The Rolling Stones between 1990 and 2020

 

 

1990 is just off the halfway point in the life of the Rolling Stones and it seems safe to say that the music made in the 30 years between 1990 and 2020 is not the music most fans will cherish and treasure. The Stones remained a commercially viable brand, especially with their mega tours, and possibly became a “national treasure,” despite their rebellious roots and Keith Richards continued semi-outlaw stance.  No Stones album released in this 30 year period is of huge value and worth and, at best, one might make a half decent playlist of the best tracks, but it won’t be the mandatory Stones playlist that the public will listen to, not like the classic tracks from roughly the first 20 years.  The two Hot Rocks compilations or the Rolled Gold double album, though each stops  short of the best stuff from the late Seventies, are probably just about the only Rolling Stones albums you ever need own. Even the early studio records had their fair share of filler and also rans. The point is, when people think of the top Rolling Stones songs, and pick their favourites, it’s not likely to be anything released after 1980 (except maybe for “Start Me Up.”)

 

 

FLASHPOINT (1991)

 

These tracks were recorded on the Steel Wheels / Urban Jungle tour, the first Stones tour since the outing in support of Tattoo You in the early Eighties. It’s the final tour featuring bassist Bill Wyman who left the band afterwards.

 

The opening track is “Start Me Up,” which seems to have become the standard show opener for the Stones, and the rest are a mixture of some tracks from Steel Wheels (presumably deemed to be the most worthwhile performing live), some hoary old classics, “Miss You” from Some Girls and two brand new tracks, a clever, popular marketing ploy in the Nineties to persuade fans to buy live albums and greatest hits sets.

 

The first impression is of crystal-clear sound and lively, energetic playing, giving life to well-known studio tracks, which must’ve made this tour a pleasure to attend. On some later live recordings the Stones, especially Jagger, sound as if they’re playing to the gallery and going through the perfunctory stadium motions with crowd pleasing tunes and antics, but here the band seems fresh, eager and sharp, as if to exorcise the demons of the animosity between Jagger and Richards in  the late Eighties and of not touring for such a long time.

 

The only disappointment is the over blown, almost showbiz blues version of “Little Red Rooster,” originally a stark, angular, spooky take on the Howlin’ Wolf classic, but with guest star Eric Clapton, I guess they felt it needed that additional bluster.

 

I’d never heard this album until I wrote this and I must confess that I have a slight regret that I didn’t buy it at the time of release, but, having said that, and taking into account that this is a great live set, I don’t know whether I’ll ever want to listen to it again. There’s a lot of Stones live material out there and I prefer the looser, starker, more gnarly Seventies shows than the perfectly recorded, stadium version from the Nineties onward, when the band became less of a gritty, working rock and roll band, to my mind, and more just a smoothly operating, mega touring, nostalgia stage show.

 

The new studio tracks, “Highwire” and “Sex Drive,” are muscular grooves, the one in gleaming, power rock vein, the other  in Stones funk style familiar from the mid-Seventies onward, but neither are essential listening. 

 

VOODOO LOUNGE (1994)

 

There was a 5 year gap between Steel Wheels and Voodoo Lounge.

 

I bought the album because I was a member of a CD club at the time and it was one of the monthly hot picks they sent you by default, but I guess I wouldn’t otherwise have owned it.  By 1994 it was far less vital than ever before to buy any new Rolling Stones studio album. 

 

At 62 minutes it’s effectively a  double album LP-wise and though I thought it was an okay record it did drag towards the end, being just too long when the songs are much of a muchness, technically well produced and played yet without significant spark.

 

The rockers pound hard, the slow songs meander along smoothly, and they groove, but that’s about all you can say  for the album. It’s not bad but it’s not great either. 

 

It’s a pro job produced by pros. Proper visceral excitement is completely absent.

 

 

STRIPPED (1995)

 

This conceptually stripped-to-the-bone version of the Stones, with “Like a Rolling Stone,”  “Street Fighting Man,”  mostly songs from the Sixties and some from the early Seventies, plus a blues to end off, is my favourite Stones album of the Nineties and, with Voodoo Lounge, one of the only two albums from this decade that I was willing to pay good money for at the time of release.

 

Most of the tracks seemed to be acoustic based and/or are played with what sounds like minimal amplification and effects, as if the band were playing in their lounge, almost like rehearsals, and it’s some of the most unaffected vocals by Mick Jagger one could hope to hear.

