Cover Story: Making the case for The Rolling Stones' Undercover album
September 04, 2008
by Dave Thompson
On the occasion of its 25th birthday, Goldmine revisits and reappraises what might well be the Stones’ last truly great new LP.
A lot of people, probably including a lot of the people reading this, consider Undercover to be one of the Rolling Stones’ more recent albums, one of those makeweight, mark-time platters that they kick out every three or four years or so, and which we file away at the back end of the collection, secure in the knowledge that we’ll probably never listen to them again.
So, it’ll probably come as something of a shock, if not an ice-cold wake-up call, to discover that it is now 25 years old — which either means that the Stones have been on cruise control for even longer than they were actually kicking out the jams… or, it’s maybe time to take a calm step backwards and set about reinvestigating the record itself.
Revolutionary chic
There is certainly a lot of justification to doing so. Undercover was, after all, the last Stones album to actually arouse even a soupçon of the excitement with which previous records were received.
And, while the controversies seem small potatoes when compared to some of the grand malfeasance of which earlier albums were accused, still there was a fission of vicarious excitement to be drawn from the knicker-twisting hand-wringing that accompanied the release of the title track’s accompanying video.
Julian Temple directed “Undercover Of The Night” — he of Sex Pistols “Great Rock And Roll Swindle” fame and already carving himself a sharp-edged niche among the enfant terribles of modern moviedom. That was what attracted the Stones to his side; their own past videos, after all, had done little more than stand the musicians up in an empty room and have them prance through their paces while trying to avert the glare of Mick Jagger’s choice in shirt.
Temple was having none of that. Packing band and film crew off to Mexico at the end of October 1983, just weeks before the single’s release, he actually listened to the song before drawing up his story board, and the result remains one of the most potent, not to mention chilling, political-action performances of the rock ’n’ roll era, a succession of flash-bulb explosions that splash from both the record and the accompanying video to ruthlessly illuminate the other side of revolutionary chic. It ain’t all street fighting men, baby.
Blood sprays, bullets fly, a young couple cower in horror from the violence, and hooded men frog march their victim around the compound. At a time when the West was just beginning to wake up to the killing fields of certain Central and South American regimes, “Undercover” was a shocking indictment of a political nightmare taking place not on the other side of the world, or even in some shadowy African jungle, but on our very doorstep. And, looking out of that door, people did not like what they saw.
The “Undercover” video was not exactly banned in either the U.S. or the U.K. But you had to search long and hard to see it on broadcast television. Apologists pointed to a particularly vivid on-screen execution as justification for their action. Activists pointed to the American government’s support of the Nicaraguan Contras, and the media’s unwillingness to step out of line. And Stones fans celebrated, because, after so many years in the wilderness, the band was back at its authority-baiting best.
Not that you found unanimity, even there. The British magazine Q would later elect “Undercover of The Night” to its chart of the “worst songs recorded by great artists,” condemning it thus: “The Stones get funky. And that’s funky in the same way geography teachers are funky.”
But it made sense at the time, and it still makes sense today, a rambunctious cascade of rhythms and edginess, fired by Charlie Watt’s virtuoso tympanis routine, punctuated by guitars that slice like scythes and fronted by one of Jagger’s most aggressive vocals in years. A #11 hit in the U.K., a #9 in the United States, “Undercover Of The Night” brought the Stones screaming back into commercial contention at a time when a lot of people believed they had finally lost the plot.
In session
In fact, they were probably in firmer control of their musical destinies than they had been since the mid-late-1970s, and a series of sessions that proved so productive that no less than three successive LPs could be drawn from them: Some Girls, Emotional Rescue and Tattoo You.
Of course, they were truly scraping the barrel by the time they reached that latter set, and that despite it contrarily featuring one of their most storied anthems ever, “Start Me Up.” Few people, noting in the newspapers that a new Stones LP was imminent, truly believed that the band could ever rise to the occasion again. Undercover would prove them all wrong.
Even the album’s genesis broke the recent mold. Touring through 1981-1982, the Stones returned to the studio with reinvention on their minds. The first sessions took place in a tiny basement studio in October 1982, as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and occasionally Charlie Watts, convened to run through a stack of new songs: “Can’t Find Love,” “Wanna Hold You,” “What I’m Saying is True,” “Christine,” “Dreams To Remember,” “I’m So Weak,” “Legwarmer,” “Lizard’s Neck,” “Run And Take,” “You Keep It Cool” and a slow-burning rocker that would eventually metamorphose into “She’s So Hot.”
