The Rolling Stones

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The Rolling Stones: Beggars Banquet

Beggars Banquet

After the confusion and grappling for identity shown by Their Satanic Majesties Request, it was crucial for the Rolling Stones to find themselves. They had gone through being a blues band, an R&B band, a soul band, a pop band, and a psychedelic band, all with varying degrees of success. But with Beggars Banquet, the Stones found their real identity: they would take all the blues and country elements that they loved and synthesize them into a brand of bluesy rock and roll the likes of which hadn’t really been heard before.

The transformation started with a single, but what a single it was. “Jumping Jack Flash” tweaked the riff of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and added a myth-making blues rock lyric (“I was born in a crossfire hurricane/And I howled at my ma in the driving rain” is easily as good as anything Muddy Waters came up with) to define the sound of the Rolling Stones once and for all. Now, over 40 years later, it remains the definitive Stones song, if not the best.

The B-side was a holdover from the Majesties sessions, but far superior to almost everything on that album. “Child Of The Moon” was tinged with holdover psychedelia, but played tougher than anything except “2000 Light Years From Home.”

As good as the single was, it was just a foretaste of the album that followed. Beggars Banquet is an anomaly among Stones albums. It is a mostly acoustic album, with only snatches of snarling electric guitar. Brian Jones, who played so well on the previous albums, was a drug casualty at this point. He managed to rouse himself enough to contribute the masterful slide guitar on “No Expectations,” but is largely absent from the rest of the album. In practical terms, this meant that the experimentation Jones loved and the diverse instrumentation he had brought to the albums starting with Aftermath, was gone. The new sound was stripped down, lean, and ferocious.

Before its release, the album was already marked with controversy. The cover desired by the Stones featured a graffiti-covered toilet stall. The record company refused to release this cover, substituting a simple white cover with an elegant script, as if it was an invitation. Normally, I tend to side with the artist, but the record company-approved cover is beautiful and proper, while the Stones’ choice for the cover was simply tacky. Unfortunately, with the release of CDs, the Stones’ original cover replaced the “invitation” cover. Too bad.

If “Jumping Jack Flash” was myth-making from Mick Jagger, the myth became set in stone with the opening track, “Sympathy For The Devil.” Played as a samba, with heavy use of light percussion (congas, tablas, maracas), Jagger assumes the persona of Satan himself, casting himself as a major player in the long parade of history, from the Russian Revolution through the World Wars and up to the assassination of John and Robert Kennedy, all while the demonic chorus chants “woo hoo” behind him as if part of an invocation. Keith throws in a harsh, discordant guitar solo that seems pasted together from disjointed licks while Jagger scats and screams like a tribal shaman. Forty years has blunted the impact of the song, but I can still remember where I was when I first heard it and the mind-blowing impact it had on me.

And yet, “Sympathy For The Devil” is completely atypical of the songs on Beggars. The stunningly gorgeous “No Expectations” follows the voodoo ritual of "Devil." The slide guitar is one of the only things added to the album by Brian Jones, but it is among the finest examples of slide guitar in the long history of rock music. Over a soft acoustic backing, Jones’s slide cries real tears and adds a depth of feeling to Jagger’s brilliant lyrics of a love gone wrong. Bill Wyman comes close to stealing the show with his understated bass, on prominent display in the perfect mix, and session man extraordinaire Nicky Hopkins contributes a stately piano solo. “No Expectations” is possibly the finest ballad in the Stones discography, and one of the finest ballads in rock’s history. It is a new kind of acoustic blues, rooted in the past but sounding completely contemporary.

From the new blues to the new country, “Dear Doctor” provides some much-needed laughs after the sinister “Sympathy” and the heartbreaking “Expectations.” Over a surprisingly good, pure country and western backing track, Jagger camps up the story of a young man being forced into a wedding with a “bow-legged sow.” It’s nearly an irresistable sing along, as Keith proves by chiming in on prominent backing vocals at seemingly random intervals. The music is excellent, but the song itself is still somewhat of a parody of country music, as if the Stones were uncomfortable expressing their love for such an “unhip” style of music (in British rock circles, at least), so they compensated by performing the song in a jokey fashion. Whatever the level of seriousness, the song works perfectly as both parody and country song, and the lyrics are clever and funny without ever turning into the punch line of a joke.

