THE ROLLING STONES
|
Recording years |
Main genre |
Music sample |
|
1963–2016 |
Classic rhythm’n’blues |
Midnight Rambler (1970) |
Page
contents:
|
|
THE ROLLING STONES[*] |
|
||||||
|
Album
released: Apr. 16, 1964 |
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
More info:
|
||
|
2 |
3 |
3 |
4 |
3 |
||||
|
Tracks: 1) Not Fade Away; 2) (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66; 3) I Just Want To Make
Love To You; 4) Honest I Do; 5) Now I’ve Got A Witness; 6) Little By Little;
7) I’m A King Bee; 8) Carol; 9) Tell Me (You’re Coming Back To Me); 10) Can I
Get A Witness; 11) You Can Make It If You Try; 12) Walking The Dog. |
||||||||
|
"What’s
the point of listening to us doing ʽI’m A King Beeʼ when you can
hear Slim Harpo doing it?", Mick Jagger once famously remarked — long
after the Rolling Stones had mastered the art of writing their own material,
of course; had he humbly and honestly made this rhetorical statement, say, in
early 1964, it could have gone a long way in ruining the band’s promotional
campaign so meticulously constructed by Andrew Loog Oldham. But now that we
are neck-deep in the 21st century, when both Slim Harpo’s original from 1957
and the Stones’ cover of it from 1964 have all but merged in the same time
dimension... as much admiration as I have for James Isaac Moore of Lobdell,
Louisiana, I think that today «the point» is quite self-evident. |
||||||||
|
Much
too much silliness, a lot of it motivated by theoretical ideology rather than
genuine heartfelt reactions, has permeated discourse on the «soulless whiteboy
blues imitation» of the British Invasion. Occasionally, there is a grain of
truth to it, depending on the level of talent, immersion, and technique of
the artist in question: as with every fad and trend, there were plenty of
second- and third-rate imitators in the early Sixties, just as there are hacks
and phoneys in any sphere at any given time period. But when we talk about
bands like the Rolling Stones, any such dismissive theoretization becomes
utterly misguided. It only takes a bare minimum of comparison to understand
that, while the early Stones did indeed mostly cover their overseas idols
rather than write their own songs, already from the very beginning they
exercised a personal and creative approach to these covers — in a way, even more
creative than the Beatles, which might actually have been one of the reasons
why it took them so much longer to overcome their shyness and begin writing
original songs on a regular basis. In other words, it is possible that they
did not feel such a pressing need to write their own songs simply because
they were quite happy about how successfully they managed to reinvent and
«expropriate» songs by other people. As
an example, take the aforementioned slow electric blues of ʽI’m A King Beeʼ, play it back to back with Harpo’s original and then make an honest
decision about which of the two you would like to leave in your collection if,
for some reason, you could not have both. The first thing you would probably notice
is the production: naturally, the 1964 standards of Regent Studios in London
make all the instruments sound sharper and clearer than the 1957 standards in
Nashville (by the way, I innocently used to think it was a Chicago song, like
most of Fifties’ electric blues, but turns out that Slim never even made it as
far as Chicago). However, admittedly this is but an inevitable technical
advantage. Much more importantly, the Stones were not content on simply
playing the song note-for-note, but were determined to capitalize on its
potential — potential that was immanently present there from the very beginning,
yet never properly explored by the author. Thus,
for instance, not only does Bill Wyman nail the «buzzing» bass zoop of the
song so that it sounds subtler more menacing than the original, but during
the instrumental break, after Mick’s cocky and inciting "well, buzz
awhile!..", he actually obeys and delivers a fun little buzzing solo
(the original tune just went along with the zoops — same thing as the verse
without the vocals). And then, the «Sting it babe!...» bit — where Harpo
delivered a few limpy «stinging» notes, Brian Jones went on to make his
guitar sound like an angry hive going wild on your ass, in one of the most
imaginative mini-solos he had ever devised. This is not even mentioning the
little extra guitar sting Brian makes every few bars in direct response to
Bill’s bass zoops, maintaining that dangerous hive-like atmosphere for the
entire duration of the song — where very, very little about Harpo’s original
actually made you feel surrounded and overwhelmed by miriads of dangerous
insects. All
right, shall you say, but what about the vocals? Surely an authentic bluesman
from the Louisiana region will sound more authoritative and convincing than a
snotty 21-year old Dartford kid who had never even seen the Delta, let alone directly
experienced the experience? But yet again, this logic is only valid if we
work from the assumption that Mick Jagger wanted to sound exactly like Slim
Harpo, and that the idea was to give a credible impression of African-American
sexual power as conveyed through blues music. If, however, we work from the
assumption that African-American blues music was simply chosen as a starting
medium for venting the suppressed sexuality of young British kids... well, in
that case I will just have to state that Mick Jagger is far more successful
here at accomplishing his own personal goal than Mr. Harpo was at
accomplishing his — simply because nobody
in the Great Britain of 1964 sounded quite like Mick Jagger. Not a single
frickin’ soul, and that’s the God’s truth. I
mean, I keep running these rowdy young boys of that time period through my
mind, one by one — Eric Burdon, Roger Daltrey, Paul Jones, Keith Relf, Phil
May, never mind any of the Beatles at all in this category — and there is literally
nobody who could even begin to approach Jagger in terms of that certain
«aggressive mystique» in his singing (and not just singing — his harp playing
was fully attuned to the same mystique as well). Mick wasn’t much of a burly
belter — more of a midnight rambler, sounding razor-sharp and sneeringly
cocky at the same time, like pop music’s equivalent of some deadly, yet impossibly
charismatic villain from some contemporary TV show or comic series. And while
half a century later it is all very well for us to smile at the «dangerous»
image that was so carefully constructed by him (and for him) in 1964, the fact is that this here ʽKing Beeʼ did sound as dangerous as possible in
the context of early Sixties’ popular entertainment. Never mind the calculated
promotion, the darkened photos, the staged «offensive behaviour»: above
everything else, the Rolling Stones were felt as «dangerous» in 1964 because
their music sounded dangerous, far
more so than the Beatles. And
speaking of the Beatles, here comes another comparison. Unlike its doctored
American counterpart, the self-titled UK version of this album opened with
the (also heavily reinvented) cover of Chuck Berry’s cover of Bobby Troup’s ʽ(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66ʼ — a basic three-chord rocker which sounds not
entirely unlike the Beatles’ ʽI Saw Her
Standing Thereʼ if you reduce both
to bare-bone structures. Both songs serve as kick-ass energetic openers to
capture your attention and devotion from the get-go. But the Beatles use the
energy of rock’n’roll to stimulate over-the-top joy and exuberance of a
burgeoning teenager — the Stones, on the other hand, use it as a fashionable,
yet barely understood voodoo mechanism. The song, which used to be a fairly
innocent ode to the wonders of U.S. highway travel in the days of Nat King
Cole, and was still quite happy sounding even in its Chuck Berry incarnation,
is here transformed into a mystical ritual: Jagger lists all these unknown,
enigmatic words like "Amarillo", "Gallup, New Mexico",
and "Flagstaff, Arizona" as if they were part of some black magic
incantation (surely they couldn’t sound any different from the proverbial
abracadabra for him at the time?), and even though their drug-drenched days
were still years away from the boys at the time, the line "would you get
hip to this kindly tip, and take that California trip" sounds positively
stoned in this context. It
does not hurt, either, that in early ’64 the Stones emerged on the scene as
easily the tightest of all nascent
British bands, period. Again, listen to the way they play ʽRoute 66ʼ and ʽCarolʼ in the context
of the time — nobody in 1964 played with quite the same combination
of speed, tightness, and mean, lean, focused energy. One of the biggest
mysteries that I have never managed to figure out is how exactly they got
their rhythm section to sound that way: with Charlie Watts’ predominantly
jazz-based interests and with Bill Wyman being older than most of the rest by
a good nine years (and having previously played with comparatively «tepid»
outfits such as the London-based Cliftons), it would seem at first like a
fairly suspicious match with their wild pair of guitarists — but from the
very first seconds of ʽRoute 66ʼ, it is clear that everybody gels in perfectly, and
that Bill and Charlie are only too happy to provide Keith and Brian with the
tightest, fastest, grittiest «bottom» that was at all possible in 1964. Additionally,
Mick proves himself to be a master of the harmonica, avoiding technical stunts
or wild power-puffs (for which he lacked extensive training anyway) and
making it, instead, into a melodic extension of his own voice (ʽI’m A King Beeʼ and Jimmy Reed’s ʽHonest I Doʼ are the best examples). Much
like the Beatles, the Stones from the very start showed clear disdain for the
idea of LP-only filler — almost every single track here smells of creativity
and excitement. So, for ʽI Just Want To
Make Love To Youʼ it was clear
that they could hardly replicate the Olympian swagger of physical love god
Muddy Waters — instead, they sped the thing up to an insane tempo that even
put Bo Diddley to shame and subjected their soon-to-be teenage girl fans to
the lose-your-head breakneck fury of a young and strong team of British rock