 

The songs show that the Stones do not have to rely on bluster and bombast and that the songs can stand the low key, acoustic treatment and still shine.

 

For my money, this is not only the best and most entertaining Stones’ live album since Love You Live, but just a damn fine record.

 

 

BRIDGES TO BABYLON (1997)

 

Never bought this record and never listened to it until I wrote this.

 

The first impression is that the production is quite excellent. The sound is beefy, sharp and clear and the music positively booms from the speakers.   Where the positive is that the album sound great, one is still left with the feeling that the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts and that the parts, though each may be individually worthy, don’t quite register in the mind as well as they could or should.  It’s the quintessential issue with Rolling Stones albums since the Eighties that they sound good, even exciting, when one listens but fade pretty quickly from one’s memory once the music stops.  They’re no longer truly “Stones records” in the way we came to know and love them but simply, and regrettably, generic rock albums.

 

 

NO SECURITY (1998) 

 

By now the Stones had firmly established the routine of record releases with each studio album followed by a tour and live album, and this set is taken from performances on the Bridges to Babylon tour.

 

The mix is a nice compromise between new music, lesser known songs, over familiar songs, one stone classic in “Gimme Shelter,” and the omission of “Start Me Up.”

 

 

LIVE LICKS (2004)

 

The tracks form this live set were recorded on the tour supporting the Forty Licks  compilation album and this album seems quite redundant seeing as it’s just another live set of songs we know well, though, I suppose, the avid fan can point to the inclusion of  tracks like “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” “Rock Me, Baby” and “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” that do deviate from the norm. Otherwise, though, one might as well just stick with Forty Licks, or any of the other good compilations of the best of the Stones.

 

The band plays well, the sound is good, and the material is generally exemplary. By this time, though, nobody went to a Stones concert for any reason other than just the event. The music is not transcendent or even viscerally exciting, or only so because of the huge sound the sound guys achieve.

 

 

 

A BIGGER BANG (2005)

 

This is the first Stones studio album I bought since Voodoo  Lounge, because the reviews were so highly positive.

 

This album clocks in at 64 minutes and is also a tad overlong. Having said that, the guitars are rougher and tougher, almost fiercely ragged, than they’ve been in a while and the drum and bass grooves are feet tappingly energised. The problem always is, though, as proficient as the musicians are, are as excellent as the production is and as well-crafted as the songs may be, there’s little here to retain in the memory as classic Stones stuff.

 

A straight blues like “Back of My Hand”  is by far the hardest hitting track on the album mostly because it does seem less tooled and geared than the rest.

 

A Bigger Bang is an admirable project and enjoyable to listen to, much like Voodoo Lounge or Bridges to Babylon, and as quicky and easily forgettable as those albums too.  Instead of putting a lengthy album every five or six (or more) years, the Stones would perhaps have better off releasing short albums more frequently. 

 

 

SHINE A LIGHT (2008)

 

Taken from performances at a charity concert for Bill Clinton and also preserved for posterity by a Martin Scorsese concert movie. There are umpteen official DVDs of various Stones tours from 1978 onward and it therefore seems as if most of our visual record of the band reflects the old guys, preponderantly more so than the far younger Stones of the Sixties or Seventies, but perhaps that’s just my perception but the period between 1969 (Altamont) and the mid-Seventies seems to be covered by only Gimme Shelter and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones, the 30 years between 1990 and 2020 is oversupplied with concert videos.

 

This one is almost as much a Martin Scorsese event as it is a Stones show. The stage is perfectly lit, and the sound is awesome, both far easier to accomplish in a theatre rather than a stadium, and the band plays tough, loud and with apparent enthusiasm. The Stones on stage is clearly the proverbial well-oiled machine. 

 

Only three of the songs were released after 1980 and the rest are the usual, over familiar crowd pleasers. Buddy Guy is the guest artist on “Champagne & Reefer” and Christina Aguilera sings along on “Live With Me.”

 

Going to the theatre to experience the movie is like being at the show and it’s good fun, but no more.

 

 

BLUE & LONESOME (2016)

 

The Stones started out as bluesmen wannabes, with Jagger declining to be in the pop music lark after the age of 30, then reconsidering when he did turn 30 and realised that the bluesmen the Stones had been emulating were still forces to be reckoned with well into middle age and after.  Here, when the core band members are in their Seventies, they give us a set of, presumably, favourite blues numbers, and do quite well at it.

