Down In The Hole

The Zoo Crew has got the needle down on a slow one tonight, and if you Zoo Freaks have been riding with us for a while you already know we like the deep cuts better than the jukebox hits. This is "Down In The Hole," sitting on side two of the Rolling Stones' 1980 album Emotional Rescue, right before the falsetto title track that everybody remembers. The single of that title track even carried this blues as its flip side, which tells you the band thought the song was worth sending out into the world even if they never put it on a stage. Mick Jagger said they made it up on the spot and only cut it twice. Ronnie Wood chimed in that they just let the tape run. That is the whole story of the record in two sentences, and it is a good one.

The sessions that fed Emotional Rescue ran through 1979, first down in Nassau at Compass Point and then in Paris at Pathé Marconi, with some finishing work later in New York. Keith Richards had just come out from under the Toronto drug case that could have put him away for a long stretch, and the band was still riding the second wind they caught on Some Girls. They cut a pile of material. Some of it stayed in the can and later showed up on Tattoo You. "Down In The Hole" was one of the keepers, a murky slow blues with a rare fade-in, Sugar Blue's harmonica cutting through the middle of it like a train whistle in the dark. An early pass at the same idea carried the working title "Stuck In The Cold." The finished lyric does not mess around. None of your money will buy you forgiveness, none of your jewelry, none of your gold. Misery, madness, and the kind of private war that does not get solved by a dance floor. It sits oddly on an album that also has reggae, a little disco, and Mick singing in that high voice, and that is exactly why we spin it. The Glimmer Twins produced it, Chris Kimsey engineered, and the core band is on there: Mick, Keith, Ronnie, Charlie Watts, and Bill Wyman, with Sugar Blue sitting in the way he had on Some Girls.

Jagger has talked about the whole album as a mixed bag, not a disco record, just a little of everything. He said the title track itself came late, mostly him, Charlie, and Woody, with Keith not even in the room for the take they kept. "Down In The Hole" feels like the other side of that loose stretch, the moment they stopped chasing the radio and let a blues crawl out of the shadows. They never played it live. That fact alone makes it a Zoo record. You are not going to hear it between the hits at a stadium. You are going to hear it here, on THE ZOO, where the Crew still believes a deep cut can carry a night.

The cover of Emotional Rescue is that strange blue-and-white heat-imaging photograph, shot by Roy Adzak and designed by Peter Corriston, the same hand behind Some Girls. The album hit number one on both sides of the Atlantic in the summer of 1980, the first Stones album to do that since Goats Head Soup. The title single went to number three in America. Critics were split, some of them calling the record vague, life seen from far away. The Zoo Crew hears the blues track and does not much care about the argument. Sugar Blue's harp, Charlie's patient beat, and Mick asking unpleasant questions about money and forgiveness are enough.

If you want the long road that led to a song like this, you have to go back to a train platform in Dartford and a little club in west London. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards grew up in the same Kent town, drifted apart, and ran into each other again around 1961 on a train, Keith carrying a guitar and Mick carrying a stack of Chess records. They had a mutual friend in Dick Taylor. The three of them started rehearsing upstairs at the Jagger house as Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, chasing Jimmy Reed, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry. Jagger set the guitar down and sang. Keith took the fretboard. Taylor played drums at first and later switched to bass.

The real turn came in the spring of 1962 at the Ealing Jazz Club, where Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated had a weekly rhythm-and-blues night. Korner was the man who opened the door for electric blues in London, and half the players who mattered in the next few years passed through his band, Charlie Watts among them. On the night Mick and Keith walked in, Brian Jones was sitting in under the name Elmo Lewis, after Elmore James, and he played "Dust My Broom" on slide. Keith had never heard anybody do that on an electric guitar. Jones told them he was putting a band together. They started sitting in with Korner's outfit, then Jones pulled them toward his own group. An ad in Jazz News brought in Ian Stewart on piano. When Korner had to pull Blues Incorporated off a Marquee Club date, he handed the night to the kids. Jones took the name off a Muddy Waters record, "Rollin' Stone." On July 12, 1962, they played their first show as the Rolling Stones, with Mick Avory, later of the Kinks, on drums. Charlie Watts came in for good not long after. Bill Wyman answered an ad and locked down the bass. That is the whole beginning: Chess records, a train, a slide guitar in a small club, and a Muddy Waters title.

The blues never really left them, even when the clothes got louder and the records got stranger. "Down In The Hole" is the proof. Twenty years after Ealing, they were still willing to let a tape run and keep the take that felt like the old country. Emotional Rescue went to the top of the charts, and this song rode along on the B-side, unbothered by the falsetto and the heat-camera cover. The Crew likes that kind of honesty. If you are a Zoo Freak who still pulls the deep cuts, this one belongs in the stack.

The band keeps a home base at the official Rolling Stones website, where the Emotional Rescue era still turns up in the archive next to the newer records. You can find them on Facebook, on Instagram, and on X. Fans who want a room of their own have the long-running Rolling Stones Fan Club group on Facebook, and the nonprofit fan site It's Only Rock 'n Roll has been passing news from fan to fan since the early days of the web. Spin it again if you want. The hole is still down there, and the harp still cuts.