Primer
is The A.V. Club's
ongoing series of beginners' guides to pop culture's most notable subjects:
filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests
us—and hopefully you. This week: The Rolling Stones, broken down by 20
songs that define their themes and styles, and five albums that every serious
rock fan should own. The Rolling Stones appear in the new concert film Shine
A Light, directed
by Martin Scorsese.
The
Rolling Stones 101:
Unlike
their classic rival, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones aren't frozen in time.
Their body of work spans several decades, covers numerous musical eras, and
varies widely in quality as the band aged, changed members, and attained
incredible wealth. Exactly when and where you come at The Stones will define
how you see the band. If you were born in the '80s or '90s, Mick Jagger has
always been a preening, somewhat ridiculous dinosaur, shaking his wrinkled ass
for graying baby boomers at $200 a ticket. It isn't a pretty picture, nor
wholly representative of a band that's been making records for nearly 45 years.
Like
the American bluesmen they emulated, The Stones have continued making music
well into their 60s. They've been pilloried as much as praised for sticking
together, but that's nothing new. As early as 1969, in the middle of the band's
prime, people railed against The Stones for not breaking up already. (Rock
writer Nik Cohn famously wished the band members would die in a plane crash
before their 30th birthdays, so they could stay forever young.) It's a silly
argument, because the greatness of what The Rolling Stones created could never
be overshadowed, even by a hundred late-career cash-in tours. Any statement to
the contrary is quickly refuted by the first 10 seconds of "Jumpin' Jack
Flash,"
which still are as hard, exciting, and vital as any moments in rock 'n' roll.
Simply
put, The Rolling Stones defined how a rock band is supposed to sound, look,
fight, and fuck. The swaggering lead singer; the guitarist/sidekick "with
mystique"; the wild, drug-fueled and sex-drenched escapades on the road; the
arrogant disregard for authority; the grungy fashion sense—all the rock-band
clichés can be traced back to here. Whenever a new rock band is supposedly
bringing the music "back to basics," it often sounds like something off of
1972's Exile On Main St., considered by many to be the definitive Stones
album—maybe even the definitive rock 'n' roll album, even though it
doesn't contain any well-known singles. (The swinging "Tumbling Dice" comes
closest.) Exile touches
on a variety of American music styles, from blues to soul to gospel to country,
sometimes in the space of a single song like "Loving Cup," a lilting Southern-soul
ballad straight out of a prairie church, but played like a straight-up rocker.
By this time, just eight years after their debut album, The Stones had so
completely absorbed and perfected the earthy roots music they grew up on that
it no longer seemed strange for pishy Brits to be playing around with music forms
created by black Americans decades earlier.
That
wasn't the case when Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones palled around
London's blues scene in the early '60s. While their love and knowledge of
greats like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf was real and deep, bringing blues
back home in a mutated, updated form—even in the wake of The Beatles'
incredible overseas success—was a dream only the most wildly ambitious
British musicians dared ponder. But while The Beatles and the clean-cut British
Invasion pop-rock bands that followed were a far cry from the Stones' hip,
bohemian aesthetic, they did create a goody-goody center so ubiquitous that an
alternative quickly became inevitable. Crafted with the help of media-savvy
manager Andrew Loog Oldham, The Stones' bad-boy image was apparent from their
first album cover, which pictured the decidedly unphotogenic group lined up
menacingly like a gang of sociopathic schoolboys. The Beatles just wanted to
hold your hand, the press breathlessly reported, but on their debut, England's
Newest Hitmakers, The
Stones covered Willie Dixon's "I Just Want To Make Love To You," a randy blues classic
popularized by Muddy Waters. The Stones' image must have been scary to parents,
but the music itself sounds precious today. Compared with Waters' version,
which still sounds filthy in the best possible way, The Stones' cover sounds
like young kids pretending to be grown-ups.
The
band's grasp of blues and R&B; quickly grew more assured, as hit cover
versions of The Valentinos' "It's All Over Now" and Irma Thomas' "Time
Is On My Side"
(both collected on the band's second album, 12X5) brilliantly show. By the
time of 1965's The Rolling Stones, Now!—a go-to party record in the band's
catalog—they were the baddest white boys on the planet, taking on the
heady likes of Chuck Berry and Solomon Burke, and providing a sturdy,
blues-punk blueprint for countless American bands just starting to bash away on
Bo Diddley riffs in their garages.