The Stones returned again to the acoustic blues with “Parachute Woman,” a more straightforward 12-bar blues than “No Expectations.” Jagger plays a haunting harmonica at the fade out. The song is, if anything, the “weak spot” on Beggars, if one exists. As weak spots go it’s terrific, a loping acoustic blues with unusual, sexually charged lyrics (“Parachute woman/Land on me tonight”).

Side one concludes with “Jigsaw Puzzle,” which is nearly as long as the epic “Sympathy For The Devil.” Once again acoustic guitars provide the main riff, with overdubbed slide (this time by Keith). The blues here is once again the “new” blues the Stones were crafting. The song avoids becoming a standard blues song on the strength of the lyric, a lengthy dissertation in the style of Bob Dylan’s character studies. Over Bill Wyman’s prominent bass, Charlie’s rock steady backbeat, Nicky Hopkins’ piano chords, and Keith’s acoustic riffing and stinging slide runs, Jagger sings about the outcasts of the world, from the tramp on the doorstep to the bishop’s daughter to the “family man” who is also a ruthless gangster. Jagger observes these characters from a disinterested, jaded perspective, waiting patiently for some revelation that will help it all make sense. The persona of the Stones is set in this song, as Jagger turns his lyrical attention to the band itself, defining them just as much as the film A Hard Day’s Night defined the Beatles for their fans. “Oh the singer he looks angry/At being thrown to the lions,” sings Jagger, likely remembering his recent drug bust and subsequent prosecution. “And the bass player he looks nervous/About the girls outside/And the drummer he’s so shattered/ Trying to keep on time/And the guitar players look damaged/They been outcasts all their lives.” The Stones encapsulated in a single verse: notorious ladies’ man Wyman, solid backbeat machine Watts, and wasted guitarists. It is the lyrics and Jagger’s performance of them that makes this song so extraordinary, with much credit going to Wyman’s rumbling bass and Richards’s stinging leads.

Side two begins with the furious acoustic strumming of “Street Fighting Man,” inspired by a peace march in London that turned violent. The song is so loud and propulsive it’s difficult to believe that it’s not a full-on electric guitar assault, but the primary riff is played by acoustic guitars that are pushed way into the red. With Watts playing an elemental drum pattern, really little more than just holding the beat steady, and Wyman once again stepping up and playing extraordinary bass guitar, Jagger sings one of the defining rock lyrics of 1968. In a dreadful year of war, violence, riots, assassinations, Jagger’s “Summer’s here and the time is right/For fighting in the street, boys” was a call to arms while the following lyric was a more jaded “What can a poor boy do/But sing in a rock and roll band?” Jones even contributes a few odd sitar drones, but they’re largely buried under that rocket-fuelled rhythm.

For the first time since December’s Children, the Stones included a cover song as the followup to “Street Fighting Man.” Unlike their earlier cover choices of Chuck Berry, fifties rock and roll and blues, and contemporary soul, the Stones dug back to the 1920s country blues for the Reverend Robert Wilkins’s musical retelling of the Bible story, “Prodigal Son.” The Stones play it straight, with Keith playing beautiful acoustic guitar and Jagger singing in a slurred voice that suits the music perfectly. It’s among the best Stones cover songs ever, sounding like a loose jam in the basement.

Considering that one of the obsessions of the Rolling Stones from even their earliest days was sex, Beggars Banquet is largely a sex-free zone. There’s the fun wordplay of “Parachute Woman,” and then the absolutely salacious raunch of “Stray Cat Blues.” Jagger sounds more sinister on this song, being himself, than he does playing the Devil on “Sympathy.” “I can see that you’re just 15 years old/But I don’t want your I.D.” sings Jagger, promising his nubile young friend that there will be “a feast upstairs.” Even as the girl promises to be a wild cat, right down to scratching and biting, Jagger one-ups the ante: “You say you got a friend/That she’s wilder than you/Why don’t you bring her upstairs?/If she’s so wild, she can join in, too.” Keith plays wild electric guitar leads over Watts’s rolling drums before the song ends with an extended jam.

