THE ROLLING STONES – “Little Red Rooster”
I’m a bit slow tonight. I just typed something about Mick Jagger’s cock, and then looked at the name of the song, and – ohhhhh, right. Now I get it.
Sung, as opposed to written, it is a more discreet metaphor at least. And Jagger’s louche, amused delivery is far more the lazy rooster than the prowling one. The rest of the Stones are similarly post-coital, conjuring a morning-after mood with arrogant economy.
6
And unlike It’s All Over Now this one is a blues and much more authentic than Herman’s Hermits. Willie Dixon wrote it, of course, and Howling Wolf first recorded it, and compared to that primeval recording Jagger sounds like a Kent surburbanite, which of course he is and it’s never really gone away despite the legend.
But ten-year-old me knew little or nothing about the blues and this was a big departure from what the Stones had been doing hitherto and I hated it. For all of a week, and then I loved it to bits. That’s how all the best things in life go.
This December would be when an enlightened Junior School teacher, Mrs Nicholson, introduced ten-year-old me and the rest of the class to a serious dose of TS Eliot. She’d been reading us Old Possum, and then zapped us with Journey of the Magi
I have Jimmy Saville to thank for liking this one. Listening to his run down of an old chart and his one way conversations with Dignified Don, and the points scoring (open bracket, close bracket) on song titles was fun to listen to in the car in the pub car park with a bottle of coke and a bag of crisps, while Dad supped a lunchtime livener inside. A much younger me was in thrall to Jagger’s laid back delivery and those little high pitched clucks from Keef’s guitar. I liked it immensely without having a clue about The Blues or its significance regarding pop. I just liked the idea of Jagger singing as though he were #1 bird in the henhouse. The phallic imagery of this particular song even now comes second to the memoory of Saville’s lunchtime show on Radio 1 and those mysterious hits of yesteryear served with Coke and cheese & onion crisps.
DESERT ISLAND DISCS WATCH:
Redmond O’Hanlon-Explorer, writer(1997).
#2 as opposite yet again: http://musicsoundsbetterwithtwo.blogspot.com/2011/07/can-he-do-it-gene-pitney-im-gonna-be.html Thanks for reading as ever!