THE ROLLING STONES
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Recording years |
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Music sample |
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1963–2016 |
Classic rhythm’n’blues |
Midnight Rambler (1970) |
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THE ROLLING STONES[*] |
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Album
released: Apr. 16, 1964 |
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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. |
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"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. |
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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? |
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Album
released: Oct. 17, 1964 |
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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. |
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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. |
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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... |
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released: Feb. 13, 1965 |
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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. |
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REVIEW
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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. |
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Album
released: July 30, 1965 |
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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. |
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REVIEW
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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. |
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Album
released: Dec. 4, 1965 |
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Tracks: 1) She Said Yeah; 2) Talkin’ About
You; 3) You Better Move On; 4) Look What You’ve Done; 5) The Singer Not The
Song; 6) Route 66 [live]; 7) Get Off Of My Cloud; 8) I’m Free; 9) As Tears Go
By; 10) Gotta Get Away; 11) Blue Turns To Grey; 12) I’m Moving On [live]. |
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REVIEW If Out Of Our Heads was the Stones’ transitional album, their third
and last American LP for 1965 was a downright schizophrenic one —
unquestionably the most incoherent collection of songs to ever come out of
the band as a more or less «original» product (though Flowers would probably come somewhat close two years later). The
United States thought it needed a new Rolling Stones record for the Christmas
market — President Johnson even signed a special executive order, as any
respectable brand of AI is sure to inform you these days if you press it hard
enough for classified information — and I guess Andrew Loog Oldham had
another unused piece of his trashy beat poetry still lying around, so,
without thinking twice, he took the album cover of the UK edition of Out Of Our Heads, stuck his words on
the back side, temporarily rechristened the Rolling Stones to December’s
Children because it made them sound like characters out of an Edith Nesbit or
Gertrude Warner novel, and filled the record with everything he could lay his
hands on (although, in all honesty, I do not know who was directly
responsible for the content and sequencing). |
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To be fair, December’s Children is not that
jumbled compared to certain other chronologically challenged monstrosities
sacrificed by American record industry to the voracious devils of
consumerism. The only song that sticks out quite sorely is the cover of
Arthur Alexander’s ‘You Better Move On’, originally released as part of the
self-titled Rolling Stones EP for
the UK market in early 1964 (its other three covers — Chuck Berry’s ‘Bye Bye
Johnny’, Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’, and the Coasters’ ‘Poison Ivy’ — somehow
managed to avoid ending up on any of the original US LP releases and up to
this day can only be found on various compilations, though they are not
outstanding enough for us to regret the fact). Everything else is at least
strictly from 1965: four songs re-plundering the British edition of Out Of Our Heads (which itself came
out after the US edition), two
songs representing the band’s latest single, three songs exclusively recorded
for the new album, and two more live performances taken from the same Got Live If You Want It! EP that had
already yielded ‘I’m Alright’ for the US version of Out Of Our Heads. There’s no sense of unity or purpose
whatsoever, but it is a fairly
representative slice of the Stones — all their good and bad sides — the way
they were wobblin’ all over rock music’s transformational year. The key track on the LP, brashly
kicking off its Side B, is undoubtedly the single: ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ has
not quite managed to linger on in the public conscious with as much
fundamentality as ‘Satisfaction’, but way back in its time it was as much of
an anthem for the fall of ’65 as ‘Satisfaction’ had been an anthem for its
summer. Some might even quip that it repeats the same formula a bit too blatantly for comfort: same key of
E major, same type of looping, nagging riff, same prevalence of wordy message
over any extra musical embellishments (e.g. the lack of a guitar solo), same
kind of fuck-off for the parasites, squares, and establishment types ruining
Mick Jagger’s road to peace and happiness. That’s all true, but the end vibe
is actually very different from
