Can't You Hear Me Knocking
| "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Song by The Rolling Stones from the album Sticky Fingers | ||||
| Released | 23 April 1971 | |||
| Recorded | March–May 1970, Olympic Studios, London | |||
| Genre | Blues rock, hard rock, jazz-rock | |||
| Length | 7:15 | |||
| Label | Rolling Stones/Atlantic | |||
| Writer(s) | Jagger/Richards | |||
| Language | English | |||
| Producer(s) | Jimmy Miller | |||
| Sticky Fingers track listing | ||||
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| 10 tracks |
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"Can't You Hear Me Knocking" is a song by English rock band The Rolling Stones from their 1971 album Sticky Fingers. The song is over seven minutes long, and begins with a Keith Richards open-G tuned guitar intro. At two minutes and forty-three seconds, an instrumental break begins, with Rocky Dijon on congas; tenor saxophonist Bobby Keys performs an extended saxophone solo over the guitar work of Richards and Mick Taylor, punctuated by the organ work of Billy Preston. At 4:40 Taylor takes over from Keys and carries the song to its finish with a lengthy guitar solo.
Richards on writing the guitar riff,
"Can't You Hear Me Knocking came out flying - I just found the tuning and the riff and started to swing it and Charlie picked up on it just like that, and we're thinking, hey, this is some groove. So it was smiles all around. For a guitar player it's no big deal to play, the chopping, staccato bursts of chords, very direct and spare."
On the recording, Richards said in 2002,
"(The jam at the end wasn't inspired by Carlos Santana.) We didn't even know they were still taping. We thought we'd finished. We were just rambling and they kept the tape rolling. I figured we'd just fade it off. It was only when we heard the playback that we realised, Oh, they kept it going. Basically we realised we had two bits of music. There's the song and there's the jam."
Taylor recalled in a 1979 interview,
"Can't You Hear Me Knocking... is one of my favourites... (The jam at the end) just happened by accident; that was never planned. Towards the end of the song I just felt like carrying on playing. Everybody was putting their instruments down, but the tape was still rolling and it sounded good, so everybody quickly picked up their instruments again and carried on playing. It just happened, and it was a one-take thing. A lot of people seem to really like that part."
Taylor continued,
"I used a brown Gibson ES-345 for Dead Flowers and the solo on Can't You Hear Me Knocking."
An early alternate take of the song (with dummy/placeholder lyrics) was released in June 2015 on the Deluxe and Super Deluxe editions of the reissued Sticky Fingers album.
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Wikipedia