Happy Birthday Keith Richards. Rolling Stones live 1969

Still living off of a baby's transfused blood after all these years. 

Song of the Week: "Moonlight Mile", The Rolling Stones

Listen - The Rolling Stones perform Moonlight Mile

On these digital pages, we good folk at Flip-Central usually like to hip you to songs we think you have not heard before, such as Born Loser. But today's SOTW is a song that we think you most definitely have heard before. We're just betting that it has been awhile since you heard it.

The song is from a small band out of the UK that goes by the name The Rolling Stones. The album is called Sticky Fingers. The song is the closing number on that 1971 album and is called Moonlight Mile.

While the song is credited to the usual suspects of Jagger/Richards, rumors have long swirled that Brian Jones' replacement, Mick Taylor had a more than major hand in writing this song. The way I've always heard it is that Richards wrote the main guitar riff while on a Mississippi Fred McDowell listening binge. Then the two Micks stayed up late working the riff into a full-fledged song. Jagger fleshing out the lonesome road weary lyrics, Taylor, fleshing out a full song structure. The boys later went into the studio in England to record the number for their 1970s debut. Keith Richards plays the dominant open-tuned acoustic guitar as Taylor ads the subtle and muted electric guitar work from his Gibson SG. [Ed Note: It appears that Keith is not on the recording at all, and that Mick Jagger plays the acoustic.]

A favorite moment of mine is when Jagger reflects, around the 3:00 mark, "I'm hiding baby and I'm dreaming. I'm riding down your moonlight mile." Then the song breaks into an aggressive surge of strings with a Far-East feel, only to subside in a long, slow descent of loose instruments as the song falls off to it's close. Ian Stewart's piano work is particularly effective in this rag-tag completion to a beautiful song that always makes me want to hit the open road. [Ed note: damn, I hate being wrong. A commenter to this article has pointed out that it is probably one Jim Price on piano, not Stewart]

Made a rag-pile of my shiny clothes. Gonna warm my bones, gonna warm my bones. I got silence on my radio. Let the airwaves flow. Let the airwaves flow.

Video Diary: The Who, "A Quick One"

The best music performance ever filmed. Period.

Song of the Week: "So Long Cruel World", Blanche

The construction of a song is a fascinating thing to deconstruct. I'm not sure that makes any sense but I'll forge on. When one pull's most rock songs apart that person is left with a musical skeleton that generally fits into two broad categories: blues construction or folk construction. Very often the two are the same so even this broad framework is too narrow. So, what, other than the lyrics, defines the character of a song? What makes one song a soul song and the next a blues number? One a country number, the other version a rockabilly number. Often it's the musical festoons, baubles or trinkets that define a song. In other words, it's the little things. Take The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction as an example. Again, we're setting aside the lyrics. The song, at it's heart is 4 chords. Simple as could be. But it's that famous "riff" that everyone humms. The little 3-note blues riff re-imagined from countless Jimmy Reed shuffles. But it's also that 5-beat drum break. And it's those dipped in reverb guitar fills Keith Richards slips between each verse line. Each of those things are as important as the lyrics at making the song more than just a blues based construction.

This is all just a very long winded intro to our Song of the Week, So Long Cruel World by genre defying Detroit-based band, Blanche. If you know Blanche at all, you probably know them because the main dude, singer and songwriter, Dan John Miller, aptly portrayed the stoic Luther Perkins in the film, I Walk The Line. 

2004 witnessed the release of Blanche's first album, If We Can't Trust the Doctors. It's an interesting stew of bluegrass, country, punk and surf all mixed together into a dark cauldron. In the middle of the album is our maudlin little song (as most of theirs are) entitled So Long Cruel World. It's a prime example, in my estimation, of a song that soars because of it's musical arrangement (festoons?) more than the structure itself. Opening with antimelodic pedal steel, a simple jazzy little bass riff played by Tracee Miller (married to Dan) on a Framus Star Bass (very similar to the one I used to play, by the way!) brings the song into whatever structure it might pretend to have. A simple banjo riff joins as the ethereal pedal steel falls into a melodic riff. Then Dan Miller ads a guitar riff worthy of a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western which twangs us into the whoa-is-me vocals. The band continues to add elements and riffs that lay on top of each other and skitter over the beats like a goony bird trying to stick a landing. There is little to no central musical framework. In between all of this - and it is in-between and not "over it" --  Dan Miller's hillbilly inflected vocals dramatizing one's suicidal yearnings are importantly backed up by the detached vocals of Tracee in a back and forth reminiscent of the work done in the early 80's by John Doe and Exene Cervenka. 

In the end the lack of structure and the lack of genre (who's in charge here anyway?) to the song is what I think makes the song so interesting. It's not for everybody, I'll admit that. But give the song a few listens and tell me if it doesn't become a way-homer for you.