Start Me Up
| "Start Me Up" | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Single by The Rolling Stones | ||||||||||||||||||
| from the album Tattoo You | ||||||||||||||||||
| B-side | "No Use in Crying" | |||||||||||||||||
| Released | 14 August 1981 | |||||||||||||||||
| Format | 7" | |||||||||||||||||
| Recorded | January–March 1978 (Basic Track), April–June 1981 (Vocals and overdubs) | |||||||||||||||||
| Genre | Hard rock | |||||||||||||||||
| Length | 3:34 | |||||||||||||||||
| Label | Rolling Stones | |||||||||||||||||
| Writer(s) | Jagger/Richards | |||||||||||||||||
| Producer(s) | The Glimmer Twins | |||||||||||||||||
| The Rolling Stones singles chronology | ||||||||||||||||||
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| 11 tracks |
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"Start Me Up" is a song by The Rolling Stones featured on the 1981 album Tattoo You. Released as the album's lead single, it reached #1 on Australian Kent Music Report, #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #7 on the UK Singles Chart.
The basic track "Start Me Up" was recorded between the January and March 1978 sessions for the Rolling Stones' album Some Girls The song was at first cut as a reggae-rock track named 'Never Stop', but after dozens of takes the band stopped recording it and it was shelved. "Start Me Up" failed to make the cut for the album, being shelved into the vault. Of the song's history, Richards has commented:
"It was one of those things we cut a lot of times; one of those cuts that you can play forever and ever in the studio. Twenty minutes go by and you're still locked into those two chords... Sometimes you become conscious of the fact that, 'Oh, it's "Brown Sugar" again,' so you begin to explore other rhythmic possibilities. It's basically trial and error. As I said, that one was pretty locked into a reggae rhythm for quite a few weeks. We were cutting it for Emotional Rescue, but it was nowhere near coming through, and we put it aside and almost forgot about it."
In 1981, with the band looking to tour, engineer Chris Kimsey proposed to lead singer Mick Jagger that archived songs could comprise the set. While searching through the vaults, Kimsey found the two takes of the song with a more rock vibe among some fifty reggae versions. Overdubs were completed on the track in early 1981 in New York at the recording studios Electric Ladyland and the Hit Factory. On the band's recording style for this track in particular, Kimsey commented in 2004:
"Including run-throughs, 'Start Me Up' took about six hours to record. You see, if they all played the right chords in the right time, went to the chorus at the right time and got to the middle eight together, that was a master. It was like, 'Oh, wow!' Don't forget, they would never sit down and work out a song. They would jam it and the song would evolve out of that. That's their magic..."
The infectious "thump" to the song was achieved using mixer Bob Clearmountain's famed "bathroom reverb", a process involving the recording of some of the song's vocal and drum tracks with a miked speaker in the bathroom of the Power Station recording studio in New York City. It was there where final touches were added to the song, including Jagger's switch of the main lyrics from "start it up" to "start me up."
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Wikipedia