studs. For ʽHonest I Doʼ, Jagger knew it was useless to replicate the famous
«toothless» voice of Jimmy Reed, so he went for a more
Europeanized, Don Juan-style delivery: you know he absolutely does not mean
it when he sings "I’ll never place no one above you", certainly not
after following it up with the wolf-whistle harmonica solo, but is that
reason enough to shy away from a lying-and-cheating one-night stand? For the
album-closing Rufus Thomas’ ʽWalking The Dogʼ, the band pulls out all the stops, with the
sneeriest, nastiest vocal performance possible and Keith blasting away on
that solo as if his life, freedom, and an upcoming 20-year heroin supply all
depended on it. Sure
enough, I like and/or respect all the original performances of these songs;
but they were never as openly defiant as what the Stones manage to turn them
into — and if you do not feel that quantum difference in your bones, you will
most likely be unable to grasp the essence of this band, not even after
formally swearing your allegiance to the likes of Sticky Fingers or Exile On
Main St. because these records are «supposed» to be so great and all. And
while this kind of arrogant youthful defiance would be recreated over several
subsequent generations of artists, the Stones in 1964 had the advantage of
playing it cool: unlike, say,
Aerosmith a decade later, they did not possess the means to generate
excessive dramatization (frenzied guitar pyrotechnics, wild screechy
vocalist, crude sex-dripping lyrics, etc.) and still had to exude that aura
of nastiness from a somewhat «gentlemanly» platform, dabbling in musical
eroticism rather than having permission to dive headfirst into the ocean of
musical pornography. (Not that I have anything against well-done musical
pornography, mind you, but well-done musical eroticism usually requires more
talent). Where
the band does slightly fail is with material which they do not manage to fully drag over to the
dark side — the most notable of these failures probably being Marvin Gaye’s ʽCan I Get A Witnessʼ: an okay cover, I guess, but Jagger is trying too hard to simply get
us up on our feet and dance, without finding himself some extra function which
was not already there in Marvin’s original; and as an «R&B singer without
a back thought», it is clear that the man does not hold his own against
seasoned pros. (In fact, I am far more sympathetic towards the instrumental
extension of this song — ʽNow I’ve Got A
Witnessʼ features
top-notch harmonica solos and another masterful guitar break from Keith). ʽYou Can Make It If You Tryʼ, originally done by Gene Allison but probably heard
by the Stones in the more recent Solomon Burke version, is another duffer candidate,
although Mick’s vocal here commands more respect than it does on ʽWitnessʼ — replacing soul with swagger, it still somehow manages to give you an
uplifting kick. The
album contained but one original, the romantic ballad ʽTell Meʼ, and it always
amused me that the «proverbially evil» Stones would have a tender,
sentimental pop ballad (albeit a tragic one) as their introduction to the
world of songwriters’ royalty (and royalties)
— but I’ll be damned if it ain’t quite a fine-written song for the ʽFrom Me To Youʼ era, with the boys already mastering the art of build-up (tender
verse to alarmed bridge to desperate chorus) and, curiously, going well over
the typical three-minute barrier, as if they got carried away with their own
success. It also set a common standard for them: in the future, the typical
Stones ballad would be a bitter lament rather than a serenade, helping to
lessen the gap between their rocky swagger and their sentimental side. In any
case, ʽTell Meʼ is a respectable keeper, rather than forgettable
fluff, and it’s kind of a pity that they buried it once and for all in their
live set after 1965 (honestly, they wrote quite a few worse clunkers in the
balladry department after that). In
short, remember this, kids of the future: there were only two artists in 1964 (as opposed to,
for instance, more than forty in
2020) to top the UK LP charts — the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and if
you fail to understand how the artistic creativity of A Hard Day’s Night could be regarded on a comparable level with
the «slavish blues and rock’n’roll covers» of The Rolling Stones, then just chalk this up to the sorrowful
consequences of how the Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham and his team were
able to dupe the British public with their titillation-based promotional
campaign. (Then again, there are also those who think that Brian Epstein not
only made the Beatles, but basically was
the Beatles, as far as their popularity and influence are concerned). But I myself
have never subscribed to that conspirologist opinion, and as time goes by,
the awesomeness of the fresh, young, nasty, swaggery Stones only becomes more
and more clear to me even against the ever-expanding musical horizons. Discography note: There are quite a few early
Stones classics around this period which managed to avoid early LP release.
The band’s first single, a cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On’ from June ’63,
already has the Stones as a super-tight unit, but misses the magical
transformation of Chuck’s vibe from fun-and-cute to fun-and-nasty. The second
single, featuring the Lennon-McCartney composition ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’
specially written for the Stones, was released in November ’63 and is a minor
classic — the band’s first rip-roaring performance whose vocals and guitars
simply ooze nastiness (especially when compared to the much more mild
Ringo-sung version on With The Beatles),
and the B-side ‘Stoned’ is a pretty evil take on Booker T & The MG’s
‘Green Onions’. The third single was an also nastified cover of Buddy Holly’s
‘Not Fade Away’ (it is included on the US version of the album).
Additionally, there was an early EP from January ’64, also called The Rolling Stones but somewhat
expendable (four covers, none of them particularly great). If
you do want to truly dig deep, though, seek out bootlegged versions of some
of the outtakes from the recording sessions for the LP — in particular, the
instrumental jam ‘And Mr. Spector And Mr. Pitney Came Too’ (because they
did), basically an extension of ‘Little By Little’ from the album with
frantic soloing from Mick on harmonica and Keith on lead guitar; and the
infamous ‘Andrew’s Blues’, a drunken improvisation to the melody of ‘Can I
Get A Witness’ which happens to celebrate the spirit of Andrew Loog Oldham in
the most appropriate manner ("Andrew Oldham sittin’ on a hill with Jack
and Jill, fucked all night and sucked all night and taste that pussy till it
taste just right" — I keep thinking of a parallel universe in which they
accidentally mixed up the tapes and sprang this on the public market instead
of the actual ‘Witness’ and I still cannot properly model the consequences).
Bet you don’t get that kind of
language from digging through the Beatles’ Abbey Road Studios outtakes, do
you? |
||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Album
released: Oct. 17, 1964 |
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
More info:
|
||
|
3 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
||||
|
Tracks: 1) Around And Around; 2)
Confessin’ The Blues; 3) Empty Heart; 4) Time Is On My Side; 5) Good Times,
Bad Times; 6) It’s All Over Now; 7) 2120 South
Michigan Avenue; 8) Under The Boardwalk; 9) Congratulations; 10) Grown Up
Wrong; 11) If You Need Me; 12) Susie Q. |
||||||||
|
While
the UK only saw one Rolling Stones LP in the year that Beatlemania took over
the world, the Americans, freshly subscribed to the thrills of British
Invasion, got luckier and received this mega-pack of 12 extra songs where the
British side got only five — the EP Five
By Five, released on the 14th of August, did indeed contain five new
recordings from five band members. In the States, it became 12 x 5; padded out with several more A-
and B-sides from recent singles and a few tracks recorded exclusively for the
American market, it came out two months later as (questionable) proof that the
Rolling Stones could now easily compete with the Fab Four at least in terms
of quantity, if not necessarily in quality. |
||||||||
|
If
one accepts 12 x 5 as a legitimate
second LP from the band, it might seem, indeed, that the proverbial «sophomore
slump» is in full flight, since there are few, if any at all, surprises in
store for us. For the most part, the recordings present the same cocktail of
Chicago blues, Chuck Berry-style rock’n’roll, contemporary soul-oriented
R&B, and one or two half-assed stabs at original songwriting — all of it competent,
but not yet suggestive of an individual artistic path leading from
interpretation to creation. And now that the novelty shock from the band’s
first major statement earlier in the year had worn down, it was not that
easy, either, to take the world anew by surprise at the phenomenon of the
Rolling Stones as a darker and seedier alternative to the smiling «moptops». Predictably,
of all the early Stones’ albums, 12 x
5 typically gets the worst rap in retrospective reviews (with the possible
exception of December’s Children,
a record that suffers even more from being scraped together from various
leftovers). Were
one only to concentrate on the band’s output in terms of singles at the time,
the awesome stylistic and substantial progression made by the guys from early
to late 1964 would be impossible to miss. In June, they had their first
proper #1 UK hit with ‘It’s All Over Now’, a song they got from Bobby Womack
and his band, the Valentinos. The original was a fun
little tune, melodically lifted almost note-for-note from Chuck Berry’s
‘Memphis Tennessee’ — but seriously distinguished, of course, by a tense and
nasty vocal performance from Bobby. Naturally, Mick Jagger could never
compete with Bobby Womack on a technical level, but, much to his honor, he
never even tried. Instead, what he did
try is to take the bitch-slappin’ potential of the vocals to a whole new
level: each verse is shot out at you in one unfaltering timbral wave, like a
revved-up prosecutor’s speech keeping the jury on the edge of their seats.