After the sexual fury of “Stray Cat Blues,” the acoustic blues of “Factory Girl,” with its Dave Mason-played Mellotron simulating a wildly strummed mandolin, and fiddle played by Family and future Blind Faith bassist Ric Grech, comes almost as a relief. The sister song of “Parachute Woman,” there is a down-home country feel to the song, but an almost Celtic underpinning. The congas (played by Rocky Dijon) and tabla (played by Charlie Watts) add a distinctly un-country sound to the background, but it all works beautifully. Jagger’s lyric of waiting for his blue-collar lover to get home is the icing on the cake.

Which brings the listener to the conclusion. A soft acoustic guitar introduces Keith Richards on lead vocal for the first verse before Jagger takes over. “Salt Of The Earth” is a classic workingman’s drinking song on first listen, but really is about how powerless the “common people” really are. Jagger’s refrain “When I search a faceless crowd/A swirling mass of grey and black and white/They don’t look real to me/In fact, they look so strange” seems to dilute the rousing verses until you listen more closely. While the verses seem to salute the “salt of the earth” with a series of toasts, prayers, and thoughts, the reality is quite different.

The answer lies in the verse “Spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter/His empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows/And a parade of the gray-suited grafters/A choice of cancer or polio.” Jagger will raise a glass to the hard-working people and drink a toast to the uncounted heads, but his real statement here is that the people no longer have power over their own lives, and that politics has failed (“they need leaders but get gamblers instead”). As the album closer, “Salt of the Earth” is breathtaking in its construction. The acoustic blues are there, but so is a gospel chorus, and a rave up finale that suggests that maybe there’s life in the people yet.

Beggars Banquet, released the same day at the Beatles’ White Album, was the peak of 1960s Rolling Stones. It marked the beginning of a five-year stretch where the Stones could seemingly do no wrong in the recording studio. It remains one of the best Stones albums ever, if not the best. It remains one of the greatest albums in the history of rock music.

Grade: A+

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The Rolling Stones: Their Satanic Majesties Request

Their Satanic Majesties RequestFresh from the back-to-back triumphs of Aftermath and Between The Buttons, the Rolling Stones returned to the studio in tumultuous times. Brian Jones was clearly on the path to self-destruction due to his enormous intake of drugs, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had been busted for drugs and were facing serious prison time, and the music scene was changing rapidly.

In June of 1967 the Beatles rewrote the musical rules with the era-changing and era-defining Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It wasn’t the first psychedelic album, and in many ways it was only minimally psychedelic, but Pepper was the first pop music album to be treated as “art.” The rest of the music world, convinced they all had a “Sgt. Pepper” in them, broke out the horn and string sections, tracked down Mellotrons, and gave it their best shot.

The Stones, too, got caught up in the psychedelic craze and, in November of 1967, released what many fans had been anxiously awaiting: the Stones’s response to the Beatles. Portrayed in the press as the “anti-Beatles,” the Stones delivered an album that was the flip side of Pepper. Where Pepper was majestic and sunny, informed by English music hall, Indian ragas, and LSD, the Stones’s Their Satanic Majesties Request was dark, drug-fuelled, and sinister even as it attempted to co-opt the language of the flower children.

The album begins with discordant piano chords, horn blasts, and what sound like a drunken choir singing about the glories of tripping on LSD. “Open our heads/Let the pictures come,” they sing on “Sing This All Together.” It’s an insanely catchy chorus but the music is out of this world: African percussion, squawking guitars, bleating horns, harmonies that fade in and out seemingly randomly. There’s a short musical interlude in the middle that sounds like wasted musicians playing instruments they’ve never played before. It’s all very strange, and all oddly compelling. At a little less than four minutes, it’s a bizarre introduction to the album, far from the punchy tunefulness that is the title track to Pepper. Still, so far, so weird. We’re not off to a great start, but at least it’s interesting.

The album continues with “Citadel” which sounds like an evil outtake from Between The Buttons. Keith’s guitar raunch starts the song, and Charlie Watts has a grand time slamming out the beat, but Jagger intones vaguely psychedelic lyrics over a musical background that once again consists of everything, including the kitchen sink. As with “Sing This All Together,” much of the music pops up at random: a blast of guitar, a horn, Mellotron. It’s a tough little rocker underneath all that, an indicator that maybe the Stones hadn’t completely forgotten where they came from.

