“SCARLET”

The Rolling Stones (featuring Jimmy Page)

THIS RECENTLY UNEARTHED gem, recorded in 1974 and featured as a bonus track on the 2020 deluxe reissue of Goats Head Soup, presents a rollicking musical collaboration between the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, who graced the track with tasteful lead guitar licks that mesh beautifully with Keith Richards’ open G-tuned riffing. The result is a funky rock and roll affair that celebrates the swagger and overlapping stylistic signatures of these legendary musicians in their early 70s heyday.

The recorded arrangement features a dense layering of numerous electric guitar parts, in both open G and standard tunings (Page, and probably Ronnie Wood too), plus an acoustic part (compliments of Mick Jagger) that makes a brief appearance during section F. For our transcription, we’ve chosen to go after only the most prominent parts and consolidate others, in order to present an arrangement that can be performed live by a three-guitar band.

Richards (Gtr. 1) kicks things off with a scratchy one-chord vamp, for which he embellishes a barre-chord shape with fingering variations, lively accents and fret-hand-muted strums, crafting a “Bo Diddley rhythm” groove around which the rest of the band joins in. Even though he’s mostly holding onto a single chord grip, the A/E shape, the guitarist performs a sequence of fret-hand micro movements, alternately squeezing the strings for the “regular” chord strums and relaxing his grip on them to achieve the pitchless, percussive “chuck” strums indicated by X’s.

Page’s short and sweet guitar solo (see section E) features his “golden touch” and some of his signature bluesy, B.B. King-approved phrasing moves, string bends and vibratos. All of the bends here, with the exception of the one at the end of bar 33, are best performed with the ring finger, supported one fret below by the middle finger. Page contributes additional tasty lead licks during what are labeled sections H and J, thoughtfully and effectively applying his blues-rock vocabulary to the underlying chord changes without sounding gratuitous. The mark of a great guitar player.