T
he big discovery
late in 1968 or early 1969 was when I started playing the open five-string tuning. It transformed my life. It’s the way of playing that I use for the riffs and songs the Stones are best known for—“Honky Tonk Women,” “Brown Sugar,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Happy,” “All Down the Line,” “Start Me Up” and “Satisfaction.” “Flash” too.
I had hit a kind of buffer. I just really thought I was not getting anywhere from straight concert tuning. I wasn’t learning anymore; I wasn’t getting some of the sounds I really wanted. I’d been experimenting with tunings for quite a while. Most times I went into different tunings because I had a song going and I was hearing it in my head but I couldn’t get it out of the conventional tuning no matter any way I looked at it. Also I wanted to try to go back and use what a lot of old blues guitarists were playing and transpose it to electric but keep the same basic simplicity and straightforwardness—that pumping drive that you hear with the acoustic blues players. Simple, haunting, powerful sounds.
And then I found out all this stuff about banjos. A lot of five-string playing came from when Sears, Roebuck offered the Gibson guitar in the very early ’20s, really cheap. Before that, banjos were the biggest-selling instrument. Gibson put out this cheap, really good guitar, and cats would tune it, since they were nearly all banjo players, to a five-string banjo tuning. Also, you didn’t have to pay for the other string, the big string. Or you could save it for hanging the old lady or something. Most of rural America bought their stuff from the Sears catalogue. Rural America was where it was really important. In the cities, you could shop around. In the Bible Belt, rural America, the South, Texas, the Midwest, you got your Sears, Roebuck catalogue and you sent away. That’s how Oswald got his shooter.
Usually that banjo tuning was used, on the guitar, for slide playing or bottleneck. An “open tuning” simply means the guitar is pretuned to a ready-made major chord—but there are different kinds and configurations. I’d been working on open D and open E. I learned then that Don Everly, one of the finest rhythm players, used open tuning on “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Bye Bye Love.” He just used the barre chord, the finger across the neck. Ry Cooder was the first cat I actually saw play the open G chord—I have to say I tip my hat to Ry Cooder. He showed me the open G tuning. But he was using it strictly for slide playing and he still had the bottom string. That’s what most blues players use open tunings for, they use it for slide. And I decided that was too limiting. I found the bottom string got in the way. I figured out after a bit that I didn’t need it; it would never stay in tune and it was out of whack for what I wanted to do. So I took it off and used the fifth string, the A string, as the bottom note. You didn’t have to worry about bashing that bottom string and setting up harmonics and stuff that you didn’t need.
I started playing chords on the open tuning—which was new ground. You change one string and suddenly you’ve got a whole new universe under your fingers. Anything you thought you knew has gone out the window. Nobody thought about playing minor chords in an open major tuning, because you’ve got to really dodge about a bit. You have to rethink your whole thing, as if your piano was turned upside down and the black notes were white and the white notes were black. So you had to retune your mind and your fingers as well as the guitar. The minute you’ve tuned a guitar or any other instrument to one chord, you’ve got to work your way around it. You’re out of the realms of normal music. You’re up the Limpopo with Yellow Jack.
The beauty, the majesty of the five-string open G tuning for an electric guitar is that you’ve only got three notes—the other two are repetitions of each other an octave apart. It’s tuned GDGBD. Certain strings run through the whole song, so you get a drone going all the time, and because it’s electric they reverberate. Only three notes, but because of these different octaves, it fills the whole gap between bass and top notes with sound. It gives you this beautiful resonance and ring. I found working with open tunings that there’s a million places you don’t need to put your fingers. The notes are there already. You can leave certain strings wide open. It’s finding the spaces in between that makes open tuning work. And if you’re working the right chord, you can hear this other chord going on behind it, which actually you’re not playing. It’s there. It defies logic. And it’s just lying there saying, “Fuck me.” And it’s a matter of the same old cliché in that respect. It’s what you leave out that counts. Let it go so that one note harmonizes off the other. And so even though you’ve now changed your fingers to another position, that note is still ringing. And you can even let it hang there. It’s called the drone note. Or at least that’s what I call it. The sitar works on similar lines—sympathetic ringing, or what they call the sympathetic strings. Logically it shouldn’t work, but when you play it, and that note keeps ringing even though you’ve now changed to another chord, you realize that that is the root note of the whole thing you’re trying to do. It’s the drone.