Jagger explained, “I decided that I wasn’t going to rely on studio composing. I hate having to go in and teach the whole band in the studio. I’d much rather do it in rehearsal time. So, when we started writing, Keith and I got in a bit early, and we rented an 8-track demo studio in Paris… with four or five songs I’d done and some he’d worked up, and we played them to each other and he suggested tempos and various adjustments.
“After a week, we had six or seven things to start with. We took turns at playing the drums and... well, we played guitar, and we got to know the material each of us had written in the past few months, you know. So, when we actually got the band into the studio, we had sort of a hard-core bunch of songs, which is most of the songs on the album.”
From the basement, Jagger, Richards and Ron Wood moved onto the Pathe Marconi studios, scene of their late-’70s triumphs, to listen through to the last surviving songs from those sessions, in search of anything that might be usable. The fact that they found very little meant that just three days later, the full band was convened to begin work anew.
Bill Wyman explained. “Everything we’d previously done that was of any — what we thought was — kind of quality or standard, were bootlegged about a year and a half ago, and so there was nothing to sort of check back on and say, ‘Oh, maybe that one would be nice for this album,’ you know. So we had to start off fresh.”
No matter that much of the musicians’ free time was being devoured by promotional duties for the upcoming “Let’s Spend The Night Together” concert film; nor that both Watts and Wyman were also heavily committed to their solo careers at the time — Watts’ Rocket 88 band was gigging constantly throughout this period, while Wyman was still basking in the continuing success of his “Si Si Je Suis A Rock Star” smash. The Stones rolled on, and Jagger enthused, “All these songs are new. They were all written this year, last year, over a short base of time when we recorded. They’re all new and none of ’em are from previous sessions.”
The Undercover sessions devoured most of November and a large chunk of December, too, as the band relaxed into a raft of songs, including many that have yet to see the light of day: a traditional blues called “All Mixed Up,” instrumentals “Brown Leaves” and “Golden Caddy,” ”Cook Cook Blues,” which they would later revisit for the B-side to 1989’s “Rock And A Hard Place,” a Keith Richards vocal through Ralph Mooney and Charles Seal’s “Crazy Arms,” two Freddie King numbers, “The Stumble” and “Hideaway,” a super-elongated version of another eventual B-side, “I Think I’m Going Mad,” Eddie Taylor’s “Looking For Trouble,” and a bevy of new Jagger-Richard compositions: “Still In Love,” “Stop That” and “Tried To Talk Her Into It.”
A host of other titles appeared on the grapevine, to make their way into sundry recording guides: “Dance Mr. K,” “Discovery Bay,” “Eliza Upchink,” “Identification,” “In Your Hand,” “Pink Pick,” “Pullover,” “Show Me A Woman.”
Some may be working titles for now familiar numbers, some may have been garbled mistranslations. Either way, the Stones played around with a lot of music, and co-producer Chris Kimsey enthused, “the Stones attract a lot of people obviously so, when you are recording, a lot of the nights it’s more like a gig anyway because, you know, a bunch of people come down. Especially in Paris, you’ve got a lot of girls that come down to dance around and it’s fun.
“There’s definitely been an incredible improvement in the amount of energy and enthusiasm, especially from Keith. It’s been remarkable. And the band’s taken on a new energy since then. It’s really kicked everyone up the backside; it’s been great. And Keith’s energy now is so high that he’ll be... he’ll stay in the studio for hours, just writing and coming up with new riffs and things. And, you know, that inspires Mick.”
By the time the Paris sessions ended, the band had a firm notion of what songs would make it onto the finished record: “She Was Hot” and “Wanna Hold You” were brought back from the basement demos, and “Tie You Up” and “Too Much Blood” were taking shape, as did “Too Tough” and “All The Way Down.”
A loose piece that early session tapes titled, simply, “Ronnie’s Idea,” would become the guitarist’s “Pretty Beat Up,” and when the sessions reconvened at the same studios at the end of January 1983, even more of the album was falling into place, as “Feel On Baby” and “Undercover Of The Night” came into focus.
The Stones were forced to take another break here, as the concert movie continued to call upon their time. But May saw them traveling to Compass Point in Nassau, to commence the gargantuan task of layering percussion and rhythms across “Undercover Of The Night,” with the Jamaican rhythm section of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespear.
