EMI Studio (SODD-103)
(56:24): Let’s Spend The Night Together, Honest I Do, The Spider And The Fly, No Expectations, Wild Horses, Memory Hotel, Love In Vain, Beast Of Burden, Slipping Away, Let It Bleed, Little Baby, Not Fade Away, I’m Free, Sweet Virginia
With Stripped, released on November 13th 1995, The Rolling Stones wanted to present a bizarre hybrid between a live souvenir from the Voodoo Lounge tour and an “unplugged” style release so popular in the early nineties. The idea was to record cover tunes and some of their more obscure songs in the studio and include them along with tracks recorded live.
The album reached #9 on the charts and reached platinum status and the two singles, their cover of Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Wild Horses” were also minor hits. Stripped is out of print but is receiving the remaster treatment along with the rest of The Rolling Stones’ catalogue.
The first studio sessions were recorded on their visit to Japan in March. Before their first show in Tokyo the band spend three days in EMI Studios in Tokyo and the final product contained “The Spider and the Fly,” “Wild Horses,” “Slipping Away,” “Love in Vain” and “Little Baby” from that session. This tape contains an additional six songs from those sessions.
The sound quality is excellent studio and these eleven tracks were obviously edited from the three day session. The presence of canned audience applause between some tracks suggests this might have been one of the directions they may have wanted to take this project.
It is thought they recorded several others songs including “Angie,” “Heartbeat,” “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone,” “The Last Time,” “Make No Mistake,” “Parachute Woman,” and “The Worst.” None of these have yet surfaced from these sessions however.
The final three tracks are the others recorded in the studio. They originate from sessions recorded between July 23rd to 26th in Estudios Valentim De Carvalho in Lisbon, Portugal. They also recorded versions of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Down In The Bottom” and Muddy Waters’ “Still A Fool” among others, but nothing other than the three songs on Stripped have surfaced.
The cover artwork is the cover of Stripped duplicated many times in a checkerboard layout. Overall, with the official re-release of Stripped due, EMI Studio serves as an interesting companion piece to the original since it both contains additional tracks that were not included on the original and also for being an early conception of the album.
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“Honest I Do”, “Let’s Spend The Night Together”, “No Expectations”, “Beast Of Burden”, “Memory Motel” and “Let It Bleed” from the above Toshiba-Studio sessions, Tokyo, March 3-5, 1995 were released as part of a rare 19 track disc titled “Stripped Companion” in 1998 [RSTS 001] in excellent sound fidelity and referred to, back then, as the perfect Stripped Companion…
“More Stripped” was also released by the KTS label [KTS 585] containing 20 tracks including some of the rehearsals at The Toshiba Studios and from Portugal as well as live performances from The Brixton Academy in London, The Paradiso Club in Amsterdam and The Olympia Theatre in Paris. This single 77 minute disc also includes other rare tracks, alternate versions, instrumentals and unreleased tracks from various venues featuring tremendous reproduction.