Our story begins one ass-freezing night time in January 1974, within the soundproofed basement of The Wick, a splendid Grade 1-listed Georgian townhouse in Richmond, London designed in 1775 for Woman St Aubyn. Two centuries later its proprietor was 26-year-old cool-as-fuck Rod Stewart/Faces guitarist Ronnie Wooden, hawk-nosed member of a brand new English aristocracy: old-money rock stars.
On the time he purchased The Wick, in 1971, Woody was coddled in money from the double-whammy success that 12 months of Rod’s Maggie Could solo single and Each Image Tells A Story album each going to No.1 in Britain and America concurrently. Ronnie performed guitar and bass on each and co-wrote the title monitor to Each Image. He purchased it for a suitcase of money and started filling the basement with recording tools.
“I didn’t do it with any kind of plan,” he later instructed me. “It began with someplace to place my guitars, then a piano, pool desk, some drums…”
With time to kill till the beginning of a Faces Japanese tour, Woody spent the primary weeks of 1974 corralling each muso that wound up at The Wick with a joint of their hand to assist give you materials for his personal forthcoming solo album, I’ve Acquired My Personal Album To Do. Chief amongst them was Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richard (nonetheless sans ‘s’ again then). Keith and his ‘previous woman’, the witchy Anita Pallenberg, had moved into The Wick’s coach home.
Busted for medicine and weapons at their Chelsea abode the earlier summer time, Richard was satisfied “the cops have been out to get me”, after the decide gave him an unexpectedly lenient sentence of a £250 wonderful. Woody’s coach home “was a superb hideout”.
Different basement regulars included Mick Jagger, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart, David Bowie, Ringo Starr, Mick Taylor, and numerous different ‘vibe retailers’ comparable to rising performing star John Damage and the crew from Monty Python. “Earlier than any of us knew it we’d be up for days consuming, getting stoned and making music,” Ronnie recalled with a beaky grin.
It was throughout one other such journey into night time, fuelled by pharmaceutical cocaine, that Woody discovered himself gleefully jamming with Jagger, Bowie, session bassist Willie Weeks and Faces drummer Kenney Jones on a loose-limbed jingle-jangle that Jagger later described as “a really Chuck Berry tune” however with “a special feeling to it than a Chuck Berry tune”.
When Jagger and Bowie began improvising and having enjoyable across the phrase “I do know it’s solely rock’n’roll however I prefer it”, it started as a coke-joke tackle comic Dick Emery’s nationwide catchphrase, heard on BBC1 each Saturday night time that 12 months: “Ooh, you might be terrible – however I such as you!” All of the sudden the entire room was singing alongside: “I do know… it’s solely rock and roll… however I prefer it!”
Some accounts have Bowie whipping out his tenor sax and fattening up the nursery rhyme refrain. Some have Richard elsewhere, together with his connection within the coach home. However they stored tooting and returning to it, “…prefer it… prefer it… sure, I dooo…” till the solar got here up and went again down.
“All of us knew it was good,” Ronnie instructed me matter-of-factly, “however nobody thought for a minute it might be such an enormous hit.” Nobody besides Jagger, who was decided to not depart The Wick with out it. The identical star-tripping jam additionally yielded I Can Really feel The Fireplace, the rock’n’reggae monitor that will open Ronnie’s solo album. “Mick and I reduce a deal,” he recalled. “He stated: ‘You retain I Can Really feel The Fireplace, I’ll hold It’s Solely Rock ’N Roll.’”
Destined to change into one of many totemic anthems of traditional 70s rock, It’s Solely Rock ’N Roll (However I Like It) was solely a medium-sized hit by earlier Rolling Stones requirements when it was launched as a single in July 1974 (No.10 within the UK, No.16 within the US). Nevertheless it grew to become some of the becoming aphorisms of the occasions, as 60s ‘we’ grew to become 70s ‘me’.
All of the sudden “I do know it’s solely [insert subject] however I prefer it” grew to become a ok excuse for something. Jagger received it immediately and ran with it. He preferred it preferred it a lot, actually, he determined they need to identify the following Stones album after it.