As
good as the early, blues-based Stones albums are, the band was still tethered
to its larger-than-life influences. It wasn't until 1968's Beggars Banquet that The Stones showed
they could make American music truly their own. Released during one of the most
tumultuous years in modern history, Beggars Banquet summed up the fear and
uncertainty of a time rife with political assassinations and street riots by
reaching back to the haunted, desolate country blues of the Mississippi Delta.
There was nothing precious about the apocalyptic cover of Rev. Robert Wilkins' "Prodigal
Son," a
positively evil-sounding gospel song for what must have seemed to some like the
end of the world. And while the rest of the rock world was preaching the joys
of free love and copious drug use, "Jigsaw Puzzle" vividly portrayed the
seamy, paranoid underbelly of the hippie dream that was just starting to rise
to the surface.
The
blues—or, more accurately, a hard-rocking British version of the
blues—form the foundation of the Stones' sound, and the band usually was
at its best creatively, the closer it stayed to those roots. Commercially,
however, the Stones' strength was in their ability to zero in on the most
exciting trends of the time and infuse their music with the new energy. Early
on, The Beatles and Bob Dylan were important contemporary influences. When The
Beatles used a sitar on "Norwegian Wood," The Stones were inspired to use
Eastern sounds on "Paint It Black." (The Sgt. Pepper rip-off Their Satanic
Majesties Request was
less successful.) When the "thin wild mercury" folk-rock sound of Bob Dylan's Blonde
On Blonde became
the rage, The Stones responded with 1967's Between The Buttons, which includes Dylan-esque
tracks like "Who's Been Sleeping Here?" The Stones weren't originators, they were
synthesizers, taking what they liked (or what was popular) from various corners
of the musical universe and integrating it into their sound. The ideas were
borrowed, but the execution was wholly original and unmistakably "Stonesy."
The
best example of this is 1978's Some Girls, the band's best-regarded
album from outside its "glory years" period in the late '60s and early '70s. Some
Girls is
an unabashed "New York" album, drawing on the city's nascent punk and disco scenes
to breath some fresh life into the band's standard blues-rock attack. The
Stones might have been another one of Johnny Rotten's "boring old farts" (he's
said he wished the band had broken up in 1965), but none of rock's old guard
confronted the present as forcefully or credibly as The Stones did on Some
Girls.
The album's rockers hit with an aggressive punk edge, and the disco track "Miss
You"
became a No. 1 hit. While some hardcore fans groaned that The Stones sold out,
"Miss You" is rightfully considered one of the best disco singles of the era.
[pagebreak]
Intermediate
work:
While
John Lennon and Paul McCartney formed a songwriting partnership long before The
Beatles made them multimillionaires, Jagger and Richards were encouraged to
become songwriters just as The Stones became famous. The early Stones albums
lean heavily on covers of blues and rock standards and current R&B; hits,
reflecting the purist leanings of then-leader Brian Jones, who founded the
band. But as Jagger and Richards, at Oldham's urging, because the main creative
forces in The Stones, Jones became the group's ace multi-instrumentalist,
introducing exotic new sounds on the band's records.
After
refining their songwriting on two near-classics from 1965, Out Of Our Heads and December's Children
(And Everybody's), Jagger
and Richards produced their first album of all-original material with 1966's Aftermath, also
their first full-fledged masterpiece and a template for every classic Stones
album that came afterward. It was here that Jagger—always an underrated
lyricist—established the themes he would ruminate on throughout his
career: sex as pleasure, sex as power, love disguised as hate, and hate
disguised as love. The songs were sarcastic, dark, and casually shocking. They
were also misogynistic, though "Stupid Girl" and especially "Under
My Thumb"
could also be heard as disturbing portraits of their hatefully macho
protagonists. Still, Jagger made sure to blur the line between critique and
celebration. It was part of a complex, slippery persona that let Jagger have it
both ways. He could be good and evil, man and woman, tough and tender, victim
and victimizer. It was a confounding, complicated image, and willfully
constructed to be misunderstood and even alienating, but it made Jagger one of
rock's most compelling frontmen.
Three
years after Aftermath, The Stones were making the best albums of their career.
