45. Monkey Man
Year: 1969
US Album: Let It Bleed
Songwriter: Jagger/Richards
“Well I hope we're not too messianic
Or a trifle too satanic
But we love to play the blues”
The distinctive sound that starts this song off is Bill Wyman on the vibraphone. Keith plays the lead and slide guitars as Brian was still in limbo. Charlie adds a very distinctive drum beat and Nicky Hopkins is on piano.
Supposedly written about Italian pop artist Mario Scifano who Mick and Keith met on his movie set, the lyrics are very out there and random – but also conjure up some interesting images.
I am empowered by
@shuke 's choice of
Monkey Man as his #1 Stones song to rave about it and
Let It Bleed. LiB is the best Stones album and it is not close and Monkey Man is my favorite song on the record. Dont make it my favorite Stones song (although is there ANYTHING more Stonesfan than throat-ripping screamalongs of monkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY, mumumumumumumunKAAAAAYY with your tongue wagging out?!), but 45 is harsh, my friend.
Uneven as it is, there's anthem after anthem in LiB -
Gimme Shelter captures the era better than any song; there simply is no tune where a boy can imagine himself a man - the basic function of rock&roll - better than w
Midnight Rambler; even the punkiest record in the world can't spit at everybody as well as
Let It Bleed, Live With Me and
Monkey Man did; and
You Can't Always Get What You Want ends the album better than an album has ever been ended. If one switches out Country Honk for
Honky Tonk Woman (even the act of bypassing label pressure by countrifying the album version is cool, if unlistenable)......well, i dont know what to tell you. sry for the spotlighting DocOc, but it's what happens when you underrate a monk
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYY!!!!
####! i got another grrrreat story about this song but it involves a girl (not perjorative - we were 14) and i never tell stories about different loves on the same day (unless a glorious substance of some kind lubricates it outta me). It's only right and part of the Storyteller's Code, man. Tomorrow i will tell my Love in Vain story. I may have to see a schedule from here on out....
And now this. I made a mistake - we were 15.
Groucho Marx Syndrome - not joining any club that would have you for a member - has clouded my entire life. I'm sad & alone because, as much as i love what goes on inside of me, i'm suspect of anyone who wants to show the slightest amount of faith in who i am. Always wanted the fancy, the unattainable, to wrestle down the tease. The honest look of faith that is truly the best thing between people always had me running for the hills like the monkaaaay i am. Woe is that way -
And it started with Robin.
The fall of '69 i got kicked in the head playing soccer. Not a bad injury, but it was complicated by the fact that my brain is improperly suspended in my skull (my spine's the same way - stenosis curses my every day) so the swelling pressed my brain right up against my skull so that any sharp movement caused a contrecoup injury on the opposite side. I ended up in cervical traction (about the most uncomfortable a human can be) for a wk to safely reduce the swelling. As soon as that was over, a group of classmates were allowed to visit me (hospitals not only kept you much longer than they do now, but were very squirrely about people under 16yo being around).
One of them was Robin L. A beautiful girl - golden hair & skin, played school sports so she had both field hockey legs & tennis butt, and eyes so blue you wanted to dive into em. Topped with a massive honker that the Wicked Witch of the West would have found excessive. She was not a mouse at all, had plenty boys after her, but she liked me and you can't help who you like.
One of the conversation subjects when classmates came to see me was the pending release of the new Stones record. Because
Honky Tonk Woman had been perhaps their biggest single, it caused Let It Bleed to be anticipated on a similar level to how
Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane had hyped
Sgt Pepper. I made a passing joke about not being able to stand in line @ North Shore Shopping Center for it and somebody remembered.
"You have a visitor, wikkid", said the nurse, and in walked that craggy vision of a girl with her hands behind her back. After registering my surprises and exchanging pleasantries, she gave me one of those looks of faith that began a life of runnings and presented me a copy of
Let It Bleed with a bow on it. I really should have stopped loving other women for the rest of my life right then & there (i dont reunion, but my best pal does and says that Robin is easily the most successful & beautiful of our classmates), but my Li'l Bardot was still around to torture me.
I've recounted very recently about my 40+yr history of being Mr Inbetween for my very first sweetheart. My Li'l Bardot is the sexiest human i've ever known, loved me well, loves me still, but almost never loved me first. Years of making out, but she didn't want me to be her first so she went to a concert and groupied a rock god for that, then we could do stuff. When i came home from running away, she had the older, musician boyfriend she was supposed to but, eventually, she let me leak thru the cracks. I quit showbiz to live with her in a mountain commune, but only after her hippiegod boyfriend had taken off to Mexico.
That summer Li'l Bardot had dispatched her cherry so, though i wasn't her official boyfriend, we shonuff got enough sweat on her plush toys. Robin may well have loved me because i was ungainly & ridiculous, but it was more likely because i was the toy of the It Girl of our school. Maybe i wanted to be treated right. I didn't.
I was moved by her gift - i mean, she actually did stand in line and it would have involved parental transportation - and i was more than polite about it, but she had a bigger nose than the Old Man in the Mountain and i was already dabbling with royalty. As you can tell, i think about it still.
The problem with Let It Bleed is how poorly its bad songs fit w the great ones. I think the first thing i ever did w a cassette recorder was zap
Country Honk &
You Got the Silver out of LiB. i originally felt the same way about
Love in Vain (which seemed a carryover of the alleycat yowling of
Beggar's Banquet which i didn't care for) but then everytime i listened to it i'd think of Robin & my statusized idiocy with her. Soon enough, i'd end up putting on that song specifically every time Li'l Bardot left me in the
lurch and yowling thru my self-pity along to it. Love is as vain as in vain.