Launched in October 1974, It’s Solely Rock ’N Roll was the primary actually 70s album the Stones would make. It was additionally the final Stones album to function their most potent line-up: the one which recorded Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Predominant St., three of the best rock albums of all time – no arguments allowed. It turned 50 in 2024. Blissfully, it has not grown previous gracefully in any respect.
Regardless of the unintended beginning of its title monitor, there was little else that was spontaneous about It’s Solely Rock ’N Roll. A patchwork of concepts stitched collectively in a panic by Mick Jagger as he strove to pull the Rolling Stones into a brand new period, it “was up and down like a rest room seat”, deadpanned Charlie Watts.
By 1973 the Strolling Bones, as NME had began to name them, have been displaying their age. Jagger and Richard each turned 30 that 12 months – final orders for rock stars in that hope-I-die-beforeI-get-old period. Invoice Wyman was 37, for chrissakes – practically as previous as Elvis. Keith – Keef – nonetheless sported a chipped entrance tooth and deathly white pallor, his matted black hair the results of his behavior of not sleeping – ever; he bragged that his report was “9 days with no wink”.
When that 12 months he got here high in a brand new NME ballot, Rock Stars Most Seemingly To Die – a title he would maintain for 10 years – he shrugged. “It’s like they need me to die,” he drawled, purring with barely hid pleasure. Jagger, nevertheless, noticed the hazard. Had been the Stones turning into a parody of themselves? When comic Freddie Starr now did his absurdist impersonations of Mick for chortling household audiences on TV, the likeness was disconcertingly uncanny.
On stage they nonetheless loved ‘biggest rock’n’roll band on the earth’ standing, however their newest album, Goats Head Soup, regardless of going to No.1 in Britain and America, had largely been met by indifference, signposted by the glaciar-paced single Angie. The sight of Richard nodding off within the video summed up most individuals’s emotions concerning the tune. In the meantime, Jagger had taken be aware of all the eye now dedicated to ‘glam rock’ stars like Alice Cooper and T.Rex, Roxy Music and David Bowie, all of whom had larger and higher hits in 1973 than the vanilla Angie.
Even junkie-implacable Keef wasn’t resistant to the gnawing sense that the Stones have been being overtaken. He developed a deep antipathy in the direction of Marc Bolan, skidding to a halt in his silver Ferrari on the King’s Street sooner or later then leaping out with a searching knife to slash at a T.Rex poster.
Rubbing metatextual salt into the wound got here the New York Dolls, fronted by garish Mick ’n’ Keef burlesques David Johansen and Johnny Thunders. When the Dolls appeared on music TV present The Previous Gray Whistle Take a look at in November, an ultra-glam, Biba-clad Johansen jokingly instructed beardy polo-necked presenter Bob Harris that he had “bunny tooth”. After they’d completed miming outrageously, Harris received his personal again announcing the band “mock rock”.
Nevertheless it was the Stones who have been now being mocked. Jagger selected to not see this as an existential disaster, however fairly a profession miscalculation, one thing that may very well be adjusted and fine-tuned. He had already recognized Bowie because the one to beat. Jagger had been there at Hammersmith Odeon when Bowie retired Ziggy that summer time, essentially the most celebrated farewell stunt since The Beatles rocked the rooftop.
On the identical day in October that the Stones performed their remaining present of the 12 months, in West Berlin, Bowie launched Pin Ups, a stopgap album of hurriedly recorded cowl variations, which went straight to No.1. Additionally within the UK high 5 album chart that week was These Silly Issues, a group of covers by the one glam artist thought-about as revolutionary and classy as Bowie, Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry.
Ferry’s champagne-bubble model of Sympathy For The Satan thrilled Jagger nearly as a lot as Bowie’s same-sex reset of Let’s Spend The Evening Collectively on Aladdin Sane, his earlier No.1 album that 12 months. It reaffirmed the Stones’ connection to the now and advised a means ahead to Jagger. The Stones would do their very own covers album, he determined. In contrast to Bowie’s mid-60s nostalgia journey, although, the Stones would deal with timeless blues and soul yardsticks.