“[There’s] a lot of drum stuff [on the album],” Richards warned. “It’s probably the drummiest album we’ve ever done. Maybe it’s got to do with [it being] the first time in a while that we’ve made a record after two consecutive years on the road. The two tours, ’81 and ’82, and then we started recording a few months after coming off the road. That probably affected it. You usually find that if you hit the studio after coming off the road, you get a difference in sound because you’ve been playing together longer than any other comparable time.”
Compass Point was a location that Richards, especially, approved of. “A lot of Jamaican reggae interests me because they have a lovely, wide-open concept about recording, which the rest of us are slowing coming around to. For them, a console is as much an instrument as a drum or a guitar. They’ll just go Whack! Bang! and drop out an instrument... When we first started working with… Chris Kimsey, we tried to turn him on to some dub records. He was interested, but he didn’t really get into it until we started working in [the Caribbean]....
“[T]here are some people you don’t normally think of as producers, like Sly Dunbar, who are incredible. I didn’t realize how good he was until recently when we were in the same studio in Nassau... Matter of fact, that’s him doing percussion on Simmons Drums on a couple of tracks on the new album... We [also] brought in a couple of guys from Senegal to get that percussive bongo sound. They brought in their own instruments and an incredible array of primitive African hardware, so there’s lots of great percussion throughout the album; a lot of work with rhythms.”
Unforgiven
The final change of scenery took the Stones to the Hit Factory in New York, where they could settle down to gifting the record with the final killer touches it required. Beginning at the end of June, and devouring the whole of July, with Sly and Robbie, keyboard player Chuck Leavell and saxophonist David Sanborn all in attendance, the completed album fell into place.
But Jagger had barely finished his first mix of the album when Richards confronted him to complain that there was, indeed, too much blood on the record. “It was like an avalanche of those images, too much gore crammed onto one piece of tape,” he said.
Jagger listened back, found himself agreeing, and returned to the drawing board. “There were a lot [of] weird things we recorded that didn’t get on the record,” he confessed. “Some because of time, some because of content... I did go over the top a bit.”
Undercover remained an unforgiving album, both thematically and atmospherically, but Richards knew that it needed to be. Because life itself was unforgiving. Undercover was a reflection of the times in which it was made, and, if you disagreed with that, then Richards knew what you needed to do.
“Look out your front door,” he instructed journalists. “Look at the news. You tell me. I’m sure Mick or I or anybody else would be happy not to be bombarded with some of these images, but we are supposedly living in a real world, after all. In a way, this album is a brother to ‘Gimme Shelter’ and maybe Beggars Banquet, or a mixture of those two records.”
Still, Jagger was swift to point out that “it’s not all bleak. It’s tough, that’s all. I don’t know really. What comes out, comes out, you know. It’s not supposed to be aimed at any kind of lovey-dovey market. It’s not aimed at anything. It’s just what comes out. You try to improve on it, but the ideas that come out is what you tend to use. I mean, there are love songs which we didn’t include on the album, which we’ll probably include on some lovey-dovey album when we feel lovey-dovey.”
Even in its revamped form, however, the record was not to everybody’s tastes.
Ian Stewart, the band’s long-serving (and long-suffering) pianist, explained, “the songs are much stronger. I think Mick’s come up with some good sort of lyrics, and his voice sounds great on it. And there’s also... there’s a good feel to it. I think Mick and Keith have done really well on this album. The only fault I’ve got against it is, again, they’ve spent much too long mixing the bloody thing. And, as a result, the actual sound of the instruments is a little bit harder and cold, whereas when they’re still in the early stages, when they’re just basic tracks, to me a lot of those things sound better.”
Dance little sister
Of course, work did not end with the completion of the album itself. With an eye for the now-bustling market in 12-inch remix singles, “Undercover Of The Night,” “Feel On Baby” and “Too Much Blood” were set aside for further work, extended and dub versions that would take the band’s already tenacious grip on the state of modern dance music and amplify it beyond all recognition.
It was five years since the extended mix of “Miss You,” from the Some Girls album, first showed the Stones what the 12-inch single was capable of, during which time their early market lead had been absolutely overtaken. Now, they were to reclaim their crown, even recruiting Arthur Baker, the King of the New York dance scene, to work his peculiar magic over “Too Much Blood.” On more than one occasion in the past, the Stones had been accused of resting upon old rock’n’roll laurels. It was time for them to start leading the pack once again.
