Mick: I still don't know how I cope with the things I do and still feel fit. It was a ridiculous, hilarious, dangerous experience. But I still intend to make more films.

Herzog: I left his entire part out in my final script because I liked him so much as a performer in the film. He was so extraordinary I had the feeling that any kind of replacement would be an embarrassment. He's a great actor and nobody has seen that. I liked his attitude very much. In Iquitos, he had rented a car, a small Volkswagen; when we had some trouble getting people across town, he would chauffeur them for us. But that was only part of his general attitude. 

What I liked very much about him was that he knew the value of real work. And he's a professional in the very best sense of the word. The test on Mick was particularly strong because, during the past fifteen years, he has lived quite a different life - a life where everything is organized by other people. But he adapted very quickly to the circumstances.

Mick: I wouldn't have missed it for anything. There was a nice moment when I came out. After waiting three days for transportation at this logging camp in the middle of the jungle, sleeping twelve in a room in hammocks with these loggers - and my Spanish is really rudimentary - well, this seaplane arrived. I had done myself up: best suit of clothes; I'd cleaned up, even shaved. And I stood up on the float of the seaplane, and just as I was about to open the door, I lost my balance and fell into the Amazon.

(Rocket 88 is) just a good band... (T)he Rolling Stones is, like, different. I mean, the Stones is basically one thing, and this is another. I mean, they're both good bands... All I ever do with the Stones is play boogie woogie anyway. The Stores are sort of boogie woogie anyway. I mean, Chuck Berry's guitar playing is purely boogie woogie piano transcribed to guitar.

There's always been periods like that with Mick and I. But there's always the opposite periods of total cooperation and good will, almost religious fervor as regards one another.

(Rounding up the Stones  is) surprisingly easy. Getting them over the idea of working on the road, that's the hard bit. You know, they're going, OHHH, I DON'T wanna go on the ROAD. And I'm trying to hustle them, because I know that it's the only way to keep 'em together. They always feel good about it once they DO it; maybe I kind of crystallize that feeling or focus it or whatever, because everybody feels the same way as me, but not at the same time. But if the band wantds to stay together, then we do have to go on the road and we do have to work. And once we get up there and start rehearsing, it's great. And it only gets better and better, you know?

The problem is - this has been one of my favorite gripes for years - that because of the way we work, doing a blockbuster tour every three years, we find ourselves on this cycle of working our way up to a certain point where we can say, NOW we're breaking, NOW we're taking off into somewhere else. And then, because the tour stops - BOOM - we're never able to get PAST that point, to push it when it's still getting better. And three years later, we have to start again from scratch, going over the same ground to find out what we already know. That's the one thing that bugs me. I've always wanted to find out what would happen if we just kept GOING.

That's just going along with record company demands and what's written in the contract.

There's a big difference in Keith's personality. His attitude to the band is much more relaxed. He's more secure. And of course, he's in love.

Mick: Tattoo You is actually an old record. It's all a lot of old tracks that I dug out. And it was very strange circumstances. Chris Kimsey and I went though all the tracks from those two previous records. It wasn't all outtakes; some of it was old songs. And then I went back and found previous ones like Waiting on a Friend, from Goats Head Soup. They're all from different periods. 

Then I had to write lyrics and melodies. A lot of them didn't have anything, which is why they weren't used at the time - because they weren't complete. They were just bits, or they were from early takes. And then I put them all together in an incredibly cheap fashion. I recorded in this place in Paris in the middle of winter. And then I recorded some of it in a broom cupboard, literally, where we did the vocals. The rest of the band were hardly involved. And then I took it to Bob Clearmountain, who did this great job of mixing so that it doesn't sound like it's from different periods.

Keith: I thought Mick did a great job with Tattoo You. There were only one or two things I went back on with Bob Clearmountain. My main complaint in the beginning with the recording of this record was that they were hopping around using different studios and it started to seem a bit chaotic. In actual fact, Mick pulled it all together. He did a great job in organizing it. It was up to Mick because it was Mick's contributions that weren't recorded. What was missing ws Mick's normal contribution to a Rolling Stones track - the vocals.

To get the most out of New York is not to get stuck in one thing. I've been traveling back and forth to New York for years, but it's not the same as living here. Then you really get a feeling for what it's like to walk out on the streets each day. 

I have a staggering number of things I could get into. One night it's good blues or reggae, another it's rock and roll. If I wanna go out, it's usually to see someone play. If I know the place they're playing, I'll get someone to call them up and see if I can get in the back door. I don't want to queue up. That's about the only concession I make to all that stardom because I hate pulling rank and all that crap. 

You can't afford to be paranoid everywhere. Being run by fear is the worst thing anyone can do to themselves. If you're afraid to come out of your house because you're afraid of walking the streets, you're assigning yourself to some kind of purgatory.

