(important work in color)
1964: The Rolling Stones (EP-UK/January: "You Better Move On," "Money," "Bye, Bye Johnny," "Poison Ivy") * UNTITLED (The Rolling Stones) (Untitled LP-UK/April) * England's Newest Hit Makers (USA/April: Same songs as the untitled UK lp with exception of "Not Fade Away" substituted for "Mona".) * Five by Five (EP-UK/August: "If You Need Me," "Empty Heart," "2120 South Michigan Avenue," "Confessin' the Blues," "Around and Around" - which would all end up on the American release 12 X 5) * 12 X 5. 1965: The Rolling Stones No. 2 (LP-UK/January) * The Rolling Stones, Now! (LP-USA/February - Similar song lineup to No. 2 - dropping "Grown Up Wrong," "Under the Boardwalk," "I Can't Be Satisfied," and "Susie Q" - which were on the 12 X 5 album anyway, and substituting "Surprise, Surprise," "Little Red Rooster," "Oh, Baby (We Got a Good Thing Goin')," "Mona," and "Heart of Stone" - making the U.S. release stronger in quality) * Got Live If You Want It (EP-UK/June: "We Want the Stones," "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love," "Pain in My Heart," "Route 66," "I'm Alright") * Out of Our Heads (LP-USA/July) * Out of Our Heads (LP-UK/September: This time it is the UK version which is released last and which drops "Last Time," "I'm Alright," "Satisfaction," "Play with Fire," "Spider and the Fly," and "One More Try," in favor of "Gotta Get Away," "Talkin' 'Bout You," "Oh, Baby (We Got a Good Thing Goin')," "Heart of Stone," and "I'm Free.") * December's Children (and Everybody's) (LP-USA/December). 1966: Big Hits/High Tide and Green Grass (March - Greatest Hits Collection) * Aftermath (LP-UK/April) * Aftermath (LP-USA/June: Substatially different version from the UK version, with "Mother's Little Helper" "Out of Time," "Take it Or Leave It," and "What to Do" dropped with only "Paint it Black" added to take their place; UK preferable) * Got Live If You Want It (LP-USA/November) * Big Hits (LP-UK/November/Greatest Hits). 1967: Between the Buttons (UK version has "Mother's Little Helper;" US version has "Let's Spend the Night Together" instead) * Flowers * Their Satanic Majesty's Request. 1968: Beggar's Banquet. 1969: Through the Past, Darkly (Big Hits, Vol. 2) * Let It Bleed. 1970: Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out. 1971: Sticky Fingers. 1972: Hot Rocks 1964 - 71 * Exiles on Main Street. 1973: More Hot Rocks: Big Hits and Fazed Cookies * Goats Head Soup. 1974: It's Only Rock 'n' Roll. 1975: Made in the Shade * Metamorphosis. 1976: Black and Blue. 1977: Love You Live. 1978: Some Girls. 1980: Emotional Rescue. 1981: Sucking in the Seventies * Tattoo You. 1982: Still Life. 1983: Undercover. 1984: Rewind (1971 - 1984). 1986: Dirty Work. 1989: The Singles Collection * Steel Wheels. 1991: Flashpoint. 1994: Voodoo Lounge * Stripped. 1997: Bridges to Babylon * No Security. 2002: Forty Licks (greatest hits plus four new songs). 2005: A Bigger Bang.
1985: Who's the Boss. 1987: Primitive Cool. 1993: Wandering Spirit. 2002: Goddess in the Doorway.
1988: Talk is Cheap. 1991: Live at the Hollywood Palladium, Dec.12, 1988. 199: Main Offender.
Memories from their old friends reveal surprising stories of the early Stones seated on stools, playing carefully, studiously, trying to be taken seriously as musicians. In photos they are skinny and astonishingly youthful. Keith's haircut and ears are preposterous. Bill looks like a walking cadaver, stooped sunken chest with a touch of Buster Keaton deadpan to his face. Blonde, pretty boy Brian always seems to be seeking out the camera, everybody else feigning disinterest, yawning, sneering, tousling their hair. They were young men, almost boys and, at this early date, somewhat innocent harbingers of a darker consciousness that would soon come swarming out of pop radio. The band to be (circa mid 1962) were looking backwards - towards the blues and r&b that Mick and Keith, in particular, had grown to love.
