The Rolling Stones (1971) Moonlight Mile - LOST 70s GEMS

 This ballad is the closer to a phenomenal album and by far my favourite Stones album 1971's Sticky Fingers. It's a beguiling track and mixes oriental, Indian and Middle Eastern scales. Like a lot of the album it follows a Zeppelin level of heaviness, who were dominating the America at the time outselling the Stones incidentally.

It starts with a lilting double stop acoustic guitar motif that is doubled by Mick Jagger vocally before the upper register piano begins chiming like a gong creating a Japanese backdrop. The ninth chord slide is a blues staple that mixes particularly well with pitched asian textures; on a sidenote BB King wailing along with an eastern backing would have been interesting to hear. A timpani drum roll ushers us into the narrative, the image of a cool wintry night with a 'head full of snow' is painted through the sparse instrumentation and one of Jaggers' most restrained performances; think a darker, more Asian version You Can't Always Get What You Want.
  The song picks up with the "sound of strangers sending nothing to my soul" as a string orchestra dirge heavily in a raga style along meaty hard rock guitar we learn it's "it's just another mad, mad day on the road". A mix of country blues slide guitar and tinkling psychedelic touches create a frosty, off kilter-ed tale of the road. The best line is when Jagger sings " I am sleeping under strange strange skies", a sincere moment against an epic backdrop of sweeping strings and droning horns .

The song becomes less placid and erupts into a bridge where a hard rock guitar figure strikes back and forth and is joined by the intensifying orchestra. It was this short guitar attack, striking in Asian flavoured high pitched bursts, that was written by Keith Richards as the 'Japanese Thing' snippet. But it was Mick Taylor and Mick Jagger who developed it into this composition by fleshing it out for the opening verses making it slower, melodious, and playing it acoustically; it actually sounds more Indian. 

 Richards' small contribution became the launching pad for the whole song. It is at heart a Jagger/Taylor tune like many from this period where Richards was taking a backseat; it was this new songwriting partnership that added the touching delicate verses and stirring hard rock hooks to the song while Richards' little jagged, swaggering guitar snippet that mimicked the sweet lilting tone of Japanese music was the catalyst for the songs rockier second half.


Mick Taylors playing is the final part of this criminally underrated gem, his taste for pentatonic blues would create juicy fretwork that would sound like fireworks; ecstatic and dexterous. Taylors' Latin and eastern based legatos were based on Jazz and would progress from one lick to another, improving or extemporising into new directions from the songs basis. It's a style that made him a showman almost working the song up into a frenzy like the rave ups of the Yardbirds. Here his sweet melodic touch creates a 'cool down' with the piano, the easing strings and even some flute producing a mystical outro reminiscent of the pastoral, folk music of the Andes.

It all finishes quietly back how it started; an acoustic hammer on piece complete with descending Japanese piano notes and even bearing a strong Rage melody in Jaggers' falsetto warbling. This eastern tinged epic bears the strings based drama of Friends off Led Zeppelin III, but a very Stonesish flavour of southern fried blues and successfully embellishing with Indian, Japanese and even Andian textures wonderful!