Keith acts like it doesn't exist. Any outside projects by the band he totally ignores. Woody's fairly interested, Charlie is reasonably interested. Mick is very interested. I hadn't seen him for a while. He said, Love that new record of yours, really like it. It should do quite well. Now you've got to do THIS. And he starts to give me the business angles. Which was good. He was interested and he liked the record.

While with Keith... you don't TALK about it. He's solely interested in the Rolling Stones. Anything else is not so much a threat as... an interference.

Everybody had wanted Ronnie off the US tour in '81 - he was just getting too out of it - but I said, no, I'll guarantee him. That meant I personally guaranteed to insure the tour and promised that Ronnie would not be misbehaving. Anything to get the Stones on the road. I figured I could handle him.

We always work at least a month to six weeks before we go on the road, usually for something like eight to twelve hours a night. It took six weeks to do it this time. We just play virtually everything we know. You've got to remember that with our band the way it is NOW, this is NOT how it was when we first started. Now we don't work live sometimes for a year... With the Rolling Stones you keep your chops going, really. The rehearsals are to learn songs but it's also to... well, the way I do it is just to get things together to play.

I can misbehave very badly but I don't particularly want to get busted anymore. It's so dull. I'm finished with that, and I want to do something else now, without getting busted. I'd say that as you get older - obviously many people stay together through their twenties or whatever they do and even then you see some of them dying or suiciding or going crazy or dropping out and not being very together. So you see that happening and you think, That's never gonna happen to be because I'm 20. And then there is a certain point where you think I'd better be careful and you consciously distance yourself from that kind of thing. You don't do that anymore because you know that that is not an honorable thing to do. It doesn't frighten me. You just know what you can't do it.

I don't feel connected with bands like the Clash, the bands that still play every night. I can only see them as repeats of everything that happened before. I think it's a bit unfortunate, too, but I think that no one would disagree with me. Most musicians in fact do agree with me. Bands like the Selector and the Specials, which are good bands, are repeats too. I mean, I saw bands like that in 1959. It's the same old thing done slightly differently. I like some of the shows I've seen. I liked the Pink Floyd show - better, anyway, than Elvis Costello's. But I haven't been interested in rock for years - I mean interested in it in the way of wanting to talk about it. It's not really the 100% of everything I'm interested in. I guess, I never have been.

We're just embarking upon this tour, you know, so we hope it's the first of many and long future tours of America that we do, from time to time. And we go on and on and on doing them. We never seem to stop so I don't see why we should stop now... No, I don't see (a group separation) in the foreseable future, you know. But I don't have a crystal ball, you never know what's going to happen. But right now, as I say, we're committed to touring for a considerable period of time and making new records...

I would say that Woody's, Keith's and Mick's lives are fairly similar. Charlie's is slightly different, but he will adapt to theirs when he's away from home because he's got nothing else he wants to do. I find hanging out and listening to music and jamming all night reasonably non-productive. I find time very valuable. It's like here, they'll hang out in Keith's room playing music or sitting around getting drunk. I'd rather be in here learning my computer. They probably think, Maybe he doesn't like to hang out with us or He doesn't come to my room in the hotel after the gig. He goes to bed. We love each other. I mean, we've all got faults, and if you have been together for 18 years you all know each other's faults and some of us are embarrassed about showing our faults to the others. My fault is I can't hang out, and I must have my privacy. And they joke about it. Anyway, I think that since that thing came out in the press about me retiring I made it obvious to them that I wasn't leaving and that it was all bullshit. We're really as friendly as it's ever been. No problems.

We hadn't toured for three years so going back on the road did feel a little strange. We had to rehearse for a long time. I was a bit nervous at first because we went straight from doing one club gig to Philadelphia, which is in front of all those people. Yeah, I was a little nervous until I got on the stage and realized that although it was a little sloppy we got away with it. I knew we could be together, the audience was with us and we were going to have a good time. It took us a few gigs to get with it - like... five, which were all HUGE gigs (laughs). There was one in Buffalo, there were two in Philly, all over. But it was pretty difficult the first week, fair enough to say.

Mick: On the 1981-82 tour we worked with a Japanese designer, Kazuhide Yamazari. Those were daytime tours; there were no night-time shows. Most concerts that took place outdoors at that time were played during the day, probably because it was cheaper, I don't know. So we had the bright, bright primary colours, which were designed by Kazuhide and we had these enormous images of a guitar, a car and a record - an Americana idea - which worked very well for the afternoon shows.

Charlie: That was the period when Mick and I started getting seriously into stages. Because we were playing in football stadiums we had to think big. When you're out there in this vast stadium, you are physically tiny up onstage, so that's why on the 1981-82 tour we had those coloured panels and later we started using devices like the video screens... And when the show gets that big, you need a little extra help, you need a couple of gimmicks, as well call it, in the show. You need fireworks, you need lights, you need a bit of theatre.