What had they heard? There were Ike and Tina Turner, The Drifters, Bobby Bland, Muddy Waters, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Willie Dixon, Charlie Patton, Sam Cooke. Elvis. Righteous performers, many of them with careers as complex and rewarding as the Stones' ultimate achievements. More than the Beatles, the Stones were mesmerized by the disturbed restless music made by Willie Dixon, Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Milton, Koko Taylor, John Lee Hooker. British, Welsh, Irish kids enraptured by an artistic movement that had been marginalized, ignored. The Hayes Code for movies, censorship for literature, segregation for music. A levee waiting to break over timidity and coyness and romantic myth. Which broke first? The music? The movies? The books? Norman Mailer's fugs. The Fugs' fucks. Gore Vidal's Willowaw. Little Richard. Elton John. Dusty Springfield. First things first, and musically it started with the blues pioneers. Early sixties' music critics (Nik Cohn is a good example) who were familiar with the sounds of the fifties felt uncomfortable over-praising new artists like the Beatles and the Stones.
The Stones must have puzzled over the Elvis anomaly. Ten years earlier, in 1952, Elvis wasn't looking backwards so much as he was looking around; segregated music, from subterranean places, snaked its way into Presley's psyche. Elvis wasn't a purist, and never seems to have expressed qualitative opinions of music. He was moved by both art and kitsch. Some of the strengths of his artistry came from the blues and r&b, but he never embraced the forms exclusively. Elvis probably liked Perry Como and Vicki Carr as much, or more, than Muddy Waters. Which is why Elvis was an anomaly and not a watershed.
Keith Richards' hero was Chuck Berry. Berry was a prolific, shrewd, and very commercial r&b songwriter who turned hard rhythm into gleeful teenage anthems and outright novelty tunes. Which made Keith a somewhat questionable purist despite his assholeish pretentions. Like Presley, Chuck Berry was not a purist performer. But, at first, purity was what the Stones were after. It focused and solidified their style.
Other Stones influences: Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, two white New York songwriters responsible for an astonishing number of r&b hits for various vocal groups. Their songs were noticeable tight formal arrangements and a great sense of humor.
At the dawn of the sixties, Motown came a little late and moved in the wrong direction. Motown performers were without the grit and roughness the Stones seemed drawn to. Motown was moving in a white direction - towards, of all things, coyness, timidity, and romantic myth.
Pulling inspiration from these same influences but with different emphasis, the Beatles launched a recording career shortly before the Stones. As with Chuck Berry, there is pop effervescence to Beatles' music. Like Presley, there is a natural inclination towards amalgamation of pop forms.
Despite their intentions, purism could only be a passing fancy for a band like the Stones. 1962 may seem like the dawn of rock and roll history. It is more aptly stated as the dawn of rock history. There is an embryonic 1962 recording session featuring Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Ian Stewart, and Tony Chapman - three cover tunes that were never released. By 1963, the Rolling Stones were loosening up at a club called the Crawdaddy, the future Yardbirds in attendance, Eric Clapton skeptically watching from the floor, the British Invasion on the horizon. The Beatles, already popular, caught a Stones show in April 1963. Did they notice any traces of purism in the Stones' performance at this point? It's easy to speculate that the Stones' rough-edged attitude may have suggested some ideas to the fresh-faced foursome, some subtlety to adapt. The Beatles definitely had a life-altering effect on Brian Jones, at least according to Giorgio Gomelsky (the band's brief first manager). * Gomelsky claims that once Brian saw a Beatles' concert packed with screaming, adoring female fans - he wanted to be a pop star. And quickly, if it could be managed. Forget purism.
