Quote:
Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower
Great solo, and it totally makes the coda of that song. But it is a different thing than the horns in, say, All Down The Line or Bitch, which (as a horn section, as opposed to a horn solo) really drive the music forward. The horn section lines in All Down The Line are fantastic and as much a part of the "rock" as the guitars. Same with Rocks Off. Can't You Hear Me Knocking is a great song from the opening guitar riff, but I have always been suspicious of the claim that the entire Santana-themed coda was a spontaneous jam that just happened to be recorded. From Wikipedia:
On the recording, Richards said in 2002,
"(The jam at the end wasn't inspired by Carlos Santana.) We didn't even know they were still taping. We thought we'd finished. We were just rambling and they kept the tape rolling. I figured we'd just fade it off. It was only when we heard the playback that we realised, Oh, they kept it going. Basically we realised we had two bits of music. There's the song and there's the jam." [1]
Taylor recalls in a 1979 interview,
"Can't You Hear Me Knocking... is one of my favourites... (The jam at the end) just happened by accident; that was never planned. Towards the end of the song I just felt like carrying on playing. Everybody was putting their instruments down, but the tape was still rolling and it sounded good, so everybody quickly picked up their instruments again and carried on playing. It just happened, and it was a one-take thing. A lot of people seem to really like that part."
Really? So I was listening in more detail this weekend, and noticed that, as far as I can tell anyway, there is no sax in the first 2:42 of the song. So was Keys just sitting there enjoying the music, with his sax ready just in case, and when the spontaneous jam broke out at 2:43, he decided that this would be a good time to launch into a lengthy solo? Is that your story, Mr. Richards?
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2. That outro is too constructed to have occurred spontaneously. And both Taylor and Keith were so frequently polluted at that point, all of their recollections are suspect. Also, Taylor's story sounds a lot like his explanation of the brilliant solo at the end of "Time Waits for No One" (
IOR&R is a crappy record, but that solo is beautiful). I think in place of an accurate memory, and because he seemed to go to another world while playing guitar* - staring at the strings and ignoring everything around him - his default line when asked about any of those many genius moments from '69-'75 is "Uh, they just let the tape run, and we did what we did."
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* Watch any concert film of him. He's either super-baked, ridiculously introverted, or an undiagnosed musical Asperger savant (or all three).