At least until “In Another Land.”

Bill Wyman’s début songwriting and lead vocal performance with the Stones isn’t a bad song at all, but the vocals on the verses are phased almost beyond recognition. When the chorus comes along, driven by a propulsive Charlie Watts, and Wyman’s vocal is saved by Jagger, the song becomes instantly better than 95% of what was then current psychedelic music, but during Wyman’s effects-laden verses, the song borders on little more than being a time piece. And did I mention that it ends with about twenty seconds of snoring?

Fortunately for the listener, “2000 Man” brings the Stones back to being the Stones. It’s still far more processed than anything on Between The Buttons, but the song itself could have fit on that album. Guitars, bass, drums, and Jagger are once again the order of the day. There are psychedelic elements to the song, but they are not nearly as obtrusive as they are on the songs leading up to it. If anything, there’s a country-ish lilt to the music, enough so to think that if it had been slimmed down even more it might have fit on 1968’s Beggar’s Banquet. “2000 Man” isn’t a landmark in the canon of Stones songs, but it ranks evenly with “Citadel” as the best song on side one of this album.

That’s mainly because side one ends with a reprise of “Sing This All Together” called, cleverly, “Sing This All Together (See What Happens).” It’s nearly nine minutes of the most godawful aimless noodling ever committed to record. Odd spoken bits (“Where’s that joint?”), tuneless instrumentation, a tweeting flute that sounds borrowed from a Traffic record, chimes…you name it, it’s on here in one discordant mess of a recording (it can’t really be classified as a song at all). It sounds like (and may be) an incredibly loose jam by a bunch of stoned musicians, and it is the first truly awful thing the Stones had released on record.

Why anyone would even want to flip the record to side two is a mystery, but if they got that far they were rewarded. The second side of the record begins with the transcendent “She’s A Rainbow,” one of the very best Stones songs from their brief psychedelic period. Watts once again steals the show while Jagger sings a beautiful lyric over a background of piano, strings, acoustic guitar, drums, bass, and Mellotron. “The Lantern” follows and it seems like the Stones may be able to salvage something out of this mess. Once again, the psychedelic elements are pushed to the back and Jagger sings over a backdrop of acoustic and electric guitar. Like “2000 Man,” “The Lantern” is not one of the best Stones songs, but it’s one of the best on this album.

“Gomper” follows, and with a title like that you know it has to be good, right? Well, it’s as good as its title. Tabla players (Jones, maybe?) make this a companion piece to George Harrison’s “Within You Without You,” but “Gomper” actually manages to pull off the neat trick of taking itself more seriously than the Harrison tune. At least George had the good sense to end his philosophical ramblings with a burst of laughter. “Gomper” also reflects Brian Jones’s infatuation with the Master Musicians of Joujouka, a group of Moroccan musicians. “Gomper” is a little too self-serious, but by combining African and Indian music, it’s also a prime example of world music (you see? Peter Gabriel didn’t invent world music…not even close). Of course, “Gomper” (I just like writing that word) also suffers from being about two minutes too long.

Majesties is nearly saved by the masterful, dark science fiction of “2000 Light Years From Home.” Brian Jones excels on the Mellotron on this song, creating one of the finest uses of that instrument in all of rock and roll, while Watts lays down a reliably steady beat. Synthesizers and distorted guitars provide coloring while Jagger sings about the loneliness of space…or perhaps the loneliness of being out on a bad trip. It all works beautifully on this song, from the snaky bass line to the swirling keyboards to Jagger’s distant vocal. Yes, it’s psychedelic but it’s great psychedelic. While most of this album has aged very poorly, this song has not. It still sounds as fresh and disconcerting as it ever did.

Much as he did on Between the Buttons’ closer “Something Happened To Me Yesterday,” Jagger assumes the role of the MC on the last track, “On With The Show.” Unlike “Something Happened,” there’s no real song with “On With The Show.” It comes off like a shameless ripoff of the concept of Sgt. Pepper, but poorly executed. Party sounds, Jagger’s carnival barker vocals drenched with effects as he tells those assembled that “we’ve got all the answers/and we’ve got lovely dancers, too/There’s nothing else you have to do/On with the show/Good health to you.” Not as stunningly bad as the side one closer, but this is no way to end an album.

