Composers: Mick Jagger & Keith Richards
Recording
date: November
1993-April 1994
Recording
locations: Windmill
Lane Recording, Dublin,
Ireland & A&M Recording Studios, Los
Angeles, USA
Producers:
Don
Was & The Glimmer
Twins Chief
engineer: Don Smith
Performed
onstage: 1994-95,
1997-99,
2002-03, 2005-07, 2012-17, 2019, 2021-22, 2024
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.