Two weeks in November have been booked at Musicland Studios in Munich. There the Stones put their acquainted stamp on quickfire stuff like Jimmy Reed’s Disgrace, Disgrace, Disgrace, which they’d achieved of their membership days (and ripped off for Little By Little, the B-side of Not Fade Away, in 1964). They tackled oddities like Hassle’s A-Comin, an obscure Chi-Lites album monitor from 1970, and embarrassed themselves with an awkwardly pale imitation of Drift Away, the rock’n’soul traditional that had simply been an enormous US hit for Dobie Grey. The one cowl that actually popped was their proto-punk model of Ain’t Too Proud To Beg, a signature hit from 1966 for Motown stars The Temptations.
Based on Richard: “We have been actually scorching [from touring] and prepared simply to play some new materials.” However when he received to Munich the plan had modified to a quickie album: one aspect covers, one aspect reside recordings. It was a choice taken partly to compensate for Richard’s newest try to get clear, at an unique Swiss clinic, the place his joke about going there to have his drug-contaminated blood modified for some recent virgin plasma would additionally enter the lexicon of 70s-hip-speak. Going for a blood change: depart me the fuck alone.
With Keith on Mick’s shit-list (once more) for placing his drug behavior earlier than the band, the singer stuffed the time writing with guitarist Mick Taylor. A 20-year-old, non-smoking vegetarian when he joined the Stones in 1969, Taylor was now on the verge of self-destruct. He had change into that almost all pitiable creature: the pampered junkie with sufficient cash to by no means have to cease.
His beautiful means to fly his guitar straight into the Solar remained as but undimmed, nevertheless, and the 2 Micks wrote a number of numbers collectively, a minimum of three of which would seem on It’s Solely Rock ’N Roll, albeit credited as regular to Jagger/Richard. It had occurred earlier than, after all; Stones songs Taylor ought to have obtained a co-writing credit score for. Again when he didn’t know what to say. Taylor was now 24 and 1,000,000 miles from then and he vowed it might not occur once more.
“I felt I ought to have been credited with co-writing on It’s Solely Rock ’N Roll,” he stated in 1997. He and Jagger had been “fairly shut associates and co-operated fairly intently on getting that album made”. Jagger, nevertheless, rolled his eyes and allowed that Taylor “possibly threw in a few chords”.
When recording periods reconvened at Island Studios in London in February 1974, Jagger started with the Wick demo of the now formally titled It’s Solely Rock ’N Roll (However I Like It).
As Keith later instructed Ronnie: “I took the precaution of eradicating your guitar components.” They did depart Woody’s 12-string acoustic within the combine, nevertheless, together with Kenney Jones’s drums, with Charlie Watts generously claiming he “wouldn’t have achieved it every other means”. Willy D. Weeks’s bass was additionally retained. As have been Bowie and Wooden’s backing vocals – that’s them singing ‘prefer it, prefer it, sure I do’, though Bowie’s vocals are so low within the combine you’d by no means know.
As with Taylor, neither Wooden nor Bowie would obtain a co-writing credit score. That so peeved Bowie that he retaliated by writing Insurgent Insurgent – a straight take-off of the Stones traditional (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. Based on Alan Parker, an uncredited guitarist on the monitor, Bowie stated: “I’ve received this riff and it’s a bit Stonesy, I simply wish to piss Mick off a bit.”
Jagger’s rising rivalry with Bowie is on the coronary heart of It’s Solely Rock ’N Roll. Bowie had began it when he referred to Jagger by identify on his 1973 hit Drive-In Saturday. 4 months later the Stones launched Angie, and Jagger allowed rumours to flourish that it had been written after a tryste he’d had with Bowie’s spouse Angie.
Whereas the Stones have been engaged on It’s Solely Rock ’N Roll, Bowie was throughout city recording Diamond Canine. When Insurgent Insurgent was successful in February ’74, Jagger shrugged it off. However when he found that his first option to design the following Stones album sleeve, Man Peellaert – then at peak fame for Rock Desires, his ’73 guide of impressionistic work of rock stars – had additionally agreed to offer a portray for Bowie’s album, Jagger was furious.
Certain sufficient, Peellaert’s portray of a unadorned half-man half-dog Bowie with full canine genitalia on show stays extra celebrated than the orgiastic fin de siècle that adorned the sleeve of It’s Solely Rock ’N Roll.