Written and recorded during a dark period in Stones history, Their Satanic Majesties Request finds the Stones grasping for an identity, following
some sort of alternative path of the Beatles. Listened to today, it’s an interesting curio and there are a few keepers on the album. In fact, if you got rid of “Sing This All Together (See What Happens)” and replaced it with the contemporaneous, extraordinary single “We Love You/Dandelion” the album would be improved enormously. Clip “On With The Show” and insert “Child Of The Moon” (the psychedelic-tinged B-side of their next single), and suddenly the album’s pretty good.

As it stands, Majesties is a failed experiment.

Grade: C+ (only because I can’t give a “C” or below to any album with “She’s A Rainbow” and “2000 Light Years From Home” on it).

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The Rolling Stones: Between The Buttons

buttons

I’ve never been able to figure out why, but Between The Buttons is one of my favorite Stones albums. It really shouldn’t be because it’s very much the work of a band that was standing on the edge of a music scene that was exploding in a million directions with no clear idea where to go. They were no longer the scruffy blues/soul band. They were a flat out rock band at this point, but rock was splintering. Dylan had brought folk consciousness to rock, there was a burgeoning scene that was aided by the use of hallucinogenic drugs, garage rock was inflitrating the airwaves, and while the Beatles lorded over all of it with their ageless classic melodies, the Who were coming up fast with a blistering sound that made the ferocious old Stones sound quaint in comparison.

In the original, UK edition of the album there are no classic Stones singles present. The US edition improves on the English version by taking out the beautiful acoustic ballad “Back Street Girl” and the quasi-psychedelic Bo Diddley-style “Please Go Home” and replaces them with two bona fide Stones classics: “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and “Ruby Tuesday.”

In it’s position as album opener, “Night” provides one of the only real blasts of rock music on the album. The filthy bass and matching piano that start the song give way to the most salacious lyric Mick Jagger had yet written. In comparison to “Night,” “Satisfaction” is subtle. Mostly wordless background vocals provide the amazing hook as Jagger sings about his desire to spend the night with a woman in question. There’s a double entendre about being frustrated (“My tongue’s gettin’ tied” sounds very much like “My tongue’s gettin’ tired“) and a drug reference that’s tossed off as if it was an aside (“I’m off my head and my mouth’s gettin’ dry/And I’m high”), yet the song became a number one hit, unquestionably helped by the innocent-sounding B-side “Ruby Tuesday.”

“Ruby Tuesday,” at track 3 on the album, is another example of a good song made great by the experimental side of Brian Jones, who plays the recorder on the song. Not as innocent as it seems, “Ruby Tuesday” is about one of the groupies on the rock scene. The lyrics are good, the chorus extremely catchy. It is Jones’s recorder that provides the real ear hook to the song; it’s an instrument that’s rarely used in rock music and I can think of no other example where it’s used so prominently. Keith Richards plays great rhythm guitar and once again the rhythm section of Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts add fire and a raunchy undercurrent.

Sandwiched between these songs is Jagger’s ode to loving ’em and leaving ’em, “Yesterday’s Paper.” The misogyny charge that was dogging the Stones gets more punch here: “Who wants yesterday’s papers?/Who wants yesterday’s girl?” Brian Jones adds both harpsichord and marimba to give the song an exotic and unusual sound, while Wyman plays frenetic bass throughout. Watts plays subtly rolling drums throughout and Keith is barely heard from, except on some fuzzy, echoed guitar and backing vocals. It’s a great song despite the lyrics. At this point the Stones were branching out musically but writing solid tunes to provide a framework.

Following “Ruby Tuesday” is a song that may be the best on the album. “Connection” was largely consigned to the history bin, forgotten by all but Stones fans rabid enough to get past Hot Rocks and delve into the more obscure album tracks. It was resurrected by Keith Richards when he performed it with the X-Pensive Winos in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Since then it’s made appearances on the Stones stage, as well it should. “Connection” is a blast of great guitar work from Keith while Brian plonks a simple piano figure and Watts and Wyman sound like they’re having the time of their lives. The entire song gives off that vibe. It doesn’t even sound produced, just recorded live by a band having fun. Backing vocals are prominent, and the harmony vocals are load and brash.