Remnants of purism would remain: a few years later Keith Richards early reaction to "Satisfaction" was one of distaste - he thought it sounded like a protest song. "Satisfaction" actually is a protest song - not the Stones' last - and it's a very good one. By 1963 and 1964, categories were starting to crawl out the window and slink into the night. The Stones' realism, the Beatles' effortless musical form, and Dylan's poetic-surrealist wordplay exploded boundaries at exactly the same time a huge market was opening up that demanded exploded boundaries. Censorship would soon be overrun in movies, books, movies. White kids would soon be celebrating black music and segregated radio would start to fade. What would result in 1965 and 1966 is a startlingly diverse batch of recording projects, which would arch upward in 1967, 68, 69. The breakthrough has fueled pop music ever since. Pop music was redefined as a possibly comfortable place for the most personal and idiosyncratic artists with the most wide-ranging influences. Expression became unfettered.
The Rolling Stones started as an r&b cover band, rather naturally evolving into r&b interpreters by amping up the volume, accelerating the rhythms, making blatant the sexual innuendo (which was at first only safe to do if you buried it deeply in the mix). When a manager suggested the boys try their hands at songwriting, they casually become songwriters. As songwriters their purist past was immediately obliterated, their natural inclinations breaking out into uncontrollable shapes. Interpretation usually has some boundaries; personal expression is rambunctious, boundless. What resulted was a r&b band writing as if they are older than their years, yet obviously influenced by the historical moment and a number of different trends (Stax horns, Beatles' sitar, protest songs, Lenny Bruce, French New Wave movies, class warfare, war, race riots, censorship, rebellion). There were always cracks in the blues-purist armour: Brain and Keith professed admiration for the Four Seasons; Mick Jagger used the Beach Boys as wake-up music. Giorgio Gomelsky recalls the band's subtle breaks with authenticity as Jagger starts becoming more of the focus: ""He finally had some power, and he found that he could invent for the world what...came to his mind to invent! And then he started conceptualizing him and the Stones..." From this break with "authenticity" arises The New Authenticity. This conceptualization didn't move extremely fast - it wouldn't be until mid-1964 that the Stones self-penned songs started appearing at a briefer pace. At which point the Beatles were well on their way to releasing four albums full of original music. New bands were nipping at their Beatle-booted heals. But it is these first tentative concessions to the pop market, as the Stones move towards self-expression as songwriters, which would prove to be as enduringly significant as their cleverly stylized blues and r&b covers, and would help set the pace for much of what was to follow. Making the most out of trend-setting photo sessions, drug busts, sexual allure, by deftly exploiting their role as the outlaw anti-Beatles and the next new thing, the Stones were stars of the new youth culture. Rock writer David Dalton singled out three men as responsible for the r&b revival in England in 1960-1961: Chris Barber, Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies. The young Stones sat in with these pioneers and movedon. An important starting date would be January 1964: the Stones released the first in a series of groundbreaking recordings. Musical and thematic growth would continue for a full eight years, leaving some of the pioneers behind in the process.
As Dave Thompson noted in Goldmine magazine, "Without the Stones to write them, we would never have had a lifetime of songs that aren't simply part of our culture, they are what shaped that culture." It was refreshing - the distaste the Stones held for pop sentimentality. Everybody felt it. Another significant event in rock and roll history was the day in 1965 when a Rolling Stones long-playing album made it into the singles charts in England. The Stones were selling more albums than most of the old style bands were selling singles. The shift in emphasis to the LP foreshadowed important things to come. Youth had found a voice and who would have thought they had anything worth listening to? In the seeds of the blues and r&b, the Stones found what was needed for the emancipation of popular music. Or, put another way, the blues and r&b ultimately emancipated popular music.