‘Satisfaction’ — in a way, the song really ushers in that very special period
of the band’s history, lasting all through 1966 and early 1967, which some
people occasionally lightly deride as «the Stones chameleoning into
Brit-poppy intellectuals» but true fans recognize as simply a very special
period in the history of the Rolling Stones’ multi-stage greatness. For starters, unlike
‘Satisfaction’, ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ is not as explicitly «dirty» or «sexy»,
neither in its words nor in its music. Each of the three little «stories»
that the verses tell puts down its own category of people — the mods, the
philistines, the shufflebutts — but somehow completely forgets to lock in on
Mick Jagger’s sexual frustrations, as if they’d suddenly become irrelevant
next to all these far more pressing problems. This is mirrored in the music
by the near-complete removal of fuzz or distortion from the melody: actually,
Keith still plays those choppy, crackling rhythm chords but this time around they are completely pushed into the background
by the much louder, cleaner, ringing lead riff from Brian — in a way, despite
Brian, as usual, not being credited for the songwriting at all, this makes
the song a sort of «Brian Jones response» to the «Keith Richards challenge»
of ‘Satisfaction’. (No wonder, then, that in his subsequent remarks Keith
does not seem to think too highly of the song, and that the band only dusted
it off very sporadically on their post-’66 tours, notwithstanding its
commercial success and critical acclaim). Ian Stewart’s supporting piano part
also helps light up the overall mood, supporting the song’s more easy-going,
almost comedic vibe. For another thing, if the lyrical
hero of ‘Satisfaction’ was basically a guy chasing around the world in hopes
of fulfillment, it took just three more months for the lyrical hero to get
tired of the limelight and retreat into seclusion. The second verse of the
song does imply something like partying way past midnight, but it’s still a home party ("it’s three a.m., don’t you people ever wanna go to bed?") —
and the first and third verse are all Mick’s take on the I want to be alone vibe. Incidentally, ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ is
listed as having been recorded at the RCA studios in Hollywood on September
6–7, which is exactly two days
after the rowdy Irish shows documented in the Charlie Is My Darling road movie, and exactly four days before the start of an even rowdier
tour of Germany — and you can already see numerous signs of exhaustion in the
movie. Life on the road was not an easy thing back in 1965, not even for the
suddenly-rich-and-famous — especially
not for the rich and famous, might I add, and ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ has a
solid bit of that attitude in it. The song itself does not sound tired, of course. Structure-wise, it is a
bit less original than ‘Satisfaction’ because, if you listen to it long
enough, you realize that its backbone is essentially lifted from the McCoys’
hit version of ‘Hang On
Sloopy’ — released in July ’65 and very likely a regular guest on the
Stones’ own turntables (as well as the Yardbirds’ For Your Love LP from the same month — both bands independently
got the song from the original 1964 Vibrations version). Not that they even
tried to conceal this legacy, as Mick would occasionally chant hang on sloopy during live performances of
the song. But they sped up and intensified the groove, eliminating all the
silence between notes in favor of Brian’s busy lead riff, and then made
Charlie Watts the second biggest star of the song (some might even say the
first) by letting him metronomically play this complex rhythmic figure
through all of its three minutes. Each of Mick’s lengthy «rapped»
lines ends up both introduced and closed off by a five-or-six-shot snare fill
that adds intensity and gravity to the declaration — but with plenty of
restraint and self-control, no Keith Moon wildness here. While this is hardly
the most technically challenging pattern in the world, keeping it so cool and
steady for three minutes must be one hell of an achievement — if you listen
to the live versions from 1966 or later, they all offer an approximation of
this perfection at best (and I think that on those rare occasions when they
played the song post-1966, Charlie mostly just kept the beat without
bothering at all to harshly regulate those snare fills — not that we’d have
any right to hold that against him). So, along with ‘Ruby Tuesday’, ‘Get Off
Of My Cloud’ is arguably the single best example of Mr. Watts as King of The
Cool Snare Fill. My only problem with the song is
that, just like ‘Satisfaction’, it exhausts its bag of tricks for us over the
first verse and chorus, leaving only the continuing flow of Jagger’s narrative
as an element of further surprise. It’s quite a fun flow, even giving Mick
the opportunity to throw in an early veiled drug reference (that bit about a
‘detergent pack’ referred to by the
‘guy who’s all dressed up just like a
Union Jack’ — and no, I don’t really think Mick is talking about Pete
Townshend here, as some have suggested), although drugs are really a very
peripheral motive of the song. But at this point, the Stones have not yet
learned to adopt the contemporary Beatlesque approach to songwriting — make each next verse a tiny bit different
from the first — perhaps intentionally, as they put far more trust in the
mesmerizing power of the groove than the Beatles ever did. ‘Get Off Of My
Cloud’, though, is still a catchy pop-rock song first and a
psycho-stimulating groove only in the second place, so it always leaves me
wanting for a bit more to it. The B-sides to the single were
different depending on which side of the Atlantic you heard them at the time.