It is one of the unusual things about this album: never before or since have the Stones used so many backing vocals and harmony vocals. They were clearly being influenced by the Beatles, Beach Boys, and Byrds at this point. The charm of it is that they’re really not very good at it. Those three bands featured harmonies that were absolutely breathtaking. The Stones were not as accomplished vocally as Lennon, McCartney, McGuinn, Clark, Crosby, or Wilson. Jagger was a great front man, but Keith’s harmony vocals and backing vocals are tortured. Yet despite the shortcomings, there is an undeniably ragged charm and insouciance to the performances. They may not be letter perfect, but the Stones sure do sound like they’re having fun on this album.

“She Smiled Sweetly” follows “Connection” with a lovely organ underpinning that gradually swells and ebbs as the vocal goes. Wyman’s bass is the most prominent instrument here, playing the lead for about half the song before it is joined by Jones’s piano. It’s an emotional performance from Jagger and a beautiful song. On this crazy-quilt album it’s followed by a ragtime-y piano intro to the wacky (and even zany) “Cool, Calm & Collected,” one of the few rock songs to feature a kazoo solo. Wyman and Watts again play it straight, while Jones and Richards have a blast playing out of tune instruments behind Jagger’s over-the-top lyrics and campy vocal before the tune speeds up as if your turntable had been injected with rocket fuel. Laughter is heard at the very end, which lets you know that the Stones were in on the joke (hey, a lot of bands weren’t).

“All Sold Out” and “My Obsession” follow. The former is an old-style Stones rocker with great guitar from Keith and potent rhythm playing from Jones. This is the only time on the record where Richards and Jones lock horns and weave magic on guitar. “My Obsession” has a growling bass and bluesy piano, and Jagger’s lyrics about owning a woman whether she wants it or not. It also has some of the most godawful backing and harmony vocals ever heard. There’s a quasi-psychedelic feel to the vocals and the music starts and stops throughout the piece. Always the piano grounds the song in blues and Wyman’s bass adds a heavy bottom while Watts rides his hi-hat like a man possessed. It’s not really that good a song and strangely, it’s those awful backing and harmony vocals that give the song enough charm to get by. Yes, they’re awful, but that’s okay. The song’s a lot more fun with them than it would be without them.

“Who’s Been Sleeping Here?” is almost a parody of a Dylan lyric, with references to “the butler, the baker, the laughing cavalier,” and “the noseless old newsboy, the old British brigadier.” Very Highway 61, Mick. But the tune is great, starting with a gentle acoustic guitar interrupted by waves of distorted guitar before Watts rides in and Jones comes in on piano.

“Complicated” and “Miss Amanda Jones” round out the rockier side of the album. There’s a great fuzz-tone guitar on “Complicated” and an organ that adds flavor to the verses. Watts rides a simple beat in the verses before laying down a more complex drum pattern on the chorus. “Miss Amanda Jones” could be the flip side of Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone.” The lyric, about a woman of the upper class who is losing her way on the party circuit, is married to a frenetic backing track with great guitar from Jones and Richards. It’s the most high energy track on the album, sounding not a little bit like the Yardbirds, and it succeeds on all levels.

The closer for such a strange album would have to be equally strange, and it is. Jagger’s tale of an LSD trip, “Something Happened To Me Yesterday,” which features Keith on lead vocals for the chorus, is a jaunty, jazz-like song complete with tuba, whistling, spoken asides (“What kind of joint is this?”), strummed acoustic guitars, and Mick thanking the audience for coming, tha

nking their “producer Reg Thorpe,” and reminding the audience that if they’re going out tonight, on their bike, to wear white. It’s a bizarre song, a bizarre performance, and it works perfectly as the album closer. Having heard the album, it is impossible to imagine it ending any other way.

Between The Buttons is a lost gem from the Rolling Stones.

Grade: A-

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According To The Rolling Stones, by The Rolling Stones

Once again the Rolling Stones follow the Beatles. Several years after the Beatles released the documentary and coffee table oral history of the band, Anthology, the Rolling Stones released According To The Rolling Stones.

It’s about as imaginative as the title suggests, but the title is really inaccurate.

