Pay Pack and Follow (Rolling Stones Records) was John Phillip’s solo effort produced by the ‘Glimmer Twins’—Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.  Recorded between ’73 and ‘79, Pay Pack and Follow was finally released in April 2001 thanks primarily to the efforts of engineer, Harvey Jay Goldberg.

 

As assistant engineer, I set up the mics as well as prepared the tapes, console and patch bays. It was not customary for me to park cars, and yet, I regularly parked Richards’ lime green Jaguar XJ6 even though no one ever asked if I even had a driver’s license. “All you have to do is drive the car around the block and into the underground parking lot,” I was told. Luckily, I did have a license and I knew how to drive a stick shift. Many a time I weighed keeping my job against driving away with the Jag.

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The recording sessions for this LP began at midnight and usually ended at eight in the morning and were often followed by a 40-piece orchestra for the PBS program, Sesame Street. There were a few nights when no one showed and in the wee hours Harvey and I found ourselves drinking scads of coffee and hanging onto the hope that Richards and/or Phillips still might show. All studio costs had to be paid whether or not the artist appeared. 

 

During the sessions, I found it necessary to keep track of both Richards and Phillips guitars as they seemed to misplace them more often than not. When Richards and Phillips were gone, I’d find their guitars without their cases left randomly in the hallways sometimes under coats. Once underway, the sessions were generally very exciting with Jagger singing background vocals and Richards overdubbing guitar parts while sitting elbow-to-elbow between me and Goldberg. Sometimes, though, too much partying got in the way, Richards would nod out, and every minute would drag. At that point, we’d just wait and watch while his lit cigarette bore into the flesh of his bare arm, waking him up just in time for the session to begin again.

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It seemed that a big part of the creative process between Phillips and Richards was getting high.  Blood on the walls in the men’s room of Studio A indicated a shooting gallery. There was an occasion when, after a night of recording, that I found Phillips passed out on the studio floor with pills strewn all around him. At six foot something, he was way too big for me to move so my method of rousing him was merely to kick him lightly in the head (through the fur hat he always wore) and warn, “You’ve got to get out of here because Sesame Street is on its way!”  He’d roll over, cough, frantically collect his array of colorful pills, and then dash out the door.

 

Because there was no ‘stand-alone’ producer in charge of the session, Goldberg’s opinions and artistic direction were often solicited by Phillips, Richards and Jagger. He was, in fact, credited with ‘additional production’ on the record. “What sticks in my mind is the vast musicality from those two naturally talented musicians and song writers—Keith on instruments, and John on melody and lyrics,” recalled Goldberg in a recent conversation.

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In ultimate ‘troubadour’ style, Pay, Pack and Follow was created, by and large, in the actual recording studio. After basic tracks were laid down to songs already penned primarily by Phillips (about his life, his drug dealers, his precocious daughter, MacKenzie), he and Richards would jam on various guitars until they found something to add to the song. There wasn’t much talking going on—just jamming and more jamming. It was a costly procedure indeed. 

 

“I remember Phillips spending a lot of time with the backup singers about the harmonies, I really don't remember much back and forth between him and Richards [as far as production is concerned],” recalled Liz Saron Milner, the other female engineer on the date. “Keith would sit down and do his thing while Harvey and I just shook our heads over how he did it—so well when they were both so wasted. As for Mick Jagger, he seemed to spend all his time flirting with the same backup girls when he wasn't making snide comments about women not belonging in studios and not being able to get a good quilt made anymore.”

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Phillips was an army brat and, according to Saron, he once told her that the term Pay, Pack and Follow referred to the military tradition of a soldier’s family forever moving onward to a new deployment. The other likelihood for the album’s name comes from a story that Goldberg recalls and a letter that Phillips wrote about the seven master tapes post recording.  After the bill was paid, the tapes were packed, and then inadvertently left by Phillips in the hull of the QE II. For years, they traveled around the world until recovered by a crewman. Then they mysteriously disappeared again only to somehow resurface in Richards’ burn pile in England. From there they curiously ended up in a Brooklyn storage unit where they were finally retrieved and put back into the hands of Goldberg. Thus the name Pay, Pack and Follow. Whatever the origin of the name, the LP was finally released in April 2001, unfortunately one month after Phillips’ death.

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JANTURAN chose to cover ‘Mr. Blue’ for its edgy lyrics and story about Phillip’s drug dealer/pimp so indicative of NYC in the late ‘70s, and ‘Wilderness of Love’ for its beautiful melody and lush harmonic opportunities.