Jagger was now a person on a mission. He took the bones of the Munich covers, inlaid some new materials, and padded it out with leftovers from the Goats Head Soup periods at Dynamic Studios in Jamaica the 12 months earlier than. Following the firing of long-time Stones producer Jimmy Miller, whose smack behavior had change into “an issue”, Mick and Keith now co-produced the album beneath the suitably 70s nom de plume The Glimmer Twins.
The completed outcomes have been patchy, at greatest. Opening monitor If You Can’t Rock Me set the tone with its trite doubleentendre refrain and jaded supply, its overexcited pleased-tameetcha guitars and no-messing drums. ‘Now I ain’t searching for no fairly face,’ Jagger yowls, ‘or for some hooker working roughish commerce…’
It might not possess the tank-like pressure of Brown Sugar or the cinematic scope of Gimme Shelter, however as a trigger-happy album opener If You Can’t Rock Me lit issues up. The combination is perhaps muddy however the message was crystal: it’s the 70s, child, recover from it.
The juddering cowl of Ain’t Too Proud To Beg that adopted was the Marmite choice. Taking The Temptations’ smooth-talking authentic and punching it up with such power-chord vitality was to not everybody’s style. Except you have been excessive. Then it sounded daring.
The impish title monitor, half Wooden’s Wick demo, half Mick’s retooling, was the actual clincher. Richard instructed Jagger: “Come on, we’ve received to steal that motherfucker again. And we did, with out an excessive amount of problem. Simply the title itself was so superbly easy.”
Facet one’s compulsory massive ballad, Until The Subsequent Goodbye, was one other from the Jagger-Taylor collaboration, and was so arch it may have been certainly one of Lou Reed’s sick jokes, the ringing acoustic guitars and Jagger’s high-camp vocal suggestive of the concept, launched by Angie, that he may now not sing a love tune with a straight face.
Certainly, the concept that the Stones would possibly give you one thing new or authentic have been ideas that felt nearly quaint in 1974. That’s till the monitor that closed aspect one, a brand new peak within the extra heightened musical arc Mick Taylor had launched to the Stones, the imperious Time Waits For No One.
One other Jagger and (uncredited) Taylor authentic, Time Waits For No One is just a masterpiece, a journey not a race that builds and builds till the strain is launched by Taylor, marinading in smack and Santana, who delivers an exquisitely tortured solo. A siren sound over midnight rooftops. Jagger’s lyrics like suicide proper on the web page: ‘Time can tear down a constructing or destroy a lady’s face/Hours are like diamonds, don’t allow them to waste…’ His voice tremulous and pained: ‘…goals of the night-time will vanish by daybreak…’
Facet two of It’s Solely Rock ’N Roll additionally suffered from a 50-50 hit ratio, starting with the ick-inducing Luxurious. Demoed throughout the Goats Head Soup periods, Luxurious is toe-curling to hearken to now, Jagger chirruping in a fauxJamaican accent: ‘I’m working so laborious, to maintain you in dee luckshurry…’
Dynamic’s proprietor Byron Lee claimed Jagger had initially written a reggae tune referred to as Man Consuming Lady, which he deliberate to rent a Jamaican band to report, for a mooted solo album. Actually reggae was breaking by means of to the rock mainstream, with each Zeppelin (D’Yer Maker) and Eric Clapton (a canopy of Bob Marley’s I Shot The Sheriff) ‘dabbling’ efficiently with the shape across the identical time.
“I feel reggae may very well be as in style because the blues,” reckoned Mick. “Black music is all about getting right into a groove. What issues is the place you place your toes and the way you wiggle your ass.”
Dance Little Sister, which adopted, was all about wiggling your ass. Pure Keef, it begins promisingly with a nasty, snub-nosed riff and a few Insurgent Insurgent-style lyrics (‘On Thursday night time she regarded a fright…’) however quickly descends into repetitiveness and cliché, in order that it’s a aid when it lastly ends. Similar with Brief And Curlies, a bawdy barrelhouse blues that includes Taylor’s adroit honkytonk guitar. One other leftover from the Goats Head Soup periods, a tune a couple of girl squeezing a person’s furry balls, was by no means prone to transcend its tawdry material no matter how deftly it was carried out.