They were not, of course, to abandon all their old tricks — Watts readily acknowledged that “Undercover Of The Night” was as heavily influenced by the nights he and Jagger spent doing the disco round as “Miss You” ever was — “we used to go to discos a lot,” he acknowledged. “It was a great period.” Elsewhere, “She Was Hot” appealed to precisely the same raging hormones as “Little T&A.”
But Undercover was the sound, too, of the Stones marching headlong into the future, as they embraced sequencers and synths with a passion they’d once reserved for somewhat more hedonistic joys and rebuilt their energies accordingly. “We wanted the record to sound very 1983,” Jagger was adamant, “as opposed to something very period, like the Stray Cats. They’re very good, but not what I’m after at the moment.”
It wasn’t a decision the entire band relished. So far as Richards was concerned, “the synthesizer… should have been left in the back room to work out on. That damn machine.” But the new technology also introduced a wealth of new possibilities, pushing the Stones into the vanguard of the year’s sonic experimenters, from the percussive hip-hop of “Too Much Blood” to the lascivious slide of “Feel On Baby,” and on, of course, the title track; songs that may not find their way into many “best of the Stones” compilations, but which proved the group wasn’t coasting all the same.
It would, after all, have been very easy for them to do that. In common with so many of the superstars of the 1960s and 1970s, the Stones really didn’t need to keep on working; indeed, they had just signed a new multi-album deal worth $28 million with CBS.
Neither did they have any reason to be out there trying to compete with the hip young kids who were hot on the chart that year… Paul Young, Men At Work, Spandau Ballet, Lionel Ritchie, Duran Duran. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had just turned 40, Bill Wyman was within touching distance of 50. Why would they even dream of going head to head with a bunch of whippersnappers half their age?
But they did, and New York Times reviewer Jon Pareles blessed them for doing so.
“On ‘Undercover,’” he insisted, “the Stones rock harder than they did on… Tattoo You, tapping into the most basic Chicago blues even as they fire synthesized drums over Charlie Watts’s backbeat.” And why? Because the band had finally realized that “sheer attitude is no longer enough.”
You cannot cruise through on past reputation alone — or you could, but that way lies Vegas and the supper club circuit. A decade or so later, the Stones would embrace that fate willingly. Right now, though, they still wanted to fight for their right to party.
“It is little short of astonishing,” Pareles concluded, “that the rich, pampered, high-living Rolling Stones are still willing to work so hard. [But] Undercover is something more than the Stones’ latest comeback from a mediocre album [the previous year’s Still Life live set]. It is a next step.”
No support
But such far-sighted enthusiasm was very much an exception. The media came down hard on Undercover; came down on the band as well, and all the more so when it became apparent that the Rolling Stones would not be touring behind the album.
You could not blame the band, of course; the extravagant outing that ate up so much of 1981 and 1982 was still fresh in the memory and, besides, “Let’s Spend The Night Together” was surely spectacular enough to give even the most devoted fan a fresh hit of live excitement. Unfortunately, if any Stones album has ever demanded an accompanying concert tour, it was Undercover — not only for commercial reasons (in climbing no higher than #4, it became their first new studio album to miss the top of the Billboard chart since Let It Bleed faltered at #3 in 1969) but also musically.
Later years, and later tours, would see several Undercover songs hauled out into the limelight — with a live performance of “Undercover Of The Night” even sneaking aboard the DVD version of Martin Scorcese’s “Shine A Light” 2008 concert film.
But how much more exciting it would have been to hear the best of the album — “Undercover Of The Night,” “Too Much Blood,” “She was Hot,” “Feel On Baby,” “Too Tough” and “It Must be Hell” — being howled out in their prime, by musicians that still believed implicitly in the songs’ quality and value?
Instead, the band allowed the singles, and their attendant videos, to do the work.
“Undercover Of The Night” was followed by “She Was Hot,” a solid “Start Me Up”-style rocker that was accompanied by a video which, in its own way, was to prove as controversial as its predecessor.
On the surface, the song was the standard Stonesy paean to lust and desire, its lyric (like much of the rest of the album, a Jagger effort) little more than a series of exhortations to an especially steamy female. Visually, however, director Temple took the message literally.
“She Was Hot” targeted the wave of prudish censorship that was then making its presence felt on the music scene, by concocting imagery that suggested that, behind the mask, the censors were as horny as the people they were trying to protect. Fly buttons pop, hips gyrate, heart attacks ensue. It’s a riot, and British television took one look at it and slapped it with an even firmer ban than had awaited “Undercover.” The single faltered at #33 in Britain, #44 in America.
