On this day · 45 years ago · 1981
45 Years Ago Today: The Rolling Stones Release 'Tattoo You'
The Rolling Stones needed an album to tour behind and didn't have time to write one. So they dug through a decade of unfinished tape, including a reggae jam Keith Richards had once ordered erased, and built their last American number-one album out of leftovers.
By Axel, Classic-rock desk · Edited by Sleuth ·
The Rolling Stones released 'Tattoo You' on August 24, 1981, assembled almost entirely from outtakes recorded between 1972 and 1981 because touring commitments left no time to write a new album. Opening track 'Start Me Up' began as a reggae jam under the working title 'Never Stop' during the 'Some Girls' sessions, was nearly erased on Keith Richards's own order, and was rescued by engineer Chris Kimsey. Richards and Ronnie Wood overdubbed its twin-guitar riff in 1981. The album hit number one in the US, the band's last chart-topper there to date, and won the Stones their first Grammy.
An album built to buy time, not to say something new
By 1981, the Rolling Stones had a tour booked and no finished album to support it. Between constant touring and, by Chris Kimsey's account, friction between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, there had been no window to write and record a full new record. "The thing with Tattoo You wasn't that we'd stopped writing new stuff, it was a question of time," Richards said in a 1993 interview quoted on the album's Wikipedia page. "We'd agreed we were going to go out on the road and we wanted to tour behind a record. There was no time to make a whole new album and make the start of the tour." So associate producer Chris Kimsey, who'd logged the band's studio tape since 1971's Sticky Fingers, spent months combing through reels from Goats Head Soup, Black and Blue, Some Girls, and Emotional Rescue. Some tracks needed only new vocals. Others were barely more than fragments. Released August 24, 1981, Tattoo You became the Rolling Stones' eighth consecutive US number-one album, and remains their most recent to reach that spot.
The reggae riff Keith Richards tried to erase
The album's opening track had the longest, strangest road to release. Keith Richards had written a reggae-flavored riff a few years earlier that the band first tried during 1975's Black and Blue sessions. During the 1978 Some Girls sessions in Paris, they revisited it under the working title "Never Stop," running through take after take, mostly reggae, with a couple of straighter rock-tempo attempts mixed in. Per uDiscover Music's account, the rock version never quite gelled, and Richards told Kimsey to wipe the tape. Kimsey quietly ignored him. More than three years later, he rediscovered the two rock takes and played them for Jagger, who wrote new lyrics, swapping "Never Stop" for "Start It Up." In early 1981, working in New York, Richards and Ronnie Wood overdubbed the track's twin electric guitar lines, and Richards landed on the power-chord intro that opens the finished song. Producer Bob Clearmountain then remixed the patchwork recording, pushing Charlie Watts's drums forward and turning the two guitars into what Kimsey called a "stinging two-pronged attack." "Start Me Up" hit number two on the US charts, and to date remains the Stones' last single to climb that high.
Open G, twin guitars, and the strings underneath it
"Start Me Up" runs on the same five-string, no-low-E open G tuning documented across Richards's whole catalog on his CYS gear profile, the setup behind "Brown Sugar," "Honky Tonk Women," and "Tumbling Dice." Wood, playing alongside him, is a long-documented Ernie Ball user in his own right. Both guitarists' pages point to the same conventional standard-tuning set, Ernie Ball's Regular Slinky, as the closest off-the-shelf match to their Telecaster and Stratocaster rigs.
Regular Slinky (.010-.046)
Why this one: The documented default gauge on both Keith Richards's and Ronnie Wood's CYS pages, a safe starting point whether you're chasing standard tuning or trying open G yourself.
Drummer Charlie Watts, whose steady snare Clearmountain pushed to the front of the mix, plays on every track credited to the full band. The album's title was meant to be simply "Tattoo." Jagger has said for decades that he still doesn't know how the "You" got attached, and the ambiguity reportedly irritated Richards at the time, who suspected Jagger changed it without asking. Reviews were largely warm, Robert Palmer called it "something special" in The New York Times, though not unanimous: Creem's Nick Tosches used his review to call out what he read as gratuitous sexism and misogyny across several of the record's lyrics. Forty-five years later, "Start Me Up" has appeared on every Stones tour since, including the band's 2006 Super Bowl halftime show.
Related