Bobby sings the song like a man who was unjustly injured, writhing in
figurative pain while getting the lyrics out; Mick throws them out like a set
of sneering, mocking, condescending insults, asserting his hip-and-ironic
superiority over his antagonist, his listeners, his audience, God almighty
and whoever else might trod along. It’s naughty, insulting, offensive... and
oddly hot. Even
more importantly, though, is the fact that the Stones did not merely «cover»
the song. Instead, they re-wrote it from scratch; I would argue that they
quite properly deserved their own songwriting credit here. There are no signs
whatsoever of ‘Memphis Tennessee’, other than the basic rhythm pattern;
instead, it introduces a completely new little blues-pop riff which is later
emphasized by an unforgettable set of power chords echoing Jagger’s chorus of
"because I USED to love her, BUT it’s all over NOW...". Nobody
would demand that kind of creativity from a cover tune, but the Stones still
went ahead and displayed it: it is within ‘It’s All Over Now’ that you should
properly look for the true seeds of the Stones’ masterful blues-rock
songwriting. The
icing on the cake is provided by Keith’s inspirational, most likely
improvised, chopped-up, sputtering, stuttering solo break which came
absolutely from nowhere (nothing even remotely like it on the Valentinos’
original) — and it has always been a deep suspicion in me that it directly
inspired Dave Davies for his own punkish solo on ʽYou Really Got Meʼ, recorded just a few weeks after ʽIt’s All Over Nowʼ hit the UK
market — thus, we get ourselves yet another legitimate
contender for «first punk song ever»
(and it still breaks my heart how Keith had completely abandoned / forgotten
that particular style of lead guitar playing some time in between the Brian
Jones and Mick Taylor periods). Finally, one more cool thing about ‘It’s
All Over Now’ is its extended instrumental coda, bringing the length well
over three minutes and sounding unusually repetitive-and-noisy for a pop
single in 1964. Maybe they just thought that little power chord sequence was
fun to drop down on the listeners several times in a row — and, incidentally,
came up with a sort of proto-Velvet Underground vibe (which, I guess, is
something worth taking into consideration for all the Velvet Underground fans
who despise the likes of the Stones for their commercial orientation and
musical predictability). ‘It’s
All Over Now’ did not make that much of an impact on the US charts, but the
band’s next, US-only single did: the cover of Jerry Ragovoy’s ‘Time Is On My
Side’, which the band certainly lifted from a recent B-side by soul queen
Irma Thomas, rose all the way to #6, for the first time putting them into the
Top 10 and becoming their greatest commercial success on that market prior to
‘Satisfaction’ — rather odd, considering that the song has little to do with
rock’n’roll, and that when it came to soul music, the Stones did not have
such a surefire formula to make it more crispy, exciting, and modern than
they did with their reinterpretations of Chuck Berry or Jimmy Reed. In this
particular case, for instance, I cannot say that their cover is in any way
«better» than Irma’s
version — tighter, perhaps, and Mick manages to give a convincing
performance, but he is nowhere near the spiritual belter that Irma Thomas is.
Ironically, ‘Time Is On My Side’ would only gradually become a fundamentally
important piece of the Stones’ legacy, as time went on and on and on and it
became obvious that time was, very much indeed, on their side (something that
they did not forget to exploit themselves when they revived the song for
their 1981-82 stadium tour). (Two
trivia notes — first, check out the very first recording
of this song, made by the jazz trombonist Kai Winding with Dionne and Dee Dee
Warwick on backing vocals, it is every bit as inspirational as both Irma’s
and the Stones’; second, remember that the Stones actually made two versions
of the song — the one on the US single and on 12 x 5 features a little gospel organ intro, while the version
later included on the UK LP The
Rolling Stones No. 2 includes a stinging guitar lead instead. So, which
one’s the better one? let us try our best and make half of the planet kill
the other half over this burning issue!) The
core of 12 x 5, constituted of
songs that were earlier released on the Five
By Five EP in the UK, was recorded in June ’64 at the exact same location
where they also did ‘It’s All Over Now’ — Chess Studios at Chicago, the
Stones’ spiritual equivalent of King Solomon’s Temple. This is why one of the
original tracks, the instrumental ‘2120 South Michigan Avenue’, bears that
particular name — the address of Chess Studios. It is, however, notable that
the location mainly served to provide inspiration — none of Chess’ regulars
appear as session musicians on any of the tracks, either because the Stones
were too humble and shy to ask, or too proud to require outside assistance
even from any of their idols, or, heck, maybe both at the same time. In any
case, while there are no great stylistic or substantial breakthroughs
contained in these tracks, they most certainly prove that these five (six, if
we count Ian Stewart on keyboards, and we should) British lads could waltz
inside the single greatest American blues studio of all time and make music
that was 100% worthy of all the illustrious names associated with the place. The
very first two tracks on 12 x 5
show that the boys are here to stay and conquer. ʽAround And Aroundʼ, taken over from Chuck Berry, is merry barroom rock that was sort of
lacking on Newest Hitmakers, and
not only does it signal the true arrival of Ian Stewart as a boogie piano
player to rival Jonnie Johnson and Jerry Lee Lewis (even if, unlike those
two, he always humbly keeps to the
background — I do not think there is even a single Ian Stewart piano solo on
any of the Stones’ albums), but it also firmly establishes Keith as the unquestionable inheritor and
perfector of the Chuck Berry lick — unlike Chuck, Keith is no big fan of
showing off, but every note that he plays sounds nastier, grittier, and, in a
way, more fully and decisively realized than the way it was played by Chuck.
The most important element is still Jagger, though — with his vocal strategy,
the cycled "but we kept on rockin’, goin’ ’round and ’round..." bit
becomes more overtly rebellious with each new repetition, a barely veiled
call to rip out theater seats and go full-out riot mode, even if the song
starts out as just an innocent piece of good-time boogie. Every time I play
the original and the cover back-to-back, Chuck’s version merely makes me want
to dance — the Stones’ version, in comparison, makes me want to storm the
Bastille or something. (For the record, the Animals’ version, released the
same year, was also injected with exuberance rather than insurgence — mainly
because neither Eric Burdon, nor Alan Price ever strived for the sort of
provocative nastiness that was a common feature shared between Mick and Keith). The
other highlight, quite different in terms of genre and style, but not so much
in the desired effect, is ʽConfessin’ The
Bluesʼ, an old blues
tune which Chuck Berry also recorded back in 1960, but in this particular
case the Stones rather take as their model the slower, steadier version done
by Little Walter in 1958. On here, Mick goes into his trademark full-out «midnight rambler» mode, with both
guitarists supporting him as grimly and snappily as possible. One could
complain that Jagger’s singing is somewhat strained and unnatural, but this
is precisely what makes the song so enticing: both Chuck and Little Walter sang those verses with their usual ease and
fluidity, making their vocal efforts unremarkable against the background of
everything else they did — Mick Jagger, however, was there to make a sharp difference
which would be sure to grab your personal attention. The tense shrillness of
his vocals is sharpened and polished to near-geometric perfection, and he had
this unique way of emphasizing specific lines with a high-pressure
glottalized burst ("oh, baby... can I ha-a-a-ve you for myself?")