For the slightly earlier US release they took ‘I’m Free’, the last song on
the recent UK edition of Out Of Our
Heads that American audiences had not yet had the opportunity to hear.
This, somewhat amusingly, reminds me that three out of four greatest British
bands of all time all had a song of their own called ‘I’m (I Am) Free’ — only
the Beatles decided not to join in on the trend — and all three have
something to say about their respective band’s nature, be it the
idealistic-poetic flow of Dave Davies (on The Kink Kontroversy), the bitter-cynical take of Pete Townshend
(on Tommy), or the rough and cocky
declarativeness of the Stones. Ironically, though, the song itself is nowhere
near as «free» as the lyrics suggest: it is tightly locked into a steady
blues pattern, so that Jagger’s "I’m
free to sing my song though it gets out of time" is disappointing
(you kind of expect the song to get out of time at that moment, but it
doesn’t. FAKE NEWS!). It also blatantly borrows the
"love me, hold me" bit
from the Beatles’ ‘Eight Days A Week’ — and I have no idea why, though the
quotation is so obvious it must have been very, very deliberate. Come to
think of it, though, ‘Eight Days A Week’ was one of the Fab Four’s
generically chivalrous declarations of eternal love for that one special
person ("one thing I can say girl,
love you all the time"), while the Stones openly declare that "I’m free to choose who I please any ol’
time, I’m free to please who I choose any ol’ time" — thus, you
could view the quotation as a subtle mockery / challenge of that ol’-timey
romantic shit, as illustrated by grandpa-value-lovin’ conservative
Liverpudlians and directly opposed to the progressive ideals of free love,
casual sex, and so much tambourine-fueled debauchery. If only it would make
the song itself compositionally superior to ‘Eight Days A Week’, that might
have nailed the coffin lid... but alas, no such luck. It’s a fairly
second-rate creation even by the Stones’ overall standards circa 1965, when
they were still, on the whole, better interpreters of other people’s takes on
rock’n’roll and R&B than masters of their own songwriting trade. It is still much less embarrassing
than the B-side they came up with for the UK version of the single: ‘The
Singer Not The Song’, albeit recorded at the same session as ‘Get Off Of My
Cloud’, feels like a possible outtake from their earliest meek exercises in
songwriting — its vibe has something in common with that of ‘Tell Me’, which
I believe was quite superior — and while I do not mind the weird sound of the
arrogantly out-of-tune acoustic guitars, I do mind the clumsy lyrics and Mick’s cringey attempt at
simulating tragic romance without the saving grace of his nasty ironic
nature. If you dig deep enough to discover that the title might be a
reference to an obscure Roy Ward Baker
movie from 1961, notable, among other things, for its subtle toying with
homosexuality, then maybe lyrics like "there’s something wrong and it gives me that feeling inside that I
know I must be right" can take on a whole new life and maybe we can
even advise Mr. Lou Reed to eat his heart out or something like that. But it
takes a whole lot of digging to even begin surmising this stuff; as it is,
though, the chorus resolution of "it’s
the si-i-i-i-nger, not the song!" has always struck me as one of the
corniest bits the Stones ever put to tape. (Not even Big Star’s Alex Chilton
could save the tune when he recorded a much more rocking version
of it for his Bach’s Bottom album
in 1981 — it ended up sounding like third-rate Jam). But perhaps the strangest — not
the worst, just the strangest — creative decision that the Stones took that
year, just four days after the release of the UK single version of ‘Get Off
Of My Cloud’, was to go into the studio and make their own official version
of ‘As Tears Go By’. We know that this was one of the very first
Jagger-Richards compositions, originally called ‘As Time Goes By’
before they installed an anti-cliché firewall in their brains that
automatically changed ‘time’ to ‘tears’. We also believe that it was likely the very song they wrote when Andrew
