Students of the Blues and Early Singles, 1962–63

What would become some of the most internationally celebrated music in rock history, performed in stadiums and arenas around the world, started from a desire to recreate American blues in a few small London clubs in the early 1960s. The Beatles spent their early years performing in Liverpool and Hamburg, often playing long hours and performing sets filled with their versions of American hits.³ The Stones, by contrast, developed their musical skills in the London blues revival scene of the early 1960s, far from the center of UK pop and mostly off the commercial radar. Since the mid-1940s, there had been a significant British interest in markedly American styles such as jazz, folk, and blues. By the late 1950s, the “trad” jazz scene had developed in the UK, led by performers such as Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball, and Chris Barber – the “three Bs.”⁴ Grounded more in Dixieland jazz than in the American bebop of the time, these British musicians were often dedicated students of American recordings. In the second half of the 1950s, a skiffle craze hit the UK, led by guitarist/vocalist Lonnie Donegan, whose “Rock Island Line” added a big beat to an American folk classic and became a hit not only in the UK but also in the USA. Like many other British musicians interested in American music, Donegan developed into an expert on American folk, reportedly scouring every possible source for information and recordings, including the library in the American Embassy in London.⁵ British enthusiasm for the blues on the London scene was led by guitarist Alexis Korner and harmonica player Cyril Davies.⁶ Their band, Blues Incorporated, began playing Sunday nights at the Ealing Club in March 1962 and in May took over Thursdays at the Marquee Club.⁷ Both Korner and Davies were at least ten years older than most of the young musicians they would influence, including not only Jagger, Richards, Jones, and Watts, but also Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Paul Jones, Eric Burdon, John Mayall, and Jimmy Page.⁸ The musical approach of Blues Incorporated is accurately represented on the band’s R & B at the Marquee album, recorded in June 1962 and released in November.⁹ This recording features a mix of originals with versions of blues classics based on recordings by Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Lead Belly. Blues Incorporated plays faithfully in the late 1950s American electric blues style without being slavish imitators, turning in a series of convincing performances that might easily be mistaken for authentic Chicago blues tracks.¹⁰

The Rolling Stones began, at least as far as Brian Jones was concerned, as a band very much in the mold of Blues Incorporated.¹¹ The band’s first gig was at the Marquee, filling in for Blues Incorporated on the bill also featuring a band quickly formed by singer Long John Baldry.¹² Bassist Bill Wyman joined the Stones in December 1962, with Charlie Watts (who had played drums with Blues Incorporated but quit to return to school) joining in January 1963. In February the Stones began their residency at the Crawdaddy Club, initially managed by Giorgio Gomelsky. In April, just two months into those gigs, a young Andrew Loog Oldham heard the band for the first time at the Crawdaddy, and by May he and senior partner Eric Easton had signed the Stones to both a management deal and a recording contract with Decca.¹³ The Rolling Stones’ first single, a version of Chuck Berry’s “Come On” (Chess Records, 1961) was released in the UK in June 1963 – less than a year after the band had played their first gig at the Marquee. That début single, which rose only as high as No. 38 in the UK, featured a version of Willie Dixon’s “I Want to Be Loved” on the B side – a song that had been recorded by Muddy Waters (Chess, 1955). The two sides of this first single clearly announce who the Stones will be over the next few years: a band pursuing pop appeal while also retaining a strong blues sensibility.

The path to the Stones’ second single perhaps reveals more about their aspirations for commercial success than about their blues roots. In July 1963, the band recorded Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s “Poison Ivy” (originally released by the Coasters on Atlantic Records in 1959), which was to be issued as the follow-up to “Come On” in August.¹⁴ But Oldham felt the track was not strong enough; he withdrew plans for its release and drafted Lennon and McCartney to write “I Wanna Be Your Man” for the Stones. Released in November 1963, this second single rose to a promising No. 12 in the UK, establishing the Stones as rising stars on the British pop scene. The Beatles also released a version of this song on With the Beatles, with Ringo singing lead. The contrast between the blues-driven, rootsy intensity of the Stones version and the commercial polish of the Beatles track provides a succinct measure of the stylistic distance between these two groups. The record also provides, on its B side “Stoned,” an early instance of the band recording its own original material. This mostly instrumental track is based loosely on “Green Onions,” a 1962 hit for Booker T. and the MGs. The Stones, however, credit songwriting to Nanker Phelge – a pen name given to songs “written” by all of the band members.¹⁵ Subsequent early Stones releases would include additional Nanker Phelge songs, which were often based on specific tracks written by others.