Starting with Beggars Banquet in 1968 and ending with Exile On Main St. in 1972, The Stones
enjoyed arguably the greatest creative period for any rock band, also releasing
the masterpieces Let It Bleed in 1969 and Sticky Fingers in 1971. (There's also a wonderful
live album recorded during the triumphant '69 tour, Get Yer Ya-Yas Out!) This is unquestionably
the band's hardest-rocking period, and its most scandalous. The '69 American
tour, the Stones' first in three years, ended in tragedy at a free concert held
that December (the day after Let It Bleed was released) at California's Altamont
Speedway, where four people died, including Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old fan
who was stabbed to death by Hells Angels bikers hired to work security. (They
were paid $500 and given all the free beer they could drink.) The murder was
filmed by documenatarians Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, and
featured in their movie Gimme Shelter.
Altamont
is often referred to as "the end of the '60s," a description that could also
apply to Let It Bleed. While the band paid lip service to Woodstock Nation before
Altamont (disastrously, as it turned out), Let It Bleed was far more cynical about
the so-called youth "revolution." The record's first and last songs tell the
story: "Gimme Shelter" is an emotionally violent rocker featuring a memorable
backing vocal by Merry Clayton, who screamed lines in the chorus that predicted
Altamont: "Rape, murder, it's just a shot away, it's just a shot away." The
album-closing "You Can't Always Get What You Want" was more accepting of an
uncertain future, and it became a fitting epitaph for Jones, who was fired from
the band during the Let It Bleed sessions after chronic drug abuse (and
drug-related convictions) made it impossible for him to play adequately or tour
with the band once the record was released. Jones died less than a month later,
in July 1969. He was 27.
A
21-year-old blonde-haired wunderkind named Mick Taylor, a former member of John
Mayall's Bluesbreakers, replaced Jones. A dazzling guitar player with a smooth
style reminiscent of another former Bluesbreaker, Eric Clapton, Taylor spent
just five years in The Stones, but he's one of the great unsung contributors to
the band's rich legacy. The Stones, arguably, never sounded as good as they did
with Taylor. Sticky Fingers, for one, is aided tremendously by Taylor's
technical proficiency, which helped raise the musicianship of the rest of the
band. "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" begins as a typical Stones rocker, riding a
chunky Richards riff and Charlie Watts' reliably funky backbeat. But after two
and a half minutes, it turns into a Santana-style scorcher, with Taylor turning
out solos that Richards (or Jones) could never touch. Taylor could keep it
simple and rockin', too—on "Sway," he rubs up against Richards' churning
rhythm guitar in the verse, then tears out a soaring solo in the outro, quietly
showing off without ruining the gut-level sleaze that makes the song so terrific.
Taylor's last album with The Stones was 1974's It's Only Rock 'N' Roll, for which he co-wrote two
of the better songs, the ballads "Till The Next Goodbye" and "Time Waits For No
One." But Taylor wasn't given a songwriting credit, and while he said the
slight didn't play a part in his decision, he left the band later that year,
just a few months before The Stones were set to make another record.
Advanced
Studies:
With
1973's Goats Head Soup, image and lifestyle moved ahead of music for The Rolling
Stones, and while the band continued to make good records, music took a
backseat to the Stones "myth" from here on out. Recorded in Jamaica because,
according to Richards, it was one of the few countries that would take them
(Keef's drug-arrest sheet was already pretty long, and it only got longer in
the '70s), Goats Head Soup garnered a mixed reaction upon release, mostly
because it doesn't hold up to the incredibly high standard of what came before.
Like the rest of the band's post-Exile On Main St. work (save Some Girls), Goats Head Soup is best appreciated when
not compared to The Stones' classic output. It's an album that once again finds The
Stones changing capably with the times, embracing a glam look and a funk
groove, along with some terrific ballads for the pop charts. "Angie" was the
hit, but the moving "Winter" is one of the great lost Stones slow songs.
Ballads frequently are the strongest tracks on late-period Stones albums, from
"Waiting On A Friend" (Tattoo You) to "Almost Hear You Sigh" (Steel Wheels) to "Out Of Tears" (Voodoo
Lounge).