that would have been considered not just offensive, but dang near-criminal just
a decade earlier. It is a marvel to listen to him zipping between different
vocal styles, transforming a potentially deadly dull 12-bar blues into a
journey of devilish seduction which, at times, sounds downright creepy (and,
of course, utterly unimaginable in the cultural context of the 2010s-2020s). Even
the harmonica break, which cannot compare to Little Walter in terms of
technique, beats Walter in terms of efficiency — with its echoey production, steady
pacing, and swaggery, threatening feel of confidence, it just seems like a
natural, if not supernatural,
extension of Jagger’s hypnotic powers. In short, when placed in the hands of
the Stones, ‘Confessin’ The Blues’ is not a love song, not even a stalker’s
monolog — it is our friend the Devil himself, who came here on Earth because
he would rather love you, baby,
than anyone else he knows in town. (Six years later, he would be making
another, even more direct, proposal, singing "my name is Lucifer, please
take my hand" through the vocal cords of yet another crazy Englishman —
although by that time, he would seem to be more honest about this, hinting to
you at eternal damnation and desperation rather than at those sexy, seductive
flames of hell). These
are the big ones in my opinion, but there’s quite a bit of fun to be extracted
from some of the smaller ones as well. One might argue that the Stones have
very little business covering the Drifters, but I have always loved the
tightness of the groove they get going on ʽUnder The Boardwalkʼ, and how even on
this superficially very happy song they still manage to introduce an odd
strain of darkness — the vibe of
those deep "under the boardwalk, under the boardwalk..." backing
vocals is anything but joyful, sounding
more like the voices of all the spirits of those unfortunate enough to drown
somewhere in the vicinity of the boardwalk, just as the unsuspecting happy
couple are enjoying their safe and sunny day out. (Cue the Jaws theme or something here). Though
much less surprising, Solomon Burke’s ʽIf You Need Meʼ is given as
strong a Jagger-jolt as ʽYou Can Make It
If You Tryʼ — no tenderness whatsoever (Jagger’s "if you need me, why don’t
you call me?" = "if you need me, bitch, just call me instead of having a nervous breakdown and
making me pay your medical bills!"), but a lot of fabulous glottal
contortions weaving an attitude of superhuman cockiness and absolute self-assurance
from somebody to whom «vulnerability» probably means the chance to catch one
too many STDs. (Do not be too harsh on a lad who’d only just turned 21: over
time, he would eventually achieve great success in exploring his sensitive
side as well). Even
the abovementioned instrumental jam ʽ2120 South Michigan Avenueʼ has its moments
of greatness — like when all the instruments quiet down for a few bars,
creating an atmosphere of suspense, and then Jagger’s harmonica blasts start
raining down from the sky with little warning. Of note is also the nasty
fuzzy tone on Wyman’s bass, bringing the tune quite close to the requirements
of classic hard rock (or, at least, «proto»-hard rock), and the funny dialog
effect between the chugging chords of the rhythm guitar and Ian Stewart’s
quietly mumbling organ solo. (Fans should also note that the latest remaster
of the album restores an extra minute and a half of the jam with a long-lost
guitar break from Keith, although it is hardly anything special). And while
the definitive Sixties’ rock cover of ʽSusie Qʼ still had to
wait for John Fogerty to mature, this short and super-tight blast is no
slouch, either: the boys bale out all the swamp from Dale Hawkins’ original
and replace it with nasty, dirty, distorted rock’n’roll fury — this is easily the single best group
performance on the album, with everybody giving their best, Bill and Charlie
almost owning the result with fairly psychedelic bass «zoops» from the former
and near-tribal drumming from the latter. In
the meantime, the number of original compositions has increased drastically —
counting both Jagger/Richards and
the «Nanker Phelge» moniker, there’s five, of which ʽEmpty Heartʼ, a pleading, brooding R&B number with interlocking guitar,
organ, and harmonica parts, is arguably the best: most of the time it isn’t
even so much of an actual song as it is more of a shamanistic ceremony, a
multi-layered magical incantation to rekindle a lady’s passion for the
broken-hearted protagonist. ʽGrown Up Wrongʼ, a rather thin one-line guitar vamp, and ʽGood Times Bad Timesʼ, an acoustic blues-pop ballad, are less impressive, but the former is
notable for being the very first (out of many more to follow) classic Jagger
putdown of a girl for acting all stuffy and conformist ("you were easy
to fool when you were in school, but you’ve grown up all wrong"), and
the latter at least features the best harmonica break on the record (the lyrics
are total crap, though: lines like "there’s gotta be trust in this world
/ or it won’t get very far / well trust in someone / or there’s gonna be
war" should be considered an insult to Dartford Grammar School, never
mind the London School of Economics). My
favorite of the originals, however, is the slow-waltzing ʽCongratulationsʼ — sort of an early precursor to the band’s baroque
pop flirt in the mid-Sixties with its inventive interlocking of two rippling
guitar patterns, with the electric part coming in with a little delay after
the acoustic part, as if chasing it away. This is the kind of interplay that
you did not see all that often even on a Beatles record, and clearly showed
that here, too, was a band with some major composing potential. The lyrics
aren’t too good, the vocals aren’t Jagger at his finest (sadness and
sentimentalism are not his forte, at least not just yet), but that guitar
work, including the dark folksy acoustic solo break, is absolutely exquisite
for 1964. In
the end, everything has to be judged in the context of its time, and while 12 x 5 might seem weak by «common»
standards applicable to the Stones, and not tremendously innovative to be
able to catch up with the Beatles, it is still a major achievement compared
to the rates and peculiarities of evolution of almost any other British
Invasion band at the time. The lack of giant strides here is compensated by
the presence of small creative steps taken in pretty much every direction —
arrangements, production, reinvention of other people’s songs, and nurturing
of the band’s own songwriting craft. Above all, it would be impossible to
hear this collection in 1964 and not
realize that, much like the Beatles, these guys were here to stay — though,
of course, it would still be impossible to realize just for how much longer
than the Beatles they would be staying... |
||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Album
released: Feb. 13, 1965 |
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
More info:
|
||
|
3 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
||||
|
Tracks: 1) Everybody Needs Somebody To
Love; 2) Down Home Girl; 3) You Can’t Catch Me; 4) Heart
Of Stone; 5) What A Shame; 6) Mona (I Need You Baby); 7) Down The Road
Apiece; 8) Off The Hook; 9) Pain In My Heart; 10) Oh Baby (We Got A Good
Thing Going); 11) Little Red Rooster; 12) Surprise, Surprise. |
||||||||
|
REVIEW
|
||||||||
|
Once
we got that all sorted out, the situation is tolerable, except for two gripes.
