Under his thumb

As former touring manager of the Rolling Stones, raconteur Sam Cutler has some marvellous stories to tell Karl Puschmann

“WHAT WAS happening was you’d be at a place where several thousand people were taking acid, as you were. We all took acid before the band played. Four or five times a week,” Sam Cutler says.

“It was a quasi-religious experience to be at a Grateful Dead gig.”

Before becoming a writer, Cutler worked as the tour manager for legendary and hedonistic bands the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead. In 1969 he took the Rolling Stones around America, a tour which culminated in the infamous and murderous events at the Altamont Free Concert and was captured in the extraordinary documentary film Gimme Shelter. After that he joined the eternally touring Grateful Dead for the first half of the 70s.

Now 75, Cutler retired from the music business at the ripe old age of 30. Operating at the highest echelon with the biggest acts, it begs the question of why he’d give it all up.

“I decided I wanted to do what I wanted to do,” he says simply. “And what I wanted to do was be a writer.”

He’s written ever since but, somewhat predictably, it’s You Can’t Always Get What You Want, his insider account of that violent and fatal day at Altamont that has garnered the most attention.

“There are already 150 books about the Rolling Stones. I didn’t want to do another one of them.

“But what I did find interesting was the contrast between the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead. This massive, super- important English band and this massive American band, which was very different. How they were different, why they were different, that was what intrigued me.

“The Grateful Dead, of course, always kept their feet firmly in the meadow of the counterculture. That’s where they came from. That’s what they were. You wouldn’t describe the Rolling Stones as a counterculture phenomenon.”

He laughs, then says,

“the Rolling Stones basically became very popular because they appealed to people who didn’t like the Beatles. Your mum liked the Beatles. There was a time where you immediately gravitated to the bad boys of the Rolling Stones rather than the good little Beatles. Yeah, they had long hair, but they washed it, you know what I mean?”

A natural raconteur, Cutler is great company, reeling off story after story about his experiences at — as the good little Beatles put it — the toppermost

Sremmlife 2; followed by Swaecation, Swae Lee’s warped solo record, doused in drowsy Auto-Tuned lyrics; and finally Jxmtro, Slim Jxmmi’s solo effort designed to be blasted from a very expensive car stereo.

It’s a lot. It should be too much. Occasionally it is. But SR3MM has so much going for it: the expansive production of Mike Will Made-It; the growth of Swae into Rae Sremmurd’s Andre 3000, with Slim filling the boots of Big Boi; and the thing that made the first Sremmlife albums so good — hooks.

But the best bits are the weirdest bits. Like Close, a mood piece featuring a woozy Travis Scott playing excellently off Swae, or Chanel, which features Pharrell singing a falsetto so high it sounds like he’s been sucking on helium. Buckets is a horror-film score you won’t want to end, while Zoe Kravitz lends several brutal lines to Anti-Social Smokers Club.

SR3MM is the album you’ll go back to for the singles. Jxmtro is the album you’ll go back to for the bangers. And Swaecation is the album that will continue to warp your mind, a corrupted Love Below for the digital age. Not bad for a pair of rappers originally accused of channelling the spirit of 90s twohit wonders Kriss Kross. Chris Schulz COURTNEY BARNETT faced a challenge after her explosion into the mainstream a few years ago. Her winning formula of scattergun ramblings and comical anecdotes, laid like an unmade duvet over a bed of fast-paced alternative rock, seemed unlikely to sustain its captivating energy over another album.

On Tell Me How You Really Feel, her sophomore solo album, Barnett has found a way to retain the intelligence of her songwriting, while finding ways to innovate and of the poppermost.

“I can remember one time where Keith (Richards) offered me some heroin and I just told him, ‘look, that’s the last time you’re ever gonna do that and if you ever try to do that again I’m gonna shove it up your ass’. So, we agreed to differ,” he grins. He describes the art of being a tour manager as keeping a distinction between running a tour and running people’s lives. He had an uncomplicated approach to the job. Mind his business.

“It’s not my business what people put in their body. My business is to make sure people live, get on stage at the time it says on the contract and fulfil their legal, moral, ethical, spiritual obligations,” he says. “I wouldn’t dream of telling Keith or anybody else not to do something. I had my own personal attitude. I despise heroin. I see it as the enemy of any kind of creative activity. I’m addicted to oxygen. That’s what I’ve decided I really like.”

He likens being a tour manager to being an army general in that you’re coordinating many disparate parts. “You have to be the kind of person who is more than prepared to deal with anything that comes down the road. Anything. If you can’t deal with stuff on that basis and be ready to make a decision in three seconds flat, you’re in the wrong job.” explore new areas of her psyche. There’s a noticeable lack of a clean-cut hit in the vein of Elevator Operator or Depreston from her debut Sometimes I Sit and Think, but there’s lots of meaty songs to fall in love with, and I suspect many a listener will see themselves in Barnett’s excavations of her most inner anxieties.

Anxiety is a theme that permeates much of the record in both subtle and obvious ways — most prominently, of course, with the playful Crippling Self Doubt and a General Lack of Self-Confidence, on which Barnett recognises her tendency to put others on a pedestal: “I never feel as stupid as when I’m around you”. Overall, it’s a much blacker record than her debut, starting right off with Hopefulessness, which rolls out of its own murky depths and morphs into a full-noise rock snarl.

When asked what was something unexpected he had to deal with he thinks back.

“Girls used to steal your clothes from hotel rooms all the time because they didn’t know which room was Mick’s or Keith’s,” he says. “In the end, I took to touring with a very small bag. I had a spare pair of underpants, a spare pair of jeans, couple of pairs of socks. That was it. Mick never used to leave any of his clothes in his room at all. Because they’d just steal them.”

Barnett has always done darkness beautifully, but she retains some measured optimism on this record, such as City Looks Pretty, which could reference her writer’s block: “Wakin’ up to another dismal day/You got a ways to go, you oughta be grateful”. Nameless, Faceless, her most political song yet, puts an internet troll in his place: “He said, “I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup/And spit out better words than you/But you didn’t.”

It’s less accessible and more insular than her previous work, but Barnett isn’t running away from her fans. Instead, she’s pushing herself more than ever before. As the extreme close-up of the cover indicates, Barnett is asking us to look her in the eye, and really hold her gaze, on an album containing her most personal music yet.

George Fenwick