Oldham locked them up in that kitchen, telling them to put out (self-written
songs) or get out, although the veracity of this account depends on the
highly fickle factor of personal memories. But we do know that back in 1964, the Stones made the artistically
sensible decision not to release the song themselves but rather donate it to
Marianne Faithfull, whose brand new cultural image seemingly agreed far more
with the spirit of the song than that of the «bad boys of rock’n’roll» — and,
subsequently, the song became one of the highlights
of her own debut record. Nobody in the UK could play the role of a saintly
medieval maiden, locked away in an ivory tower to drown in her own tears,
better than Marianne did in 1964. Why the Stones themselves suddenly
decided to return to this early exercise in songwriting more than a year
later and reclaim it as their own property is anybody’s guess. Yet if you
look closely at the context, the tentative guess becomes a surefire one: on
September 13, 1965 the Beatles put out ‘Yesterday’ as a single (only in
America, though), and on October 9 it rose to the #1 slot where it stayed for
four weeks. Right in the middle of that stay, the Rolling Stones march into
London’s IBC Studios and record their own
sentimental, acoustic guitar-plus-strings heartbreaking ballad. They did not
even have the time to write a new one — perhaps Andrew Oldham had put them to
the whip once more — but the important thing here was not to lose the
momentum, as the market seemed to be hot for more of that «rock’n’rollin’
boys embracing the sweet temptation of the Art Ballad» type of product. I have to confess that I myself
have never really loved the Stones’
version of ‘As Tears Go By’, though I do admit that, with the professional help
of Mike Leander’s orchestration, they did make it into a «lovely» piece of
work. Amusingly, they ended up steering it into even more classical territory
than Marianne by completely stripping the song of its rhythmic base (the
original recording had a steady pop rhythm section), again, in a clear nod to
‘Yesterday’, but also to simply emphasize the intimacy of the scene — and, in
a subtle way, the exclusive spiritual connection between The Glimmer Twins,
as it’s literally just Mick’s voice and Keith’s guitar, with the angelic
strings completing their «marriage». This may have made it into even more of
a shock for typical Stones fans (at least, male ones — the girls must have gladly embraced it as swoon
material) than ‘Yesterday’ was for Beatles devotees. At least «pretty boy
Paul» had already established the reputation of a sentimental balladeer, with
the seeds of ‘Yesterday’ sown in songs like ‘Till There Was You’ or ‘And I
Love Her’. «Bad boy Mick», on the other hand, was mostly known for breaking
other girls’ hearts, not sitting out there sulking in the darkness and
nurturing his own bleeding one. Shock or
no shock, though, the very fact of
an artist working outside their comfort zone is by no means a bad thing, and
on paper — as well as in certain versions, like Marianne’s — ‘As Tears Go By’
is a pretty good song, with a strong buildup to the chorus and everything.
But it is simply not the kind of a
song where the classic suspension-of-disbelief trick is possible if the
singer behind it is Mick Jagger. It’s not that Mick is terminally incapable
of conveying deep sentiment and vulnerability (though some might insist he
is); it’s that his psychologism is always at its best when it is tempered
with a bit of intellectual cynicism. Mick Jagger is only Mick Jagger when he
stays in control; Mick Jagger trying to emulate broken-down despair, hopelessness, and defeat comes across as a
bad actor. Regardless of who actually wrote the song, I believe Marianne when
she sings it, but I have a hard time trying to believe the big fat lips of
Michael Philip "I Can’t Get No" Jagger. Also, I don’t really like
Mike Leander’s string quartet arrangement. It’s too loud and overblown,
almost to the point of "I’ll see your string quartet and raise all the
way up to eleven, Mr. George Martin, bitch!"