I just got fascinated by relearning the guitar. It really invigorated me. It was like a different instrument in a way, and literally too. I had to have the five-string guitars made for me. I’ve never wanted to play like anybody else, except when I was first starting, when I wanted to be Scotty Moore or Chuck Berry. After that, I wanted to find out what the guitar or the piano could teach me.
The five-string took me back to the tribesmen of West Africa. They had a very similar instrument, sort of a five-string, kind of like a banjo, but they would use the same drone, a thing to set up other voices and drums over the top. Always underneath it was this underlying one note that went through it. And you listen to some of that meticulous Mozart stuff and Vivaldi and you realize that they knew that too. They knew when to leave one note just hanging up there where it illegally belongs and let it dangle in the wind and turn a dead body into a living beauty. Gus used to point it out to me: just listen to that one note hanging there. All the other stuff that’s going on underneath is crap, but that one note makes it sublime.
There’s something primordial in the way we react to pulses without even knowing it. We exist on a rhythm of seventy-two beats a minute. The train, apart from getting them from the Delta to Detroit, became very important to blues players because of the rhythm of the machine, the rhythm of the tracks, and then when you cross onto another track, the beat moves. It echoes something in the human body. So then when you have machinery involved, like trains, and drones, all of that is still built in as music inside us. The human body will feel rhythms even when there’s not one. Listen to “Mystery Train” by Elvis Presley. One of the great rock-and-roll tracks of all time, not a drum on it. It’s just a suggestion, because the body will provide the rhythm. Rhythm really only has to be suggested. Doesn’t have to be pronounced. This is where they got it wrong with “this rock” and “that rock.” It’s got nothing to do with rock. It’s to do with roll.
Five strings cleared out the clutter. It gave me the licks and laid on textures. You can almost play the melody through the chords, because of the notes you can throw in. And suddenly instead of it being two guitars playing, it sounds like a goddamn orchestra. Or you can no longer tell who is playing what, and hopefully if it’s really good, no one will care. It’s just fantastic. It was like scales falling from your eyes and from your ears at the same time. It broke open the dam.
Ian Stewart used to refer to us affectionately as “my little three-chord wonders.” But it is an honorable title. OK, this song has got three chords, right? What can you do with those three chords? Tell it to John Lee Hooker; most of his songs are on one chord. Howlin’ Wolf stuff, one chord, and Bo Diddley. It was listening to them that made me realize that silence was the canvas. Filling it all in and speeding about all over the place was certainly not my game and it wasn’t what I enjoyed listening to. With five strings you can be sparse; that’s your frame, that’s what you work on. “Start Me Up,” “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” “Honky Tonk Women,” all leave those gaps between the chords. That’s what I think “Heartbreak Hotel” did to me. It was the first time I’d heard something so stark. I wasn’t thinking like that in those days, but that’s what hit me. It was the incredible depth, instead of everything being filled in with curlicues. To a kid of my age back then, it was startling. With the five-string it was just like turning a page; there’s another story. And I’m still exploring.
My man Waddy Wachtel, guitar player extraordinaire, interpreter of my musical gropings, ace up the sleeve of the X-Pensive Winos, has something to say on this topic. Take the floor, Wads.
Waddy Wachtel:
Keith and I come to the guitar with a very similar approach. It’s funny. I sat with Don Everly one night, Don was a real drinker at that point, and I said, “Don, I’ve got to ask you something. I’ve known every song you guys have ever done”—that’s why I got the job in their band; I know every vocal part, I know every guitar part—“except,” I said, “there’s something I’ve never understood on your first single, ‘Bye Bye Love,’ and that is the intro. What the fuck is that sound? Who’s playing that guitar that starts that song?” And Don Everly goes, “Oh, that was just this G tuning that Bo Diddley showed me.” And I went, “Excuse me, I’m sorry, what did you say?” And he had a guitar, so he’s putting it in the open G tuning and he goes, “Yeah, it was me,” and he plays it and I go, “Oh, my fucking word, that’s it! It’s you! It was you!”
