‘A Night in Tunisia’: the forgotten song that underpins The Rolling Stones’ 1968 masterpiece
The reputation that The Rolling Stones fostered during their 1960s heyday was one of brash, bare-bones rock and roll rebellion, with more of a focus on attitude and adrenaline than the comparatively experimental stylings of a band like The Beatles. In reality, though, the Stones were just as expansive in their output as anybody else.
While the band’s early days were dominated by blues-rock cover versions, it didn’t take very long for the Jagger-Richards songwriting partnership to spur on some vastly underrated musical innovations. Although the band themselves have since been rather unkind about the album, Their Satanic Majesties Request is a prime example of that underappreciated experimentation, seeing the band go off in an entirely new direction, with Brian Jones particularly adept at embracing those newfound influences.
It wasn’t until the peak of The Stones’ countercultural years that their true artistic genius started to gain some mainstream notoriety, with ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ marking the inarguable high-point of their output during that era.
An expansive six-minute epic, the Beggars Banquet opener encapsulated the entirety of The Rolling Stones’ musical journey up to that point, drawing upon a wealth of different influences and featuring some of Jagger-Richards’ all-time greatest songwriting.
As with many Jagger-Richards compositions, though, the song wasn’t plucked entirely from thin air. In fact, it was an amalgamation of different avenues of inspiration, spanning the spectrum from Mikhail Bulgakov to Bob Dylan. One key piece of inspiration, which is often overlooked, though, lies in Charlie Watts’ unmistakable backbeat.
Quite the departure from Watt’s typical style, the drummer apparently drew his inspiration from the realm of jazz. “‘Sympathy’ was one of those sort of songs where we tried everything,” the late drummer recalled in According to The Rolling Stones. “The first time I ever heard the song was when Mick was playing it, and it was fantastic.”
He continued, “We had a go at loads of different ways of playing it; in the end, I just played a jazz Latin feel in the style that Kenny Clarke would have played on ‘A Night in Tunisia’.” That Latin jazz atmosphere might not have been immediately obvious upon listening to the song, but once you know where Watts’ inspiration arose from, it is impossible to unhear.
It is, nevertheless, rather unsurprising that Watts was a disciple of Kenny Clarke, given the percussionist’s absolute domination of bebop drumming, particularly after his move to Paris in 1956. It was in the French capital, after all, that Clarke recorded his seminal performance of Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘A Night in Tunisia’ for the 1963 LP Our Man in Paris, led by Dexter Gordon.
A testament both to the often underrated stylings of Charlie Watts and the expansive sound of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, that backbeat ended up having a life of its own, emulated by countless rock percussionists in the hopes of recapturing the magic of that 1968 track. It is not known, however, whether Kenny Clarke was ever made aware of just what a colossal impact his 1963 performance of ‘A Night in Tunisia’ had on the future of rock and roll.
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