‘Brown sugar’ was recorded at Muscle Shoals in December of 1969.
Keith’s Fender Twin with JBL speakers was completely dimed (my ears hurt even thinking about it) and so loud it needed to be moved into the next room.
Apparently it was an export model with switchable voltage so it may have come with the band. Concert footage around that time have several of these amps (and the ampegs) in the back line:
This RCA 77DX ribbon microphone had the uncomfortable task of being in the room with this Fender twin ‘wide open’...
During the initial recordings, the amp was smashing the meters on the universal audio console so far into the red that the amps settings were going to have to changed. But then, Johnson remembered a newly acquired 20db pad which he patched into the signal chain. It worked.
But a question remains... what guitar did Keith use for this iconic track?
Most naturally assume that he was playing a telecaster —I always did.
But in fact, telecasters only started being used by the Stones around the time of Exile, in 71’.
It turns out that that Keith was almost certainly using a Gibson SG!
What guitar was Keith playing? It was a Gibson, but not a Les Paul. Do you know that model that was right under the Les Paul, the solid body double cutaway-what is that? Oh yeah, the SG. I think it was an SG, and as I recall it was black. I remember it had those sharp horns on the cutaways. That’s what he played most of the time he was here. And Mick Taylor? Taylor, to my recollection, was playing a Strat. And guess what we came up with for Bill Wyman? Do you remember those Plexiglas body basses that were around then? I checked with David Hood later and he says it was a Dan Armstrong. So to the best of our recollection, that’s what it was. He played through David’s Fender Bassman setup, the tube head and separate box. -Jimmy Johnson, Founder of Muscle Shoals Studio
Unbelievable! A childhood imagining Keith playing ‘Brown Sugar’ on a telecaster overturned in an instant!
I spent quite a bit of time comparing the original ‘Brown Sugar’ to live takes yesterday.
When you think about it, a tele through a twin would have more spank and top-end bite than the original recording, so an SG sounds possible. The guitar may have even been Mick Taylor’s mid-60s SG:
Though Jimmy Johnson remembered the guitar Keith played as being black. So it could have been another one —perhaps an SG with P90s as the opening riff does sound like single coils.
Another guitar that was definitely at the Muscle Shoals sessions was Keith’s peculiar Dan Armstrong transparent guitar, so who knows....maybe he slipped this on for the take that made it to the album...
We may never be completely sure which guitar Keith used, but we’ll always know exactly what it sounded like...and it sounded good:
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