The Rolling Stones in the Sixties

 THE ROLLING STONES IN THE SIXTIES

 

The Rolling Stones came from London and were bluesmen compared to the Beatles Liverpool beat group origins and were hyped as the hairier, more offensive competitors to the clean cut Beatles who became the public’s darlings where the Stones became the bane of the public, ostensibly anyway. If one listens to the records, the Stones were as much interested in commercial pop success as the Beatles and if Jagger / Richard started off in the shadow of Lennon / McCartney as a songwriter partnership,  they soon came up to speed and, arguably, soon wrote songs that were as good as any from the Beatles’ stable ad, in my view, in many cases, better.

 

At the start of his career, Mick Jagger had difficulty comprehending that he, or the other guys, could still be in the pop music industry after turning thirty and yet, almost 50 years later, the Stones, dropping a few members along the way, are still regarded as the greatest rock and roll band in the world.

 

The records I discuss here are only the UK releases.

 

THE ROLLING STONES (1964)

 

The young, fresh, wide eyed Rolling Stones performing a mix of blues, current R & B hits and three original compositions, two of them credited to the group and one, the quite awesome “Tell Me,” to Jagger  / Richards. One imagines that this studio set is also pretty much the live set of the time and on this evidence the Stones weren’t that different in approach and repertoire to their peers. The album followed some singles, not collected on the record, and was a chart topper but it hardly  gives us any clue that the band would become as massive as they did, even if one can point to the presence of Jagger and Richards. Brian Jones is fully integrated into the sound, as befits the erstwhile leader of the band, and Charlies Watts drums magisterially and Bill Wyman holds down his end with authority, yet the set list and thin sound aren’t particularly impressive.  

 

It’s an enjoyable album with spirited performances but one can’t say much more about it than that.

 

I’d bet that the singles (the best ones were “Come On,” I Wanna Be Your Man,” Not Fade Away,” “It’s All Over Now,” “Time Is On My Side,” “Little Red Rooster” and “Heart of Stone”), aimed at commercial success are the true reflection of the power of the Stones even this early in their career.

 

 

The formula is the same as with the debut album, with three Jagger / Richards compositions in a lightweight pop vein.  The productions values are higher, which means that the tunes sound less tinny than on the debut album but there’s still a sense that the covers are merely earnest interpretations of the music the band loved, despite the vigour of the performances.  For example, the musical performance of “I Can’t be Satisfied” is stellar but Jagger sounds awfully young and  British.  The band’s own songs are far better.

 

Once again the singles tell the story much better than the album tracks do. “The Last Time,” “Play with Fire,“ “Time Is On My Side,”  “ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “Get Off of My Cloud,” amongst the others, are viscerally exciting, energetic and full of the creative ingenuity that pushed the Stones to the head of their peer group class. “Satisfaction” was the monster international hit that propelled them to success and huge status in the USA, after which they never looked back.

 

 

OUT OF OUR HEADS (1965)

 

Surprisingly, still more of the same, with three Jager / Richards  songs and one group composition.  If it wasn’t necessarily true for the debut album, by the time of The Rolling Stones No 2, it seems that the covers are little more than filler because of the then practice of not including singles on albums. If the Stones could have included their strongest material, the singles, on their albums, these would have been far stronger and more cohesive.

 

This is probably where the strategy of different track listings for the UK and US albums works in favour of the latter because these records could happily discard the covers in favour of UK singles. It’s surprising how much the Stones relied on cover versions to  populate their albums. I suppose, not only was the advice to save the Jagger / Richards compositions for singles but that the pressure to release albums (in those days usually at least two a year) was so intense that the songwriting partnership just couldn’t keep up.

 

The production on this record is excellent and quite bottom heave, for the first time giving the Stones the literal weight to their sound that their music needed to make impact. Closing track, “I’m Free,” sounds like a defiant proto hippy anthem.

 

 

AFTERMATH (1966)

 

The tracks were recorded in the US and all songs were written by  Jagger / Richards.  At 11 minutes plus, “Going Home” is the longest track the Stones have released, and about only Bob Dylan had done something like that before. The Beatles were still dong three minute pop songs. Not that “Going Home” is a great song, being just a long, jamming groove with Jagger improvising vocals for most of the duration.

 

With “Stupid Girl,” “Under my Thumb”  and “Out of Time,”  another long song, the songwriters’  misogyny, which became a trademark during the following period, became openly apparent. 

 

Richards and Jones discover how powerful acoustic guitars can be if amplified correctly, and Jones spreads his instrumental horizons with sitar, marimba and dulcimer, though Richards played all of the standard guitar parts.

 

Though the best tracks on the album have become classic Stones songs, not all of the tracks are great, but at least this time around even the filler was composed by Jagger / Richards.

 

“!9^th Nervous Breakdown” and “Paint It, Black” were the contemporaneous singles. 

GOT LIVE IF YOU WANT IT!  (1966)

 

This album was originally released only in the US as a cash in on the popularity of the Stones. When I first listened to it, I was unimpressed by the performances and the sound.

 

The tracks is the expected mixture of hit singles and filler, representing the Stones live sets of the period.  Not very interesting to say the least except as some sort of concert memorabilia. Both the on-stage sound and repertoire would be infinitely better 10 years later with technological advances and with the core songs we have become over familiar with. 

 

 

BETWEEN THE BUTTONS (1967)

 

Surprisingly light, proto-psychedelic, Swinging London pop that seems an atypical release from the grungy rhythm and blues musicians the Stones were at the start of their career only a few years before, but Jagger and Richards were always as much pop song tunesmiths as they were blues fanciers and on Between the Buttons they show off their ability to write as good frothy confections as anybody else.

 

“Yesterday’s Papers” and “Back Street Girl” continue the misogyny.

