How Howard Stern pulled off a hoax Rolling Stones song: “We stole it”
No one would blame The Rolling Stones if they decided to stop releasing any new music for the rest of their career. The band have earned the right to live off their classics for the rest of their days, and even with years of rock and roll guitar riffs, it’s still nearly impossible to beat what Keith Richards did on songs like ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘Satisfaction’. There does seem to be a bit of a holding pattern, and Howard Stern was one of the few who were brave enough to actually call it out.
Because when you look at the band’s music since around 1976, you start to notice more than a few similarities between every song. Ever since Richards discovered the open-G tuning, many of their best works have been dominated by using the same rudimentary chords over and over again.
If you find something truly original, successful and adored though, why would you want to change it? Richards practically had an entire tuning trademarked now, so there was no reason for them to think that returning to standard tuning would be more exciting. That didn’t stop Stern from poking fun at it.
While anything Stones-related would have been on Stern’s radar, he decided to get a little bit cheeky when he was told he would be getting a copy of their single, ‘Harlem Shuffle’ before it reached the masses. Since the group had been stuck in a specific style for so long and the song was already a cover tune, why not do a little bit of guesswork?
Instead of waiting until he was given the song, Stern thought it would be much better for ratings to give it to his friend Fred Norris to record, saying, “The Stones were coming out with a brand new song. And we said, ‘The Rolling Stones have a brand new single. We stole it from the record company, and we’re going to play it for you’. Fred went into a studio with the song and pretended to be Mick Jagger”.
For a band as iconic as The Stones, it isn’t hard for many people to make a few estimates on what a new track would sound like. Outside of getting the chords right, nailing down Mick Jagger’s distinct rasp has been done to the point of parody, but Norris ends up sounding uncannily close to the man himself, so much so that the record company gave them cease-and-desist orders because they were convinced it was the real thing.
As for those who have been listening to The Stones since birth, more than a few elements are missing that are a bit easy to spot. No matter how much Norris put into the track, nothing would match Richards’s approach to the guitar. Not the most technically proficient player, Richards always uses the roll of his performance to give the band their distinctive sound.
Then again, it wouldn’t matter whether Stern played it early or not. In the grand scheme of Stones albums, Dirty Work isn’t regarded as one of their best. The glossy production makes them sound closer to would-be granddads trying to put together a funky groove and left the group’s LP in the lower echelons of their work.
It might have been a joke, but you have to hand it to ‘The King of All Media’ for pulling off one of the better hoaxes in recent rock history. And as for Norris, given his accuracy with his impression, does the cease-and-desist order count as a complement or an insult?
