Blues with a feeling
Paul Size, ex-Red Devil guitarist and one-time Jagger sideman, leaves L.A. and returns home
By Robert Wilonsky
Article Published Feb 1, 1996
Music Details
Paul Size doesn't recall much about the day (or even the exact year) he went into the studio with Mick Jagger--or, for that matter, if it was a day at all. It might have been two days spent recording with the flabby icon, might have been even more and could have been much less. Size, then a member of the post-trad blues band Red Devils, was just there as a favor, pocketing a few hundred bucks for his lead guitar work and then going home.
What Size doesn't recall has become the stuff of legend: Jagger, looking to regain credibility away from the Stones while paying homage to such blues heroes as Little Walter and Muddy Waters, hired producer and American Recordings owner Rick Rubin and retreated to a Los Angeles studio to record a solo record. But after a couple of days recording such obscurities and standards as "Still a Fool," "Blues with a Feeling," and "Checkin' Out My Baby" with the Red Devils, the sessions were scrapped. Jagger instead released the moribund Wandering Spirit in 1993, which was the very antithesis of the Red Devil sessions that have become the astonishing bootleg The Nature of My Game, on which Jagger finally sounds like the weary and wise bluesman he always imagined himself to be.
What Size does recall of those long-lost sessions is this, and it isn't much.
"What happened from what I could figure out was Rick Rubin already had us on his label [American Recordings] and thought he'll get us in there and have Mick sing and have us back him up," Size says now. "We had the stand-up bass and the old traditional blues sound, at least as far as it goes for L.A. To get it to sound better they should have gotten James Harmon's band, but Rick used us to save money, anyway. I only got $900, anyway. We got $800 and a $100 bonus. Now, I'm like, 'I was stupid.'
"I was so relaxed. The other guys were freaking, but, see, I knew who Mick was, but I didn't know he was like Elvis. I had heard of the Rolling Stones, but the only song I had heard Jagger sing was 'Dancing in the Street' with David Bowie. I know a billion songs, but I don't know who the artists are. If I'd have known, I might have been so shaky and not been able to pull it off. He was just this short little dude who laughed a lot."
But Size's days--or day--of being Mick Jagger's lead guitarist are past him for the moment; he has not even heard the fruits of that session and awaits his own copy of the bootleg. Since then, Size has abandoned L.A. and returned to his folks' home in Denton. He is no longer a Red Devil signed to a major label and playing to packed houses at the King King, where the likes of Jagger and Bruce Willis would show up and sit in with the band.
Size, who began playing when he was 15 and who's still just a kid at 24, is back playing the local blues circuit with a new band, Easy Jones, and rediscovering his passion for the blues that two years in L.A. squeezed out of him.
"I got tired of living out there," Size explains. "I didn't get along with those guys. Well, not so much didn't get along, but you know how you don't want to be around certain people? I dug the music to a certain extent, but I got bored with it, and I missed home. To me, the music was fun--it was all, 'get drunk, play loud, let's go'--but I wanted to moved on. I wanted to do something that wasn't as loud.
"I wasn't disappointed about the end of the Red Devils at the time," Size shrugs. "I am now. I wish it could have worked out because we were on our way. We got to play with Mick Jagger and open for the Allman Brothers, a big ol' tour with Los Lobos, a festival in Holland. It blew my mind to play in front of 75,000 people with the Black Crowes, Lenny Kravitz, Living Colour, Thelonious Monster. I regret it a little, but I'm so happy with the Easy Jones thing. Shoot, I'm happier now and playing a lot better music and with guys I can actually hang out with."