 

I wonder why it took them so long to release a pure blues set, given that their music, especially up to Exile on Main Street, was so heavily informed by blues and they often threw in a nice little blues number to nestle brightly amongst the rock tracks of their various albums.  Whatever the reason,  whether as a stopgap because they didn’t have original material and needed to issue a studio album or simply wanted to show off their blues chops while they still could, it’s a very enjoyable set and the band sounds like they’re having unadulterated, unpressurised fun.

 

From the get-go, apart from perhaps “Little Red Rooster,” the Stones weren’t a purist blues band, fusing too many different genres into their musical stew but their R & B roots were always on show in their rock ‘n roll, and they rocked the R & B with brio and swagger. Here, they sound like a dynamite club band, good for accompanying drinking and dancing in a smoky room. 

 

I reckon only Stripped and this album need be in any record collection to represent the Rolling Stones in the 30 year period from 1990 to 2020.

  

The Ruling Stones in the Eighties

One can’t say that the Stones “lost the plot” in this decade, despite the well documented, less than amicable, estrangement between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, because the band still  rolled on inexorably like the commercial juggernaut it had become, released studio albums and, eventually, returned to touring. For me the first two and final studio albums of the decade represent the best work the Stones did but even so, the main impression is that neither Jagger or Richards wrote inspirational songs anymore and had become professional song craftsmen, with nothing much to say but a contractual burden to write and record new material.  Arrangements and production values seem to drive the records, all of which sound good, but none of these records are classics and hardly any songs are memorable anymore.

 

Despite the young Jagger’s misgivings, the Stones had lasted well beyond his 30^th birthday, had  become a brand and an enormously successful commercial venture, mostly from touring, and the records seem ancillary, merely necessary evils.

 

EMOTIONAL RESCUE (1980)

 

The Stones ended the Seventies on a high with Some Girls, a  roaring response to punk and New Wave, and then lost the plot some with this album of sprightly, supremely light weight rock, and the throwaway funky opener “Dance Pt 1” that could be an outtake from Black and Blue.  The production is bright and shiny yet can’t completely redeem the vapid tunes that may have been better served if performed by a skinny  tied power pop band.

 

Some Girls showcased a rejuvenated band with what seemed new purpose to stake a claim as greatest rock and roll band in the world, and then they almost regressed and produced songs, regardless of how well played they are, that just sound silly.

 

“Down in the Hole,” an ominous blues, is the closest this record comes to vintage Stones swagger and the title track is arguably the highlight of the set.  It’s not a good sign when only two tracks out of 10 on an album are worth putting in a Stones playlist.

 

 

TATTOO YOU (1981)

 

“Start Me Up” was the greatest hit from this album and about the only Stones classic of the Eighties, bearing in mind that it was originally conceived in the Seventies, and became entrenched as a show opener over the next 30 years. “Waiting on a Friend” is the other best-known track. “Black Limousine” is another highlight.

 

The album is divided into a fast and a slow side and the fast tracks rock hard enough, but the slower songs tend to drag and can’t sustain interest for more than a  minute at a time.  In the same way the rockers tend to become insubstantial from Emotional Rescue onwards, Jagger-Richards may continue to  write technically well-crafted slow songs, but they just seem crafted songs, written by professional song writers, rather than heartfelt or with sincere emotions. The songs are carried by their arrangements and the proficiency of the musicians and not by intrinsic value.

 

The best one can say for Tattoo You is that it has at least one side of listenable material  but “Start Me Up” is understandably the only truly standout track on the record.

 

 

STILL LIFE (1982)

 

Culled from the Tattoo You tour, this is a very enjoyable, single album of highlights, one of which is anointment of “Start Me Up” as perennial set opener. This tour was probably the first proper stadium tour the Stones undertook in the USA and somehow they still sound human-sized, like the club band of the Seventies and without the bluster and bombast of the tours from Nineties and beyond when the Stones became much more of a Big Brand Band than they are here.

 

I think of it as a fun live set, not as deeply satisfying as its two predecessors from the Seventies but a good listening experience, nonetheless.

 

 

UNDERCOVER (1983)

 

The last album in a series of annual releases. From here on in the Stones released studio albums more infrequently (only two more studio efforts in the Eighties), tour less and release regular live album souvenirs of the tours.

