughs).
Yes - (I played) drums on... Sleep Tonight
-
I could never get over the thought of playing instead of Charlie, I thought
that would be a sacrilege, but he insisted because he was going through
a lot of problems at the time and couldn't be at the studio. Keith said,
Right,
you're on drums, so I finally hacked it into shape and when Charlie
got there I gave him the sticks and he said, No, I can't get it right,
you play it. It worked out good.
On
Sleep you can really hear how Keith's
blonde Tele rings - it's fantastic. The acoustic on there is the (Martin
1967) 00-21, which was used for Nashville tuning.
Yeah, that's high-strung, the Nashville tuning.
It's a lovely stringing, it really rings. I first used that on Wild
Horses down in Muscle Shoals in '69, where I picked it up. I remembered
it for a year or two, then I totally forgot about it unil this year, when
it came up in conversation with Alan Rogan and Joe Walsh, so we strung
up a guitar like that. It gives you the feel of a 12-string without all
that boom from the bottom strings and all of the hassle of having to tune
TWELVE STRINGS (laughs). It just gives you that octave high G, that pretty
little ring.