 

The US version of the album contains the singles “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and “Ruby Tuesday”  in place of “Back Street Girl” and “Please Go Home.”  The singles add some heft to the album and perhaps losing the sneering misogyny of “Back Street Girl” is not a bad thing but the Diddley-esque romp (the Stones’ take on the Northwest Pacific punk rock scene which was influenced by the Stones in the first place) of “Please Go Home” is rather fun if utterly lightweight.  

 

The best I can say about this records is that the breadth and pop ambition of Jagger / Richards songwriting is quite intriguing and the album is enjoyable but is so bereft of gravitas that I see it mostly as an experimental curiosity and not one of the top Stones albums of all time.

THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES REQUEST (1967)

 

Apparently, this was the Stones answer to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and maybe the Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile, in that this was their stab at high psychedelia.

 

It wasn’t very well received at the time of release and was seen as a poor imitation of the Beatles’ “masterpiece” but, when I listened to it for the first time, possibly 40 years after its release, I didn’t understand why contemporary  rock critics took such a dim view of it. I already knew some of the tracks from various Stones compilation albums, such as “2000 Light Years from Home,” “Citadel” and “She’s a Rainbow.” The latter could’ve fitted on Between the Buttons, “Citadel” has an excellent, post-Cream heavy riff and “2000 Light Years from Home” is deliriously, beautifully, gloomily psychedelic.

 

“In Another Land” is Bill Wyman’s debut composition on a Stones album and he sings it, a departure from the norm where Jagger sings most of the songs and Richards has one or perhaps two vocals per album and was never repeated. The song itself seems influenced by “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Wyman’s flat vocals let down what otherwise would have been a lovely little pop tune.

 

Jagger / Richard tries to imagine how middle aged people would see the new generations in “2000 man,” only 33 years away (I wonder how they felt about this song in the year 2000) and in this they seem to take a cue from the skewed views of Ray Davies of The Kinks.

 

“Sing This All Together (See What Happens)” seems to be a studio jam, perhaps cobbled together from various takes, and the methodology and a throwaway riff halfway through sounds very much an adumbration of Miles Davis’ On the Corner. Put it down to LSD inspired  experimentalism.

 

The best one can say for “The Lantern” and “Gomper” is that they’re different, off-kilter folky and psychedelic with respectively electronics and Indian instrumentation to tart up slight whisps of songs.

 

This album has only three good tracks, the ones that turn up on so many compilations and though none of the rest are bad, they’re just not very engaging. The Stones attempted to stretch the envelope, and perhaps they did, but to no great appeal or success. There’s so little visceral excitement here.

 

I would say that Their Satanic Majesties Request marks the end of the progression of Stones Mk I from grungy R& B band to Swinging Sixties psychedelic pop.  And although Brian Jones was still technically a member of the band for the making of Beggars Banquet, that album marks the genesis of Stones Mk II.   

 

 

BEGGARS BANQUET (1968)

 

The last Stones album recorded and released during the lifetime of founding member Brian Jones, though he was no longer much of a force in the band and contributed nothing to the recording. 

 

“Jumping Jack Flash,”  the non-album single, introduced the “new” Rolling Stones, on the cusp of becoming eh greatest rock and roll band in the world, with the innovation of acoustic guitars played through a cheap cassette tape recorder that distorted the sound to a degree that it became more powerful than roaring electric guitars.  On close listening it seems as if almost every track has a bedrock of acoustic guitars with electric guitar overlays and fills.  Regardless, it’s still a quite tough record and even the slighter songs benefit from this treatment.

 

Part of the sessions for the album, specifically the recording of “Sympathy for the Devil” was filmed by Jean Luc Godard for inclusion of one of his movies.

 

“Jigsaw Puzzle,” “Street Fighting Man,” “Factory Girl” and “Salt of the Earth”  are the social commentary songs, “Stray Cat Blues”  is the misogyny song and “Prodigal Song” is the acoustic traditional blues, adumbrating “You Gotta Move” from Sticky Fingers.

 

The conceptual change here, seems to me to be that for the first time the Stones overtly embraced Americana, blues and country, in an amalgam that served them extremely well over the next five years and resulted in their best music, their most original music, the music that truly did make them that great rock band.

 

 

LET IT BLEED (1969)

 

Mick Taylor joins the Stones and the music changes subtly with less of the dual guitar interplay that characterised the Brian Jones period, with Keith Richard sticking more to rhythm and Taylor playing lead guitar. Let It Bleed and Beggars Banquet are the first two instalments in a 4 album purple patch (Sticky Fingersand Exile on Main Street are the others) that straddle the end of the Sixties and the start of the Seventies, and arguably represent the Stones at their creative peak. 

 

The album opener, “Gimme Shelter,” is up there with “Sympathy for the Devil” as a kick off for arguably the most complete Stones album to date with possibly the highest ratio of classic Stones songs, that include “Midnight Rambler,” “Love in Vain,” “Live With Me” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

 

“Honky Tonk Women” was the monster single of the time, mirrored by “Country Honk,” a country tune played earnestly and not for laughs, as the band was wont to do in later.

 

Let It Bleed ended of the Sixties for the Stones, as much as the notorious Altamont concert in December 1969, meant to conclude the first Stones tour of the US in many years, ended the peace and love vibes of the late Sixties and proved, for all the rebellious stance, that the Rolling Stones were only people, powerless as individuals or band to influence badness around them even if they were building towards the satanic majesties peak of the early Seventies. Rock and roll is built on myth and the myth of the infallible superstar rocker is possibly the biggest.

 

What is also true, though, is that as band and as songwriters the Rolling Stones changed, mutated and improved radically between 1962 and 1969, from a rinky-dink English R & B group to a powerful, internationally famous and influential rock band.