 

The term “Stonesy swagger” characterises, for me, an insouciant, bravura style of blues-infused rock and typifies the best Stones songs until the Eighties, particularly over the period between Beggars Banquet (1968) and Exile on Main Street (1972) there are examples from the preceding and subsequent years, but from the start of the Eighties the band seemed to lose, or to forego, that loose yet tight swagger

 

The Stones became just another rock band, albeit with the recognisable voice of Mick Jagger up front and Keith Richards’ riffs and Charlie Watts’ drumming in the engine room. The problem is that the ineffable qualities that made great Stones songs are mostly absent from the mid-Seventies onward.  As an NME writer put it: the Stones were capable of writing some good songs and releasing half decent albums but were no longer capable of making great albums.

 

As is usual by now, the production values are high and the band sounds good but is where the typical big, overworked Eighties sound that overtakes the Stones characteristic rock ‘n roll swagger, kicks in and reduces the band to just another anodyne AOR rock act.

 

“Undercover of the Night” and “Too Much Blood” (both the Stones’ take on funk / dance) are the best known tunes, and “Wanna Hold You” (Keith’s vocal), “Pretty Beat Up,”  “Too Tough,”  “All the Way Down” and “It Must Be Hell” are the simpler, enjoyable, `Stonesy’ rockers that end off the record nicely. Even so, one still feels that these are just jumped up throwaways tarted up by production to make them feel more important.  The fact is that none of these songs, however ephemerally pleasurable,  are worthwhile compiling on a “best of” playlist.

 

 

 

DIRTY WORK (1986)

 

The album born in the period of strife and estrangement  between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and the vaunted struggle for control of the soul of the Stones, with Jagger choosing to follow a solo career, as did Richards in riposte, as Eighties pop-rock musician.

A cover of “Harlem Shuffle” was the underwhelming leadoff single from the album and “One Hit (to the Body)” also received airplay. The production values are high, and the album sounds great but once again it’s sound and fury signifying nothing.  Some will argue that it’s the worst Stones album ever but for me it’s not even a question of being bad, it’s just so non-essential and pointless. One can imagine that it was the result of contractual  obligations rather than creative need and that it was professionally written and put together by professionals who did a job of work and took no pleasure from it other than from the completion of the project.

 

“Too Rude” (Keith Richards’ vocal) is a Stones reggae and sounds least like the rest and is therefore intriguingly enjoyable. and the title track and “Had It With You” are the best rockers on the record. The latter sounds like an outtake from Exile on Main Street. And that’s a compliment. ‘Sleep Tonight” (another Richards vocal) is a good slow one.  

 

I suppose it’s no coincidence that Keith Richards contributes the best tunes on the record.

 

 

STEEL WHEELS (1989)

 

Bill Wyman’s last album as Rolling Stone.

 

I loved this album when I heard it for the first time, possibly because it just seemed so much more organic and, well, more “Stonesy”, than the previous two. “Sad, sad, sad” seemed almost old-school in its tough bluster and was the best album opener since “Start Me Up.”

 

Of course, the loose bluesiness of the best mid-Seventies material has been banished permanently and the mega hard rock sheen is firmly fixed in place but, for all that polish, there’s a limber toughness with solid riffs and some of Charlie Watts’ best playing, and, incredibly, the best songs the Stones have managed to pull off in a while, certainly since Some Girls. The rockers aren’t exactly classics, but they rock satisfactorily hard and there’s plenty of innovation of sound, groove and mood.

 

“Hearts for Sale,” the ‘experimental,’ virtually electronic,  “Continental Drift,” the twelve bar blues strut of  “Break the Spell” and “Slipping Away,” the Richards set closer, are particularly impressive.  

 

Steel Wheels was an apt way to close the Eighties for the Stones. They, like so many of their Sixties and Seventies contemporaries, seemed to lose their way, turning forty, finally beginning to slip out of the hip pinnacle and into mainstream adult oriented tock, and trying to remain relevant to the younger generation of rock fans by adopting all manner of contemporary, faddish production techniques and ways of expressing oneself. The Stones had become established professionals and journeymen; they were no longer dangerous and were no longer at the vanguard of rock. From here on, specifically, they ambled into the twilight of their career, with infrequent studio releases and mega tours, effectively as much of a “classic rock” act as their peers but with the unparalleled cachet of being ‘the Stones” drawing an audience that comes for the spectacle and the bucket list ticking attendance of a gig by one of the greatest of all rock bands, even as the musicians were as old as the parents or grand-parents of those cheering them on. 

 

The blues Power of Albert King

 

Albert King is my favourite of the three kings (Albert, B B and Freddie) partly because I heard him first and partly because I like his style of guitar playing best.

