Album: Tattoo You
Year: 1981
. . .
Tattoo You was born because the Stones wanted to go on tour in the fall of 1981 and they needed a new record out. (It was 40 years ago, and that’s just how it worked.) The problem was that Mick and Keith weren’t really speaking to each other, so Mick went digging through the vault, pulling and reworking tracks going all the way back to Goats Head Soup.
It should have been a mess, but with judicious overdubs, plus the conceit of having a “rocker” side and a “ballad” side, Tattoo You turned out to be a pretty good record, perhaps even their last great one. I certainly thought so in 1981, because I played the shit out of Tattoo You that year. I’ll betcha dollars to donuts that if you’re a person of a certain age, you did too.
For one thing, after opening the three previous albums with funk and disco tracks, they opened Tattoo You with the unmistakable sound of one last killer Keith Richards riff, the instantly catchy hook that announces “Start Me Up,” as Stonesy of a Stones song that they ever Stonesed.
Legend has it that this was a cosmic accident: “Start Me Up” was originally recorded as a reggae song during the Black and Blue sessions, and again during the Some Girls sessions, and while there were about a zillion reggae takes, there were only a couple of takes of it as rock ‘n’ roll song, including the version that we’re now all very sick of 40 years later.
In fact, the fact that they had done so many reggae takes might be why the opening is so iconic: Charlie comes in at the wrong place, and you can practically seen him and Keith adjusting to each in real time until they find the beat. And in fact, it’s entirely possible that they assumed that this take was a throwaway, which accounts for the almost unnatural looseness of the whole thing, starting with Bill’s bass line hooks, but coming to a head on the chorus, which is still a marvel of space and time.
You make a grown man cry
You make a grown man cry
You make a grown man cry
Spread out the oil, the gasoline
I walk smooth, ride in a mean, mean machine
Start it up
First off, if there is a song that makes better use of handclaps — which make a good song great and a great song immortal — in all of the Stones canon, or even all of popular music, I’ve yet to hear it. They’re just perfectly placed, and completely play off not just the lyrics, but the drum roll builds Charlie executes each time the choir of Micks yell “you make a grown man cryyyyyyyyy.” Charlie also adds one last roll at the end of the choruses for good measure.
Given the awesomeness of the chorus of “Start Me Up,” everything else is just gravy: Mick’s yelp of “start it up, whoooo” in the third verse as the handclaps come back, Ronnie’s tinny leads, everything Bill and Charlie continue to do and of course that final vocal sigh at the end of “I’ll take you places you’ve never, never seeenn, heyyyy yeahaaahyyyayy.”
And of course, Mick, who is on fucking fire anyways, needs to add this at the end of what was obviously gonna be a single: “you make a dead man come” which you might even have heard on the radio, since technically none of those words are obscene.
“Start Me Up” was a huge huge single for the Stones, making the top ten around the world, and just missing topping the charts in 1981, which was an unusually rock-friendly year for the top 40. Oh, and in 1995, the whole controversy of dead men coming long forgotten, Microsoft licensed it to advertise their new operating system, Windows 95, because it had an innovation called a “start button.” It was a huge controversy at the time, mostly because everybody hated Microsoft and knew that a quarter-century later, Bill Gates would put a microchip into everybody as part of a vaccine rollout. Meanwhile, old sourpuss himself, Brian Eno, got away scot-free with his involvement with Windows 95.
“Start Me Up”
“Start Me Up” Official Promo Video
“Start Me Up” live in Hampton, 1981
“Start Me Up” live in Tokyo, 1990
“Start Me Up” live in 2006
“Start Me Up” live in 2015
“Start Me Up” live in Glastonbury, 2018
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