Rolling Stones – "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" (1971)

Can't you hear me knocking?

Throw me down the keys!

Martin Scorsese l-o-v-e-s him some Rolling Stones.

No director uses more classic pop and rock songs in his movies than Scorsese.  (And no director uses the eff word more than Marty – The Wolf of Wall Street uses “f*ck” 506 times, which is the all-time record.)

Scorsese featured a lot of Stones songs in his movies.  He used all seven minutes and 15 seconds of “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” to accompany a long sequence in his 1995 movie, Casino.  Here’s part of that sequence:

“Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” was originally supposed to be a three-minute song.  The long instrumental jam that began when Mick Jagger stopped singing was more or less accidental.

According to Stones guitarist Mick Taylor,

[The jam at the end] just happened by accident; that was never planned.  Towards the end of the song I just felt like carrying on playing.  Everybody was putting their instruments down, but the tape was still rolling and it sounded good, so everybody quickly picked up their instruments again and carried on playing.  It just happened, and it was a one-take thing. 

Mick Taylor and Keith Richards

Mick Taylor replaced original Stones member Brian Jones in 1969, and played on three of the group’s very best albums – Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street – before quitting the band unexpectedly in December 1974.  His long solo on “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” may have been his finest moment as a Stone.

But as good as Taylor’s solo was, the guitar work of Keith Richards during the first third of the song is even better.  

If you want to learn to play Keith’s famous opening riff, there’s no shortage of instructional videos that will teach you how to do just that:

Here’s “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”:

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