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"It came together very quickly," says Jagger. They considered pursuing the song for Some Girls, but when Richards listened to the playback, as well as worrying that it was just a new version of "Brown Sugar", he thought it sounded too similar to something he'd heard on the radio. And so Chris Kimsey, the engineer, was told to dump it. Luckily Kimsey didn't wipe the tape and the band took another stab at it during the 1979 Emotional Rescue sessions. Once more it was consigned to the shelf. Two years later they tried again.

"[The song] was just buried in there," says Jagger. "Nobody remembered cutting it... it was like a gift."

For the lyrics, Jagger used a glove compartment full of car metaphors ("My hands are greasy, she's a mean, mean machine" etc), while the line about the woman being able to make a dead man "cum" no doubt originated from Lucille Bogan's old blues number, "Shave 'em Dry" ("I got something between my legs'll make a dead man come"), which Richards had been listening to for years.

And when Jagger started dancing to the song on stage, you could still see the vestiges of the innate irreverence that made him famous in the first place. As the Guardian writer Richard Williams once observed, "Where Paul McCartney grinned, shook his head and went 'Wooooo!', Mick Jagger did a sinuous, lithe Nureyev-goes-to-Harlem dance and shook his quadruple maracas like voodoo implements, a portrait of self-absorption." Oh, yes please. The ten-week, 30-city tour grossed £25m, at the time it was the highest-grossing tour in history. It was said that the 1981 tour divided America into two camps: the three million people who saw one of their 51 concerts, and the 223 million who wished they had.

Whenever I think of Jagger I think of Jessica Mitford's brilliant quote: "I don't think I could ever take myself seriously enough to go grubbing about looking for my soul - that is, I couldn't get interested in it, hence religion, psychiatry, consciousness-raising and the like are all totally beyond my ken." John Lahr said that style, "it seems to me", is metabolism, and that if you can find the pulse of the artist, you can find the pulse of the art. With Jagger, the pulse had, for some time, been about little but showing off, which was why Tattoo You was a perfect Rolling Stones record: it was all about showing off.

Anyway, Tattoo You is there to be rediscovered, and if you like the Stones, this is probably the last great record they made, probably the last great record they will make, and it deserves to be cherished.

Searching the internet late one night for reviews of the album, I came across a blog full of comments about the album, many of which were full of praise ("This is an excellent buy for any age group to slam on at a party to get everyone rockin', or quietly sit back in a dim light with a joint and a bourbon on the rocks, and let the evening drift away!"), many of which were just statements of fact ("Tattoo You is a rather good album. It sort of 'Starts Me Up' and tries to bring me to 'Heaven'. It kind of rocks"), while an equal amount were fairly disparaging. To wit: "I took Tattoo You to my friend Brubaker's house because we were all gonna drink and watch the movie Neighbors with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi," wrote one Shawn Kilroy. "They both came out at the same time and I associate them. Tattoo You is the last great Stones album as much as Neighbors is the last great Aykroyd/Belushi movie. My plan was to put the song 'Neighbours' on as soon as [the] credits [rolled], however when I got up to get it, seems that Bru had put my LP in the oven and melted it into a shrinky dink. I was horrified and asked them why they would do such a thing.

"'Don't you love the Stones?' I shrieked.

"Bru said, 'Yeah, but not that disco bullshit.'"

Kilroy's passion was undiminished: 'It's still my favourite Stones album," he wrote.

He's not alone, and there isn't a disco song in sight.