Skip to main content

The Rolling Stones Release a Long Lost Track Featuring Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page

The Rolling Stones are readying a re-release of their 1973 album Goats Head Soup in September, featuring demos and rarities and all sorts of goodies. Yesterday, they dropped the above song: “Scarlet.” Never bootlegged before, this firecracker of a track features Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page on guitar.

The recording happened in October 1974, long, long after the recording of the Goats Head Soup tracks in Jamaica at Dynamic Sound Studios. In fact, they’d also finished recording It’s Only Rock and Roll, Goats Head Soup’s follow-up. Mick Taylor was about to leave the band. But in this case, Led Zep and the Stones were two groups passing in the night, or in this case the corridors of London’s Island Studios.

Jimmy Page was there recording solo with Richards, along with a group that included Ian Stewart (a longtime unofficial member of the Stones) on piano, Traffic’s Ric Grech on bass, and Bruce Rowland on drums.

“My recollection is we walked in at the end of a Zeppelin session,” says Richards. “They were just leaving, and we were booked in next and I believe that Jimmy decided to stay. We weren’t actually cutting it as a track, it was basically for a demo, a demonstration, you know, just to get the feel of it, but it came out well, with a lineup like that, you know, we better use it.”

The initial sketch of the song came out of an earlier jam session, according to Jagger:

“I remember first jamming this with Jimmy and Keith in Ronnie (Wood)’s basement studio,” he said. “It was a great session.” The choppy riff is very much Keith Richards all over. Jagger’s lyrics are rough too, and you can hear a shared melody with “Angie,” their hit from that year.

Named after Page’s young daughter, “Scarlet” coulda woulda shoulda been a single or even an album track, but was shelved for whatever reason.

In the Stones’ minds, Goats Head Soup was one of their best. But when it came out in August the music press considered it as a pale follow-up to the sprawling Exile on Main Street. The band were riding high, but their fame sort of turned on this album, as the band started to reference themselves and plunge into true 1970s rock star excess. Lester Bangs hated the album, writing in Creem, “just because the Stones have abdicated their responsibilities is no reason we have to sit still for this shit! Because there is just literally nothing new happening.”

Allen Crowley, also in Creem, noted the generational shift happening: “The Stones are still consummate entertainers, but somewhere along the line we began to expect something more than entertainment from them. In Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed, the Stones began to tell us what was going on... And that's what missing in this very durable record. And beneath that knowledge is the wonderment at how that durable expertise carries on in the face of disintegration.”

Rolling Stone's Bud Coppa was more enthusiastic, knowing that a lot of Stones’ albums are sleepers: “Soup stands right next to Mott, the thematically similar LP of the Stones' brightest students, as the best album of 1973. For me, its deepening and unfolding over the coming months will no doubt rate as one of the year's richest musical experiences.”

Over the years, the critical reception has come around on Goats Head Soup. Not a classic, but not a disaster—it was a conscious break with the muffled sounds of Exile, yet still filled with lyrics about crime, despair, and alienation. It’s not the happiest of albums.

And by the way, this would not be the last time Jimmy Page played with the Stones. He played the solo on their 1986 single “One Hit (to the Body).”

Related Content:

Watch the Rolling Stones Play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” While Social Distancing in Quarantine

The Rolling Stones Release a Timely Track, “Living in a Ghost Town”: Their First New Music in Eight Years

A Big 44-Hour Chronological Playlist of Rolling Stones Albums: Stream 613 Tracks

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

The Rolling Stones Release a Long Lost Track Featuring Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3g4SXSk
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more