Keith: Prince has to find out what it means to be a prince. That's the trouble with conferring a title on yourself before you've proved it. That was his attitude when he opened for us on the tour, and it was insulting to our audience. You don't try to knock off the headline like that when you're playing a Stones corwed. You'd be much better off just being yourself and protecting that. He's a prince who thinks he's a king already. Good luck to him.

Mick: I talked to Prince on the phone once after he got two cans thrown at him in L.A. He said he didn't want to do any more shows. (Laughs) God, I got THOUSANDS of bottles and cans thrown at me! EVERY kind of debris. I told him, if you get to be a really big headliner, you have to be prepared for people to throw bottles at you in the night. (Laughs) PREPARED TO DIE!

When we started (the tour), we really thought we could do a bunch of clubs. But you can't just go onstage and jam for fun for 20 minutes. If we'd done the show tonight, for instance, there would have been 600 people expecting a Rolling Stones show. They don't want to hear us play old blues songs for fun - they want Honky Tonk Women and Jumpin' Jack Flash and All Down the Line and on and on and on. So realizing we'd have to do that, Mick said, Well, I just did two shows, my voice is bad, I'm tired, I could really do with the day off. I don't want to fuck my voice up tonight and then not have a voice in Orlando. How do you feel? I don't damage my fingers playing bass, so I wouldn't mind it. But after the show, Keith felt really bad - he had a massage. Woody? Gone asleep. Charlie? He was probably bashing around on his drums somewhere. We ended up saying, Well, let's have a day off. And it wasn't like being lazy - it's just thinking about the next important gig.

(P)robably the band feels that working in one of the nice old places like the Fox Theater in Atlanta is kind of MORE satisfying most of the time because the sound isn't dissipated totally, and you don't have to worry about the wind factor and things like that. It's much simpler and easier to get - it's just (snaps fingers) turn it up, get to it.

Bill: I was really looking forward to (the tour). I thought it was going to be a great tour. About 1.5 million were coming and I thought, Well, that's an awful lot of people. First of all, it was gonna be like TWELVE shows. I think the very first talk about it was just like hitting New York, L.A., Chicago - like a few big places. And then suddenly it was gonna become four weeks and then it got to about eight weeks and - I thought it was getting a bit LONG, but it looked like we were going to earn good money out of it for a change. 'Cause, you know, we don't earn that amount of money that everybody thinks we do on tours. And only in America do we actually make money. So we went out there and we suddenly found that the tickets were going like wildfire and, insteading of doing like the one gig in Philadelphia, one in L.A., and one in Chicago or wherever it was, we were being asked for a SECOND gig, which was also enormous. And so it ended up that we played to twice as many people as we'd thought because of all the second gigs that were added.

Keith: The only thing surprising about the '81 tour was just HOW successful it was. I mean, we could throw in stadium gigs within three or four days' notice, you know, and still sell it out. We were lucky. The album was ready, and it took off. I mean, it's a matter of timing. There are certain things - you can have all the ingredients but, you know, talent is 10% of it. There's still the variable which is that certain timing which comes along now and again where everything just goes bang, bang. If you tried to plan it, it wouldn't happen.

Mick: We did make a lot of money, but not anything like Jann Wenner said. Yeah, we made a lot, because that was the biggest tour ever. Yeah, we spent money on it. That's one of the things, is that if you spend money on them, people say, It's worth it. Other people say, Don't fucking do it. It's only rock & roll and that crap. I like to think that the money you spend and the time and effort you put into the staging, as well as playing and the combination of both, make people come back and see it. They say, Well, the Rolling Stones... yeah it's usually a good show, and they got their twenty bucks' worth, plus parking, plus T-shirts. Whereas you could do it much simpler, and I guess some people really wouldn't care. I know a lot of the band wouldn't care (laughs).

I came to the conclusion that as far as the American market is concerned if you have one good cut on an album you can sell a million of them. If you have three good cuts you sell three million, four is four million. It seems to work out like that. You are not going to sell five million albums with one hit single on it. Nobody does... No one's ever told me that. I just figured it out myself. I'm sure record companies think like that but very few people do. So you can try and say Well, where's the fucking hits coming from? I really don't know. You see, I like the records to sell a lot because it means a lot of money for me but it also means that you're getting people to actually listen to them.

Yeah, (we were nervous) because we were doing live TV but, you know, once you get out there... you know, it's all this thinking about it. Keith was saying, No! I don't want to do this. What have we gotten into? And then you try and blame, How did I get into this? It's your fault! No, it's YOUR fault! And then when you eventually get out there, it's really the same as any other show. Except that the pressure is that you know you've got to kind of sing pretty much in tune whereas I - I know I should always sing in tune and all that, but there's a sort of thing where you can't do everything, you know. If you want to do a lot of leaping about and fooling, you can't except every note to be note perfect. So the pressure is a bit to sing a bit better than you would normally and not fool around quite so much.