Fool to Cry

The Zoo Crew has been easing "Fool to Cry" off the turntable for the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO, and it still lands like a late-night confession even though the record is half a century old. The Rolling Stones cut it for Black and Blue, the album that came out on April 23, 1976, and it was the only single they pulled from that set. It climbed to number 6 in Britain and number 10 on the American chart, the band's only Top 10 that parked exactly at ten. The album itself went to number 1 in the United States and number 2 back home. For a song that some folks still call soft, it carried the whole record.

The story behind the track is a guitar audition wearing a ballad's clothes. Mick Taylor walked out in December 1974, just as the Stones were lining up sessions at Musicland Studios in Munich. Keith Richards has said the album turned into a stretch of rehearsing guitar players. The Glimmer Twins, which is Mick Jagger and Richards producing under that old nickname, tried out a small army of pickers. Ronnie Wood of the Faces, Harvey Mandel from Canned Heat, and Alabama session man Wayne Perkins all left fingerprints on the tapes. Perkins got the call in a roundabout way. Eric Clapton mentioned over breakfast that Taylor had quit, Perkins asked him to put in a word, and Clapton phoned Jagger on the spot. Perkins flew to London, moved in for a spell at Ronnie Wood's house The Wick where Richards was staying, and the two guitarists clicked. On "Fool to Cry" you can hear Perkins laying those watery fills in the open spaces and then wailing through the outro. Richards later told a British writer, with Perkins standing in the room, that his favorite for the job was right there with them. Wood still got the chair. Perkins walked away with some of the best playing on the album, including "Hand of Fate" and "Memory Motel," and never quite got over how close he came.

Jagger plays electric piano on the song, and Nicky Hopkins handles the acoustic piano and a string synthesizer. The lyric is a left turn for a band better known for swagger. The singer is down on himself. His little daughter tells him not to carry on, and so does the woman he loves. Both of them say he is a fool to cry. In 1993 Jagger put it plain: the song dates from the period when he had a young child, his daughter Jade, around a lot, calling him daddy. He called it another of their heart-melting ballads, a bit long and waffly at the end maybe, but he liked it. Richards was glad somebody in the band could hit that falsetto. He has said he has a decent falsetto himself, but when the singer can reach those notes you let him go. Jagger had been soaking up falsetto soul singers like Aaron Neville, and what goes in comes out. Cash Box called it a departure, relaxed beat, Fender Rhodes and guitar played funky, and praised the falsetto. Record World said the ballad rivaled "Angie" for soul.

There is a road story that the Zoo Crew still tells with a grin. On the 1976 tour through Germany, Richards nodded off while the band was playing "Fool to Cry." The song runs a little past five minutes on the album and fades sooner on the single, and the groove is so slow and pillowy that even the man who built half of it could not stay awake in the middle of a show. It is the only Black and Blue track that made the career sets Forty Licks and GRRR!, which tells you the band never really shook it loose. The rest of the album leans funk and reggae, with a cover of Eric Donaldson's "Cherry Oh Baby" and the studio heat of "Hot Stuff." "Fool to Cry" is the soft center, the one that still sounds like a man talking to his kid.

If you want the long view, the Stones did not start as the world's most famous rock and roll band. They started as two Dartford kids who lost track of each other and found each other again on a railway platform. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had gone to primary school together, drifted apart, and bumped into each other around October 1961 at Dartford station. Jagger was headed toward the London School of Economics with an armful of blues and rhythm-and-blues records. Richards was on his way to Sidcup Art College. They got talking about Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, and Bo Diddley, and realized they already shared a friend in guitarist Dick Taylor. The three of them began meeting to play records and jam, and with a couple of others they formed a little outfit called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys.

The real spark came in the spring of 1962 at the Ealing Club, where Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated was holding court. Jagger and Richards were knocked sideways by a slide guitarist billing himself as Elmo Lewis, after Elmore James. That was Brian Jones, from Cheltenham, a blues fanatic who could already play piano, recorder, clarinet, and washboard before he was out of his teens. Jones was putting a band together. He took the name from a Muddy Waters track, "Rollin' Stone," recorded for Chess in 1950. Legend has it he was on the phone with a journalist who asked what the group was called, and the Muddy Waters title was what came out. On July 12, 1962, they played their first show under that name at the Marquee in London, with Jagger singing, Richards and Jones on guitar, Dick Taylor on bass, Ian Stewart on piano, and Mick Avory, later of the Kinks, on drums. Taylor left for art school and later formed the Pretty Things. Bill Wyman came in on bass. After some persuading they landed Charlie Watts, the drummer they had wanted all along, who had been playing with Korner and then working at an advertising agency. That lineup, built on Chicago blues in West London pubs, is the root of everything that followed, including a slow 1976 ballad about a father who cannot stop crying.

The band still keeps a front porch for the faithful. The official home is rollingstones.com, where the catalog, the shop, and the long road are all still posted. You can also find them on Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the deep diggers, the long-running fan club site It's Only Rock 'n Roll has been passing news from fan to fan since the early magazine days, and the public Rolling Stones Fan Club group stays busy with photos, arguments, and set-list memories. Put "Fool to Cry" on again. Let the falsetto sit there. It is still a fool's song, and it still works.