First, in the process the American catalog somehow managed to lose hold of an
excellent cover of Muddy Waters’ ʽI Can’t Be
Satisfiedʼ (pity, since
it features a fine sample of Brian’s slide playing in full-on Delta mode),
and second, there are actually two
versions of Solomon Burke’s ʽEverybody Needs
Somebody To Loveʼ out there — the original three-minute demo, released by mistake on Now!, and the longer, officially
sanctioned, five-minute finalized version on No. 2. Subsequent CD pressings of Now! corrected that mistake and swapped the short demo for the
long master take, but here’s the funny thing: I actually like the demo far
more than the master take — the latter rather loyally clings to the
optimistic, party-spirit tone of the original, which I would rather accept
from Solomon Burke in person; the former, however, is surprisingly darker,
more echo-laden, stuffed with weird ghostly vocal harmonies and tense,
aggressive micro-breaks from Keith’s electric guitar, basically feeling like
a special Halloween version or something. They probably thought that such
darkness clashes unfavorably with the cheer-up message of the song, but to
me, the demo version has always seemed to fit in much better with the
delicious nastiness of the ensuing tracks — so I would advise you to be
tenacious and track down the «mistaken» three-minute version, which isn’t
that hard to do in the digital age anyway. Anyway,
confusing details aside, Now! is a
fairly accurate reflection of what the Stones were all about in early ’65 — still
only just beginning to cut their own songwriters’ teeth, but continuing to
polish and deepen their atmospheric qualities by reinventing other people’s
classics in new, exciting ways. On a song-by-song basis, this is arguably the
best release of the early Stones period; for the rest of 1965, there would be
a slight dip in LP quality, as records would become more and more populated
with early Jagger/Richards originals that still suffered from relative greenness,
but Now! strikes a very good
balance between proper covers, self-credited «rewrites» (new words for old
tunes), and just a couple high quality true originals — and there’s hardly
even one unwise choice among the lot. Soulful,
chest-thumpin’ R&B, one of the Stones’ biggest loves at the time but also
unquestionably their most vulnerable spot, is kept here to an absolute
minimum — Allen Toussaint’s / Otis Redding’s ʽPain In My Heartʼ is the only
track on the album that could be brushed off as an inferior imitation of a
masterwork, but while I won’t be defending Jagger’s vocals (they’re okay, but
directly competing with Otis without trying to cheat is a no-no), the band
still comes up with an inventive guitar-based rearrangement of the
brass-based original, and Wyman’s grim-fuzzy bass tone gives it a bit of a
new face. On
the other hand, their intrusion onto slow Southern territory totally hits the
jackpot. ʽDown Home Girlʼ was a small local hit for Alvin Robinson, a
grizzly-voiced New Orleanian singer-songwriter closely associated with Leiber
and Stoller, the former of which co-wrote this sultry ode to a Louisiana mud
queen with his friend Artie Butler. It is quite obligatory for any true music
lover to seek out the original
version (Robinson’s vocal timbre truly sows the impression that he
emerged from out of the depths of the bayou), but this is really a tune that Mick
Jagger was simply born to sing, regardless of the fact that he’d never even
seen a proper "cotton field" before, let alone tried walking in
one. The funniest thing about the song is that originally it was just
humorous, not sarcastic — the girl in question is being admired for her down-to-earth nature, not put down or anything;
the Stones, however, remake it as if the protagonist had this complicated
attraction-and-condescension relationship for his passion. Honestly, this is
one of those moments where even an outspoken defender of women’s rights might
want to put the feminist stance on pause and revel in the gleeful sneer of
Jagger’s voice, cleverly mimed by Brian’s bottleneck triple-note «ha, ha,
ha!» When it gets to the chorus, Robinson’s drawn-out "oh, you’re so,
down home girl" is a prolonged howl of primal lust, but Jagger throws in
the armor-piercing Wrench of Nastiness and scores a critical hit. You might
want to take a shower, though, after exposing yourself to its full radiation
potential. As
good as the band’s covers of ʽCarolʼ and ʽAround And
Aroundʼ used to be, Now! is also where they reach the top
with their modernization of the Chuck Berry sound — for some reason, both ʽYou Can’t Catch Meʼ and ʽDown The Road
Apieceʼ fell out of
their live repertoire fairly early, but maybe they just couldn’t live up on
stage to the requested levels of speed and tightness shown here. As befits
the title, ʽYou Can’t Catch
Meʼ zips along at
the fastest speed they could get at the moment, with Bill and Charlie setting
the frame for a performance that really imitates the spirit of a breathless
car race — again, with much of Chuck’s lightweight humor replaced by grim and
gritty efficiency. There’s that odd whiff of something dark and mysterious
all over again, exemplified by... well, for instance, what’s up with that
weird «dripping» sound they add — that one lonely "ping!" coming in at regular intervals, like a water splash
from a leaking faucet? I have no idea whose idea that was, or even what
instrument is producing the effect, but it’s goddamn weird — together with
all the reverb, it makes the song sound as if it were recorded inside a jail
cell. A song about fast-and-furious car racing inside a jail cell? See, bet
you never knew just how weird these
early Stones covers, so easily dismissed by the non-curious, can really get. ʽDown The Road
Apieceʼ is clearly
less mysterious — an old roadhouse boogie that goes all the way back to the
days of the great piano player Amos Milburn, but the Stones, naturally, are
once again exploiting the Chuck Berry version, and, once again, are elevating
it to a whole new level of excitement: not only is the production thicker and
tenser, but Keith is given free reign in the studio, and he profits from that
by extending the song by almost an entire minute, just so that he can
demonstrate his complete mastery of every single Berry lick, which he glues
together in a seamless sequence (the song only begins to fade away once he has
exhausted the pool and begins repeating himself) and polishes to perfection;
additionally, every once in a while he engages in call-and-response dialog
with Ian Stewart, banging away like there was no tomorrow in the background —
there is a clear feeling here that they are intentionally sweating to beat
Master Berry and Master Johnson at their own game, and you know what? They
might just be succeeding at that (allegedly, Chuck himself was noted to have
been genuinely amazed when he saw them recording the thing at Chess Studios
in mid-’64, and one does not simply walk into Chuck Berry’s presence and
receive a compliment from the guy for doing one of his tunes). In
the 12-bar blues department, they hit some high points, too. ʽLittle Red Roosterʼ is an early showcase for Brian, who seems to have a lot of fun doing various
animal impressions with his electric slide; I would praise Mick’s vocal
effort, too, but this time he has to compete against Howlin’ Wolf, and that’s
even more of a no-no than competing with Otis Redding — so let’s go along
with the flow and agree with the critics who always point out Brian’s
electric slide parts as the finest ingredient of the song. Such was the power
wielded by the Stones at the time that the song, released as a tentative
single, shot to #1 on the UK charts — the first time ever in the history of
12-bar blues, and probably the first time ever in the history of songs
written about a dysfunctional penis. That
said, my personal favorite out of the generic blues tunes on this album has
always been ʽWhat A Shameʼ, another re-write of something Jimmy Reed-style on
which the band just sounds so admirably tight — every single
musician, including the rhythm section and the pianist, contributing on an
equal level, all melodies sharpened razor-style (gotta love Keith’s ascending
bass line at the end of each verse) and with perhaps the single best case of
«guitar weaving» between Keith and Brian on the entire record, when Brian
enters his slide guitar run. Of special interest are the lyrics — seems like
a first, timid attempt at writing something socially relevant, proto-ʽGimme Shelterʼ style: "What a shame / They always wanna start a fight / Well it
scares me so / I could sleep in the shelter all night"...
"shelter", get it? Nobody paid proper attention at the time, but
this just might have been the first recorded case where they’d use the spooky
potential of their blues-rock sound to accompany a bona fide alarmist
message. In
the middle of it all comes the band’s first original masterpiece; I wish I
could be original myself and award that award to ʽOff The Hookʼ, but as groovy as Keith’s crunchy riff is, the repetitiveness of the
song ultimately works against it (maybe a decent bridge could have been a
better choice than the endless vamp of "it’s off the hook, it’s off the
hook, it’s off the hook..."), so I still have to go along with ʽHeart Of Stoneʼ. Curiously, from a melodic standpoint it seems like it may have begun
life as a variation on the aforementioned ʽPain In My Heartʼ (they share
plenty of similarities in all aspects of melody, structure, lyrics, etc.),
but the Stones have turned the tables and made life more complex — now it’s not about a girl who is breaking the protagonist’s heart, it’s
about a girl who is not breaking
the protagonist’s heart, yet at the same time you can feel that the
protagonist’s heart is on the breaking point anyway, adding an extra level of
psychologism: "...this heart of stone" is delivered by Jagger in
such a way that you can’t help noticing a serious internal contradiction. Overall,
‘Heart Of Stone’ has to qualify as Mick’s first truly gripping dramatic
performance. It would still take him a few years to become a consistently
first-rate voice actor in the studio (an ability that, unfortunately, he was rarely
able to take with him on stage), but the modulation range on ʽHeart Of Stoneʼ is already quite impressive — from the opening
cockiness of "there’ve been so many girls that I’ve known..." to
the childishly puzzled intonations on "what’s different about her?"
