Recorded:
August 26-September 6, 1978: RCA Studios, Los
Angeles, USA
January 22-February 12, 1979: Compass Point
Studios, Nassau, Bahamas
June 21-July 7, 1979: Pathé
Marconi Studios, Paris, France
Late July-August 25, 1979: Pathé Marconi
Studios, Paris, France
September 12-October 19, 1979: Pathé Marconi
Studios, Paris, France
Overdubbed & mixed:
Early November 1979-Late
January 1980:
Electric Lady Studios, New York City, USA
Late April 1980: Electric Lady Studios, New
York City
Producers: The
Glimmer Twins
Associate producer & chief engineer:
Chris Kimsey
Mixer: Chris
Kimsey
Released: June
1980
Original label: Rolling Stones Records (on WEA &
EMI)
Contributing musicians: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, Ron Wood, Ian Stewart, Bobby Keys, Nicky Hopkins, Sugar Blue, Max Romeo, Michael Shrieve, Arif Mardin (arranger), Jack Nitzsche (arranger).
Dance (Pt. 1)
Summer Romance
Send It to Me
Let Me Go
Indian Girl
Where the Boys Go
Down in the Hole
Emotional Rescue
She's So Cold
All About You
Mick: (Why that title?) (Laughs) I was looking at
Ronnie desperately...
Ron: No, this is Ronnie saying that Mick is too
embarrassed because he's a very shy lad to say that he came up
with that title. Am I right or wrong, Charlie?
Charlie: (Joking) No, you're wrong.
Ron: Right... - wrong?
Charlie: (Laughs)
Mick: Well, it sounded nice. Nobody came up with
anything better really.
Ron: But also you find it comes in everyday sentences
these days, you know. People walk down the street, Oh last
night, I had such an emotional rescue! (laughs)
We've already got a few things finished and mixed, because the ten tracks on Some Girls comprise the bare minimum. In actual fact we recorded something like 42 tracks in Paris, and although some of it isn't finished it all has the same basic feel... There's also a really good finished track called Everything's Turning to Gold and both Hang Fire and So Young are mixed and ready.
It got very laid back because Keith was safe
by then. Spaced-out, whereas Some Girls was a very
focused album. A lot of reggae was being listened to at that
time, I remember.
It took FOREVER. I started writing a ton of
songs last summer, then Charlie and I did a few demos. Some of
them came out of that. Some had been written before. Then we
recorded a whole lot of newer things, which weren't really
complete. THEN, we went back and more or less chose the ones we
started with. I mean, it was just so haphazard and slapdash. Too
much work was made out of it. I think Parkinson's disease or
whatever sets in if you've got no real cutoff date, 'cause you
just keep going until you've done EVERYTHING you can possibly
think of. And then you say, well, great, but now we've got 40
songs, some of which are good and some of which COULD be good if
only they were, you know, DIFFERENT. At the end, you think,
Jesus, WHERE am I? It's STUPID. That's a DUMB way of doing it.
We DO have a lot of material, admittedly, but that's NOT the
point. The point is that it took 2 years to get it. You could've
easily made it in nine months. Nobody had any proper vision of
it. NOBODY fucking knew where they were going. That includes me.
You get bored with things very quickly. My attention span is so
limited. You know, I just love to make up songs and I don't even
like to finish the words. I just like to sing ooooh all
the way through. And then I'm happy after that. I don't want to
do anymore. That's IT. I don't even want to hear it again.
I don't think Emotional Rescue was
as coherent a bunch of sessions as Some Girls. All the
fast, punk things had gone by then. We were doing more of the
dance thing.
We cut enough for two albums. That was
almost as big a problem as not having enough - knowing what to
leave out. It's not that we used the best of what we had; we
just used what fitted together. My idea is to try to get out
another album this year, and then we can get these motherfuckers
on the ROAD! Instead of the same old treadmill of road, studio,
road, studio, road, studio, we can make extended road trips or
do anything else we want to do: be moving stars or make solo
albums.
The material on Emotional Rescue was
a little bit more diverse than had gone on before. If anything,
it was a little more soul-orientated and laid back than the Some
Girls album. A lot more relaxed. The writing for that
album was a little bit more experimental. There hadn't been a
long writing period. All of this built-up frustration had come
out in Some Girls, but the Emotional Rescue felt
a little bit left over.
Ron: You have to be prepared to lose a lot (of
songs), 'cause you get attached to songs.
Bill: It's also the ones that get finished the
quickest, as well.
Mick: Yeah, that's one of my points. You know, the
ones who get finished quickest are the ones that are gonna get
used...
Bill: The other prospect, the whole problem of... if
you do 4 or 5 songs in the same key at the same tempo, you can't
use 'em all (...)
Mick: Yeah, what he's saying is right.
Bill: You've got 2 other really great tracks that you
all love, but you can't (use them) all because you've got Where
the Boys Go.
Mick: You've got 4 similar things is what Bill is
saying.
Bill: And the same applies to slow ballads, which
we've got lots of really great ones. You can only put so many on
an album. One, maybe 2 if you're lucky.
Mick: During the whole thing, I mean I really wish
there was someone that could do a lot of this. Cause there's a
lot of donkey work making records, you know. You hear about
bands making... spending 2 years making (records.) A lot of it
is donkey work 'cause what you do is a really stupid way of
making records. Instead of going in with 10 songs saying, These
are the 10 songs we all know and like, you know - they're all
rehearsed, great, fantastic, here they come... (Again we
did) 30! - it's like making a movie. And so... and then you
start, Oh, I wish we could use that one!, and Ronnie's
going, What about that one? (laughs) ... And so you
wither it down from 30 down to 10 and it's a very slow
process...