Singles and Albums, 1964–65

In January 1964 the Rolling Stones had their first success on the top of the charts: The EP The Rolling Stones (containing four tracks, including the previously withdrawn “Poison Ivy”) topped the UK charts. This was followed by the British release in February of “Not Fade Away,” a Buddy Holly/Norman Petty song from 1957. The B side was “Little by Little,” another Nanker Phelge song, this time based on Jimmy Reed’s “Shame, Shame, Shame” (Vee-Jay Records, 1963). This third single went to No. 3 in the UK, and when released in the USA in March with “I Wanna Be Your Man” as the B side, rose to No. 48 – the Stones’ first chart appearance in the States.¹⁶ Aside from the songs attributed to Nanker Phelge – which, as already noted, were not particularly original – the first three singles and first EP featured no songs written by Jagger and Richards. Table 1.1 lists the Rolling Stones’ singles from 1963 to 1965. Note that it is with the fourth single (not counting the aborted release of “Poison Ivy”) that a Jagger/Richards song, “Good Times, Bad Times,” is included, though as a B side. “Tell Me” marks the first Jagger/Richards song to appear as the A side of a single, though it was released in this way only in the USA. After this, with only one exception, the remainder of the singles listed in Table 1.1 feature at least one, and sometimes two, songs written by Jagger and Richards. Note also that in the fall of 1964 the band released “Time Is on My Side” in the USA (going to No. 6), but released “Little Red Rooster” in the UK. “Rooster” had been released by Howlin’ Wolf on Chess in 1961, and the release of this slow blues number as a pop single was a risky move – though it paid off with a No. 1 hit. It seems likely that with the clear pop emphasis of the previous singles, the band was eager to reestablish its blues-revival bona fides with “Rooster,” especially at home in the UK.¹⁷ Table 1.1 provides a good picture of how, over the period 1963–65, the Stones moved from versions of songs previously recorded by others to Jagger/Richards originals.

The absence of Jagger/Richards songs in the first batch of singles, as well as on the first EP, might suggest that Jagger and Richards were either not writing much or were unwilling to release what they may have been writing.¹⁸ As can be seen in Table 1.2, however, Jagger and Richards were indeed writing during this period, though these songs were released by other artists, two as early as January 1964. Among these songs, the most interesting is Marianne Faithfull’s recording of “As Tears Go By,” which (as seen in Table 1.1) the Stones released in their own version in late 1965. The use of chamber strings in the Stones version seems to be influenced by the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” but the philosophical quality of the song’s lyrics actually predates McCartney’s “Yesterday” lyrics by a year. Still, the character of these Jagger/Richards songs recorded by others suggests that the Stones believed that material to be too pop-oriented for the band. And the timing of those first songs, released in early 1964, suggests that the October 1963 meeting with Lennon and McCartney that produced “I Wanna Be Your Man” helped prod Jagger and Richards into writing their own music.¹⁹

As Table 1.1 suggests, the differences in UK and US releases can make the chronological organization of the Stones’ singles difficult – or at least complicated. The problem is even more pronounced when it comes to the Stones’ albums, at least up to Their Satanic Majesties Request of December 1967. Albums with the same name, for instance, will contain a different collection of songs, while albums (or EPs) that appeared on one side of the Atlantic were never released on the other. Table 1.3 lists eight “album projects,” with each album project representing the combination of all songs that appeared on the US or UK versions of a given album. For example, the début LPs in the USA and UK together include thirteen tracks; eleven appear on both albums, while one appears on the US version only (“Not Fade Away”) and another appears on the UK version only (“Mona (I Need You Baby)”). The combination of the UK and US versions of Out of Our Heads totals eighteen tracks, with six held in common and six appearing only on one or the other. This approach to organizing the Stones’ releases has the advantage of grouping together tracks that were recorded at about the same time, allowing the development of the band’s style to be tracked from one album project to the next.²⁰ There are some songs along the way that get left out using this general organizational scheme, but these are few. There are also albums such as December’s Children (December 1965, USA only), Big Hits (High Tides and Green Grass) (March 1966, USA; November 1966, UK), and Flowers (June 1967, USA only) that are left out of this listing; such albums are primarily compilations that introduce only a few new tracks, with these new recordings placed side by side with ones recorded much earlier and thus blurring the band’s stylistic development.²¹

In addition to identifying the eight Stones album projects from 1964 to 1968, Table 1.3 provides the number of songs written by Nanker Phelge and Jagger/Richards on each of these. Note that the first four album projects are dominated by Stones versions of music written by others.²² The first album project contains ten versions, two Nanker Phelge tracks (based, as noted above, on the music of others but not versions, strictly speaking), and one Jagger/Richards song. While the number of Jagger/Richards songs increases with each subsequent album project, the fourth, Out of Our Heads, still contains eight versions of songs previously recorded by others. A dramatic and important change occurs with the fifth album project, Aftermath, which contains Jagger/Richards songs exclusively – a feature continued in the sixth album project, Between the Buttons. Their Satanic Majesties Request includes one song by Bill Wyman but is otherwise all Jagger and Richards. Beggars Banquet settles into what will become the model for the Stones – one version among otherwise exclusively Jagger/Richards material. Viewed against the rest of the Stones recordings through the years, the first four albums stand out for their dependence on the music of others.

