Sidemen Quotes

But we were chumps and we knew it. As makers of sentences we were practically fetal, beneath notice, unlaunched, fooling around in our spare time or on somebody else’s dime. Nobody loved our sentences as we loved them, and so they congealed or grew sour on our tongues. We barely glanced at our wall-scribblings for fear of what a few weeks or even hours might expose in our infatuations. Our photocopied fortune slips we’d find in muddy clogs in storm drains, tangled with advertising flyers, unheeded. Our manuscripts? Those were unspeakable secrets, kept not only from the world but from each other. My pages were shameful, occluded everywhere with xxxxxx’s of regret. I scurried to read Clea’s manuscript every time she left the apartment but never confessed that I even knew it existed. Her title was “Those Young Rangers Thought Love Was a Scandal Like a Bald White Head.” Mine was “I Heard the Laughter of the Sidemen from Behind Their Instruments.

In one of the most scathing of these reviews, New York Times critic Robert Palmer wrote: “He has mastered the art of making lyrics that are banal—and, when they are about women, frequently condescending—sound vaguely important. He has mastered the art of making the simplest drum accent sound as portentous as a peal of thunder and of introducing his side-men’s solos with such dramatic flourishes that they almost sound like gifted, sensitive musicians rather than like the hacks they are. He has won a huge following by making emptiness seem substantial and Holiday Inn lounge schlock sound special.

Henry was right to observe that two players left Wings, and Paul hadn’t asked why. But Paul hadn’t asked why because he knew the answer. The dispute that led to McCullough’s departure mirrored fights he’d had with Harrison over what to play and how to play it, as well as Lennon’s complaint, in that painful Rolling Stone interview, about Paul treating them as sidemen. He was, once again, accused by his bandmates of being a control freak.

I have never gone to battle where some poor fools on either side—men who didn’t want to be there in the first place—weren’t going to bear the brunt of the pain.” “Maybe,” Kaladin said, “that should make you reconsider those other wars, rather than using them to justify this one.

There are no sidemen in this band,” Glenn said firmly, with his gruff voice. “We’ve all been there and we know what that’s like.” I was pleased and relieved to hear it.

The sessions for Some Girls always had a following wind from the moment we started rehearsing in the strangely shaped Pathé Marconi studios in Paris. It was a rejuvenation, surprisingly for such a dark moment, when it was possible that I would go to jail and the Stones would dissolve. But maybe that was part of it. Let’s get something down before it happens. It had an echo of Beggars Banquet about it—a long period of silence and then coming back with a bang, and a new sound. You can’t argue with seven million copies and two top ten singles out of it, “Miss You” and “Beast of Burden.” Nothing was prepared before we got there. Everything was written in the studio day by day. So it was like the earlier times, at RCA in Los Angeles in the mid-’60s—songs pouring out. Another big difference from recent albums was that we had no other musicians in with us—no horns, no Billy Preston. Extra stuff was dubbed later. If anything the buildup of sidemen had taken us down a different path in the ’70s, away from our best instincts on some occasions. So the record was down to us, and it being Ronnie Wood’s first album with us, down to our guitar weaving on tracks like “Beast of Burden.” We were more focused and we had to work harder. The sound we got had a lot to do with Chris Kimsey, the engineer and producer who we were working with for the first time. We knew him from his apprenticeship at Olympic Studios, and so he knew our stuff backwards. And he would, on the basis of this experiment, engineer or coproduce eight albums for us. We had to pull something out—not make another Stones-in-the-doldrums album. He wanted to get a live sound back and move away from the clean and clinical-sounding recordings we’d slipped into. We were in the Pathé Marconi studios because they were owned by EMI, with whom we’d just made a big deal.

But Ram was mostly recorded in NYC, in a top-dollar studio during nine-to-five business hours, with two sidemen he’d never met before. It was a professional approach to music designed to sound unprofessional. It worked, too, with Hugh McCracken playing that great guitar break in “Too Many People.” (My favorite McCracken solo, except maybe Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen.”) For Paul, country life meant stretching himself. He kept featuring

Meanwhile, the Flatt and Scruggs juggernaut rolled on. Under Louise Scruggs’s shrewd management, Monroe’s former sidemen had become the bluegrass darlings of the northern folk music revival.