He did a much more tasteful job on Marianne’s original version, in my opinion
— here, it seriously smells of elementary penis envy. Ultimately,
I think the Stones’ version of ‘As Tears Go By’ has some historical
importance, in that it was an early attempt to stick their hand into the
tricky genre of baroque-pop, which would be so much en vogue for the next year and at which they would get so much
better, especially once Brian Jones would be fully included into the creative
process. Its release as a single did show the world that the Stones could be very different, though it probably
also became the first in a chain series of arguments about how the Stones
were really nothing but Beatle copycats. The truth about that rivalry is
probably that the Stones did see
the Beatles as a guiding light, especially when it came to groping around for
new creative directions with a strong promise of commercial and critical
appeal. But unlike so many other bands, the Stones never stooped to directly
copying or mimicking the Beatles in these directions. Indeed, on a formal
level ‘As Tears Go By’ is a direct reaction to the success of ‘Yesterday’ —
yet it is still a completely different song, whose spirit is perhaps closer
to 16th century England than to... uhm... well, to whatever the spirit of ‘Yesterday’
is closest to. (And if you want something that is really cringeworthy — San Remo-style cringeworthy, that is — you
should probably try and listen to Mick singing the song in Italian, retitled
‘Con Le Mie Lacrime’
for the nobly aristocratic continental European market). Anyway, it
is time to finally turn our attention to LP-exclusive territory here,
considering that American audiences actually heard the Stones’ version of ‘As
Tears Go By’ on their copy of December’s
Children (December 4) before getting a chance to buy it as a single
(December 18). One song that they got to hear later than their luckier UK brethren, though, was ‘She Said Yeah’
— an old jokey Little Richard-style rock’n’roll number, apparently one of the
first Sonny Bono songwriting credits, first recorded by New Orleanian
jokester Larry Williams.
It was popular enough in Britain, with both the Animals and Cliff Bennett
releasing cover versions in 1964; but it took the Stones to turn it into
something else, so much so that it became the opening track on both the UK edition of Out Of Our Heads and, later, on December’s
Children. Chucking
out the piano and replacing it with harsh, fuzzy, metallic riffs, Keith
Richards essentially creates here the perfect blueprint for punk rock; I
don’t intend to say that nobody else rocked with such intensity back in 1965,
but the overall combination of nasty tone, fuzz, feedback, simplicity, and speed — once the entire band kicks
into gear, ‘She Said Yeah’ becomes the fastest anybody ever played back in
1965 — would be pretty tough to challenge for its time. They manage to bring
the original running length from 1:50 all the way down to 1:35, and when you
put it together with the primal crudeness of the lyrics — dom deedle dee dom dom, little girl where
did you come from? — that’s the Ramones for you, pure and simple, except
that the riffs are bluesier, the lead vocalist is less friendly than Joey,
and the guitar solo is screechier and fussier than a typical (and rare)
Johnny lead. Had this recording come from a little-known one-hit band, to be
included on a garage-rock collection like Nuggets, it would have been one of the major highlights; coming
from the Rolling Stones, it amply demonstrates that the Stones, on the whole,
were not a bona fide «garage-rock band» not through lack of spirit or
«(anti-)musicianship», but through voluntary choice. They would very, very rarely rock as hard as they do on
‘She Said Yeah’ in the next two years — with the Beatles and the Kinks
pointing the way to go, melody and subtlety would keep on winning over pure energy
— but they sure as hell would not forget this valuable lesson. Unfortunately,
of the remaining studio recordings included on the LP, nothing comes close to
that power. The only other patented «rocker» is Chuck Berry’s ‘Talkin’ About
You’, a second-rate song from 1961 which sounds good, but «1964-good»: it is
the exact kind of sound that the Stones had going for themselves on their
earliest records, and you’d think that by the fall of 1965 they would already
get past that. Likewise, their latest stab at straightforward 12-bar blues —
Muddy Waters’ ‘Look What You’ve Done’ — sounds generic and predictable, just
like any harmonica-soaked 12-bar blues they ever did before (think
‘Confessin’ The Blues’, for instance, but with less of that delicious vocal
nastiness). It’s not bad in general, but it’s bad in the context of 1965,
reminding me of all those relative Beatles lowlights like ‘Wait’ or ‘Another
Girl’ which are good songs but tend to leave you with that «oh, I kinda
expected more...» aftertaste once you’ve been spoiled by all the extra
creativity. Same thing here — caught in the transition from inspired cover
artists to trend-setting original songwriters, multiplied by the first wave
of exhaustion from spinning inside the pop machine gears, the Stones
unpredictably churn out golden nuggets mixed with (what has by now become)
generic workmanship. The other two
studio tracks are original compositions, but neither feels inspired or
efficient to my ears. ‘Gotta Get Away’ is a slow, monotonous shuffle written,
perhaps, under the influence of Sonny & Cher or any other such folk-pop act,
with a barely developed chorus and a perfunctory repetitive hook; Jagger’s "gotta get away, gotta get away..."
