Today's Happy Hour Soundtrack

Today we're enjoying our first outdoor Happy Hour in quite a while and it is VERY nice to be sitting outside in a warm late-autumn sun... beer, book, and cigar in (at?) hand.  Our soundtrack today is the Rolling Stones... and how could it NOT be, seein' as how we continue to read Keef's memoirs, albeit slowly but oh-so-deliberately.  And so it came to this, one of my all-time faves...

About which (to begin with), this:

“Wild Horses” almost wrote itself. It was really a lot to do with, once again, fucking around with the tunings. I found these chords, especially doing it on a twelve-string to start with, which gave the song this character and sound. There’s a certain forlornness that can come out of a twelve-string. I started off, I think, on a regular six-string open E, and it sounded very nice, but sometimes you just get these ideas. What if I open tuned a twelve-string? All it meant was translate what Mississippi Fred McDowell was doing—twelve-string slide—into five-string mode, which meant a ten-string guitar. I now have a couple custom built for that. It was one of those magical moments when things come together. It’s like “Satisfaction.” You just dream it, and suddenly it’s all in your hands. Once you’ve got the vision in your mind of wild horses, I mean, what’s the next phrase you’re going to use? It’s got to be “couldn’t drag me away.”

That’s one of the great things about songwriting; it’s not an intellectual experience. One might have to apply the brain here and there, but basically it’s capturing moments. Jim Dickinson, bless him—he died August 15, 2009, while I was writing this book—will say later on what “Wild Horses” was “about.” I’m not sure. I never thought about songwriting as writing a diary, although sometimes in retrospect you realize that some of it is like that.

What is it that makes you want to write songs? In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you’re playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people. To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart. Sometimes I think songwriting is about tightening the heartstrings as much as possible without bringing on a heart attack.

That's from Life, of course. "Wild Horses" and I go back to the day "Sticky Fingers" was released, days that found me on Turkey's beautiful Black Sea coast and in the throes of a love affair with a (then) unobtainable woman.  The song remained a favorite down through the years, mainly for the plaintive and oh-so-familiar emotions the song evokes.  These days the lyrics take on an entirely different but no less applicable meaning.  I'd be thinking of this:

I watched you suffer a dull aching pain
Now you've decided to show me the same
But no sweet, vain exits or offstage lines
Could make me feel bitter or treat you unkind 

That, of course, is a story much too long to go into.  It's true what Keef sez, tho: the best tunes are all about tightening the heartstrings, a stab to the heart.  What's funny-strange is how the meaning and/or relevance changes down thru the years yet remains as true as it ever was.  Perhaps even more so.