Mr Charm

Hey Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on a fresh slab from the Stones that still has that old highway grease under its fingernails. Mr Charm comes off the Foreign Tongues album and it is pure late-night groove with a crooked smile. Mick started the whole thing with a simple guitar riff and a rough melody on a demo, then handed it to Keith who turned the riff into the song’s signature lick and cooked up a bass line that was never in the original sketch. Ronnie answered with his own answering phrases so the two guitars weave around each other live on the floor the way they have since the seventies. Steve Jordan laid down that piledriving four-on-the-floor pulse while Steve Winwood, an old friend from way back, sat in on B3 organ and even pulled out some congas that Jimmy Miller once gave the band. Mick calls the vocal a kind of rap thing because the words come fast and have to lock right to the hi-hat. There is even a dirty overdriven acoustic that Keith wanted because it reminded him of Street Fighting Man. The whole track sits somewhere between a dance floor and a roadhouse, and the chorus keeps promising that Mr Charm would never do you harm.

The official video puts Golden Globe winner Alexander Skarsgård in the middle of the desert heat out in Palmdale, California. Director Henry Scholfield, who has worked with all kinds of modern acts, shot it so the clip opens with a nod to that old Start Me Up gas-station dance before Skarsgård spends the rest of the minutes looking like the beautiful disaster the lyrics describe. The single also snuck out Bad Luck Hideaway, a duet between Mick and Keith that still carries Charlie Watts on the drums from earlier British Grove sessions. Foreign Tongues itself is the band’s twenty-fifth studio record, cut in under a month at Metropolis Studios in West London with Andrew Watt back in the producer’s chair after Hackney Diamonds. It features leftover sparks from those earlier sessions plus guests like Paul McCartney, Robert Smith, and Chad Smith, and it still finds room for one last Charlie Watts track. The album hit number one in fourteen countries and gave the Stones their fifteenth UK chart-topper, tying them with the Beatles for second place behind only Robbie Williams. Mick has said the grooves have to be perfect so the guitars can slide over them and the whole thing becomes a group song instead of just his demo.

The Zoo Crew keeps spinning records like this for the listening audience who call themselves Zoo Freaks, the same freeform spirit that has kept THE ZOO alive as the independent listener-supported station reviving the old KZEW 98FM flame. You can find the full story and keep the rock rolling over at THE ZOO.

The Rolling Stones themselves started the same way a lot of long-haul outfits do, with a couple of Dartford kids who bumped into each other on a train platform in October 1961. Mick was heading to the London School of Economics with a stack of rare American blues and R&B records under his arm. Keith was on his way to Sidcup Art College. They had known each other as kids at Maypole County Primary but lost touch. That afternoon the records did the talking and they realized they both lived for Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Jimmy Reed. They already had a mutual friend in guitarist Dick Taylor, so the three of them started jamming as Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, rehearsing covers upstairs at Mick’s house. Brian Jones came into the picture through the Ealing Jazz Club where Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated held court. Brian was the one who spotted a Muddy Waters LP on the floor during a phone call to Jazz News and named the new group after the track Rollin’ Stone. Their first official gig went down at the Marquee Club on July 12, 1962, with Mick out front, Keith and Brian on guitars, Dick Taylor on bass, Ian Stewart on piano, and Mick Avory (later of the Kinks) on drums. Charlie Watts joined not long after, then Bill Wyman locked in the bass, and the classic early lineup was set.

In those early days they were strictly a blues and R&B cover band, playing the small clubs around West London and building a following at places like the Crawdaddy in Richmond. Andrew Loog Oldham saw the potential, got them a deal with Decca, and pushed Mick and Keith to start writing their own songs the way the Beatles were doing. The first original hits arrived soon enough and the band never looked back. More than six decades later the same core spirit is still in the room when they cut a track like Mr Charm. Mick still writes the punkier, slashing parts even if Keith and Ronnie prefer a more open weave, and the band still records live enough that you can hear Steve Jordan checking if the tape is rolling right at the top of the song. The whole thing feels like the long road that started on that Dartford platform has just kept rolling.

If you want the official word straight from the band, head over to their site at rollingstones.com where they keep the latest on the records and the road. Their Facebook page is facebook.com/therollingstones, the Instagram is instagram.com/therollingstones, and the X account is x.com/RollingStones. For the dedicated fan side of things, the long-running It’s Only Rock ’n Roll site at iorr.org has been the place since 1980 for news, photos, and tour talk from Stones fans worldwide, and it has been covering Foreign Tongues right along with everything else. Active Facebook groups for fans include SHIDOOBEE with StonesDoug and the larger THE ROLLING STONES FANS communities where folks trade stories, old ticket stubs, and whatever new music is coming down the pike. Those groups keep the conversation going the same way the Zoo Freaks keep the request lines open over here. The Stones have always been about that mix of the blues root and the open road, and Mr Charm just proves the engine is still turning over just fine.