GET YER YA-YA’S OUT! (1970)
These tracks, on a single LP, were culled from shows on the Stones’ US tour in 1969, the one that culminated in the horror show of Altamont. I have another live album, on CD, with tracks from that Altamont show that are obviously of greater historical interest and significance than anything on Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out but this album is nonetheless an excellent snapshot of the Late Sixties Stones in concert, with some humongous rock and roll moments. These shows were played long before the huge, elaborate stage sets of the tours from the Nineties onward and one has a real sense of a band just getting on with their day job, albeit one they love, on a bare stage, with no artifice, no theatricality, no knowing smirks of self-parody. The tunes on here are not yet the hoary concerts staples that some eventually became. For all these reasons this live set is hugely enjoyable.
STICKY FINGERS (1971)
This album sees the Stones straddling their late Sixties rock sound and the more sophisticated Seventies singer songwriter ethos, with some great rockers and some great slow songs and n “Moonlight Mile” perhaps the first version of the more adult, yet far less interesting, Stones type of introspection that became rifer during the following decade. Out of the 10 tracks on the record, “Moonlight Mile” is, to my mind, the only (and very much) disposable tune. This is a good return on investment for the Stones fan.
After Exile on Main Street, Stones albums became more and more hit-and-miss affairs that are mostly relatively dissatisfying. One can probably make one decent album from the best cuts off the albums from Goats Head Soup to Some Girls. I’d rate Sticky Fingers just below Exile and the pair are the last examples of what I’ve always thought of as Stonesy rock ‘n roll: bluesy, relaxed grooves with tough riffs, muscular playing and the sense of exhilaration that comes from still being young men extending their musical horizons yet never straying far from their roots.
After this double whammy, the Stones seem to enter a world of added professionalism where, indeed, it’s very clear that one can have a rock and roll career after the age of 30, and need not give it up, but the inventiveness slowly fades and is replaced by proficiency, especially with songwriting. Songwriting craft, productions values and arrangements improve but are often the only things that hold the songs together. The sense of fun and the excitement of being daring and succeeding, is gone.
EXILE ON MAIN STREET (1972)
This is one of the albums I obsessed over as a kid, hanging out I the local record store with no money to buy any records and contenting myself by obsessively flipping through the stack of empty record sleeves and making wish lists of records I’d buy if I could. Exile’s cover was fascinating and almost defied understanding, at least mine, and seemed to make no sense as reference to the album title.
“Tumbling Dice” was the only song off the album I ever heard until I eventually bought the damns thing, probably bout 20 years after released, because it was played on the radio. The first time I heard “Happy” was on the Love You Live set from 1977. The other tracks remained mysteries until I put the records on my turntable.
I already knew that critics, especially from the NME (my music reference bible during my student years), regarded Exile on Main Street as the last indisputably great Stones album, and this was still only in the late Seventies. I doubt that this opinion would’ve changed much over the past 40 years. The Stones have made some good albums since Exile but have hardly made any other album that’s so bereft of filler and just has one great tack after the other, a rarity on a double album. Some Girls comes close and I have a fondness for Steel Wheels (1989) too but the later Stones studio albums are mostly the kind of records one appreciates rather than find viscerally thrilling from start to finish.
GOATS HEAD SOUP (1973)
“Angie” was the monster hit off this album, the follow up to the absolute highlight in the Stones discography that was Exile on Main Street, and for me the only valuable track here, still thrilling every time I hear it. Oh, and he other good things about this album are the title and the cover photograph. That’s about it, though.
Perhaps it was inevitable that whatever followed Exile couldn’t possibly match, never mind top, its brilliance and, anyway, the Stones abandoned the bluesy rock & roll glories of the predecessor to explore new, progressive directions but, still, for me, this album fits in conceptually, considering it retrospectively, with the Nineties albums that followed Tattoo You, with a sound that makes the Stones just sound ordinary, professional record makers, and an ambience that’s adult contemporary in the worst way.
