(Credits: Far Out / Bent Rej)
Sun 19 April 2026 16:30, UK
During the making of Let It Bleed, a lot was happening within The Rolling Stones.
In one room, Brian Jones was effectively kept away from the sessions, with the microphones turned off so he could not disrupt the rest of the band. After hours and away from the studio, Mick Jagger was busy filming Performance, while also complicating things further by having an affair with Anita Pallenberg, Jones’ ex and Keith Richards’ partner at the time.
With all that interpersonal chaos, it is remarkable that they managed to make an album at all, let alone one that included now timeless tracks like ‘Gimme Shelter’ and ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’.
The band was falling apart at the seams on every level. The situation with Brian Jones had become so bad that they no longer knew what to do. It was not just that his addictions made him musically unreliable, often unable to get through a single take, but also that he had become someone they did not want to be around. The year before, during a trip to Morocco, Richards had seen Jones assaulting Pallenberg and had taken her back to England to get her away from him. As the two were now together, the situation between Richards and Jones was clearly not conducive to a healthy working or collaborative relationship.
Where once the two multi-instrumentalists had been able to bounce off one another, splitting up guitar parts or weaving them together to create something interesting, Richards no longer had any desire to be doing that, and Jones didn’t have the brain capacity to make it happen. So instead, they would simply tell Jones not to show up to the studio, and if he did, they’d relegate him to a different room so he wouldn’t be a holdup as they ushered Mick Taylor in the back door as his replacement.
Then there’s the matter of Performance. While still mostly based on rumour, the theory went that while filming the movie, Jagger and Pallenberg’s sex scenes were legit and an affair kicked off. To make matters worse, while also making Let It Bleed, Jagger had invited their friend Jack Nitzsche over from the States to work on the soundtrack for the film.
While stewing in all of this and simply trying to make it work, Richards found a guiding light in Nietzsche’s plus one: Ry Cooder.
Appearing like a saving grace to give the guitarist something else to focus on, Cooder was not only a great player, but was practically a scholar in all things country and blues. While everything was crumbling, the two would be found in a corner with Cooder showing Richards some cool tunings, or working on a mandolin take for ‘Love In Vain’.
While losing faith in his bandmates, Richards found a new icon of sorts, stating, “I took Ry Cooder for all he was worth. His tuning, the fucking lot. I ripped him off.”
That’s one way of saying, ‘I was deeply inspired by my new friend’, but I guess the tenderness towards him can be found in the way that Richards playing from then on has always been a little more Cooder-shaped.
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