Jagger
claimed he "really put all I had into" Goats Head Soup, but neither he nor the
other Stones could honestly claim to care much about 1976's Black And Blue, which was recorded while
the band was auditioning replacements for Mick Taylor. In fact, Black And
Blue is
virtually an audition tape, with new Stone Ron Wood sharing time with
unsuccessful applicants like Wayne Perkins and Harvey Mandel on the album's
jam-oriented tracks. 1981's Tattoo You was similarly slapped together, collecting
outtakes from the previous 10 years and overdubbing new vocals. But at least
the material on Tattoo You was stronger, with one side featuring
decent-to-splendid fast numbers (including the band's last classic rocker, "Start
Me Up")
and the other side centered on ballads.
Tattoo
You was
one of the bestselling records of the band's career, and it proved to be the
last time an album of original Stones material was received so warmly
commercially and critically. Once The Stones became a stadium act, spectacle
became their main focus. Records increasingly seemed like an excuse to launch
another highly lucrative, globetrotting tour. Still, while the post-Tattoo
You output
displays little of the fire or inspiration of the group's classic period, The
Stones still made good records that can be appreciated on their own terms.
Perhaps the most underappreciated (and strangest) entry in the Stones catalog
is 1983's Undercover, which chucked the standard-issue hard rock of Tattoo You for a wildly experimental
mélange of new wave, dub, pop, and reggae. Lyrically, Undercover is almost comically
violent, with songs like the serial-killer portrait "Too Much Blood" (with its references to The
Texas Chain Saw Massacre) delivered with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Undercover isn't an
entirely successful record—the slick, danceable textures don't quite make
up for the lack of songs—but it's certainly more interesting than the
solid but too-safe "comeback" record Steel Wheels, released in 1989 after
Jagger and Richards spent a few years sniping at each other and pursuing solo
careers.
[pagebreak]
From
the '90s onward, The Stones made a concerted effort to "be like The Stones,"
releasing albums every five years or so that self-consciously tried to recall
the band's '60s and '70s prime. The best Stones album from this period is
1994's Voodoo Lounge, which plays like a survey of the band's various guises from
1964 to 1972, from the folky chamber-pop of "New Faces" to the dark blues of
"Thru And Thru" to the straightforward rock of "Sparks Will Fly." It's a pretty
good record, though it's occasionally forced. (When Jagger sings "I wanna fuck
your sweet ass" on "Sparks Will Fly," he's asserting his fiftysomething sexuality
a little too strongly.) While it isn't technically a Stones record, Jagger's
1993 solo effort Wandering Spirit is the best Stones-related release since Tattoo
You. Working
with professional late-career rehabber Rick Rubin, Jagger pushed himself beyond
the conservatism of late-period Stones albums on rubbery dance tracks ("Sweet
Thing") and gorgeous country numbers ("Evening Gown") that spotlighted his
still-powerful vocals well. Wandering Spirit also rocks more
convincingly than any recent Stones record. "I'm as hard as a brick, I
hope I never go limp," Jagger sings on "Wired All Night," a defiant,
tour-'til-we-drop mission statement for The Stones as they approach 50 years in
rock.
The
essentials:
1. Singles Collection: The London Years
The
Rolling Stones didn't make a bad album in the '60s—even the maligned Their
Satanic Majesties Request has more good songs than terrible ones—but for most of
the decade, the group hit hardest on its singles, which are collected (both A-
and B-sides) on this three-disc collection. A reading of the track list tells
you all you need to know about how essential The London Years is: "Tell Me," "The Last
Time," "Heart Of Stone," "Satisfaction," "19th Nervous Breakdown," "Play With
Fire," "Get Off Of My Cloud," "Let's Spend The Night Together," "Ruby Tuesday,"
"Honky Tonk Women," "Jumpin' Jack Flash," and dozens of other indispensable
classics. Taken together, these singles tell the story of how a British blues
group called The Rolling Stones because the world's greatest rock 'n' roll
band.
2. Exile On Main St.
Often
called the best Stones album, Exile On Main St. best distills in a single
package what made the Stones great. There's all kinds of songs—blues
standards, country songs about black angels, gospel hollers haunted by voodoo
spirits—but it all sounds like rock 'n' roll. And make no mistake, this
is the most desperate rock 'n' roll of the band's career. Exile is the sound of a band
trying not to fall down; soon afterward, The Stones would succumb to creative
(if not necessarily physical) exhaustion after maxing out its capabilities in
every possible way for a decade.