to the bitter pleading of "don’t keep on looking..." to the
desperate self-denial of "you’ll never break this heart of stone, oh
no...", this shows the Stones already adhering to that one maxim which
made their classic period so, well, classic — you may not believe in the
stuff you write, but it is your sacred duty to make it believable for everybody
else. And do not forget Keith, either, who accordingly plays the wailing
guitar solo like a man gone crazy with grief: a beautiful 15-second ascension
from grumbly gloominess to desperate hysterics that packs as much emotional
punch into it as any Eric Clapton performance, even without doing anything
particularly inventive with the standard blues scale. Play this one next to
‘Tell Me’ and see how much deeper these guys learned to crawl under your skin
in just half a year’s time. In
conclusion, one would be forced to admit that maybe the record was not nearly as fabulous as to allow you the
infamous moral right to follow the advice printed inside the sleeve notes and
"see that blind man knock him on the head, steal his wallet and have the
loot" (hey Mr. Andrew Loog Oldham, we really need you in the 2020s to
help us shape our social strategies once again!). But in the context of early
’65, it was still totally cutting edge. Perhaps the formal «shape» of the
Rolling Stones was not yet completely formed, since they still had to largely
rely upon borrowing other people’s skeletal structures instead of supplying
their own, but the «spirit» was every bit as vibrant and flamboyant as it
would be at any later point of their finest decade. For the rest of 1965, they
would officially qualify as an A-level singles band and more of a B-level
album band — but The Rolling Stones,
Now! is just amazingly consistent
from top to bottom, and remains, as it has always been, my first and foremost
recommendation for a thorough, multi-sided acquaintance with the first (and
most commonly neglected) phase of the band’s career. |
||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Album
released: July 30, 1965 |
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
More info:
|
||
|
3 |
3 |
4 |
2 |
3 |
||||
|
Tracks: 1) Mercy Mercy; 2) Hitch Hike; 3)
The Last Time; 4) That's How Strong My Love Is; 5) Good Times; 6) I'm All
Right (live); 7) (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction;
8) Cry To Me; 9) The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man; 10) Play With Fire; 11) The Spider And The Fly; 12) One More Try. |
||||||||
|
REVIEW
|
||||||||
|
As
good and time-honored (I do insist) as those early Stones records were, I am
pretty sure there could have been some serious doubt, as 1965 loomed on the
horizon, about the band’s capability of artistic survival in this new, far
more demanding age. For sure, they had a great groove going, but so did The
Animals; and whether they would be able to switch from their — admittedly
highly polished and sharpened — take on the beats of Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry,
and Jimmy Reed was a question waiting to be answered. Meanwhile, their
«original leader», Brian Jones, turned out to be completely inefficient when
it came to any sorts of songwriting, and as for the soon-to-be «Glimmer
Twins», they weren’t doing too hot for the first couple of years either: not
only did they have to live forever with the humiliation of the Beatles
writing their first hit song for them, but just about everything Mick and
Keith got out of their own heads in 1963–64 had a clear aura of timidity
around it. Covering Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters seemed to give them
confidence; performing their own songs such as ‘Grown Up Wrong’ or ‘Surprise
Surprise’ seemed to suck it back out of them. The
first indication that the Jagger-Richards theme might be starting to grow
into something worth keeping tabs on was arguably ‘Heart Of Stone’ — a great
soul ballad in its own right, yet not exactly a great candidate to set the
brand new world on fire. That honor, so it seems, would belong to ‘The Last
Time’, not one of my favorite Stones songs but an important milestone all the
same. First and foremost, ‘The Last Time’ introduces Keith Richards The
Riffmeister — that simple, jumpy, see-sawing, undeniably unforgettable chord
sequence, which might have been developed by the guitarist while riffing
around the ʽEverybody Needs
Somebody To Loveʼ groove, opens
up one of the greatest Epic Riff Runs in the history of popular music.
Certainly Keith Richards did not invent the guitar riff, but he probably did
more to establish it as the basis for hard rock in those early days than
anybody else; my only problem with the riff of ‘The Last Time’ is that it
feels catchy, but not particularly «meaningful» — very soon, Keith would
start coming up with melodic phrases that almost read like genuine messages
to the brain, but here, I’m still trying to figure out which exact message
the slingshot of ‘The Last Time’ is hurling at my perception centers. Another
innovative quality of the song is its unusually grand, booming, echoey
production — apparently, the Stones had crossed paths with Phil Spector
himself on that early January day at the RCA Studios in Hollywood, and,
though uncredited on the official record, he assisted them with the mix so
that, for the first time ever, the Stones ended up sounding larger than
themselves. The song itself was hardly all that grand to merit the bombastic
Phil Spector touch, but it actually helped cover the deficiency of the solo
break — neither Keith nor Brian had any good ideas in store here, so the solo
becomes just an arpeggiated variation on the riff itself. Meanwhile, Jagger
cleverly borrows an old gospel trope — in its original and most lyrically and
melodically similar form, it can be heard on The Staple Singers’ ‘This May Be The Last Time’
— readapting it from religious to completely secular purposes and turning
what used to be a mildly threatening apocalyptic invocation into a ballsy pop
hook. (Occasional irate howls about the Stones «stealing» the song make no
sense whatsoever because what they are doing here is quoting, not stealing —
which is a great incentive for comparative culturological analysis, but a
pretty poor basis for a lawsuit, let alone holier-than-thou moralizing). Yet
for all the importance of ‘The Last Time’ to the maturation of rock music in
the mid-Sixties, I would dare suggest that it was the B-side that first
suggested the Stones were to be something more than «just the greatest
rock’n’roll band in the world». ‘Play With Fire’ announced an entirely new
type of Stones music, one that would reach its apogee in 1966-1967 and then
retire into a relatively latent state: the «Anglo-Stones», finally
consenting to turn their heads away from across the Atlantic and back to
their native shores. A dark acoustic ballad, further colored with Jack
Nitzsche’s baroque harpsichord lines, and with lyrics that namedrop plenty of
English realities, replacing the barely known (and barely pronounceable)
Winona, Kingman, Barstow, and San Bernardino with the more familiar Saint
John’s Wood, Stepney, and Knightsbridge, it sounds like a barely veiled
threat to the upper classes — and it was recorded and released several months
prior to ʽLike A Rolling
Stoneʼ, with which it
shared at least the basic theme, if not the details. If
Mick Jagger sounded like a mere lascivious midnight rambler in 1964, then on ʽPlay With Fireʼ he actually sounds like a real menace — and all he has to do is keep that
voice down to a stern, but calm, half-spoken tone. "Well you’ve got your diamonds... and you got your pretty clothes..."
— the very first line already gives it away that this situation is probably
not going to stay the same for very long. The lyrics aren’t completely
transparent, though, as the song’s greatest enigma remains in the personality
of its first-person protagonist: "So
don’t play with me / ’cause you play with fire". Who exactly is me? The young socialite’s rebellious
underdog lover? How would she be «playing with him», then, and how would that
relate to the main bulk of the verses? Could the me actually be something more abstract — the Dark Force, perhaps?
There’s definitely a bit of a sulfur-and-brimstone whiff around those somber
chords. In
any case, based on whatever the Stones were doing in 1964, a song like ‘The
Last Time’ could be predicted;
after all, it embraces pretty much the same spirit as ‘It’s All Over Now’,
which, by the way, was also riff-driven, even if its riff was not nearly as
distinctive and melodic. But nothing from their first two years of activity
suggests the emergence of ‘Play With Fire’. What on earth drove them to
record a song that begins like some Joan Baez folk ballad and then continues
in a «John Lee Hooker meets Johann Sebastian Bach» sort of vein? There wasn’t
even any Marianne Faithfull on the horizon yet to push her thick-lipped lover
boy into the proverbial artsy-fartsy direction! All we know is that Mick and
Keith supposedly wrote this while staying in their hotel room in Washington,
with Keith strumming his Gibson Hummingbird and Mick improvising to the
chords. But what exactly pushed them in that
direction remains unclear. Still,
in the context of 1965 ‘Play With Fire’ remained an anomaly for the group —
this particular vibe was so very much ahead of its time, it had to wait
around until 1966, when the band’s «pop phase» would really kick in. But it
was awful nice to offload it on both the British and American public, as a
B-side addition to the irresistible temptation of ‘The Last Time’, which went
all the way to #1 on the UK charts, though it stalled at #9 on the US market
(lower, actually, than ‘Time Is On My Side’ from the previous year). For the
first time ever, both sides of the single would be credited to
Jagger-Richards; and for the first time ever, a hard-rocking original
composition on Side A would be subtly mollified by an «artsier» creation on
Side B, a strategy that the Glimmer Twins would quite often put into action
in the future (remember, for instance, the much underrated psychedelic
mini-masterpiece ‘Child Of The Moon’ as the B-side to ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’). Then
came June 5, 1965, and with it, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. It’s a
little funny that the song it eventually displaced from the top of the US
charts was another «I Can’t» song —
the Four Tops’ ‘I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)’... and now that
I’ve reminded myself how it goes, I can actually find a few similarities
between its own opening piano riff and the one on ‘Satisfaction’. This is
sheer accident, of course, but it’s still ironic how one of the most
ecstatically happy songs of the year suddenly gave way to one of its angriest
and grumpiest declarations. Later, in concert, Mick would actually downplay
the importance of his own creation: the extended jammy codas which you can,
for instance, hear on material from the 1969 American tour (such as captured
in the Gimme Shelter movie) pretty
much turn all the social frustration of the first verses into a short
prelude, after which Mick uses the rest of the song to go on an imaginary
woman hunt ("I’m looking for a
good woman to give me satisfaction", etc.). But that’s not how it
goes in the original version — which is one of the rare cases where I
seriously prefer a Stones studio original over the way it evolved in their
live show. The
original version keeps a nice, reasonable balance between Jagger’s sexual and
social dissatisfaction — strongly suggesting that both are very much tied
together but never really letting us know if it is sexual dissatisfaction that
derives from social one or the other way around. (Which, again, reminds me of
that funny bit from the Gimme Shelter
movie where a post-Altamont Mick watches the footage of a pre-Altamont Mick
at the press conference during the tour launch — the pre-Altamont Mick
answering a reporter’s question with "well, we’re financially dissatisfied, sexually satisfied,
philosophically trying". "Rubbish",
grimly reacts the post-Altamont Mick). It also has this sly-seductive
contrast between the opening soft, slippery, high-pitched vocal and its
gradual descent into hysterical hell, whereas in a live setting Mick usually
enters his «barking mode» from the get-go — parallel to Keith’s lead guitar
which just keeps on picking steam until it re-explodes back in all of its fuzzy
glory on the chorus. And
speaking of fuzzy glory... it’s curious that, although the Maestro FZ-1
Fuzz-Tone device is said to have been introduced by Gibson as early as
1962 (under the influence of Grady Martin’s classic «fuzzy» recordings such
as ‘Don’t Worry’ and ‘The Fuzz’), I cannot for the life of me find any
evidence of any commercial recordings made with it prior to ‘Satisfaction’. Keith himself allegedly used the pedal
as a temporary substitute for horns — but the horns never came until the Otis
Redding version, so the fuzz pedal had to do, and every one of those fuzzy
garage-rock recordings we know from Nuggets
came after ‘Satisfaction’. The
funny thing is, those old Grady Martin recordings sound pretty nasty and
gimmicky; Keith’s fuzz tone, however, feels perfectly natural for the song.
