Monkey Man

You are locked in with THE ZOO, the place that still treats album rock like it matters, and the cut spinning right now is one of those deep-side numbers that never needed a chart position to earn its keep. This is “Monkey Man,” the eighth track on The Rolling Stones’ 1969 album Let It Bleed, a Jagger-Richards original that sits on side two between Keith Richards’s first full lead vocal, “You Got the Silver,” and the choir-and-French-horn closer “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Four minutes and eleven seconds, hard rock with a blues spine, and a personality all its own. If you have been riding with us over at THE ZOO, you already know we do not skip the album tracks just because radio once did.

“Monkey Man” was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and recorded in April 1969, produced by Jimmy Miller, the American who had already steered Beggars Banquet and was in the middle of the band’s great late-sixties run. The song was framed as a tribute to the Italian pop artist Mario Schifano, whom Jagger and Richards had met on the set of Schifano’s film Umano Non Umano, which translates as Human, Not Human. That odd little origin story fits the record. Let It Bleed is not a tidy concept album. It is a band holding itself together while the decade falls apart around them, and “Monkey Man” is the grin in the middle of the wreckage.

Listen to the opening and you will hear why collectors still drop the needle on this one. Bill Wyman, the quiet architect of the Stones’ low end, doubles as a vibraphone player. Those chimes come in cold, almost like a spy-film cue, sitting on the left side of the mix with Nicky Hopkins’s piano. Hopkins, the session pianist who gave the Stones so much of their late-sixties color, does not play polite cocktail chords here. He tumbles. Underneath it, Wyman’s bass locks with Charlie Watts, who keeps the whole thing from turning into a cartoon. Watts never overplays. He just makes the pocket feel inevitable. Producer Jimmy Miller is on tambourine, the same Miller who sat in on drums elsewhere on the album when the track needed a different kind of push. Keith Richards carries the main riff and then steps out for the slide solo, that nasty, singing bottleneck tone that became a Richards signature once Brian Jones was no longer the slide man in the room. Jagger sings it like he is half confessing and half daring you to keep up. Richards answers in the background vocals. No horns, no choir, no guest star trying to steal the frame. Just the core band and two trusted outsiders, Hopkins and Miller.

The lyric is pure Jagger theater. “I’m a fleabit peanut monkey, and all my friends are junkies” is not a slogan you put on a poster in 1969 and expect the disc jockeys to read on the air. It is street language, camp language, and a wink at the chemical weather the band was living in. Some listeners have heard the verses as coded talk about how much trouble felt like fun. Others hear a put-on, Mick playing a character the way he played the Boston Strangler’s cousin on “Midnight Rambler,” the track that opens side two. Both readings work. The song never explains itself. It just struts. That is the Stones method at the end of the decade. They stopped trying to sound like anybody’s idea of a pop group and started sounding like a bar band that had swallowed a symphony and a police report.

Place the track back on the album and the picture gets sharper. Let It Bleed followed Beggars Banquet and arrived in December 1969 on Decca in Britain and London in the States, right as the band was coming off its American tour and right as the decade’s last ugly headlines were stacking up. Brian Jones had been pushed out earlier in the year. He died in July. Mick Taylor had come in, and Taylor does appear on other Let It Bleed cuts, including “Country Honk” and “Live with Me,” but “Monkey Man” is a Richards guitar record. Keith was, for most of these sessions, the only guitarist in the building, covering rhythm and lead while the band rebuilt itself. Engineer Glyn Johns was at the desk for the Olympic Studios work that defines so much of this era. The sleeve, with its cake, its tire, and its clockwork disaster, told you the mood before you dropped the needle. “Gimme Shelter” opened the record like a warning. “Monkey Man” showed up late, after the country detour and the blues opera, and reminded you the band could still be funny, mean, and danceable in the same four minutes.

It was never a single. The radio world took “Honky Tonk Women,” released earlier in 1969, and later lived off the album’s bookends. “Monkey Man” stayed an album cut, which is exactly why it still feels like a private handshake between the band and the people who played the whole side. The Stones did not lean on it live for a long time. They finally put it to work on the 1994 and 1995 Voodoo Lounge Tour, and a later performance from the Licks Tour turned up on the 2004 live album Live Licks. Film editors noticed what radio had missed. Martin Scorsese used the track in Goodfellas, in the stretch where the camera rides with Henry Hill through the coke trade and the paranoia, the vibes and the slide cutting against the suits and the briefcases. Television borrowed it too. A song that never cracked the singles chart ended up doing more cultural work than half the hits of its year.

A word on the band, because “Monkey Man” only makes sense if you know who was holding the instruments. The Rolling Stones formed in London in 1962, named, depending on which telling you trust, out of a Muddy Waters song. The classic lineup that walked into the Let It Bleed sessions was Mick Jagger on vocals, Keith Richards on guitar, Bill Wyman on bass, and Charlie Watts on drums, with Brian Jones already on the way out and Mick Taylor about to step in. They had started as a hard-edged blues cover band in the clubs, gotten famous as the supposed opposite number to the Beatles, and by 1968 and 1969 had outgrown the cartoon. Aftermath, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, then Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St., form the run that still defines album rock. Jagger wrote and performed like an actor who had studied American rhythm and blues until he could bend it. Richards wrote riffs that felt older than the records they were printed on. Watts, a jazz drummer at heart, gave them swing instead of stomp. Wyman kept the floor from collapsing. By the time of this album they were already institution and outlaw act at the same time, banned, busted, celebrated, and impossible to schedule. Watts died in 2021. Wyman had left in 1993. Ronnie Wood, who joined in the mid-seventies, is the other guitar half of the modern stage show. Jagger and Richards are still out there, still arguing, still the songwriting credit on the sleeve.

If you want the catalog, the tour news, and the official word, the band keeps house at rollingstones.com. Their verified pages are up at Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the long-running fan club that has been logging set lists and show reports since before most of the internet had a name, the It’s Only Rock ’n Roll site at iorr.org is still the room where serious Stones people compare notes. And when you want the deep cuts without the commercials, you already know where the dial is set: THE ZOO.

That is “Monkey Man.” Vibes in the doorway, Hopkins rolling the piano, Richards on the slide, Watts making it swing, Jagger selling the joke and the threat in the same breath. Not the single. Not the anthem. The track you play when you want the Stones as a working band, caught in April 1969, still dangerous and still laughing. Stay with the side. You Can’t Always Get What You Want is next, and around here we do not lift the needle early.