3. Sticky Fingers
If
The Stones fretted about their reputation after the Altamont tragedy, they
didn't show it on 1971's Sticky Fingers, the most overtly sexual and druggy album of
their career. (Which is saying a lot.) With its Andy Warhol-designed "crotch"
cover brazenly hinting at the sleaze contained within, Sticky Fingers is an in-your-face
desecration of all that is good and decent in the world, and (not
coincidentally) one of the great "rock 'n' roll" rock 'n' roll albums. Kicking
off with "Brown Sugar," a still-scandalous song about a white English
slavemaster having sex with a comely slave, Sticky Fingers is the seven deadly sins
set to a killer riff and a danceable beat, though the slow songs ("I Got The
Blues" and the epic "Moonlight Mile") hit the hardest.
4. Beggars Banquet
Bob
Dylan once said that he could have written "Satisfaction," but Mick Jagger
couldn't have written "Mr. Tambourine Man." Maybe so, but Dylan would have
killed to write an opening line as memorable as "Please allow me to introduce
myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste." The sinister salutation opens "Sympathy
For The Devil," which opens 1968's Beggar Banquet on an appropriately
foreboding note. The band's commitment to stripped-down country blues was
commendable at a time when the jammy psychedelia of Cream reigned supreme, but
this record belongs to Jagger, who committed some of his most unsettling,
disturbing, and darkly funny lyrics to this scathing collection of songs
documenting the sad degradation of so many hopes and dreams as the '60s came to
a close.
5. Some Girls
Most
of the big '60s rock bands either ignored punk or denigrated it for the lack of
musicianship, playing directly into the hands of the "keep it simple, stupid"
crowd. Never ones to shy away from aggression, The Stones were invigorated by
the chesty upstarts and responded with Some Girls, the band's nastiest, most
energetic record in years, and its last indisputable masterpiece. Jagger proved
he could be as provocative as any punk on the title track, where he talked
about the attributes of bedding women of various races, while "Shattered" was a
paranoid nightmare set in New York City, and powered by mounds of cocaine. On
the pop charts, The Stones scored another No. 1 with "Miss You," which was
danceable enough for disco fans, and rocking enough for disco haters not to
notice.
Miscellany
Martin
Scorsese isn't the first A-list director to document The Rolling Stones at
work. That distinction goes to French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard, who
filmed the band recording "Sympathy For The Devil" for his arty, disjointed,
'60s counterculture treatise Sympathy For The Devil, released in 1970. Also from 1970 is the
Maysles brothers' Gimme Shelter, still the definitive Stones movie, and one of the
great films about the 1960s. Hal Ashby's Let's Spend The Night Together from 1983 isn't even close
to being in the same league, though the Stones weren't in their old league,
either, at this point. Filmed during the stadium tour for Tattoo You, The Stones play their old
songs poorly and way too fast, and Ashby films the band to accentuate its
distance from the audience. It's an accurate depiction of the band at the time,
perhaps, but pretty uninvolving as a viewing experience nonetheless.
The
most infamous Stones film is the toughest to see: Robert Frank's Cocksucker
Blues. A
lurid, cinéma vérité, black-and-white documentary about the 1972 North American
tour in support of Exile On Main St., Cocksucker Blues is full of scenes
depicting drug use, orgies, heavy drinking, and other (probably staged) acts of
rock 'n' roll awesomeness by The Stones and their depressing cloud of
hangers-on. Except Cocksucker Blues isn't all that awesome or exciting to watch; it's
intentionally dull and monotonous, proving once and for all that even the most
disgusting acts of debauchery become no more dangerous than taking out the
garbage once you have license to commit them. The Stones filed a court order to
block the film's release, though it can still be screened if Frank is present.
Otherwise, Stones fans have had to track down bootleg copies to see
scintillating footage like this:
Along
with numerous concert films, The Rolling Stones have released nine live albums,
from 1966's no-fi Got Live If You Want It! up through this year's
soundtrack for Shine A Light. Most are of interest only to diehards and
completists, but three are worth a listen for casual-to-committed fans: 1970's Get
Yer Ya-Yas Out!, an
absolutely essential document of the band at its live peak, recorded at Madison
Square Garden in 1969; 1977's Love You Live, if only for the side of
smoky blues covers recorded at Toronto's El Mocambo club; and 1995's Stripped, which
offers likeably intimate versions of some lesser-known cuts from the band's
catalog.