 

I bought Years Gone By (1968), with Albert in a conservative sports jacket against a psychedelic backdrop, in either 1977 or 1978 mostly, I must admit, because it was cheap, but I’d heard of him by then and the descriptions of his fierce playing style in the NME piqued my interest. Since I’ve duplicated the original vinyl LP on CD as well as digital download and as a vital example of a tough soul blues set on Stax Records in the mid-Sixties when Albert, like B B, had been “discovered” and adopted by the cool white kids, it’s still way up there. 

 

Around the same time as I bought Years Gone By I also acquired a collection of B B King  tracks from the Fifties, possibly recorded at the height of his “urban blues” period, backed by a big, horn driven  band. I didn’t like this B B King stuff at all. There was too much big band riffing and too little guitar for my liking and though it was a style I came to appreciate, if not exactly love, many years later, it’s relative lushness and smoothness was a stark and, to me, unfavourable contrast to the tough, small combo backing of the Albert King album.

 

it was a long while before I heard anything by Freddie King. I knew of him, knew that he wrote, or made famous, “Have You Ever Loved a Woman,” a huge track for Eric Clapton and that he once played support on a tour for  Clapton who quite liked him.  King also wrote the, instrumentals “Stepping Out” or “Hideaway,” which I knew in  versions by Cream, and “San-Ho-Zay”  covered by many other guitarists. When I heard Freddie King play, and by this time  I’d come to love B B King’s work anyway, I realised that as good as he may have been, his energetic, busy, style of Texas blues guitar was not for me.

 

So, over the years I’ve acquired plenty different music by the other two Kings, from their Fifties stuff, when they were not too dissimilar, to the Seventies end Eighties, and in the case of  B B  also the Nineties and beyond.  Albert died too young.  In both cases their respective record companies did their best to update their blues stars’ sound to keep them appealing to contemporary audiences, who really only wanted to hear the old hits anyway.

 

In my view, B B King’s best tunes seem to be those big band jump blues he kept trotting out in live shows, along with :”The Thrill is Gone,” whereas Albert King’s best tunes are the mid- to late Sixties soul blues he’s best known for and that, like “Born Under a Bad Sign,” have been covered most by other bluesmen.  in each case it’s sad that these guys seem forced to repeat, ad infinitum, the same small number of songs but I suppose that’s true of most musicians. The audience always wants to hear the over familiar hits. Having said that, I think I’d rather listen to Albert King repeating his hits,  because I like them better than the B B style songs regardless of how good he is.

 

Years Gone By is not one of those albums that has hit after hit, with only “Wrapped Up In Love Again, “ “You Threw Your Love On Me Too Strong,”  “Killing Floor” and “The Sky is Crying” that could be live standards and the last two are not specifically identified with Albert in the first place, but as an example of what Albert King sounded like at the time and how blues was being recorded and probably aimed at the White audience that gave blues a new commercial lease of life, you can hardly go wrong.

 

King of the Blues Guitar is the best compilation of the tracks for which Albert is known  and Live Wire / Blues Power (1968)  is an excellent record of what his live sound and approach was in the Sixties. The Thursday / Wednesday Night in San Francisco live albums are also excellent examples of Albert King on stage and at the height of his powers.  These, and a compilation of Fifties tracks, when Albert and B B weren’t so far apart in their respective ways of playing the blues, represent my current Albert  King collection and I think that’s sufficient.

 

in the Seventies  Stax Records, and whoever else he recorded for, attempted to update the blues by recording King with funk musicians and smoothing out his rough edges and to my this was a mistake because, if the records aren’t altogether bad, they’re not gritty enough to be satisfying and most of them sound like Albert King going through the motions because of contractual obligations  and perhaps a misplaced compliance with the advice from his producers who tried to convince him that he’d sell more records that way. 

 

Obviously an artist can’t afford to be stuck in the same rut all their creative lives, although it’s true only for new record releases, as the set list for any live gig will always feature the usual suspects the audience come to hear. Unfortunately, updating an artist’s sound or approach to recording can often depend on the vision and opinion of a record producer, or a record company, and their idea of commerciality may not suit the artist or even be that successful with the public. Muddy Waters’ career was revived in the late Seventies with a new record company and Johnny Winter as a producer who went back to the roots with Muddy  and simply gave his Fifties sound a contemporary vintage slant production wise. John Lee Hooker’s career had a longer and arguably more successful renaissance when producer Roy Rogers not only updated the sound, brought in well-known guest artists but found a new way to rejuvenate old familiar songs that stuck to the template and yet shone new light. 

