This is for rock and roll addicts, especially those who listen to the Rolling Stones. I came upon them pretty late in life, through the Madras radio station. Someone there must have loved the Stones, and kept playing tracks from Tattoo You and Emotional Rescue. I think it was in the early Eighties. I kept hearing Start Me Up, Emotional Rescue, Slave, the last has some nifty keyboard work, excellent guitar riffs, and a saxophone that screeches, honks on and off, courtesy Sonny Rollins, the tenor colossus. They were great songs that gave you good highs without the paraphernalia that usually goes with the Stones. Hearing them, I felt somehow happy. Mick Jagger’s falsetto delivery of Emotional Rescue with the plosive opening kept jabbing at me through the airwaves. At first I wondered who it was who was singing, not having heard this voice before. It was motownish and very funky in some ways. It was of course Mick Jagger. You have to see him in action to believe it. I remember someone, I think it was the irrepressible Joan Rivers, who famously declared that Mick Jagger could easily kiss a moose—he has child-bearing lips.
But those lips can sing as well. Yet this is not so much about Jagger but the way Stones let the saxophone in on some of their more memorable songs, Emotional rescue, Brown sugar, Rip this joint, especially Can’t you hear me knocking. Bobby Keys, who passed away last year, lent an entirely new and phenomenal dimension to the Rolling Stones sound. You may have heard Keys in Lennon’s Whatever gets you through the night (Walls and Bridges). Saxophone is not unusual in rock and roll and blues and pop: Branford Marsalis played with Bruce Hornsby, Sting, and the Grateful Dead; Ornette Coleman guested with the Dead as well; Steely Dan roped in Wayne Shorter (Aja) who suffused some of Joni Mitchell’s songs as well with his sensibility; Chris Potter blew with Steely Dan (Two Against Nature). Michael Brecker with Billy Joel (Big Man on Mulberry Street), Dick Parry with Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon). Gerry Rafferty (Baker Street), Al Stewart (Year of the Cat), and of course Bruce Springsteen was big on saxophone. I surely must have missed a few.
It is just that the Stones consistently used Bobby Keys to great effect. It was only after his death late last year that I found out what a colourful character he had been. He was hooked on to little blue, green, yellow pills, alcohol and weed, once getting caught in Hawai after a packet tumbled out of his saxophone at the customs.
Keith Richards, the Stones guitarist and Bobby’s partner in crime, called him a depraved maniac: once Keith had gone looking for Bobby because he had to play in a concert and finally found him with a cigar between his lips in a bathtub filled with champagne. There was a French woman in the bathtub as well. (Bobby was to recount later that he couldn’t speak French and she couldn’t speak English.) When Keith asked Bobby to get out of the tub, Bobby asked him to Eff off. Afterwards Mick Jagger wouldn’t let him play with the Stones for 10 years. Such a loss. I haven’t read his autobiography Every Night Is Saturday Night, but when I read it I am sure it will confirm that Bobby Keys occasionally played the saxophone as well.
Sudarshan is the author of Anatomy of an Abduction: How the Indian Hostages in Iraq Were Freed sudarshan@newindianexpress.com