is delivered with so little passion, you’d think this was a jingle he
specially wrote for his court session on the advice of a corny divorce
lawyer. Clocking in at just over two minutes without even featuring a bridge
or an instrumental break, it’s typical filler stuff. As for the ballad ‘Blue Turns
To Grey’, it is somewhat polarizing — some fans believe it is actually one of
the band’s deepest breakup anthems, and I have to concur that lyrics-wise, it
is rather a highlight from those early days: "so now that she is gone / you won’t be sad for long... / then blue turns
to grey" is a cool twist, as not a lot of pop songwriters wrote
about the dull grayness of loveless existence as opposed to regular sadness
and despair. But melody-wise, well, Jagger and Richards are no Paul McCartney
or Rod Argent, and ‘Blue Turns To Grey’ is no ‘For No One’ or ‘I Remember When
I Loved Her’, just to knock off a few awesome melancholic tunes for
comparison. Definitely a step up from ‘The Singer Not The Song’, but still
the Stones’ best days as bitter balladeers were yet ahead of them. Leaving
behind the weird decision to beef up the track listing with that
early-as-heck cover of Arthur Alexander’s ‘You Better Move On’, we’re saving
some of the best for last. Continuing to rip apart the short EP Got Live If You Want It! that was
already mentioned in the review of Out
Of Our Heads, the Stones finish off each side of December’s Children with one live track from that performance —
and although the two of them together barely cover five minutes of the live
experience, take this from me: this is five of the finest minutes of a live Rolling
Stones experience you ever get. If you think that the Rolling Stones only
really earned their title of greatest
rock’n’roll band in the world around 1969, with Mick Taylor and all those
new awesome songs and Madison Square Garden and Altamont and Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! — or, for that
matter, if you think the Rolling Stones weren’t all that great even back then
as a live band at all — these short, to-the-point blast-offs of ‘Route ’66’
and Hank Snow’s ‘I’m Moving On’ should at least demonstrate that the Stones’
reputation as live performers was far from entirely built on Mick Jagger’s big
lips and physical prowess. At most, it should demonstrate that the Stones
were the greatest live rock’n’roll
band in the world already back in 1965. The only
actual hint at that physical prowess provided by the recordings is the
scream-a-thronic background, which, unfortunately shall prevent many a
potential admirer from truly digging them. To quote James Hector’s little
guide to the Stones’ music on this version of ‘Route ’66’, "when Keith Richards began his solo, the
audience erupted, but probably not in appreciation of his virtuosity; my
money’s on Jagger’s leg-twitching James Brown impression". Ah, but
you don’t really see the James Brown
impression here, so that shrill, siren-like, absolutely hysterical guitar
eruption still remains as the natural psychological association with the
audience response, and it’s one of the coolest moments in official recorded Rolling
Stones live history. And it’s not just the solo — Keith is well-oiled
perfection throughout, shadowing Mick with never-erring, always-moving,
rough-’n’tough lead lines all the way, while Charlie and Bill provide simply
the fastest and tightest rhythmic foundation you could hope to find anywhere
at the time. Not that the
Beatles couldn’t be pretty tight, too, particularly when they brushed off stuff
like ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ or ‘Matchbox’, but theirs was a joyful tightness, replete
with Ringo wreaking childish havoc on the cymbals, John «sometimes I play the
fool» Lennon emphasizing the irony of it all, and Paul trying to endear
himself and the lads to the audience to the best of his ability. These guys, though, they’re not as
much about connecting with the fans as they are about subjecting these fans
to a brutal blitzkrieg. Even Mick’s voice has somehow toughened up by 1965,
with an extra metallic ring and brash confidence squeezing out the last drops
of insecure childishness that you can still hear, for instance, in some live BBC
recordings from early-to-mid 1964. This here is the sound of a fully mature
rockin’ warhorse, capable of operating with metronomic precision — the result
of a most fortunate arrangement between cool-calm-and-collected professionalism
(Bill and Charlie) and perfectly controlled musical violence (everybody else).