It’s nasty, too, but it’s alive and
nasty, not «synthetic-nasty», if you get my meaning. (This is how it used to
go, on that Marty Robbins recording of ‘Don’t Worry’: not only
is the sound way too reminiscent of the «faulty equipment» issue, but it
doesn’t really belong in the song). I even like how the fuzz effect shows
signs of instability — instead of running smoothly along with each note, it
sometimes intensifies and sometimes weakens as if it had a life of its own,
really talking to us and all. No AI could learn how to replicate that. Of
the two epochal youth anthems about «-ations» that came out in 1965 —
‘Satisfaction’ and ‘My Generation’ — there is no doubt in my mind which one
is the greatest. As much as I like ‘My Generation’, its flaw is that (like so
many Townshend compositions) it overthinks itself; it’s really a piece of oversimplified
social philosophy masquerading as a rock’n’roll number, from somebody who
feels like he might have read a bit too much Jean-Paul Sartre or watched one
too many of Jean-Luc Godard’s movies. It’s certainly not a crime, but it
redirects some of the song’s magic from your guts toward your brain, thus
dampening the «primal» effect of the song. ‘Satisfaction’ does no such thing;
it’s all about the protagonist’s immediate reaction to the surrounding
bullshit, with no overthinking, excessive self-reflection, or, importantly,
narcissistic self-aggrandizing whatsoever. "I can’t get no satisfaction" just seems so much better to go
along with the general flow than "This
is my generation, baby". Who really cares about whose generation it
is when the real problem is that
you’re trying to make some girl and she tells you "baby, better come back maybe next week because you see I’m on a
losing streak?".. Hey, this is why The Rolling Stones really are a
«people’s band» and The Who appeal so much more to illusion-riddled arthouse
audiences. (Not that those target groups don’t overlap, mind you). The
good news is, I think, that ‘Satisfaction’ still stands up tall and proud
more than a half-century later. Nobody has really been able to improve on
that dirty, stinkin’ fuzz tone, or on Charlie’s unnerving pounding, or on the
line about some useless information
supposed to fire my imagination — more relevant in the age of social
media than anytime before. ("He
can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me"
has aged a little more poorly, but if you replace cigarettes with Iphone
you’ll be getting there). A more complicated question would be concerning the
LP that contains it — how well does that
one stand more than half a century later? Were the Rolling Stones able, by
mid-’65, to have their LP-only material stand up to the quality of their
singles, like the Beatles (usually) did? The
answer is ambiguous and blurry, and here, once again, we are witnessing the «clever»
strategy of the American market: by integrating the band’s outstanding
singles of 1965, it made the American version of Out Of Our Heads, released at the end of July, into a flash of
summery splendor next to its UK counterpart, which only came out at the end
of September and looked somewhat gray and autumnal in comparison; actually,
track-wise it would be more like the equivalent of the equally disappointing US
release of December's Children
(with which it would also share the front sleeve). On the other hand, there
is also no denying that the US version of Out Of Our Heads seems uncomfortably bumpy in comparison — with
A+ level songs sharing the bus with decidedly inferior originals and covers
that clearly belong in the pre-‘Satisfaction’ era. Take
the three above-mentioned biggies off the record, and what you are left with
is rather a letdown in comparison with the tightness and excitement of the
material on Now!. First, there is
a clearly defined tilt towards soul-tinged R&B: Don Covay, Marvin Gaye,
Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, and
Solomon Burke all get represented by one song each, as if skinny white boy
Mick Jagger were challenging them all to five rounds of a ring fight in half
an hour’s time. That’s quite a cocky challenge if you ask me, and it’s even a
wonder that he does not continuously fall flat on his face all the time — but
he does take a bit of a beating; the problem is that, unlike American blues
and American rock’n’roll, American soul
is that one particular genre which the Rolling Stones, as a band, find the most difficult to
subvert to their own musical purposes, and in the end, this is where almost
everything depends on Mick Jagger, and for all his shrewdness and
versatility, Mick Jagger is not going to be always able to get what he wants. Well, if he tries sometimes... Unsurprisingly,
things work out best when Mick’s musical buddies make a strong effort to
support his personal theater. ‘Mercy Mercy’ was a solid hit for Don Covay on the
Atlantic label in the fall of 1964, and, amusingly, Covay’s exceptionally
passionate vocal performance was allegedly backed by the electric guitar
playing of none other than Jimi Hendrix — though only the most seasoned
Hendrix expert might have suspected that, what with the rhythm flow indeed being
quite Jimi-like in terms of chords and phrasing, but with none of the classic
Hendrix flash-and-flair showing up anywhere. It’s a nice and colorful guitar
part, but also quite modest, never threatening to upstage the singer. You
might not even notice it at all. Quite probably nobody ever did back in 1964. This
is something that the Stones set out to remedy — and it helps quite a bit
that their cover happened to be recorded on the very same day as
‘Satisfaction’, with the Maestro FZ-1 still hot from the action. Keith’s riff
is not as complex or crackling here as it is on ‘Satisfaction’, but it still
makes the song roll along with a vengeance, and together with Mick’s attempt
to out-Covay the original singer by pushing his emotional overdrive even
deeper into his pharynx, they make the song even less of a genuine plea for
mercy and even more of an actual threat. In this version, "if you leave me baby / Girl if you put me
down / I’m gonna make it to the nearest river child / And jump overboard and
drown" becomes a menacing ultimatum. As in, do you really want to live out the rest of
your years with a lover’s suicide weighing heavy on your conscience, girl?