Robert Christgau wrote a brilliant evaluation of the Stones' early career that is included in Rolling Stone's Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (1980). He touched on all aspects of their complex allure - the blues-based simplicity and the bohemian depth, the sneering, arrogant irony and the focused desire to get things right and make it matter. Christgau on the Stones: "Mick Jagger was never a rocker...he was an anti-utopian version of what Americans called a folkie... [the Stones] were neither heroic nor naïve, just ambitious...they chose to be vulgar - aggressively." Jagger's "mewling nasality might have been copped from a Cockney five-year-old ... some people wonder how this whiner...can pretend to mean the adult words he sings," but "Meaning It" is definitely not what the Stones are about." Jagger "accepted his inability to sing from as deep in his heart as Sam Cooke, sometimes he reveled in it, but he wan't sure he liked it..." "This dual commitment to irony and ecstasy makes the Stones exemplary modernists ... it has been their readiness to leap that has won the Stones their following - at least until the time of the punks, no one ever rocked on out with more ecstatic energy. But it is their realism, bordering at its most suspect on cynicism, that makes all that energy interesting...". Jagger's "project of radical self-definition flourished where so many others failed." Christgau exposes the populist sheen as a brainy concept that was both anti-aristocratic and anti-populist.
It still seems amazing that the Stones' art was/is built upon Charlie Watt's backbeat, which is simple but somehow never redundant. Wyman's bass playing provided both a gut-felt sub-current and a sense of movement that heightens the busy bee drones of dual rhythm guitars and elegant dipping and soaring guitar lines. Keith Richards plays a rhythm guitar that has become legendary, yet always uses fifties' Chuck Berry chord techniques and simple chord progressions as a touchstone. Brian Jones was instrumental in the Stones' tightly wound thrust of complimentary guitars - a sound that has inspired thousands of rock bands. Mick Jagger, thankfully, has an unblessed lead vocal sound. At an early point in the Stones' career an associate of manager Andrew Oldham suggested that Jagger be fired because of his perceived lack of vocal power. Jagger's tone can be shallow, pinched, cold, and never allows for the pure, clear sounding of notes, nor does it flatter the dynamics of melody. His vocal eccentricities (strained falsettos, strange accents) result from having few places to go. Which makes Jagger a complex stylist with a complex way of emoting. Though we think of the Stones as guitar-oriented, from the earliest recordings, piano and organ has always been a vital part of the music. There would be an addition of horns later. Sometimes the result is so busy it reaches cacophony (Exiles on Main Street). The Rolling Stones were brooding, nasty, not pretty. They roared through the sixties and early seventies, meeting challenge after challenge. They have never quite been a pop band - but an eternal rhythm and blues machine who have been lucky enough to find a welcome-wagon waiting patiently every time they returned to the stage.
Exiles on Main Street, released in 1972, was the end of the Stones' very extended classic era. It's a summation, and an elaborate work, touching on every aspect of the Stones' enchantment with black r&b. Gospel, voodoo, blues, fake country, gambling, whoring, drinking, praying, fighting, and a whole lot of love are involved. The album is a stew made up of every musical ingredient that had influenced the Stones. More than any other Stones' album it requires patience, a little work (it definitely helps to know the lyrics - the vocals are buried), and maybe the right mood to accomplish this. But it's a definitive album, an almost worshipful work that defines exactly what the Stones' have contributed to popular music.
Perhaps there was nowhere to go, but down.
On the 1973 album Goats Head Soup there was a profound change in the Rollings Stones' demeanor. A mediocre album was actually a big surprise coming from the Stones. In retrospect, it was around this period when it appears they slowly started losing their ability to be overwhelmingly persuasive as artists. What happened? Here are some theories:
As counter-culture rebels, basking in the contempt of mass distaste, the Rolling Stones thrived. As cultural heroes, with the world embracing them, they were somewhat normalized. The sound remained classic, but only A POWERFUL WORK and a GREAT STATEMENT would startle us after all the Stones' had accomplished, and perhaps this just wasn't possible. In the sixties, the Stones' were culturally reactionary in music and attitude. Class issues and sexual issues heightened the tension. It was a brilliant style but the problem with a brilliant style is that, once found, it never leaves much room to find anything beyond itself. The idiosyncrasies of the would-be stylist determine which elements will be rejected and which elements will be embraced as style. A stylist's inclinations don't suddenly change and become a different style made up of a group of new choices. For the accomplished rock stylist, artistic problems become problems of how to sing the same things in ways that aren't repetitive, how to avoid succumbing to what is always there as the downside of any particular style, how to reinvigorate text without diminishing its old power. With the Stones, this often became a contrived business attempt to remain in the spotlight. Goat's Head Soup contains overwrought ballads ("Angie" and "Winter" - not the most quintessential of Stones' product, though "Angie" would later be simplified into a movingly wretched emotional experience on the Stripped album), an underwritten ballad ("Coming Down Again" - an early attempt at what is actually a very compelling elegance in the song structures that Keith creates, but which, at this stage isn't very well thought out); gothic pulp ("Dancing with Mr. D" - and the Stones' aren't really superstitious), a boring jam ("Can You Hear the Music" - it's filler time - a new twist for the Stones), and odd moralizing ("Doo Doo Heartbreaker" and "Star Star"). Some of it rocks, but little of it matters. The Stones may have been courting the ever-changing pop market after the under-produced, slow-to-become-classic, and fairly hitless Exile on Main Street. Goat's Head Soup worked commercially. Commerce has always been a consideration in the Stones' style, and it is at this point that commerce ascends over other more important aspects of the Stones' artistry.
