Line-up:

Drums: Charlie Watts
Bass: Darryl Jones
Dobro guitar: Keith Richards
Electric guitars: Keith Richards (incl. solo)
Slide electric guitar: Ron Wood
Lead vocals: Mick Jagger
Background vocals: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bernard Fowler & Ivan Neville
Piano: Chuck Leavell
Maracas: Mick Jagger
Handclaps: ---
 

TrackTalk

Hybrids, ones (that Mick and I wrote) together (include): Love Is Strong, Got Me Rocking, and Sparks Will Fly.

(The songs) come in different ways, SO many different ways. For instance, You Got Me Rocking. It started off as Keith playing the piano as sort of a slow, boogie-woogie blues. And the form was, like, just the same thing going round and round and round. You never knew whether you were singing the verse or the chorus. And it was very fluid, good fun and all that. But then, when we went to play it with the band, it was like, Well, am I singing the verse here or what? What's going on? Is this a chorus? Do we need another part? So we had to decide if we needed a bridge there, and if this was going to work. I want to know when I'm finished singing the verse! I've got to know! Otherwise, it all sounded the same. Ah, it doesn't matter, Keith would say. Well, it matters to ME! And, of course, he's right. And I'm right. We're BOTH right. So we transpose it from piano to guitar - I was playing the guitar, Keith is playing piano and singing. And then I started playing slide guitar, and it started to sound like Elmore James. And then back to something else. Finally I said, Keith, you've got to come off the piano and play guitar. I can't hear what's going on, there's too much racket! Then the song had to take on the band thing, with everybody playing, so you start to codify it a bit, where the chorus is and so on. And it STILL doesn't have a lyric, and I'm STILL messing with the melody. Keith had a couple of them he was using when he played. If it's going to be a rock song, it has to have a definite chorus and melody. So, I picked one. Maybe that's not how Keith remembers it, but that's how I remember it.

Keith is also great at phrases. You got me rocking now - that was his phrase, and Mick finished it.

(The monster drum sound) is the stairwell. It's on four or five songs on the album - You Got Me Rocking... It (was) a 4-flight stairwell, and I started off at the top, which is Moon Is Up, and I ended up at the bottom playing You Got Me Rocking and Thru and Thru... The studio's at the top. It's like going down, then? So it's open all the way down. So we started off out by the door there, and then Don Smith said, Would you go to the bottom and try it? It was a bit small down there, but it was all right. The problem is you can't hear anything down there except drums. Such tremendous sound.

The mystery guitar will no longer be a mystery if I tell you. (Laughs) What the hell... It's a solidbody dobro, but I play it with a stick - just a little stick I picked out of Ronnie's garden. It's just an interesting percussion effect.

There could be (a ZZ Top-quality to it). I haven't heard ZZ Top for a long time. Apart from the fact that we both play rock & roll, the comparison wouldn't occur to me, but you never know. We all cross over. I know that to me the rhythm has a bit of Motown, like Going to a Go-Go, a little funky. I was looking for a swampy rhythm, something punchy. Wrote the thing on piano and then transferred it over the guitar.

One (reviewer) talked about his unbidden irony in the line I was a hooker losing my looks. I wrote that completely as a joke on myself.

The sense of this is like, You've got me buzzin' again, or whatever word you want to use. It's about someone who was becoming a disastrous failure, until they woke up. You know, the butcher that cuts himself, the surgeon who shakes, the pitcher that's in a slump, the tycoon who loses all his money.

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