Ron: (Jokes) And there's guitar lessons for Mick, you
know. They take weeks and weeks....
(Mick and Keith) fought a lot during that
album because Keith thought Mick was getting his way too much,
and Keith had to fight for what he believed. Keith fights for
his half of the Glimmer Twins.
It seemed like Keith and Mick were a little
bit more polarized at that time. There wasn't quite the same
vibe when everyone was gathered together as there had been in
the Exile On Main Street days.
(T)he tracks were too similar! That's why I
screamed. I was the maniac on that album, always complaining,
always going to battle. It's more difficult to get people to go
along with certain ideas now because it's become such a fucking
organization. If you're the odd one out who speaks out and says,
Look, I know we can do that song better, they they turn
around and say, Everybody loves it. And you end up being
the agitator, the paranoiac, you know... What's HE on?
At the end of January (1980) I went to New York to do an album with Graham Parker, and while I was there, I ran into Mick and overdubbed on some tracks for the forthcoming Stones album. I think the ones that went onto Tattoo You are a lot better than the ones on Emotional Rescue.
There's a lot of pastiche all over the album. It's all our piss-taking, in other words. Pastiche is just a big word for it.
I think people are misinterpreting Emotional
Rescue. It's just a lot of fun. A humorous,
tongue-in-cheek record. It's not supposed to be taken seriously.
Emotional Rescue is sort of half
Rolling Stones working within the basic mold, and the other half
is trying out things.
I don't think (it's a New York City album).
To me, New York is like Lou Reed and all those other bands..
(The rhythms in Dance and Emotional Rescue),
(t)hat is New York, yeah. English people hate it, 'cause they
say it's all disco. I know (it's not), but that's what THEY
think it is, you see. It's just black music.
(W)ell, it's not TOO misogynous. But there
IS a bit of a one-track mind in there. Everyone's been reminding
me that the album has only got one subject, which is GIRLS.
Obviously, that's got to change... Maybe I'll become a Marxist
rock & roller and make a Marxist album. Fuck all this girl
stuff. Make an album with anonymous musicians - apart from
MYSELF - who won't get paid.
(I)t doesn't (have the resonance of Some
Girls). You know, Emotional Rescue is a lot of
leftovers from Some Girls. Really.
One thing's for sure: Emotional Rescue isn't the news-break that 1978's Some Girls was. The Rolling Stones haven't suddenly gone salsa (in spite of some south-of-the-border horns). Old hands haven't stepped out of early retirement to show cocky young punks exactly how best to offend, and radio censors won't have a case... If the Stones have adopted a gentlemanly attitude these days, their prime concerns - sex and money - are the proletariat's, too. But when Mick Jagger is desperate enough to mail-order lovers wholesale, you can't help but wonder who's supposed to be rescuing whom. At least he has fun with the idea. I will be your knight in shining armor, he intones at the end of the title track, sounding like a high-priced fantasy gigolo gone silly with the strain. After nearly eighteen years of well-paid nights and approximately twenty-seven albums of acted out desires, maybe these guys can't help getting lust and cash confused... Still, judging by Emotional Rescue's language, the Rolling Stones - Jagger and Richards at least - are feeling as vulnerable as zombies can. Never ones to be self-deprecating, they've translated that feeling into global terms. A jilted Jagger fools around (literally) with foreign affairs in Send It to Me, proposing an energetic redevelopment program - a sort of self-help sexual capitalism: She may work in a factory/Right next door to me. In Indian Girl (where the Stones meet mariachi), Central American political realities are seriously, if rather vaguely, considered: Mister Gringo, my father he ain't no Ché Guevara/He's fighting the war in the streets of Masaya. And in the agonizingly slow blues, Down in the Hole, the black markets, foreign zones and diplomatic immunities of modern rebellion merely become so much barbed wire in a private war of emotional imperialism...
But so much of Emotional Rescue seems vague and not quite real - life seen from very far away - that it's hard to take the LP seriously. Even when it comes to simple desire, the Stones act like tourists in a foreign country. In the night, I was crying like a child, Jagger confesses in the middle of Emotional Rescue, and his voice sounds as estranged and bewildered as the echoing horn.... (E)ven two years back, Some Girls still had a good bit of impudent, anticipatory spark - or at least an experienced, I told-you-so air that was second best. With its fusion of redneck rudeness and elegant, discofied languor (and its honking, conspicuous New York orientation), Some Girls placed itself near the front of the Old Guard... Nowadays, Sugar Blue is buried in the mix, and there's a weird sort of powerlessness in even the funniest numbers... And for all the Stones' tongue-in-cheek insistence that ladies are commodities to be mail-ordered or tinkered with, it doesn't seem to make them any easier to control. (I tried rewiring her, Mick Jagger sings in She's So Cold. I think her engine is permanently stalled.) Once I would have believed that such irony meant Jagger knew better, but now I think he's hoping his feelings of powerlessness will pass for cynicism. Sometimes when I turn up the volume, looking for the connection I can't believe isn't there, I imagine that the Stones have actually died and this word-perfect, classic-sounding, spiritless record is a message from the grave. That would be the only irony that could save Emotional Rescue, the only vantage point that would explain the Rolling Stones' insulated view of wide horizons, their passionless disillusionment, their foreigner's confusion about sex, money and worldly possessions. Otherwise, unless the Stones are born again or something, I'm afraid that people won't be calling them survivors much longer.