The Stones followed up Goat's Head Soup with a more traditional rock and roll album - It's Only Rock and Roll - and it was mostly a bore. What they could get away with when they were young, i.e. "she comes in colors", would soon sound creepy as adults, finally resulting in "Short and Curlies" and, later, the almost incomprehensible, "Little T & A." The Stones had written songs with misogynist themes, without being particularly misogynist; they had written violent themes without being violent: yet somehow they made it all seem culturally and personally relevant. They had set high standards, and now they were failing to meet those standards. They tried raggae and disco, and Jagger became a brilliant businessman, and the Stones became a touring band. Approximately 171 songs were written or released in the sixties. This fell to about 100 songs in the seventies (denoting a drop both in quantity and quality - especially after Exiles on Main Street). Around 60 songs in the eighties (as solo projects became a distraction), about the same in the nineties, only 4 in the first three years of the new century.
In the meantime, the culture that the Rolling Stones so profoundly influenced had grown up at an astonishingly rapid rate. Adolescence was never quite as innocent again, with rock music giving unabridged and uncensored insights into the mysteries of life. Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, the J. Geils Band, and the New York Dolls (all influenced by the Stones) reveled in Satan and cynicism and madness and sex and arrogance and ultra-violence and decadence as pop music's neo-realist taboo-breaking (early standards set by the Stones) became the norm. The Stones' wit now had company, as did their chops. Bands blasted past them on sheer musical prowess. A few found a greater scope in the new thematic freedom. The Rolling Stones bad boy image didn't' always serve them well - a problem Jagger was openly grieving over in interviews in the seventies. The most obvious reason being that they weren't bad boys, at all - though many fervid fans never seemed to catch on.
The Stones suddenly awakened to the fact circa 1972 that everybody else had made money off of them (their lawyer Allen Klein would end up owning almost all of their classic songs), and that perhaps it was time to make some money of their own. With increasing business acumen, and a significant body of work to fall back on, priorities shifted. They were successful and it was time to reap, and take vacations. Bi-yearly releases were dispersed between live albums, or rarities/hit releases. The members of the Rolling Stones would gather together occasionally in one or another exotic location and throw some new songs together. Though many of them used a classic Stones' template, they seldom came up with a classic rock song, and, until Bridges to Babylon, would never create a new classic album. Classic ideas were never reworked with deep redefinition.
All bands have an initial string of hits and then suck. (An easy answer, unfortunately disproved by any number of artists.)
The Stones had reached a second level of maturity in the years that encompassed Beggar's Banquet and Exiles on Main Street with the unlikely Satanic Majesties Request serving as a bridge between one type of Stones sound and another slightly different sound. There is a general consensus that the post Exiles work is weaker, with the expected arguments cropping up here and there, defending this or that seventies' album. Sucking in the Seventies is the self-deprecating name of an album's worth of out-takes released in 1981. Disbanding in the eighties probably wouldn't have hurt their reputation. Unexpectedly, the Stones showed signs of reaching a third level of maturity with the less contrived, more personal, songwriting of Steel Wheels, Wandering Spirits (Jagger solo) and Bridges to Babylon. The second side of Steel Wheels, encompassing "Rock and a Hard Place," "Can't Be Seen," "Almost Hear You Sigh," "Continental Drift," "Break the Spell," and "Slipping Away," shows a consistently imaginative recasting of earlier work, and, more importantly from an aesthetic standpoint, a recognition of the need for more imaginative recasting of earlier work. And finally they have a production that gives the band sonority.