 

For me, that didn’t happen with Albert King’s studio output towards the end of his life. The smooth sheen of the production blunted his edge into non-existence and the producer(s) couldn’t find new tunes that could, or did, become classics in the King repertoire.  It’s not as if, for example, Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker made records with all new hits; they recycled tried and trusted material, but the production managed to revitalise them. Albert King’s new material had no vitality to start with.

 

The old bluesmen, from the earliest days to about the mid-Sixties, and excluding the odd “discoveries” like Leaf Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee who were adopted by a section of the White cultural elite in the USA, played to and for their own people, the Black audience, but from the mid-Fifties when R & B and then soul gained popularity and were seen as progressive and modern compared to the down home label of blues, this includes the urban blues of B B King, T Bone Walker and others, what one might call traditional blues lost ground and its audience slowly dissipated. Where once some blues was seen as a hip, sophisticated urban music (not the raw Delta style blues, then), it was replaced by a new type of  musical expression embraced by younger generations of urban blacks with little or no connection to the countryside and who wanted  a music that was not their parents’ music and exemplified a modern worldview.  For a while the bluesmen struggled and then fate intervened when there was an increasing large scale exposure to and adoption by young White listeners and audiences who then became the greatest supporters of blues outside of the deep country side where some musicians always managed to keep playing, even if it meant they had a day job to put food on the table, and the bluesmen were playing to larger audiences than before, made more money than before and were suddenly regarded and discussed as cultural phenomena  rather than as just the providers of good times in bars and juke joints. Where the original White, intellectual and musicological interest in blues had been focused mostly on the country bluesmen, almost all of blues was brought in to the ambit of these deep cultural roots and significance, as if these people were cultural mavens and ambassadors for their people rather than just musicians who chose this form of making a living as being far better and more lucrative than the menial jobs most Blacks seemed to be stuck with.

 

I’ve read many books on the history of blues and all of them have at least one chapter on the origins of the music and the meaning the blues has in the community as an expression of the mood and life experiences of the people as a whole. These learned discourses often make it sound as if a Delta blues musician intentionally made art as a cultural and political expression of conditions (poverty, racism and repression) amongst his people, and was therefore a folk heritage herald, so to speak, and not just someone who chose to make music because they were interested in it and it gave them some escape from  their daily grind or gave them an additional income or got the ladies interested.

 

For me, the blues may have originated as a cry in the wilderness, but at least from the start of the recording industry, it was as mush a commercial, show biz endeavour for the musicians as it was for the record industry. Once musicians learnt they could make money from records, the concept of blues being no more than an expression of a people’s soul blew out the window. The blues men were already for tips on the streets, and at house parties for some money, food and drink, and now  there was yet another revenue stream.

 

When Big Bill Broonzy or Sonny Boy Williamson I were recording for Bluebird Records,  or Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf were recording for Chess Records and John Lee Hooker was recording for whomever he could cut a side or two, just to name some well-known examples,  they were doing for strictly commercial reasons and when they were playing the bars and dives of Chicago and Detroit, they had the same motivation. It was a moneymaking gig, not a campaign of folk expression.   It was about paying the bills, raising a family and having some of the good things in life.

 

I suspect that most of what we now “know” about the origin, nature and cultural impact of  blues, comes from White intellectuals seeking to find deeper, hidden meaning in a very simple musical genre, because it couldn’t be just what it appears to be. Some of it may be true but eventually the blues tropes we  are  familiar with, seem to have been formulated by people who analysed the music and its background rather than by the people who made the music.

 

Albert King has a narrative in his tune “Blues Power” about what the blues supposedly is, and he gives some very banal examples, such as a crying baby, a disgruntled teenage girl or himself, who misses his main squeeze. These sound carefully constructed and sanitised to be relatable to a young White audience and do not refer to poverty, racism or repression; he does not pretend that his blues is rooted in and informed by the extremely negative experiences of his people. King is playing the gig to entertain his audience. Music is his career and blues is his chosen genre. I don’t for a moment believe that Albert King chose this particular career because he had a burning, material need to be a spokesman for his people and to expose the injustices of this world in general and the prejudice Black people in the USA suffer. His blues are braggadocio or cries of woe over a bad woman and perhaps one can see the latter as metaphors for how Black people are treated by White society but most of that seems farfetched to me. It’s professional entertainment, pure and simple.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Revisiting Highway 61 Revisited

 