I remember when I discovered this weird tuning—as it seemed to me then—Keith had adopted. In the early ’70s, I went to England with Linda Ronstadt. And we walked into Keith’s house in London and there’s this Strat sitting on a stand with five strings on it. And I’m like, “What happened to that thing? What’s wrong with that?” And he goes, “That’s my whole deal.” What is? He goes, “The five-string! The five-string open G tuning.” I went, “Open G tuning? Wait a minute, Don Everly told me about an open G tuning. You play open G tuning?” Because growing up and playing guitar, you’re learning Stones songs to play in bars, but you know something’s wrong, you’re not playing them right, there’s something missing. I’d never played any folk music. I didn’t have that blues knowledge. So when he said that to me, I said, “Is that why I can’t do it right? Let me see that thing.” And it makes so many things so easy. Like “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” You can’t play that unless it’s in the tuning. It sounds absurd. And in the tuning, it’s so simple. If you lower the first string, the highest string, one step, then the fifth is always ringing through everything, and that’s creating that jangle. The inimitable sound, at least the way Keith plays it.
Those two strings he travels up and down on, you can do a lot with them. We got on stage with the Winos one night and we’re about to do “Before They Make Me Run,” and he goes to do the intro and he starts to hit it and goes… “Argh, I don’t know which one it is!” Because he has so many introductions that are all based on the same form. The B string and the G string. Or the B string and the D string. He just went, “Which one are we doing, man? I’m lost in a sea of intros.” He’s got so many of them, a whirling dervish of riffs, open G intros.
When I fell in with Gram Parsons in the summer of 1968, I struck a seam of music that I’m still developing, which widened the range of everything I was playing and writing. It also began an instant friendship that already seemed ancient the first time we sat down and talked. It was like a reunion with a long-lost brother for me, I suppose, never having had one. Gram was very, very special and I still miss him. Early that year he’d joined the Byrds, “Mr. Tambourine Man” and all that, but they’d just recorded their classic
Sweetheart of the Rodeo,
and it was Gram who had totally turned them around from a pop band into a country music band and expanded their whole being. That record, which bemused everybody at the time, turned out to be the incubator of country rock—a major influence. They were touring, on their way to South Africa, and I went to see them at Blaises Club. I expected to hear “Mr. Tambourine Man.” But this was so different, and I went back to see them and met Gram.
“Got anything?” was probably the first question he asked me, or the more discreet “Erm, anywhere, erm…?” “Sure, come back to…” I think we went back to Robert Fraser’s to hang out, do some stuff. I was taking heroin by this time. He wasn’t unfamiliar with it. “Doodgy” was his word for it. It was a musical friendship, but also there was a similar love of a similar substance. Gram certainly liked to get out of it—which made two of us at the time. He also, like me, liked to go for the highest quality —he had better coke than the Mafia, did Gram. Southern boy, very warm, very steady under the drugs, calm. He had a troubled background, a lot of Spanish moss and Garden of Good and Evil.
At Fraser’s that night we started to talk about South Africa, and Gram asked me, “What’s this drift I’m getting since I got to England? When I say I’m going to South Africa, I get this cold stare.” He was not aware of apartheid or anything. He’d never been out of the United States. So when I explained it to him, about apartheid and sanctions and nobody goes there, they’re not being kind to the brothers, he said, “Oh, just like Mississippi?” And immediately, “Well, fuck that.” He quit that night—he was supposed to leave the next day for South Africa. So I said, you can stay here, and we lived with Gram for months and months, certainly the rest of that summer of 1968, mostly at Redlands. Within a day or two I thought I’d known him all my life. There was an immediate recognition. What we could have done if we’d known each other earlier. We just sat around one night, and five nights later we were still sitting up talking and catching up on old times, which was five nights ago. And we played music without stopping. Sat around the piano or with guitars and just went through the country songbook. Plus some blues and a few ideas on top. Gram taught me country music—how it worked, the difference between the Bakersfield style and the Nashville style. He played it all on piano—Merle Haggard, “Sing Me Back Home,” George Jones, Hank Williams. I learned the piano from Gram and started writing songs on it. Some of the seeds he planted in the country music area are still with me, which is why I can record a duet with George Jones with no compunction at all. I know I’ve had a good teacher in that area. Gram was my mate, and I wish he’d remained my mate for a lot longer. It’s not often you can lie around on a bed with a guy having cold turkey in tandem and still get along. But that is a later story.