Citation: Mcgrath, JP (2019) "Doctor, I'm Damaged": Medical and Cultural
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Citation: Mcgrath, JP (2019) "Doctor, I’m Damaged": Medical and Cultural Narratives of Nicky Hopkins and The Rolling Stones. In: Beggars Banquet and the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Revolution: ‘They Call My Name Disturbance’. Ashgate Popular and Folk Music . Routledge. ISBN 9781138304758 Link to Leeds Beckett Repository record: https://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/id/eprint/7234/ Document Version: Book Section (Accepted Version) This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Beggars Banquet and the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Revolution: ‘They Call My Name Disturbance’ on 09 December 2019, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9781138304758 The aim of the Leeds Beckett Repository is to provide open access to our research, as required by funder policies and permitted by publishers and copyright law. The Leeds Beckett repository holds a wide range of publications, each of which has been checked for copyright and the relevant embargo period has been applied by the Research Services team. We operate on a standard take-down policy. If you are the author or publisher of an output and you would like it removed from the repository, please contact us and we will investigate on a case-by-case basis. Each thesis in the repository has been cleared where necessary by the author for third party copyright. If you would like a thesis to be removed from the repository or believe there is an issue with copyright, please contact us on [email protected] and we will investigate on a case-by-case basis. Doctor, I’m Damaged: Medical and Cultural Mythologies of Nicky Hopkins and the Rolling Stones ‘We are deeply indebted to Nicky Hopkins and to many friends’, ends the list of acknowledgements on the Rolling Stones’ 1968 album Beggars banquet. Unlike producer Jimmy Miller or engineers ‘Glyn Johns, Eddie and Gene’, Hopkins’ actual contribution—as session pianist on seven of the album’s ten tracks—is unspecified. Nor is his position in relation to ‘friends’ clear. In the playful third verse of side one’s ‘Jigsaw puzzle’, as ‘the boys in the band’ are introduced, there is no lyrical allusion to the pianist playing on the track. Although vital to the Rolling Stones’ studio work of 1966-75, plus their 1971-73 tours, Hopkins never would become a member of the band. Yet while the singer, bassist, drummer and guitar players take turns in the lyrical spotlight in ‘Jigsaw puzzle’, instrumentally, Hopkins’ piano part—which, as in many of his performances, varies significantly across successive verses—enters double time and establishes equal prominence to the slide guitar in the mix. A comparable pattern defines Hopkins’ legacy in relation to the Stones: he does not always receive the nominal recognition (nor credit) he may have deserved, yet as Beggars banquet audibly and gloriously testifies, Nicky Hopkins was there throughout the album’s most enduring songs, and was—as Brian Jones receded from the band—indispensable to the Stones in 1968. Hopkins, who died age 50 on 6 September 1994, sits as an extraordinarily recurrent yet invariably marginal figure in popular music history. He worked as a session pianist on releases by over 300 different artists, including the Who, the Andrew Oldham Orchestra, the Kinks, the Yardbirds, David Bowie, the Beatles, Marianne Faithfull, Steve Miller, Jefferson Airplane (with whom he also performed at Woodstock), Ella Fitzgerald, John Lennon, George Harrison, Harry Nilsson, Ringo Starr, Art Garfunkel, Meat Loaf, and Paul 1 McCartney. In 1968, Hopkins refused an invitation to join the New Yardbirds (about to rename themselves Led Zeppelin). But that should not automatically be read as a regrettable decision; Hopkins also declined to join the Who in 1971. However, his position within the Rolling Stones’ personnel was more complex—and his work for and with the Stones from 1966-75 that most compellingly illustrates Hopkins’ versatility at the peak of his (and their) achievements. This essay explores Hopkins’ eventful, sometimes contentious relationship with the Rolling Stones as both band and brand. To do this, it is essential to foreground a decidedly marginalised area in rock mythology, which is only gradually being discussed in popular music studies: disability. Hopkins’ role as a session musician began, in 1965, because a serious and lifelong gastrointestinal illness prevented him from touring for several years, thus making him less eligible for full-time membership of any band (which in turn left him reliant on work for which, he later pointed out, ‘you don’t get paid if you’re off sick’: Dawson, 2011, p.80). The essay therefore considers Hopkins’ legacy with the Stones in the context of in disability studies, exploring interaction between impairment (as bodily— including mental—condition, illness or injury) and ‘disability’ (as social responses, or the lack thereof, to bodily ‘difference’). By contrasting the late 1960s lifestyles of Hopkins as an introverted, teetotal musician against the