Fact #37394

Marshall Chess [Chess Records] : The first US tour by the Stones was not The Beatles tour. We had a cult following in the cities and were abandoned in the sticks . The boys needed cheering up. I could not have them de-planing in London looking like the brothers glum.

I called Phil Spector from Texas where the Stones had just supported a band of performing seals and asked him to get us booked just as soon as possible into Chess Studios. Phil or Marshall Chess called back and said he'd set up two days of recording time, two days hence. Chicago was a piece of heaven on earth for the Stones. The earth had been scorched on most of our mid-American concert stopovers.

We hadn't set any records; we didn't yet have the goods, apart from a trio of wonderful one-offs, I Wanna Be Your Man, You Better Move On and Not Fade Away, we had yet to find our vinyl legs.

2120 South Michigan Avenue housed Chess Records and Studios and in two days the group put down some thirteen tracks, their most relaxed and inspired session to date, moved, no doubt, by our newfound ability to sell coals to Newcastle. Who would have thought a bunch of English kids could produce black R 'n' B in the States? And here they were in the sanctum sanctorum of Chicago blues, playing in the lap of their gods.
(interview with Harvey Kubernik, 2007)

Bill Wyman (bassist, Rolling Stones) : On the first day, Buddy Guy dropped by the studio with Willie Dixon who tried to sell us a few songs.

Keith Richards (guitarist, Rolling Stones) : The weirdest thing was that when we met Muddy he was painting Chess Studios. You walk in and start recording, on your hands and knees in this Mecca, and they say, you might like to meet this guy who's up on a step ladder in a white overall, and you say, who's that? That's Muddy Waters.

It was another of those slaps around the face. His records weren't selling. And at the same time he was a real gentleman. I was sure he'd look down at us, but none of those guys were like that. Or John Lee [John Lee Hooker], it was like, we've had some babies, and they're white! And they sort of nurtured us. Those guys were gentleman, they saw wider than the music business. They immediately nurtured us, and had no reason to know that, because they had, in a year or two they'd be selling more records than they had in their lives before. I would have expected a 'get out of here white trash' reaction but those guys were bigger than that.

Like John Lee, who just has a bigger heart, an inner vision of what's happening. John Lee is no spring chicken now, but I went over to his house for a barbecue just after a session, and he had a whole bunch of young ladies with him, all guitar players. So you end up in John Lee's front room with everybody plugged in hammering away and John just sits in the back there eating, going, yeah, that's pretty good. That gives you hope, that this guy's nearly twice as old as I am and he's still playing. When you start playing you don't realise what hurdles will come in the way. It's like looking over the edge - nobody's taken the music this far. It's a voyage of discovery. I'd be very happy to be 75 years old playing guitar and working on my stuff and having 15 girls all learning how to play guitar from me.

Marshall Chess : The ground floor was a gem, as was Chess engineer Ron Malo. He treated them just like ... musicians. Nothing sensational happened at Chess except the music. I was producing the sessions in the greatest sense of the word: I had provided the environment in which the work could get done. The Stones's job was to fill up the available space correctly and this they did. This was not the session for pop suggestions; this was the place to let them be.

Oh, I may have insisted on a sordid amount of echo on the under-belly figure on It's All Over Now, but that was only ear candy to a part that was already there.

We had fabulous engineers. Ron Malo and Malcolm Chism. Thery were the two best engineers. Ron came from Detroit. He had worked on Motown studios and he was a big part. Before Ron, we had these two Weiner brothers, who actually built the studio. It was a basic classic studio design, with the echo chamber in the basement, very small control room.

One of the secrets of the Chess studio was not the studio but our mastering. We had a little mastering room with a lathe. Eventually we had a Neumann lathe. The first one was an American one. We did our own mastering and had these Electrovoice speakers on the wall. The great part about that room that when it sounded right in that mastering room it would pop off the radio. That's what it was all about.

And The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, later Fleetwood Mac, had to make visits there. I'll tell you a story about the Chess artists that sort of sums up the 'blues nerds.' This is going back to the '60s, right. Driving me crazy. I knew the blues fans, the guys from Blues Horizon, Mike and Richard Vernon. I knew them well and loved them. They would come to Chicago and I would show them the original Chess master book, and they'd put their fuckin' hands on it like it was the bible. So this blues nerd was driving me crazy. "I've got to know what kind of microphone Little Walter uses to get that sound." It drove me crazy.

Just so happened, Walter was recording. And I knew Walter from being a very little kid. I said, "Walter. This crazy motherfucker is driving me crazy. He wants to know what kind of mike you use?" "Are you crazy motherfucker? Whatever microphone I didn't pawn that week!"

You get it? These artists were great and would have been great in any studio. It was the artistry, the playing. The studio was great and we captured a sound, and it had a sound, but it was our artists that made that sound.
(Source : not known)