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Keith Richards

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5 Dec, 1969

Love In Vain

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The band releasesLove In Vain, from the album, Let It Bleed. The song is a remake of Johnson’s blues classic. Richards:

For a time we thought the songs that were on that first album were the only recordings Robert Johnson had made, and then suddenly around ’67 or ’68 up comes this second bootleg collection that included Love in Vain. Love in Vain was such a beautiful song. Mick and I both loved it, and at the time I was working and playing around with Gram Parsons, and I started searching around for a different way to present it, because if we were going to record it there was no point in trying to copy the Robert Johnson style or ways and styles. We took it a little bit more country, a little bit more formalized, and Mick felt comfortable with that.

The Rolling Stones - Love In Vain (Live) - Official

11 Jul, 1969

Honky Tonk Women

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The band releases their song, Honky Tonk Women, from, Let It Bleed. Richards:

Honky Tonk Women started in Brazil. Mick and I, Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg who was pregnant with my son at the time. Which didn’t stop us going off to the Mato Grasso and living on this ranch. It’s all cowboys. It’s all horses and spurs. And Mick and I were sitting on the porch of this ranch house and I started to play, basically fooling around with an old Hank Williams idea. ‘Cause we really thought we were like real cowboys. Honky tonk women. And we were sitting in the middle of nowhere with all these horses, in a place where if you flush the john all these black frogs would fly out. It was great. The chicks loved it. Anyway, it started out a real country honk put on, a hokey thing. And then couple of months later we were writing songs and recording. And somehow by some metamorphosis it suddenly went into this little swampy, black thing, a Blues thing. Really, I can’t give you a credible reason of how it turned around from that to that. Except there’s not really a lot of difference between white Country music and black Country music. It’s just a matter of nuance and style. I think it has to do with the fact that we were playing a lot around with open tunings at the time. So we were trying songs out just to see if they could be played in open tuning. And that one just sunk in.

25 May, 1968

Jumpin’ Jack Flash

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The band releases their song, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, from the album, Through The Past Darkly (Biggest Hits Volume I). Richards:

The lyrics came from a gray dawn at Redlands. Mick and I had been up all night, it was raining outside, and there was the sound of these boots near the window, belonging to my gardener, Jack Dyer. It woke Mick up. He said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s Jack. That’s jumping Jack.’ I started to work around the phrase on the guitar, which was in open tuning, singing the phrase ‘Jumping Jack.’ Mick said, ‘Flash,’ and suddenly we had this phrase with a great rhythm and ring to it.

10 May, 1967

Court appearance

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article-2193466-14A60F5D000005DC-876_634x574Jagger and Richards appear before magistrates in Chichester, West Sussex, charged with drug offences.  Jagger, 24, is accused of illegally possessing four tablets containing amphetamine sulphate and methylamphetamine hydrochloride. Richards, also 24, is charged with allowing his house to be used for the purpose of smoking cannabis.  Both  plead not guilty and are released on bail to appear for trial at West Sussex Quarter Sessions on 22 June.

7 May, 1966

Paint It Black

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The band releasesPaint It Black, from, Aftermath. Richards:

We were in Fiji for about 3 days. They make sitars and all sorts of Indian stuff. Sitars are made out of watermelons or pumpkins or something smashed so they go hard. They’re very brittle and you have to be careful how you handle them. We had the sitars, we thought we’d try them out in the studio. To get the right sound on Paint It Black we found the sitar fitted perfectly. We tried a guitar but you can’t bend it enough.

26 Sep, 1964

Time Is On My Side

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The band releasesTime Is On My Side, from the album, 12 x 5. Richards:

In America we were basically known for heavy, slowish kind of ballads. Time Is On My Side, Tell Me, Heart of Stone, that was what we were known for. Strangely enough that was our thing. Every single was a slow song. Who would believe it? You’d think they’d be clamoring for out-and-out rock and roll, but no, it was the Soul ballads that happened for us in America.

The Rolling Stones - Time Is On My Side (Live) - OFFICIAL PROMO