Word: tonk
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...commission. The album should have been done live and as a two record set. One can understand Marmaduke's desire to get some royalties by putting ten songs on an album (all his own) but it was a real sin for them not to include "The Weight" and "Honky Tonk Women". In pre-album fantasies, I envisioned one side each of "Dirty Business", "The Weight", and "Honky Tonk". There is no dispute among Dead freaks that the Riders do their best on these three numbers...
Their "Honky Tonk" is, believe it or not, more exciting and clearer than the Stones' live version. While the Stones' studio "Honky Tonk" is sharp and clean and hard (especially Richard's guitar), the track on "Ya-Yas" is notable chiefly for its all-around muddiness. It's not so with the New Riders--Garcia plays the pedal steel with a wicked clarity that sends every audience I've ever seen into paroxysmic ecstasy. Their version of "The Weight" is similarly superb...
...five he discovered music. The town's most famous honky-tonk dance place, Funky Butt Hall, used to send its band-including Cornettist Buddy Bolden, Trumpeters Bunk Johnson and Joe ("King") Oliver-out on the street to drum up business. Armstrong hung around to listen. By the time he was twelve, he was strolling through the Storyville red-light district singing tenor in a boys' quartet. Taunted one day by a neighborhood tough, he swiped a revolver and charged down Rampart Street, firing shots into the air. He was caught and shipped off to the Colored Waifs...
...Sticky Fingers opens with "Brown Sugar": as the first Stones 45 to be released since "Honky Tonk Woman" came out in July 1969, this song has already become number one on the AM radio stations. While it is hardly as epochal as "Honky Tonk Woman" or "Gimme Shelter," it is a damn fine song to dance to, filled with those old Chuck Berry-style guitar licks that sound so good on a car radio. Fortunately the vocal is somewhat garbled so that one can avoid listening to the lyrics which, besides being rife with the Stones' usual sexism, are racist...
...third "show-stopper" is Alexis Smith's spectacular "Story Of Lucy And Jessie" which is a honky-tonk dance number written in the style of Cole Porter. The lyric (the cleverest in the show if not the best) is all there, but that is all that is there. As soon as Miss Smith is finished with her tongue twisting the orchestra pulls up to an abrupt halt, leaving the listener panting for more...