Which brings us to Bridges to Babylon. It's a masterful work, full of the old sixties' magic but, for many complex reasons, nobody noticed. Everything that was great about the Stones in the sixties could be found in the nineties on Bridges to Babylon. The Rolling Stones universe as created by Jagger and Richards is a place where weak women and brutal men - or is it weak men and brutal women - climb into a boxing ring of romance and passion. There are despicable actions, vengeance and brutality. There is hedonistic destruction and gentle impulses. The way Jagger sings the tunes, things are never as simple as they seem. This is an absorbing universe - one that makes the Rolling Stones continually relevant. Jagger mines the interpersonal power-play brutality; Richards mines the sleaze with his tales of adultry and illicit love. Richards ragged dog quality is hung around some beautiful arrangements on "A Thief in the Night," and "How Could I Stop." The well-sketched character studies "Gunface" and "Flip the Switch" are as over-the-top violent as anything from the band's early days. "Flip the Switch" is gleeful in its depiction of an unrepentant socio-path. The "Under My Thumb" subtexts are present on "Already Over Me;" "Lady Jane" tongue-in-cheek, literary extravagance is present on "Saint of Me." Everywhere the complicit outlaw stance and bohemian demeanor is reinforced by the Stones, not in their identification with the misfits, but in the refusal to succumb to what has again become a pop marketplace of fake romance and artificial sexiness. Probably the best quality about Bridges to Babylon is that the band foregoes the more obvious Stones templates of simple, "nasty" rock and roll tunes in favor of elaborate ballads, which challenge their style and result in some pleasant surprises (the Wayne Shorter/Charlie Watts jazz crescendos in "How Can I Stop;" the floating structure of "A Thief in the Night:" the drugged out undercurrent on "Might as Well Get Juiced").
Of course, "masterful" is not something that is considered a big deal in pop music when it relates to an old white band. The question will remain unanswered, unless we ask it ourselves: What is meant in referring to Bridges to Babylon as a work as powerful as the original Stones' classics? One way to gauge the impact is by comparing it to other works. This gives us a grounding, some since of value that relates to today's product, places the Stones product among today's music and throws it into some kind of relief. A Radiohed's neo-sonic frontiermanship is always going to be bigger news as it captures a younger generation's attention in a big way, simply because of the "neo." A marketing/"rock critic" Mafia will over-project Radiohed's reputation as it tries to keep the advertising money coming into the magazines/newspapers in the short amount of time the attention of the pop market will last. Radiohed is new news (at least they used to be); the Stones are old news (perennial, but still old, news) so one band gains dominance regardless of which work is better, just as new bands will someday diminish the interest in Radiohed, regardless of how good the work is. And let's state the theory that one or two Radiohed albums may be better than Bridges to Babylon. This is still a comparison that in no way diminishes the importance, or masterful nature, of the Stones album. After all, in the days of the Stones' most revered product, comparisons were there to be made with the most varied product - the Beatles, Kinks, King Crimson, Fairport Convention, Captain Beefhart. Comparisons between diverse product used to be made but now the Stones, relegated to the ranks of old bands, no longer benefits from any serious comparison with new bands. Of course, Bridges to Babylon is better than Boomkat's debut. Looking around at some highly touted recent albums by groups like Coldplay and Zwan, comparisons could be made that actually benefit the Stones. Coldplay's neo-U2/Pink Floyd, almost-too-impressionistic, lyric bent is wedded to an eighties style keyboard production value. This style may not hold up as well as the Stones more durable style; reaching massive airplay, Coldplay's songs begin to cloy, the repetition and vagueness become irritating. Billy Corgan's born-again love fest with Zwan has resulted in a luxuriant shower of love tunes. They are impressive in their churning guitar frenzy, but a bit repetitive in the tune by tune details which seem to restate the love lyrics in the song before. Expect a diminishing return from guitars fueled by phase-shifting effects in general, and a tinny vocal that never seems to tire of itself. These are just generalized statements and in no way are meant to diminish either band. But the Stones style has proven durable. The classic band armed with great new material ultimately withstands the onslaught of the new and the trendy. The Stones represent a lot of classic sixties bands who are a long way from being treated the way old masters like, say, Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, were treated by the youngsters in the sixties.. This is an age-ist atmosphere that blinds itself to the debilitating implications to art, and sacrifices aesthetics to commerce.