One can’t fault the craft of the song writing, the production values or the excellence of the playing but it’s not the kind of record that seizes your attention at first listen and it hasn’t improved with repeated listening. I can kind of appreciate it without ever having an emotional investment in it, “Angie” excepted.
IT’S ONLY ROCK ‘N ROLL (1974)
It’s only Rock ‘n Roll (1974) was the first Rolling Stones album I bought (though the double album Hot Rockswas the first Stones album I owned, having received it as a birthday or Christmas present), being persuaded by the discount price at Sygma Records a couple of years after the record had been released, and because I’d loved “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” even more than the title track. it had been Radio 5’s top hit of 1974 too.
Up to that point I was acquainted only with the best tracks of the Stones’ Sixties catalogue, the hits on Hot Rocks, and this was the first studio album I listened to, with the two best known tracks and a mixed bunch of others.
At that time of my life and musical appreciation I was into loud fast and the long, slow tracks “Till the Next Goodbye.” “Time Waits for No-one” and “If You Really Want to be My Friend,” didn’t appeal to me at all and I disliked the guitar sound on the latter. It took many years and some maturity in my musical tastes before I started appreciating this side of the Stones too, and now I regard them as highlights on the album with the cod calypso rock of “Luxury” and the jerky funk rock of “Dance Little Sister” as the weakest tracks on the record, even if they still sound powerful.
On first listen, other than the two hits, I was most impressed by the rousing romp of “Short and Curlies,” which probably can be seen as the real throw-away filler track on the album, but it was jolly, bouncy and funny. The propulsive groove of “Fingerprint File” is a great end to a good album of worthwhile, if not utterly classic, Stones material.
Over many years I’ve managed to own or at least listen to all the Seventies albums and for me Goat’s Head Soup (1973) and Black & Blue (1976) are the weakest and Emotional Rescue (1979) just fluff, and the first Stones album that lacks the gravitas and authority of the earlier releases, the records that made the Stones what they were, are and always will be. It’s only Rock ‘n Roll was the last record to feature Mick Taylor and can be seen as the end of an era, before the oddly eclectically experimental Black & Blue that was the bridging album to Some Girls (1978.) Ron Wood replaced Taylor has been a Rolling Stone for far longer than Brian Jones and Mick Taylor combined.
For me, the best Stones albums of the Seventies are Get Yer Ya-Yas Out (1970), Sticky Fingers (1971), Exile on Main Street (1972), It’s only Rock ‘n Roll. Love You Live (1977) and Some Girls. Over time I’ve become less enamoured with Sticky Fingers, more impressed with Some Girls and still rate Exile on Main Street as the best of the lot by some distance. It’s only Rock ‘n Roll suffers from the typical song writer’s malaise, and in particular the Stones, that they come up with some superb songs but also a bunch of minor stuff that serve only to complete the track listing, and it’s evident from how few of the minor tracks ever make it to a live set list. Exile has no weak links and is to be the most inspired Stones since Let it Bleed and has not been outdone to date.
From about Goats Head Soup Jagger Richards team truly became professional song writers with deep experience and a great deal of craft who can write good tunes, good hooks, workmanlike lyrics, but struggle for the moments of inspiration that lift a tune from banal to brilliance. That’s when instrumental proficiency and tricky arrangements must tart up insubstantiality.
I’m very fond of It’s only Rock ‘n Roll. It has the hugely satisfactory merits of a grower, an album that reveals its strengths over time, with one’s own maturity of appreciation, and, once established as a gem, never palls.
BLACK AND BLUE (1976)
I’ve listened to this record once before, and, curiously, it was a copy I borrowed from the Stellenbosch Municipal Library. Someone at the library must’ve been able to sneak in contemporary rock records into their collection of classical music, jazz and spoken word, and this is where I first heard Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Harvest, Band on the Run, Ladies of the Canyon, Blue, Tapestry and, sadly also, Tea for the Tillerman and Jethro Tull’s Songs from the Wood.
I presume Black and Blue was in the collection because it was brand new and not necessarily because the buyer thought of it as a classic album; I don’t recall any other Stones records at the library.