You’d better think twice before committing the biggest mistake of your
life... This makes the recorded version into a meaningful, garage-y update on
the more country-style original — and a hell of an energetic opener for the
LP (note that ‘Satisfaction’ opens the second side, so talk about a strong
«fuzzy welcome» each time you interact with your turntable). Another
clever reinvention is ʽCry To Meʼ. Solomon Burke already was one of the band’s most
frequently covered artists (perhaps Mick found it easier to adapt to his
style than to any other soul singer’s), but this is the first time they
directly tampered with the original song’s mood, groove, and melody,
reflecting an increased level of confidence. Burke’s big hit for Atlantic
was an energetic dance number in the vein of ‘Stand By Me’, and great as it
was, it did create somewhat of a discrepancy between the lively melody and
the depressed lyrics. The Stones set out to remedy that flaw; slowing down
the tempo and redirecting the song toward a more natural I-vi-IV-V
progression, they turn it into a lyrical ballad, and it’s a good thing —
compare Solomon’s jumping into the song with the lively "WHEN your baby...!" and Mick’s
slow easing into it with the tender and breathy "when your baaaaby...", creating an atmosphere of empathy and
consolation from the very first notes. (Which, by the way, reminds me of the
often overlooked role of Mick Jagger as one of the best vocal empathizers in
the history of rock music — from ‘Cry To Me’ to ‘Shine A Light’ and ‘Winter’,
the man could be a true soulmate like no other, even if this facet of his
tends to get forgotten behind all the swagger and posturing). Meanwhile,
on the musical front Brian Jones switches to rhythm guitar, while Keith once
again helps out with a lead part that is every bit the rightful soulful
counterpart of the vocal. The best is saved for last, when the singer and the
guitar player fight each other over the coda with machine-gunned vocal barks
and bluesy licks, making the whole thing wilder and crazier than any soul
ballad they’d tried out before. There was no such coda in the Burke original,
meaning that the Stones also add a whole new dynamic development — the tune
starts out as a subtle ballad and ends as a thunderstorm. You must,
therefore, excuse me for openly declaring that the reinvented version is
downright superior to the original, even if Mick Jagger could never hope to
be able to belt out "DON’T YOU
FEEL LIKE CRYYYYYING" with all the un-earthly power of the «Muhammad
Ali of Soul». Sometimes, though, inventiveness and subtlety carry the day
over brashness and brawn. But
not everything works as smoothly as it does on ‘Mercy Mercy’ and ‘Cry To Me’.
On the other three covers, the band does not manage to come up with similarly
creative rearrangements, and the entire burden of living up to the originals
is placed on Mick’s shoulders — with somewhat competent, but ultimately
useless results. Marvin Gaye’s ‘Hitch Hike’ is a bit stiff, Mick has a hard
time matching Marvin’s vivaciousness, and the guitar accompaniment is
actually less creative than the
cool brass and woodwind interplay on the Motown original. Otis Redding’s
‘That’s How Strong My Love Is’ is copied faithfully to the original, which
means that the guitars are just out there strumming, and it’s all about Mick
Jagger trying to imitate Otis’ "now I’m soft and tremble and weepy / now
I’m incensed and energized and screechy" approach... and it’s not a
half-bad imitation, but it would all be much better once he’d start using all
that experience for his own compositions rather than directly copying the
vibe of one of the greatest soul singers of all time. Precisely the same
judgement applies to Sam Cooke’s ‘Good Times’ — a beautiful pop song in its
own right to which the Stones add absolutely nothing. (Other than, perhaps,
Charlie Watts’ magnificently rolled drum intro). With
all that soul stuff scattered around, one might almost forget about the
Rolling Stones being a rock’n’roll band. To hastily remedy that at the last
moment, Decca pads the record with a live version of Bo Diddley’s ritualistic
vamp ‘I’m All Right’, «borrowed» from the earlier EP Got Live If You Want It! (released in June ’65 and recorded three
months earlier). It’s a good, classic example of an early «Stones rave»
(though it’s much too short to properly convey the trance-inducing powers of
the Stones in that era), but there are some problems — first, it’s live, so
there are obvious problems with sound fidelity; second, it feels ripped out
of its dutiful context; and third, it would be reinstated back into its
dutiful context on next year’s full-fledged live LP (I think that the actual
recorded instrumental track might be exactly the same, but the vocals would
be re-recorded in the studio). As enjoyable as some of those «dive-bomb»
guitar patterns from Brian can be, the track does not really feel at ease sitting
here in the middle of the LP. There
is still enough space left for three more originals, at least two of which
qualify as throwaways, albeit of a very different nature. ʽThe Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Manʼ is basically a repetitive one-riff vamp (could have
been a serious influence on The Velvet Underground, though) whose primary
purpose, as I had thought for a pretty long time, was to vent some
frustration at the alarmingly expanding ego of Andrew Loog Oldham, but,
apparently, the true culprit here
was a certain George
Sherlock Raymond Jr. (obviously no relation to the protagonist of the Buster
Keaton movie), one of Decca’s promotion department people who irritated the
band so much that they pilfered the groove from Buster Brown’s ‘Fannie Mae’ and the
song titling principle from Bob Dylan to write one of their first bits of
specifically targeted social satire. The only thing I really admire about it
are Mick’s highly expressive ejective fricatives on the "sss’eer-ssss’ucker ssss’uit"
adlibbing bit at the end. Other than that — well, it’s always fun to hear the
Rolling Stones get angry and sarcastic about something or somebody, but it
doesn’t always automatically imply classic status. Another
bit of unsatisfactory filler is the two-minute long ‘One More Try’, a fast,
cheery pop-rocker that shares a similar vibe with their very first single —
the cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On’ — and, honestly, sounds as if it could
have been written around the same time (early 1963, that is). I really like Brian
Jones’ harmonica part — during the instrumental break, at one point he seems
to really «lift off» and briefly take the band in some different and exciting
direction — but everything else about it feels trivial and disappointing,
particularly the wannabe-uplifting chorus of "don’t you panick, don’t you panick, give it one more try!". Four
years later, the Stones would grow up big enough to add an epic feel to this
kind of encouraging vibe and end up with ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’;
this, however, is child play,
especially sitting next to the likes of ‘Satisfaction’ or ‘Cry To Me’. On
the other hand, the album’s one genuinely «sleeping gem» is the original B-side
to ‘Satisfaction’: ‘The Spider And The Fly’, riding on a cool, calm and
collected mid-tempo Jimmy Reed groove, is a delightfully devilish and cynical
exploration of the subject of sexual temptation, a song that would surely
have ended up on Oscar Wilde’s playlist had he lived to be a hundred and
fifty. The yarn spun by Mick over three and a half minutes offers no
moralistic conclusions whatsoever, and the story does not even have an ending
— we never get to learn what happened to the protagonist’s relation with his "girl at home" after his sordid
tryst with the random lady who "was
common, flirty, looked about thirty" and "said she liked the way I held the microphone", but something
tells me he could hardly be expected to be repentant about what had
perspired. In any case, what matters are not the words as is the intonation
with which most of them are sung: slow, drawly, grinning from ear to ear,
this is the first occasion on a Stones record where Mick Jagger goes for a
positively «Luciferian» delivery that would, naturally, reach its apogee on ‘Sympathy
For The Devil’ three years later. The
atmospheric / emotional contrast between the likes of ‘The Spider And The Fly’
and ‘Cry To Me’ is, in fact, quite astonishing — it’s a much, much wider
range than anything any of the Beatles were capable of, and while the Beatles
could get nasty and cynical every
once in a while, even bad boy John preferred to openly get in your face
rather than play the part of a man possessed by a devilish trickster spirit
on the inside. The mere sound of Mick Jagger pronouncing the word "hi" in the second verse would send
mothers and fathers lock up their daughters — or, in the 2020s, send social
media mobs up in flames of moralistic indignation. Meanwhile, Keith Richards
completely and utterly conforms to the spirit of his working partner by
playing a simple, 100% efficient guitar solo that oozes the same essence of
naughty seduction. If ‘Satisfaction’ was an almost «righteous» protest song
in its core, then its B-side was downright criminal — the anthem of somebody
who does not shout out loud on
every corner about getting no satisfaction, but instead prefers to achieve it
surreptitiously and salaciously while breaking every rule of good
old-fashioned moral conduct. Utterly disgusting! And utterly irresistible. "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it" —
remember that one? As
you can see, Out Of Our Heads is
quite a mixed bunch in the end, a decidedly transitional album if there ever
was one for the Stones — which is perfectly normal for 1965, a year of
transition for just about everybody, starting with the Beatles themselves. That
said, all of my criticisms of the individual songs are thoroughly relative: I
do actually enjoy the record from start to finish, because, hey, even ‘Hitch Hike’
and ‘Good Times’ are great songs and the Stones do them justice — it’s just
that I would have no need for them on my desert island if the original
versions were available. Any mid-Sixties crossing from «musical adolescence»
into «musical maturity» would be a bit of a bumpy ride by definition, and
after all these years, it’s a lot of fun to look back at all the bumps and
discuss the relative degrees, shades, and perks of their bumpiness. |
||||||||
[*] For personal
convenience’ sake, in these reviews I follow the Rolling Stones’ 1964–67
original American catalog rather than the smaller UK one. This particular album
in the US was subtitled England’s Newest
Hit Makers (the UK sleeve was a plain photo with no wording at all) and
started out with the Stones’ latest hit single, ‘Not Fade Away’, replacing a
cover of Bo Diddley’s ‘Mona’ in the UK version. Subsequent differences between
US and UK albums would be much larger.
