The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [157]
Keith was playing twelve-string and singing harmonies into the same microphone as the twelve-string. We recorded it in this tiny studio in the West End of London called Regent Sound, which was a demo studio. I think the whole of that album was recorded in there. But it’s very different from doing those R&B covers or Marvin Gaye covers and all that. There’s a definite feel about it. It’s a very pop song, as opposed to all the blues songs and the Motown covers, which everyone did at the time.
The first full album that really kind of jumps out is ‘Out of Our Heads.’
What’s on there? [Laughter] I have no idea. I’m awfully sorry.
“Cry to Me,” “The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man,” “Play With Fire,” “I’m All Right,” “That’s How Strong My Love Is” . . .
Yeah. A lot of covers, still.
But it had a unity of sound to it.
Most of that was recorded in RCA Studios, in Hollywood, and the people working on it, the engineers, were much better. They knew how to get really good sounds. That really affects your performance, because you can hear the nuances, and that inspires you.
And your singing is different here for the first time. You sound like you’re singing more like soul music.
Yeah, well, it is obviously soul influenced, which was the goal at the time. Otis Redding and Solomon Burke. “Play With Fire” sounds amazing—when I heard it last. I mean, it’s a very in-your-face kind of sound and very clearly done. You can hear all the vocal stuff on it. And I’m playing the tambourines, the vocal line. You know, it’s very pretty.
Who wrote that?
Keith and me. I mean, it just came out.
A full collaboration?
Yeah.
That’s the first song you wrote that starts to address the lifestyle you were leading in England and, of course, class consciousness.
No one had really done that. The Beatles, to some extent, were doing it, though they weren’t really doing it at this period as much as they did later. The Kinks were kind of doing it—Ray Davies and I were in the same boat. One of the first things that, in that very naive way, you attempted to deal with were the kind of funny, swinging, London-type things that were going on. I didn’t even realize I was doing it at the time. But it became an interesting source for material. Songwriting had only dealt in clichés and borrowed stuff, you know, from previous records or ideas. “I want to hold your hand,” things like that. But these songs were really more from experience and then embroidered to make them more interesting.
Where does that come from in you? I mean, you’re writing about “Your mother, she’s an heiress/Owns a block in St. John’s Wood,” but she’s sleeping with the milkman, or something.
Yeah, yeah. Well, it was just kind of rich girls’ families—society as you saw it. It’s painted in this naive way in these songs.
But at the time to write about stuff like that must have been somewhat daring.
I don’t know if it was daring. It just hadn’t been done. Obviously there had been lyric writers that had written stuff much more interesting and sophisticated—say, Noël Coward, who I didn’t really know about. He was someone that your parents knew.
The lyricist who was really good at the time was Bob Dylan. Everyone looked up to him as being a kind of guru of lyrics. It’s hard to think of the absolute garbage that pop music really was at the time. And even if you lifted your game by a marginal amount, it really was a lot different from most everything else that had gone before in the ten years previously.
A lot of it was perhaps not as good as we thought, but at the time it was fantastic. “Gates of Eden” and all these Mexican-type songs, even the nonsense ones: “Everybody Must Get Stoned” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Positively 4th Street.”
Then you did ‘December’s Children (and Everybody’s).’ Does that title mean anything particular?
No. It was our manager’s [Andrew Loog