«Lawful evil» at its finest, as opposed to the «chaotic evil» of your average
garage band. This is
perhaps even better heard on ‘I’m Moving On’, which is sometimes quoted as
one of early British Invasion’s most successful transformations of country
into rock’n’roll — although, in all honesty, the Stones are following Ray Charles’
R&B version from Genius Sings The Blues
here rather than Hank Snow’s actual country original, so the achievement is
not nearly as tremendous as might have been thought. (It’s still hilarious,
though, to hear the ultimate
source and the latest reinvention back-to-back and marvel how a song with
such an original sunny, optimistic, and innocent disposition could end up sounding
like a rabid stampeding buffalo’s mating call). Even so, when
Bill and Charlie establish their proto-metallic groove in the very first
seconds, they pretty much invent the blueprint for half of Hawkwind’s classic
material — if only this weren’t just for two minutes, but could go on for
about 10 or 15, it’d be the perfect trance-inducing «stoner rock» groove ages
before the term was even invented. And where Keith is the big musical hero on
‘Route ’66’, here the stage is occupied by Brian Jones and his delicious Elmore
James-ian Hawaiian slide runs — which seem to come from a completely
different terrain but fit in perfectly with the groove. The thundering bass,
the unerring drums, the golden waves of Brian’s guitar, the nasty undertones
of Mick’s vocals, the chaotic harmonica blasts, the
out-of-tune-but-passionate backing vocals from Keith, and even the wild flow
of the audience screams — it’s two minutes of the most intense controlled chaos
there could ever be. Yes, it’s
just the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world, the Rolling Stones. They
would soon lose the honor for a few turbulent years — which is why, perhaps,
the «1969 comeback» is sometimes intuitively perceived as a beginning to the band’s live
greatness, but by all means it was
a comeback, because the Stones had hit their original live peak somewhere
right about this time. Brian Jones
never sounded better as a slide-infatuated bluesman, Keith would never come
back to outchucking Chuck Berry while playing his rock’n’roll grooves with
such speed and precision, and Mick’s ego was at that perfect intersection of
adult confidence with restrictive discipline; by 1969, «adult confidence» would
already be tainted with stage narcissism, and discipline would begin to
falter (reaching an absolute nadir in the mid-1970s). Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! would, of course, have the benefits of great
songwriting, cleaner sound, and monumental epic vibes, but still, these few
tracks make me extremely sad that the boys and Andrew Oldham did not manage
to come up with a truly great LP-size sample of the classic Stones’ live
sound from mid-’65 à la Five Live Yardbirds. (The Got Live LP from next year, alas, would
already be not quite it for
multiple reasons that shall be discussed once we get around to it). Thus, as
you can see, December’s Children
ends up being an extremely mixed bag, confusing everything — covers and
originals, live and studio tracks, old bearded outtakes and cutting-edge
singles, fabulous songwriting and generic filler. Perhaps this was, in a way,
reflective of the band’s actual state of mind at the end of 1965, (a) torn
between their original love of straightforward blues, R&B, and rock’n’roll
and the need to adapt to rapidly changing trends, (b) desperately trying to
solidify their status as original songwriters to retain a legitimate place on
the A-tier list, (c) exhausted from incessant touring while still under
constant pressure to uphold the «bad boy» image, (d) already suffering from
internal rivalry between the Mick / Keith duo, on one hand, and Brian Jones,
on the other, whose ambitions to make a really big something of himself were
only offset by the fact that he did not quite understand himself what kind of
«something» he had in mind. As Alex Chilton, in a sort of retro-prophetic
way, would sing eight years later, «december
boys got it bad», and although the line had nothing to do with the Rolling
Stones, I think it quite appropriately summarizes the situation here. Much
more so than Andrew Oldham’s stupid beat poetry on the back cover, anyway. |
||||||||
[*] 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.
