Nicky Hopkins

       I'm excited to read Julian Dawson's biography of the great session player of the 60s, Nicky Hopkins. I don't have the book yet; it's sold out on amazon.com, but I heard Dawson discuss it on West Coast Live. Even though you may never have heard of him, his resume includes most of the best rock music produced in the 1960s. A case could be made that Hopkins, a hired hand for the Stones, the Beatles, the early records of the Kinks and the Who AND the Jefferson Airplane and the Dead, virtually created rock as a transatlantic style, in rock's second wave.  
         Always respected, Hopkins never made the fortune he deserved. It's an old story: the only way to make money is to write the songs and own the publishing rights. Dawson tells the story that EMI paid Hopkins the princely sum of six pounds--about ten dollars--for his to the Beatles' Revolution: a deathless, truly manic, Jelly Roll of a piano solo, that more than matches the pumped up guitars on the track. Keith Richards is among the hundreds of people Dawson interviewed for the book. Richards recalls the sessions for the "We Love You" single; narrowly escaping long jail sentences (John "Hoppy" Hopkins would not be as lucky) and in the studio, Jagger and Richards were also, not surprisingly, dry of inspiration. But then Nicky came up with the song's riff, and "boom," Keith recalls, "we had a song." 
     In fact, the song is the riff. When Dawson asks why Hopkins never got a songwriting credit, Keith cheerfully replies, "That's the Stones for you." Sigh. You're a cad, Keith (not that he cares). 
      But while Keith didn't want to share, he still loved--and certainly used--Nicky. Hopkins is all over the great Stones records of the late 60s and early 70s. Rod Stewart's cover of "Street Fighting Man" seems a direct nod and tribute to Nicky's work with the Stones in that period as much as to Jagger-Richards (from The Rod Stewart Album, 1969, Mercury Records; released a year after the Stones' original, Rod covered it because he admired the words so much, and was frustrated you couldn't make them out in the Stones' version). 

        Dear Reader, I don't normally recommend Rod Stewart records but this one's an exception (actually, the next three are). As Joe Kenny notes in Head Heritage, Rod's first record "could easily be re-titled Beggars Banquet," even down to similar cover designs (see above). "Street Fighting Man" opens the album, as a statement of intent. Nicky had played on the original song, contributing the trippy arabesques at the fade, if you can call arabesques "trippy." Where the Stones' song marched, and lurched, this version's slowed down to a funky groove. The Stones' song made the acoustic guitar rock. This sonic innovation did not go unnoticed by Rod and the band here: future Faces Ron Wood and Ian McLagan. They stop abruptly, and then start again, this time at the slightly faster tempo of the original. It's a wall of sound, a thick mesh of  acoustic guitar, piano, and bottleneck slide.  The song stops one more time, and resumes with Mac playing the piano riff to "We Love You" to the fade out. I don't know whose idea it was to mash up SFM with the earlier song, but the fact that it works perfectly suggests a band who were doing a lot of wood-shedding while listening to post-67 Stones records. I want to think the "We Love You" sample was Mac's idea, and that he realized, even then, the crucial role that Nicky Hopkins played in creating the best records the Stones ever made.