A third video shoot, again in Mexico, put “Too Much Blood” before the cameras, and, again, Temple and the band had little time for social niceties. This time, they leaped straight into the heart of video nastydom, again on a day when such things were high on a lot of people’s hit list.
Moving around a house filled with the gory detritus of so many films, Jagger wonders aloud how people can take any kind of pleasure from the new wave of slasher flicks hitting the theatres in the early 1980s, in a tone of voice that suggests he knows perfectly well, because he’s one of them.
“Did you ever see ‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre?’ Horrible, wasn’t it? You know people ask me: it is really true where you live in Texas, it is really true what they do around there, people? I say, ‘Yeah, every time I drive through the crossroads, I get scared there’s a bloke running around with a f**king chain saw. Oh no, don’t saw off me leg, don’t saw off me arm.’ When I get to the movies, you know I’d like to see something more romantic, you know. Like ‘An Officer and a Gentleman’ or something. Something you can take the wife to, you know what I mean?”
It’s a hysterically funny routine, all the more so when Jagger dips into that hokey yokel accent that he’d been employing as far back as Beggar’s Banquet’s “Dear Doctor,” and which reached its apogee on Some Girls’ “Faraway Eyes.” Except not so many people got the joke this time; so few, in fact, that when it came to selecting a third single from the album, “Too Much Blood” was left on the shelf — and that despite that sterling Arthur Baker remix.
Instead, CBS pulled “Too Tough” into the market, and if anybody needed a reminder of just how dominant video had become in the marketplace of early-’80s America, this was it. “Too Tough” was not accompanied by a video, and it became the first non-charting Rolling Stones single (live cuts excepted) since “I Wanna Be Your Man,” back in 1963.
Backlash
And now the backlash began, not only in the marketplace, but among the Rolling Stones themselves. Ronnie Wood was especially scathing in his assessment of the album, insisting “it’s all over the shop. It’s a mixture of salvaged songs and a couple that I am never conscious of having made it onto the album. In terms of musical peaks… there really aren’t that many.” The most interesting thing about the percussive hip-hop of “Too Much Blood,” he said, was going to Mexico to make the video.
Keith Richards, too, would soon be dismissing the album, reflecting upon its lengthy gestation with brutal disdain.
“It was pissed around as if it was a toy. Every time somebody wanted something to do, and they wanted to get away from the old lady, they went to the studio and pissed around with the tapes. It was the best we could do at [the] time. It’s a very hard record to ask me questions about. Apart from playing on it, I had very little to do with it ’cause I wasn’t allowed in the country where it was being mixed, but I had to live with it. It wasn’t a brilliant album, whichever way you look at it. The thing is, when you’re at that point of finishing it off, you’re in the least position to judge because you’ve been sitting on the f**king thing for about a year and you’re totally blown away.”
Jagger, however, remained enthusiastic. “I think Keith sees the Rolling Stones very much as a conservative rock ’n’ roll band with very strong traditions, and as he gets older his ideas have become more conservative.”
Undercover, he was suggesting, was just a little too modern for the doughty old warrior’s tastes. “[But] I liked it. It didn’t sell perhaps as much as I would have liked, though it sold over 2 million copies. I shouldn’t really complain.”
It was clear, however, that the divisions that scarred Undercover were not going to heal quickly. Jagger understood Richards’ reticence. But that did not mean he approved of it. “His traditional view is so strong that I can’t function only within that. I used to tell people that I would never need to make a solo album because I could do whatever I wanted to do within the band, but I think it started to get narrower, so I no longer felt that; I like to be a bit more open-minded about things.”
So open-minded, in fact, that that long-delayed solo album was now becoming a reality. She’s The Boss would be released in 1985, just 18 months after Undercover, and already the word on the street was that the Stones would roll no more.
Jagger denied it; so did Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards. But talk, as the latter would one day title his own solo debut, is cheap, and when Live Aid rolled around that same summer, and the singer was again pointedly solo for the occasion, few people expected the Stones ever to reform again. In fact, Jagger as much as said so in a Rolling Stone interview on the eve of his LP’s release.
“There can’t really be a Rolling Stones when you’re all 50,” mused journalist Christopher Connelly.
“No, I don’t think so either,” Jagger replied.
Only time would tell if he was right or wrong.
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