Because of the fashion, the young people don’t have any access to the history of music, unless people like me revive it. There are very few people to revive it, because you can’t earn any money doing it.
I can’t really sing and play live, because I can’t play bass efficiently and sing at the same time. If I concentrated on the vocals, I’d mess up the bass, and if I concentrated on the bass, I’d forget the lines.
If you are any competent musician, if you have creative ideas, ideas of songs, of arrangements, in a band like the Stones, where these 2 people do all the things, there is no freedom.
Companies spend twenty, thirty, forty percent of revenues on advertising to brand their product and to get, essentially, acquire customers cheaply. You get a lot of exposure on something like this.
Onstage I like to play with a an 18-inch speaker, which very few bass players do. I need that fat, underneath sound, which I’ve always had. It suits me admirably to do it like that, and I can imitate that sound by plugging directly into the board in the studio.
You’re always frustrated, you don’t have the chance to do a song on the album, like the Beatles did with Ringo and George, or like Led Zeppelin, where everybody was given a chance to contribute. There never is a chance with the Stones.