Highway 61 Revisited was released in 1965 and allegedly changed rock and roll forever, not so much the sound of it, I guess, but the contents of lyrics, hitherto generally love songs or perhaps songs celebrating teenage rebellion, to full blown surrealistic, impressionistic and intellectualised poetry set to music. Dylanesque does not refer to  musical style, except if the reference is to an idiosyncratic amalgam of folk, blues, country and rock, but to a style of writing lyrics, that are narratives, often weird, wonderful and rambling, but generally, especially in his best work, intriguing and engaging even if, on reflection, many of the “poetic” verbiage and “philosophical” insights  are quite banal and nonsensical.  Like the surrealists, Dylan may juxtapose conflicting images, at jarring odds with each other, as if normal and listener will then draw deeper conclusions that may come from personal experience or perspective of what these images mean, usually on the supposition that there must be more significant deeper or hidden  meaning than the surface meaning, simply on the basis that Dylan wouldn’t simply say something banal or commonplace and mean it to be that. He has said, on camera, that he shouldn’t be asked to explain his songs; he just writes them.  Perhaps they are simply ridiculous, with no other significance, and banal without redemption.

 

Rock critics, and the adoring public too often seem to want to find artistic significance in rock lyrics where none is to be had.

 

I was around 21 or perhaps 22 when I listened to Highway 61 Revisited in 1980 or 1981 for the first time, and this was after I’d already become a fan of Blonde on Blonde (1966), the more expansive version of the vision and attitude first expression on its predecessor, and this was in a world already influenced by Dylan to the degree that neither of these records shook my world (I was probably too old anyway to be unduly impressed) but both, with Bringing It All Back Home to complete the troika, became firm favourites and contain my top favourite Dylan songs of all times.

 

At the time I first delved in to Highway 61 Revisited I was newly invested in surrealism and the beat poetry of Allen Ginsberg and prose of Jack Kerouac and the songs, and those on Blonde on Blonde, made perfect sense to me and struck a deep chord of poetic recognition of a peer. I knew very little about the USA  then and for me Highway 61 was a mythical road, a metaphorical road, and it was many years before I learnt that Highway 61 connected  New Orleans and Mississippi (home of the blues) with Minnesota where Bob Dylan was born and grew up, and featured in at least one blues, “61 Highway Blues.”  He may have used the highway as metaphor, but it was a very real stretch of tarmac. Dylan not so much revisited this iconic highway, as revised it for his vision of a semi-apocalyptic society.

 

Greil Marcus wrote an entire book about “Like A Rolling Stone,” another one of is investigations of the “old, weird America” that he likes to link to Dylan, amongst others, to portray an almost unbroken cultural chain, mostly, in my view, as part of the quest to elevate rock music, specifically Dylan’s, to the pyramid of high culture and cultural immortality.  it’s not even my favourite song on the album and has strong competition from the rest, even, again in my view, the blues tropes of “From a Buick 6” or “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.”    I also think that “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Desolation Row” have as much philosophical depth even if the latter  is one of those grocery list songs where Dylan drops all manner of famous names into his narrative which is seen as the quirkiness of genius that can shine a sharp spotlight on the zeitgeist by referencing the past. When it comes down  to it, though, it’s just a young guy who’s read some books or heard some names or of some events and  manages to shoehorn them into his rambling shaggy dog story. it could just be that youthful insouciant bullshit baffles those who know nothing.

 

I’ve often thought, in contrast to the lyrics of, say, the Beatles up to Rubber Soul, that Dylan’s apparent erudition must have seemed as incontrovertibly brilliant purely because they were either about nothing much, but so well said, or if they were love songs, they were more direct and ostensibly personal than the usual generalised love songs Lennon and McCartney wrote until they, too, fell under the Dylan spell and realised that one could be more adventurous in the way one expresses oneself, but then you got Lennon’s “Help,” seen as heartfelt psychological cry  for support yet was as facile as the earlier love songs.

 

The rock and roll of Highway 61 Revisited is not as tough as the typical sound of the mid-Sixties bands from the UK or the American groups influenced by the “British invasion” and is far more informed by blues, folk and country so that one could call it an early form of what eventually became known as “Americana” (fittingly, given Greil Marcus’ referencing of the “old, weird America”) and see Dylan, insofar as he had a real influence on how the music was played, an American  auteur who relies on the musical heritage of his own country to form the backdrop for his literary song writing that’s firmly based on American literary  tradition, both the highly sophisticated and the more “country” and homespun variety.  Dylan is not a highly trained, technical composer of music; he’s a composer of visionary verbal narratives.  This means that one must listen closely to the records to reap the full value, unlike so much mid-Sixties rock where the beat and the raucous guitar rave ups are the main focus and the lyrics are there, more or less, to avoid the song being characterised as an instrumental.