Sandwiched between these apparent fillers, although, was one of many album’s shock highlights, If You Actually Need To Be My Good friend. In contrast to the fey and prissy Until The Subsequent Goodbye, If You Actually Need To Be My Good friend was essentially the most heartfelt love tune Jagger had written since Wild Horses. It’s a tune about grown-up sentiments comparable to true sexual freedom, actual platonic love, and the bile that builds when these issues are quashed or denied in a relationship.
On this case, Jagger’s troubled marriage to Nicaraguan-born magnificence Bianca Pérez-Moras Macias, whom he wed in St Tropez in Could 1971 when she was 4 months pregnant. ‘I do know you assume life is a thriller/You play the vamp, I play the killer…’ When he goes on to sing about how ‘individuals inform me you’re a vulture… Say you’re a sore in a most cancers tradition’, it’s clear the jive speak is over. That Jagger the crafty deceiver is for as soon as being sincere. With Philly Soul outfit Blue Magic including lush backing vocals, and the band – augmented by common visitor keyboard gamers Nicky Hopkins and Billy Preston – at their most tasteful, If You Actually Need To Be My Good friend is an sudden second of emotional fact on an album in any other case constructed to grind its groin muscular tissues.
“I’m not within the least domesticated,” Jagger instructed Viva journal. “I attempt to not grasp round my household any greater than I’ve to.” In the identical article, Bianca contemplated: “Maybe Mick isn’t drawn to me any extra.” A disingenuous comment, on condition that on the time she was in an on-off affair with Hollywood film star Ryan O’Neal. Whereas Mick, as Bianca put it, “screws many however has few affairs”.
The album ends on a Kafka-esque be aware with Fingerprint File. A cool chunk of post-Watergate paranoia, it’s the longest monitor on the album and its most mysterious. Many critics disliked what they noticed because it’s tricksy manufacturing – the handled lead vocal, the manipulated guitars, the phased, intentionally woozy manufacturing. Including to the sense of otherhood, Jagger performs rhythm guitar, Mick Taylor performs bass, Invoice Wyman switched to synthesiser, Charlie Watts was supported by tabla participant Jolly Kunjappu, and Keith loved himself vastly on Superfly-model wah-wah guitar.
Wanting again, Keith put it greatest when he noticed: “Rock’n’roll can’t be deliberate or ready. Goats Head Soup to me was a marking-time album. I prefer it in some ways however I don’t assume it has the freshness this one has.”
In America, It’s Solely Rock ’N Roll grew to become the fourth of eight consecutive Stones albums to go to No.1. In Britain it reached No.2, breaking an unbroken chain of No.1 albums going again to 1969’s Let It Bleed. Music movies have been shot for a number of of the songs. Essentially the most well-known is the one for It’s Solely Rock ’N Roll (However I Like It) that includes the band, for causes by no means made clear, in US Navy sailor fits performing in a tent, which regularly fills with foam – once more, for causes nobody may very well be bothered to decipher.
Movies have been additionally achieved for Ain’t Too Proud To Beg and Until The Subsequent Goodbye. However when the It’s Solely Rock ’N Roll single proved to be a poor-selling follow-up to Angie, plans for additional singles have been quietly shelved. Ain’t Too Proud To Beg grew to become the second and final single from the album, scraping the Prime 20 within the US, however was not launched in Britain.
By January 1975, Mick Taylor had formally give up the Stones. The official motive given was that he wished “a change of scene”. Richard despatched him a telegram: “Thanks for the previous 5 years – it’s been a pleasure working with you.” Jagger took it as a private betrayal and remarked sarcastically: “Little question we are able to discover a sensible six-foot-three blond guitarist who can do his personal make-up.”
In the meantime, again within the smoky basement of The Wick, Keith, his new gold tooth glinting, turned to Ronnie and requested: “I do know it’s solely rock’n’roll, however how about it?” To which Ronnie replied: “I prefer it, prefer it, sure I dooo…” Sincere.