Black and Blue is definitely no classic Stones album and, like Goats Head Soup, adumbrates the mid Nineties Stones records where proficiency and craft are prized over simple inspiration and the enjoyment of making music. I’ve always thought of this record as the Stones’ attempt to follow in Bowie’s footsteps when he abandoned the tough rock of the Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane/Diamond Dogs period and exchanged glam for sharp suits, foppy haircuts and White funk. I didn’t care for Bowie and I don’t much care for Black and Blue’s ventures into various Black music genres and Mick Jagger’s faux American accent. The Stones never attempted to sound like Mississippi bluesmen when they were a blues band yet, when he’s in his Thirties, Jagger wants to sound more black than black and to me, now, it’s the vocal equivalent of blackface.
The music is kinda funky, it’s well arranged and competently played and the production values are as high as one would expect yet the record is forgettable.
LOVE YOU LIVE (1977)
When I first heard a track off this double live album (probably on Radio 5), and it might have been “Honky Tonk Women,” I was disappointed and distressed. This version of a song I loved seemed weak, sloppy and lacking in energy. For this reason I avoided buying the album for probably 30 years afterward until I found a discount copy of the CD re-issue, that I bought because the budget price was irresistible.
To my very happy surprise, I really liked the album this time around and didn’t find the same fault I did back when I heard it on the radio. In fact, now I think it’s a good live album, delivering a mixture of the usual hits, some of the best songs from the preceding Seventies albums and, on the El Mocambo side, zippy, zesty blues and rock ‘n roll covers performed in a small club, as if the Stones were the world’s best bar band.
From 1982’s Still Life onward, the Stones regularly released live albums of their most recent concert tours, presumably as contract fillers, as much as concert mementos, as they were no longer putting out a studio album every years but apart from Stripped (1995), they are nothing better than mementos and not compelling at all unless you want to hear how the Stones’ live sound changed as they aged.
For my money Live You Live is one of the last live albums where the Stones sound like an honest working band and not merely effectively a nostalgia act, endlessly repeating past glories and perfunctory versions of tracks from forgettable contemporary albums.
Love You Live does rock in a way one would expect from the greatest rock and roll band in the world.
SOME GIRLS (1978)
Even in South Africa “Miss You” was a big hit, a relentless disco groove rock track I never tire of. This was the kind of almost effortlessly alluring tune the Stones had been aiming at when they made of Black and Blue and deserves to fall in the category of Great Stones Songs, whereas Black and Blue should be filed under non-essential in its entirety.
Apart from “Faraway Eyes,” a jokey, throwaway song featuring Jagger mocking country and gospel music, the rest of the tracks on this album are excellent, tough, contemporary Stones rock. Oh, and an effervescent version of “Just My Imagination (Running Away With me)” that reminds one of the very early Stones, when their albums contained a mix of gritty blues and almost innocent R & B pop.
The great delight of this album is that it’s a rock album and more genuinely straight-ahead rock at that than most of its predecessors with probably the best, most consistent and exhilarating rock grooves the band’s achieved since Exile on Main Street. It’s stripped down music, simple yet highly effective and exudes the guitar power some NME journalist bemoaned as lacking in the Stones in the punk period. The Stones did not so much reinvent themselves, as they seemed to want to do in the Seventies but reformulated the mission statement in currently understood terms.
The “Deluxe video edition” of the album has another 12 tracks of rock ‘n roll and blues presumably recorded at the same sessions as those on the standard album, and these additional recordings are delightful, playful and exuberant and seem to indicate a band rediscovering its mojo and the reasons why the individuals wanted to make music in the first place. These fun, joyous and unaffected performances are highly satisfactory in their artless simplicity; the musicians are kicking back in the studio doing what they do best and with no pretensions. Sometimes “bonus materials” and studio outtakes are only historically interesting, and obviously not good enough for the official album. The additional tracks on this version of Some Girls don’t fit the mood and attitude of the main album but I think they are eminently worthwhile releasing.
In my view, Exile on Main Street, It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll and Some Girls are the only completely satisfactory Stones studio albums of the Seventies.
