Boogie 4 Stu

Boogie 4 Stu is a tribute to original Rolling Stone pianist Ian Stewart, and features former Stones bassist Bill Wyman's return for the project.

The album highlight for many will be the version of Bob Dylan’s song Watchin’ The River Flow. This features Mick Jagger on vocals & harmonica, Keith Richards on guitar, Charlie Watts on drums, Ronnie Wood on guitar and Bill Wyman on bass.It’s the first time Wyman has recorded with his former colleagues since 1992. As well as his work with the Rolling Stones, Ian Stewart played with a host of other talents including Led Zeppelin [this album is named after their track ‘Boogie With Stu’], Howlin’ Wolf, The Yardbirds, his own band Rocket88 and more. Keith Richards said, Ian Stewart. I’m still working for him. To me the Rolling Stones is his band. Without his knowledge and organization … we’d be nowhere.

Listen here--it's good stuff.

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Steal This Book (UPDATED)

I'm in the midst of Keith Richards' book Life. Great stuff; tough, tender, meandering and musical.

Life...

UPDATED 11/17/10:

I finished Life a couple of days ago. As Richards is one of my bedrock cultural touchstones, I had a close familiarity with many of the iconic episodes retold in the book, but it was the stuff in the crevices--the shadings applied to Life's canvas--that brought it all alive. Keith Richards comes off as fiercely loyal, surprisingly tender, intermittently ferocious, rough-hewn, high-humored and unblushingly honest. It's all about the sound, all about the song, and Sinatra had nothin' on Keef when it came to doin' it his way...

Coming Soon: 'Life' By Keith Richards

Excerpt news:

Rolling Stone will publish an exclusive excerpt from Keith Richard’s long awaited memoir Life on October 15, eleven days before the eagerly anticipated book hits stores on October 26. The 10,000 word excerpt will cover the early days of the Rolling Stones, Keith’s trip to Tangiers in 1967 where he stole Anita Pallenberg from bandmate Brian Jones and tales of excess from the Stones’ infamous 1972 U.S. tour. "You can’t imagine that this book could be any better than it is," says Rolling Stone Managing Editor Will Dana. "Keith holds nothing back. It’s funny, gossipy, profane and moving and by the time you finish it you feel like you’re friends with Keith Richards. Outside of Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, it’s probably the best rock memoir ever written." Richards, who will appear on the cover of the magazine, also spoke with Rolling Stone’s David Fricke about the book and the Stones’ upcoming plans, strongly hinting that the band will be active in 2011.

To this day, I remain eternally pissed-off at a Norwegian named Andre, whose fight with his wife led to our subsequent late arrival at a Keith Richards in-store appearance at the old Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard. Our group was queued up next and then a lovely lady--I think she was Richards' manager Jane Rose--walked outside and told us it was "time for Keith to go."

Several minutes later, there was the Human Riff himself, waving at us from the open window of a van, sunglasses on in the L.A. night, smiling and smoking with satisfaction plastered all over his face.

Those of us in the queue? Shadoobie....shattered, shattered...

"Rumors Of My Sobriety Are Greatly Exaggerated."

The Rolling Stones are reissuing Exile on Main Street in May with 10 long-buried tracks included. Asked about plans for something, um, newer, Keith Richards said,

“There’s no definite plans, but I can’t see any of them stopping,” he says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we did some recording later this year...I don’t know how the rest of them feel about roadwork at the moment...(m)aybe we’ll search for a different way for the Stones to go back on the road. Maybe not the football stadiums anymore. Maybe something different. You can’t go around there in lemon-yellow tights forever.”
As for those stories about last call? “Listen, the rumors of my sobriety are greatly exaggerated,” he says. “And we’ll leave it at that.”

(H/T: Rolling Stone.)

Pick It Up: Marianne Faithfull--"Easy Come Easy Go."

I read a concert review the other day about a recent Marianne Faithfull show. I've been a fan since sometime around "Broken English." Faithfull brings to mind a tough-yet-tender late-night chanteuse, and she would be on my short list of people with whom I'd like to share a closing time drink. Today her tipple would likely be sparkling water; I'd stick with my usual.

Anyway, the reviewer mentioned her most recent album, "Easy Come Easy Go," which reminded me to pick it up. I had downloaded a single track last spring--"Sing Me Back Home" (sung with old friend Keith Richards)--and I meant to buy the whole thing then. It's moody and atmospheric and colored by some killer arrangements and that wizened voice of debauchery and survival.

Here's an excerpt from a piece on MSNBC.msn.com:

"The first party I went to in London where I was discovered by Andrew Oldham — all the Beatles were there and the Stones were there too," says Faithfull. Soon after, Oldham brought the soprano with an angelic voice into the studio to record the melancholy "As Tears Go By," the first song co-written by Keith Richards and her soon-to-be boyfriend Mick Jagger.

"It's a strange song to get a 17-year-old to sing. It's all about a woman looking back on her youth, not participating, I couldn't really feel it. ... But now I can really feel it and it's very beautiful... I got to the right age where the woman in the song is," says Faithfull, who now sings the song in her world-weary contralto voice roughened by too much tobacco and booze in her colorful past.

But Faithfull has little in common with the song's protagonist who is content "to sit and watch" as her life goes by. She has gone from singing light folk-rock in the '60s to becoming a leading interpreter of the dark pre-World War II Berlin theatrical music of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

Faithfull is proud of her role as muse to the Rolling Stones in their early years, inspiring such songs as "You Can't Always Get What You Want," "Wild Horses, and "Sister Morphine" (for which she belatedly received credit for writing the lyrics). And she was a muse to the Beats — Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughts and Gregory Corso — in their later years.

The latest script is her new album "Easy Come, Easy Go," on which she interprets songs spanning nearly a century of popular music from Duke Ellington and Dolly Parton to Neko Case and the Decembrists. It has a contemporary feel thanks to collaborations with younger musicians such as Chan Marshall, known as Cat Power, and two children of her musician friends, Rufus Wainwright and Sean Lennon.

"It's not just an old person singing covers, no, thank God," she says, distinguishing it from albums by contemporaries like Rod Stewart. It's also stylistically eclectic — a mix of jazz, blues, country, folk and rock — because she explains "nobody listens to one style of music, nor do I."

Faithfull credits Richards for inspiring the album through bootleg recordings he made of his favorite songs in the '60s.

The album closes poignantly with Faithfull and Richards joining voices on Merle Haggard's death row ballad "Sing Me Back Home," a tune she first heard the Stones' guitarist play with Gram Parsons in the '60s. The two longtime friends sing lyrics like "Make my old memories come alive."

Here's the standard track list (there's also an import version with a second CD.)

Pick it up:

"Down from Dover", (originally by Dolly Parton)

"Hold On, Hold On", with Cat Power (originally by Neko Case)

"Solitude" (originally by Duke Ellington & Eddie DeLange)

"The Crane Wife 3", with Nick Cave (originally by The Decemberists)

"Easy Come, Easy Go" (originally by Bessie Smith)

"Children of Stone", with Rufus Wainwright (originally by Espers)

"How Many Worlds", with Teddy Thompson (originally by Brian Eno)

"In Germany Before the War" (originally by Randy Newman)

"Ooh Baby Baby", with Antony Hegarty (originally by Smokey Robinson)

"Sing Me Back Home", with Keith Richards (originally by Merle Haggard)