much-publicized chemical adventures of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones, I wish to illustrate and then question some underlying attitudes to substance-usage as a form of agency celebrated in cultural mythologies, and to ‘disability’ as a comparatively taboo physical, mental and social experience. However, the relationship between medical and cultural mythologies discussed here is continually interactive. And though, at the time of Beggars banquet, the 24 year old Hopkins had abstained from alcohol and recreational drugs throughout his life, he would experience serious addictions to both in the 1970s, especially when facing the pressures of 2 recording and playing live as a briefly well-paid but ultimately obscure solo artist (on top of his prolific session work). JIGSAW PUZZLE: Documenting Nicky Hopkins’ work The most fascinating documents of Hopkins’ role in the Stones work are also the most empirical: they are, of course, the songs. Beggars banquet is pivotal here. Hopkins’ piano would later contribute to the chill of ‘Gimme shelter’ and recur on various Let it bleed tracks (1969). While the Stones completed Sticky fingers (1971), Hopkins was working as a member of the Quicksilver Messenger Service, although he did play on the album’s ‘Sway’. Exile on Main Street (1972) features several of his most distinguished performances. Hopkins was present through much of the mayhem and decadence that took place at Keith Richards’ Nellcôte home in France, and reportedly found the four-month period ‘enormously boring’ (Dawson, 2011, p.139). Hopkins also appears sporadically on Goats head soup (1973), It’s only rock and roll (1974) and Black & blue (1976); unreleased recordings from his last sessions for the Stones also surface on Emotional rescue (1980) and Tattoo you (1981). However, from Let it bleed onwards, these works differ from Beggars banquet because most subsequent tracks feature two guitarists (Ry Cooder guested on the 1969 sessions before Mick Taylor was brought in). Brian Jones features clearly on Beggars banquet’s ‘No expectations’ (slide guitar), ‘Street fighting man’ (sitar) and ‘Stray cat blues’ (Mellotron). However, on four more of the ten tracks—‘Sympathy for the Devil’, ‘Parachute woman’, ‘Jigsaw puzzle’ and ‘Prodigal son’—Jones’ presence (if he was indeed in the studio) is so indistinct as to be listed against question marks in Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon’s The Rolling Stones: all the 3 Songs (2016). Jones’ performances on Beggars banquet are thus far less defining to the album than those of Hopkins. Filmed in May 1968 and released that November, Jean-Luc Godard’s One plus one (1968) captures a transitional period not just in the recording of Beggars banquet, but in the Rolling Stones’ career. Godard’s film of the ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ sessions documents that Jones was in the studio and playing an acoustic guitar, yet even in the earlier takes (he is absent from later ones), he is musically silent (or silenced). The nearest microphones appear to be switched off. Meanwhile, Hopkins—who, after the transformative entry of Rocky Dijon on congas half way through the sessions, moves from organ to his favoured instrument, piano—gains and gains in vitality as ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ nears completion. Hopkins is mentioned extensively in Margotin and Guesdon’s study, especially in reference to Beggars banquet. Yet Margotin and Guesdon’s book has a significantly documentary component, listing dates, locations and personnel of sessions for every Stones release, and provides commentary on each. Elsewhere in the relevant publications however, the ‘boys in the band’ pattern of the ‘Jigsaw puzzle’ lyric persists: Hopkins is instrumentally prominent on many of the Stones’ best-known songs, but remains absent from the attendant narratives. Although Bill Wyman’s Stone alone (1990) periodically acknowledges Hopkins, Richards’ Life names him only momentarily as one of the band’s ‘supersidemen’ (Richards, 2010, p.317). The official, mostly photographic Rolling Stones 50 (2012) contains no images of the ‘late, great Nicky Hopkins’, though he is mentioned as such in relation to the London 1971 Marquee performance (Jagger et al, 2012, Kindle location 104). However, one intriguing reason suggests itself for Hopkins’ disproportionate slightness in the Stones’ own narratives compared to his prolific role in their music. When asked about this pianist, the Stones and dozens of musicians with whom he worked remember his musicianship with the highest esteem. Yet, almost as frequent as the praise for Hopkins’ talents are the recollections 4 of him as a very ‘quiet’ and ‘shy’ personality ‘who spoke happily when spoken to but rarely volunteered’ (Dawson, 2011, p.140; see also p.74-6, p.85). Meanwhile, the source for these quotations is a superbly informative biography of the musician himself. Julian Dawson’s And on piano… Nicky Hopkins (2011) takes its title from Jagger’s onstage introductions to the additional musicians during the 1971 shows at London’s Marquee and Leeds University (both included on the 2015 deluxe Sticky fingers).