Keith Richards:
Sing Me Back Home (Merle Haggard)
Say It's Not You (George Jones)
Don't (Elvis Presley)
(Sounds Interchange Recording Studios, Toronto, Canada, 12 & 13 March, 1977)
In late February, 1977, a bad week gets worse. Upon arriving with Keith in Toronto, Anita Pallenberg is arrested at the airport after she is found carrying cannabis and “other substances.” Three days later, the authorities arrest Keith in his hotel room for possession of drugs. Over the course of the next several days, the couple undergoes a series of hearings, bails, fines, and re-arrests; as his buddies do their best to soothe his habit, Keith does his best to rehearse with the Stones. It doesn’t take much imagination to grasp what an uninspired affair these sessions must have been for everyone involved. Finally, on March 8th, Mick Jagger and Ron Wood leave Toronto to start working on Love You Live in New York City. Charlie Watts departs the following day. Bill Wyman follows, and on March 11th, Keith is left alone to await his impending court hearing.
When there was nothing left to do, and no one left to lean on, Keith spent the last two nights before his hearing playing songs in an empty studio. Ian Stewart (pianist and ceaseless guardian angel to the Stones) kept Keith company as he played many of the songs he would return to six years later on the Honeymoon Tapes. The Everlys, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis. Though mostly, as Keith later explained, he played “all these songs I learned from Gram Parsons. I was very tight with him for a long time. I've never really done anything, in the eight since years since he taught me, anything more than put them on cassette to just remember the lyrics.”
Maybe it’s too presumptuous to say that Keith couldn’t help but think of the doomed Parsons as he faced the prospect of losing his gift to an indomitable addiction and an unlucky set of circumstances. Surely these pieces came to him for more reasons than that. A depressed soul will naturally gravitate toward songs such as these, with their staggered tempos and mournful voices. The narrator of “Say It’s Not You” doesn’t want to face the cold truth about his lover, while “Don’t” finds its singer desperately trying to convince his girl of his heart’s feelings. They are two different songs, sung from two different points of view, yet in Keith’s hands they become a single painful plea. Even if the lyrics hadn't offered a woundedness for Keith to emphasize, he could still unite them on style alone. The keys are played as if by gravity alone, and the songs are bound by little more than deep breaths. For those two lonely nights in Toronto, every note was hurtfully splayed and too far extended.
If life read like rock history, Keith would have overdosed after these sessions, leaving them his last will and testament. “Sing Me Back Home” would be pure gallows humor from a man facing jail time, if Keith didn’t play the song as if he were resigned to any fate but living. Rock fans would still be eating out on this epitaph: “Take me away and turn back the years / Sing me back home before I die.” Instead Keith kept going. And rather than reprise Parsons’ romantic ruination, his story became more stupidly surreal. His trial was delayed for a year and a half, and instead of facing hard time, Keith got Lorne Michaels to testify on his behalf, and was eventually sentenced to playing a benefit concert for the Canadian National Institute For the Blind. Rock martyrdom has never experienced such a severe diversion.
It’s better that the story didn’t end with the Toronto tapes. Keith went on to write “Beast of Burden” as an apology to his bandmates for being such a fuck-up, while the Toronto tapes went down a lost record, its woeful moans a secret confession rather than symbolic elegy. "Lost" is right. Even the albums that most plainly convey a damaged state of being—Neil Young’s On the Beach and Tonight’s the Night; Big Star’s Third; Scott Walker’s The Drift—display a sense of self-possession and creative energy that is completely missing on Keith’s Toronto tapes. These recordings refuse to fail or succeed by any normal standards. They belong as much to the junkie’s decaying body as they do the artist’s sensitive heart, a hopeless reflection of all that was their creator.
