It was 1981, and the Rolling Stones were stuck. They had committed to a massive summer tour, and they didn’t want to waste the opportunity to promote a new record. But Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were fighting—barely speaking, much less writing any new songs—and the clock was ticking. “There was no time to make a whole new album and make the start of the tour,” said Richards, in 1993. The band’s longtime engineer, Chris Kimsey, came up with an elegant solution. They had released five albums in the previous seven years, so maybe, he reasoned, there were enough worthy outtakes or unfinished drafts to assemble a record. “I spent three months going through like the last four, five albums finding stuff that had been either forgotten about or, at the time, rejected,” said Kimsey in a 1982 interview. “And then I presented it to the band and I said, ‘Hey, look, guys, you’ve got all this great stuff sitting in the can and it’s great material, do something with it.’”The result, released forty years ago today, was Tattoo You—ultimately, one of the most curious entries in the Rolling Stones’ discography. It was the last album by the band to hit Number One on the US charts (though, to be fair, every single one of the Stones’ 24 studio albums since their 1964 debut, England’s Newest Hit Makers has reached the Top Five). Powered by the beloved opening track “Start Me Up,” it was… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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