Trouble In Mind

During their November-December 1979 tour with Rocket 88, Charlie Watts and Ian Stewart also managed to record with old pals Brian Knight and Geoff Bradford, who both were part of the 'embryonic' Rolling Stones scene in 1962, but didn't make it to the final stage. Keith Richards, describing his first meeting with Stu at Soho's Bricklayer's Arms pub, recalls:

"And I started with him and he says, "You're not gonna play that rock-and-roll shit, are ya?" Stu had massive reservations and he was suspicious of rock and roll. I'm "Yeah", and then I start to play some Chuck Berry. And he's "Oh, you know Johnnie Johnson?" who was Chuck's piano player, and we started to sling the hash, boogie-woogie. That's all we did. And then the other guys slowly started to turn up. It wasn't just Mick and Brian.

Geoff Bradford, a lovely slide blues guitar player who used to play with Cyril Davies. And Brian Knight, a blues fan and his big number was 'Walk On, Walk On'. He had that down and that was it. So Stu could have played with all these other cats, and actually we were third in line for this setup. Mick and I were brought in as maybes, tryouts. These cats were playing clubs with Alexis Korner; they knew shit. We were brand-new in town in those terms.

And I realized that Stu had to make up his mind whether he was going to go for these real traditional folk blues players. Because by then I'd played some hot boogie-woogie and some Chuck Berry. And by the end of the evening I knew there was a band in the making. Nothing was said, but I knew that I'd got Stu's attention. Geoff Bradford and Brian Knight were a very successful blues band after these early Stones sessions, Blues By Six. But they were basically traditional players who had no intention of playing anything else except what they knew: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy".

On Brian Knight's "A Dark Horse", the resulting album from the late 1979-early 1980 sessions at Matrix Studios, London (released in 1981), Charlie Watts, who played with Blues By Six before joining the Stones, and Stu performed on a handful of songs, including the blues standard 'Trouble In Mind', written by jazz pianist Richard M. Jones. Ex-John Mayall and Fleetwood Mac guitarist Peter Green is on guitar. They still got the blues!

Adapted from the following source: Keith Richards, Life, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010. Warning: just like the "Rocket 88" post, this one contains many links, and once again it could have been many more. It seems things are getting out of hand!