Got Live if You Want It (1965), Liver than You'll Ever Be (bootleg), Get Your Ya-Yas Out (1970), Love You Live (1977), Still Life (1982), Flashpoint (1991), Stripped (1994), No Security (1997).
A hidden element in the on-going importance of the Stones as artistic entities can be found on a few of their unjustly neglected live albums. Unfortunately, Got Live if You Want It is the only live representation of the Stones as a mid-sixties band. The rhythm section is a blur in the background. Mick is up front in the left speaker, and the high pitched roar of a screaming audience is a distraction throughout. It's a mess despite Bill Wyman's memory of the tunes being doctored up in the studio. A better representation of the Stones' concert experience from this era would be appreciated.
Get Your Ya-Ya's Out has classic moves by Mick Taylor and Keith Richards and is a great representation of the Stones lithe musical architecture and the rhythm section's sublimely unhurried ferocity. Jagger may not always be serious, but he knows how to feel his way around a lyric, throwing off different suggestions as the urge hits. The naked pace of "Stray Cat Blues" is definitive Stones; as is the tight rush of "Little Queenie." Mick Taylor explodes on a few cuts for some of his finest playing.
And it's a Jack Flash gas following "Love in Vain" through a series of live albums, most recently on "Stripped." The song seemed too simple to begin with, but 30 years later the Stones are able to reveal previously unmined depth in the blues classic.
The early albums by the Rolling Stones were released in different versions in the UK and USA. The result wasn't quite as drastic as the difference between the Beatles' UK and USA releases. The Beatles' USA versions gave the states a degraded version of the band. With the Stones, the results were not debilitating. I tried to make some sense of it up above and will try to make it a little clearer here:
1. Between the Buttons in UK version and USA version are essentially the same. If you like "Let's Spend the Night Together" better than "Mother's Little Helper," than the USA version is the one to get. Or vice versa, and it probably doesn't matter much.
2. With Aftermath, the UK version is much better because the USA version drops four good songs, and only adds one ("Paint it Black" - but, of course, this song is essential so you need to get it somewhere).
3. Out of Our Heads UK has more songs than the USA version, but both versions have nice track sequencing - and the recommendation is go ahead and get both, so you don't miss anything.
4. The first UK untitled Rolling Stones record, and the USA release "England's Newest Hitmakers" are the same except for one song - "Mona" is on the UK version; "Not Fade Away" on the USA version. "Mona" shows up later on another American release so we suggest the USA "Hitmakers" album since Joe Strummer called the Stones "Not Fade Away" THE SONG that opened his eyes to rock and roll.
5. Got Live if You Want It: The USA version is an expanded version of the British LP, without the intro chant by the audience. Neither is essential - they both sound silly and fiddled with.
6. If you obtain the U.S. releases December's Children and The Rolling Stones, Now!, you won't really need The Rolling Stones, No. 2. The song selection is stronger on Now!. The songs deleted from Now! show up on December's Children anyway, and you've got that one if you paid attention.
England's Newest Hitmakers (USA)
The Rolling Stones, Now! (USA)
Out of Our Heads (USA)
Out of Our Heads (UK)
December's Children (USA)
Aftermath (negligible difference)
Between the Buttons (difference is negligible)
*(Some of the biographical material above is culled from David Dalton's very good book, The Rolling Stones: The First Twenty Years Knopf 1981 - by David Dalton).
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