 

Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding are the three most completely satisfying Dylan albums for me and of these Highway 61 Revisited is the most visceral  fun though “Visions of Johanna” from Blonde on Blonde is  my favourite Dylan song of all time and John Wesley Harding’s punchy acoustic tunes are perhaps more satisfying aesthetically. On Highway 61 Revisited it’s as if Dylan found the motherlode of exuberant creativity both in himself and the backing musicians and all parties were high on the euphoria of creating s seamless synergy between the erudite wordiness of the songs, the winding melodies and the craft of putting instinctive, almost improvised, loose yet intense  music to inspired vocals.

 

Rock music is best when made by young people who coast on enthusiasm, verve and unselfconscious ambition, in the struggle days before they realise that a very long career may stretch out in front of them and before age and the passing of time dilutes and often removes the exuberance and the creative flame and replaces them with professional craftsmanship. I’m one of those bores who don’t care much for anything Dylan recorded after John Wesley Harding (though I’ve listened to and/or bought various of the subsequent releases) and I don’t quite believe that Blood on the Tracks is the unalloyed masterpiece that orthodox rock criticism holds it to be. My criticism of the “born again” phase is that Dylan either lost or abandoned his gift for lyrics. He lost his way in the Eighties, like most of his peers, and  if there were a revival of fortunes in the late Nineties, he’s become guilty of just throwing together lines, almost for the sake of a rhyme, with much the same kind of mix ‘n match narrative of his youth but without the nous or any engaging, alluring content. Now it’s just a narrative, mostly utterly banal, with no incentive to the listener to find something deeper than the surface meaning.

 

Having said that, if Dylan’s lyrics sounded more serious, poetic and meaningful than standard Sixties pop lyrics, on  listening to the songs now, his words sometimes seem risible, like jokes on straight society pulled by a smart alecky young guy who realised, once his reputation was made, that he could get away with stringing together stream of consciousness non sequiturs, in the wake of beat poetry, put them to music and, without making a fuss, be perceived as a genuine poet, a rock and roll poet, but when you really examine the lyrics much of them are just nonsense jumbled together  and that have no meaning on the face of it and probably no deeper meaning either. The adoring fan or the intellectual rock critic seek to impute meaning because, according to their view, this apparent nonsense cannot be simply nonsense; there must be deeper philosophical, poetic or intellectual truths and enlightenment. And so everyone develops a vested interest in elevating Bob Dylan into being a genius he most probably isn’t. He saw and exploited a gap in the market, got lucky, and here we are.

 

Rock criticism is as rigidly orthodox and reactionary as most intellectual pursuits and once the hagiography has become cast in stone and the view of a certain artist and their worth has been entrenched, with continuous repeats, by critics seeking to find meaning whether it’s there or not, and by interpretations that can become wilder and ever more ridiculous.  There is a standard, accepted viewpoint of Dylan’s position in the rock pantheon and it’s not likely to change any time soon. Rock revisionism is never looked on kindly by the establishment  and, as is typical of generational change, the older, original rock critics will hardly ever change their opinions and will simply blame younger insights on the lack of cultural depth or insight of the newer generations.

 

The typical response is that a breakthrough artist must be judged  and experienced from the perspective of the time in which they break through, and not from a perspective of twenty, thirty of forty years later when that shock of the new no longer applies and when what was once revolutionary has now become the norm. Fair enough,  one should bear that in mind to understand why an artist was so highly rated or was seen as such a maverick in their time, but, especially when studying Dylan’s lyrics, one must conclude, if he were considered a genius in the Sixties, that he had no competition from other pop lyricists who were still bound to a more old-fashioned, traditional template and that rock critics, in order to be taken seriously when they were talking up rock as a serious, significant cultural endeavour, that they were desperate to find a figurehead who could justify their view and bolster their arguments. However, as I’ve said, one close examination, Dylan’s lyrics, however clever or innovative, are often just silly and at an intelligent, well read, adolescent level of smartness.  They are just rock lyrics after all, where close scrutiny is useless and pointless; they only work in the context of a song where the superficial poetics and pseudo philosophical insights strike deeper because the emotional framework of the performance makes the whole superior to the sum of the parts.

 

 

 

Rolling Stones: The Seventies albums

 

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.