With Anthology, the Beatles set out to tell their side of the story, and they did it in exhaustive detail. While I might have preferred more information from the Fabs on their fascinating recording sessions, both the documentary and book were a treasure trove of stories. Every vacation, tour, and album were discussed in some length (more in the book than the film). But Paul McCartney has always been very conscious of, and protective of, the Beatles.

The Rolling Stones, on the other hand, don’t really seem to care all that much about their history. Mick Jagger especially is much more comfortable talking about their latest album/tour than he is talking about Exile On Main Street and the 1972 tour. Keith Richards tells the stories you want to hear, but the self-mythologizing can be excruciating. Charlie Watts is reticent to discuss much of anything. That leaves Ron Wood who is, at best, an unreliable narrator (as his own autobiography proves).

According to The Rolling Stones is excellent for what it is: a book that was used to cross-promote the Forty Licks tour and CD. It’s not dissimilar to 25 X 5, which was a mediocre documentary that was great if you recognized it for what it was: a promotional piece for the Steel Wheels tour. As a far-reaching, well-thought history of the band, 25 X 5 fell short. So does According to The Rolling Stones.

The Beatles Anthology was done while George Harrison was still alive, so it featured both old and new interviews with the three surviving Fabs, and pertinent pieces of old interviews brought Lennon into the mix. But where are old interviews with Brian Jones? Or new interviews with Mick Taylor or Bill Wyman? These three played essential roles in the Rolling Stones, but they are no longer in the band and have thus been whitewashed out of existence for the creators of this book. Wyman especially could have been a goldmine of information since he kept extensive diaries and notes about every note the band ever played.

But that’s the dirty secret here: this is not a history of The Rolling Stones in their own words. This is a promo piece for a CD and tour. You want proof? The Sticky Fingers album barely gets mentioned. The Forty Licks tour gets the last two chapters.

If you take the book for what it is, it’s very good. If you really want the complete history of the Stones from the band members themselves…well, have fun waiting. I just don’t see it coming.

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The Rolling Stones: Aftermath

aftermath

Following closely on the heels of their breathtaking single, “19th Nervous Breakdown,” the Rolling Stones released their first album of all original songs. Gone were the soul and blues covers played so lovingly and faithfully by the band. In their place were a series of pop and rock gems, beautifully colored by a rich palette of instrumentation, courtesy of Brian Jones.

This was also the album that had the most differences between the English and American versions. The English version has three additional songs (“Out Of Time,” “Take It Or Leave It” and “What To Do”), substitutes “Mother’s Little Helper” for “Paint It Black,” and changes the order of the songs. I grew up listening to the American version and, despite the shorter length, still prefer it. While “Out Of Time” is an absolute gem, both “Take It Or Leave It” and “What To Do” are simply good songs that would have fit comfortably on any of the earlier Stones albums. “Mother’s Little Helper” is a great song and one of the quintessential Stones singles, but it’s dwarfed by the brilliance of “Paint It Black.”

It’s the American version I’ll stick with here.

A lightly plucked sitar announces with little fanfare that the Stones were no longer going to be merely blues and soul fanboys. Brian Jones is all over the track while Keith Richards plays some electrifying guitar fills, but to me this track belongs to Charlie Watts. The drumming on this song is simply incredible. Watts never gets his proper due as a great drummer, but the fills, rolls, and cymbal crashes that fill this song provide a bedrock you could build a city on. It’s a textbook example of great drumming in a rock and roll song. With Bill Wyman’s pounding bass, Richards rooting the song in gutsy rock and roll, and Jones reaching for Eastern skies, the coup de grace of Mick Jagger’s brilliant lyric (a meditation on the death of a loved one) and his ferocious performance (he practically spits out the lyrics), “Paint It Black” will forever be one of the greatest songs the Rolling Stones have ever done. What a way to start an album. Yes, “Mother’s Little Helper” is a great song, but this is the way to start an album.

The Stones have taken a lot of heat in their career for being misogynists. It’s not an entirely unfounded accusation. Evidence for the prosecution includes two of the next three songs, “Stupid Girl” and “Under My Thumb.” Sexist lyrics aside, “Stupid Girl” gets by on the organ (played by producer Jack Nitzsche or Ian Stewart) underpinning. Richards plays choppy rhythm guitar throughout, slashing at chords and lightly picking brief leads, while Jagger once again swaggers menacingly. The lyrics of “Under My Thumb” can also be considered sexist, as Jagger sings convincingly about turning the tables on a dominating woman. The guitar playing is understated and brilliant, but the song achieves classic Stones status on the backs of Brian Jones’s marimba…an instrument not often heard in rock and roll. The exotic instrumentation adds so much flavor and depth to the song that it is entirely understandable if you want to ignore the sexual politics of the lyrics and just sing along. The fuzz bass provided by Wyman and the solid drumming of Watts keep the song rooted in rock and roll.

Sandwiched between these two songs is the Elizabethan ballad “Lady Jane.” Over a background of Keith’s plucked guitar, harpsichord, and Wyman’s simple, but resounding, bass, Jagger sings an ode to a woman that would not have seemed out of place if Henry VIII were singing it to Lady Jane Seymour. It seems a little stilted, especially with the old fashioned lyrics (“I pledge my troth to Lady Jane”), but it’s a beautiful and elegant piece.

Side one is rounded out by two mid-tempo rockers “Doncha Bother Me” and “Think.” The former is marked by a slide guitar refrain that punctuates the singing of the title. Harmonica and keyboards add the flavor, and there is a nice amount of raunch in the guitar playing. For “Think” the guitars mimic horns over Charlie’s shuffle beats while Jagger once again sings a lyrics that probably wouldn’t go over too well at a N.O.W. convention. There’s also a tasty guitar solo from Richards. “Doncha Bother Me” is not exactly an earth-shaking Stones song, but “Think” is criminally undervalued. It may not be the best song on “Aftermath” but it stands as an excellent piece of early Stones songwriting.

Side Two opens with the tale of a man who boards “Flight 505” with no clear destination, only to go down in a crash into the sea. Once again the song is raunched up by Bill Wyman’s fuzz bass, and Richards plays great lead guitar. The vocal is slurred and kind of buried in the mix, and it’s not really a great lyric anyway. But what’s most interesting in the song is the piano intro that starts the piece. After some basic boogie woogie piano (probably Ian Stewart), the opening chords of “Satisfaction” are played before the rest of the instrumentation crashes in.

Aftermath came out in 1966, when the 45 RPM single was still King, and albums were purchased only by rabid fans. The Stones legend is based on their singles from this time, and many great album tracks are lost to all but the most ardent fans. Such is the case with “High And Dry,” “It’s Not Easy,” and “I Am Waiting.” The first of these songs is an early, and successful, attempt at a straight country song. The lyrics are a little jokey (Jagger admits to not taking country music all that seriously until later on), but Wyman’s walking bass line and Jones’s harmonica hooting make the song an enjoyable listen. It may have been meant as something of a parody of country music, but it works as a straight song.

“It’s Not Easy” is a guitar driven mid-tempo rocker with great backing vocals and fuzzed up rhythm guitar. To add even more punch, Bill Wyman once again trots out the fuzz bass and Watts provides more textbook fills. “I Am Waiting” is a beautifully simple song. Jagger’s voice is noticeably double-tracked on the verses and the music follows the melody of the vocals. When the chorus comes in, the elegant song becomes pop music heaven. Wyman shines throughout, his bass mirroring Jagger’s vocal on the verses and leading the music in the choruses. The guitar is lightly plucked during the verses and in the chorus becomes a beautifully rhythmic strummed engine that propels the song.

The album ends with “Going Home.” This is not the eleven-minute long Ten Years After jam. No, this is the eleven-minute long Stones jam. It starts promisingly enough as a basic blues with Jagger enjoying the prospect of getting back to his girl after all this time on the road. Somewhere around the three and a half minute mark, the song ends and the endless jam begins. What’s most noticeable is that Jagger here is refining the sort of scat singing he started in the fadeout of “The Last Time” and would perfect on both “Sympathy For The Devil” and “Midnight Rambler.” In many ways, “Going Home” is the musical precursor to “Rambler.” The problem is that it’s just not very good, and while it’s bad enough that it ends the album, it could have been worse. It could have been in the middle of the album (where it is in the UK version of the album). It’s a way to end an otherwise brilliant album (the first truly great album of the Stones career) on a real bum note.

Grade: A.