Table 1.4 lists the original artists who previously recorded the songs appearing on the first four album projects. These album versions provide us with a general sense of the music the Stones seem to have enjoyed most during these years and the names listed are almost entirely those of American rhythm and blues artists.²³ Two of the hit singles from 1965 (see Table 1.1), while credited to Jagger and Richards, also reinforce this strong American R&B influence. “The Last Time” is heavily indebted to the Staple Singers’ 1954 single “This May Be the Last Time,” while “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” draws on Martha and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run,” released in early 1965.²⁴ With these songs, the Nanker-Phelge practice of adapting the music of others seeps from B sides and album tracks into Jagger and Richards A sides, and suggests that the many versions that appear on Stones albums and singles through 1965 played an important role in the band’s stylistic development. The complete turn away from versions that first occurs in 1966 with Aftermath thus marks an important shift that divides the 1963–67 period roughly into two parts: 1963–65 and 1966–67.

Singles and Albums, 1966–67

The practice of abandoning versions of songs recorded by others that marks Aftermath and the album projects that follow can also be seen clearly in the singles released by the Stones in 1966–67 (see Table 1.5); all but one of the songs appearing on these releases is written by Jagger and Richards, and that one song not credited to Jagger and Richards was written by Bill Wyman. These singles mostly rose into at least the top ten in the USA and UK, though the second half of 1967 finds the band struggling somewhat in the US charts due to the relatively poor showing of “We Love You” (No. 50) and “She’s a Rainbow” (No. 25), while Wyman’s “In Another Land” (No. 87) barely made a dent. The three Stones album projects during the same period, however, were strong commercial successes (see Table 1.3). The summer of 1967 was marked by legal and business problems for the band. At various points Jagger, Richards, and Jones all faced drug charges, while simultaneously the band’s relationship with manager and producer Oldham was deteriorating. While some critics believe these events took a heavy toll on the band’s music, at the very least they were a distraction that might partly explain the temporary dip in the group’s success.²⁵

In my chapter focused on Beggars Banquet, I detail the band’s increased musical ambition in the period from about 1965 to the release of Their Satanic Majesties Request in late 1967. During these years we find the Stones employing novel instrumentation (sitar, dulcimer, Mellotron, and more) and moving away from the two guitars, bass, drums, and vocals combo approach characteristic of the music from the 1963–64 period. They blend aspects of classical music into their style, by both the use of instruments associated with it (harpsichord, strings) and employment of harmonic and melodic materials that reference classical practice (“Ruby Tuesday,” “She’s a Rainbow”). The lyrics are at times philosophical and often contain evocative imagery. During the same time, it must be noted, the band also produced driving rock tracks such as “19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Mother’s Little Helper,” and “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” Thus, the overall arc from 1963 is first marked by a decisive shift towards Jagger/Richards songs, and then by a tendency to explore a variety of styles and instrumental combinations. Their Satanic Majesties Request is a point of arrival that prepares the way for Beggars Banquet and the Stones music that follows.

Singles and Albums, 1968–74

The Stones’ move towards increasingly ambitious approaches to their music leading to 1967 was not unusual in rock music of the mid-1960s. The Beatles’ album releases of 1967, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour, combined with the singles “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields,” marked a high point of musical ambition for them, as had the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and “Good Vibrations” of 1966.²⁶ At about this same time, significant changes were afoot in the music business, especially in the United States. The emergence of psychedelic culture into American mainstream culture during 1967’s Summer of Love brought with it an emphasis on albums rather than singles: Singles would come to be the format for AM radio – devoted to hit records in much the same way pop radio had been earlier in the decade – while the burgeoning FM band, freer in approach and at least initially less driven by advertising, would be the home for album tracks. FM radio and album-oriented rock became the music of college-age fans; pop singles on the AM band were targeted at teens and pre-teens. This change in the American music business impacted the Rolling Stones, who began to think more in terms of albums than singles.²⁷

Table 1.6 provides a listing of Stones singles from the 1968–74 period, while Table 1.7 lists the albums from the same years. A comparison with Tables 1.1, 1.3, and 1.5 above reveals how the pace of these later releases slowed during the late 1960s and into the 1970s. In the 1963–67 period, for instance, the band released three or four singles a year and usually two albums (not counting compilation albums). Table 1.6 shows that this rate slowed to about two releases a year for singles, and Table 1.7 lists roughly one album per year (with no album released in 1970). This pattern conforms to a general practice among other bands during the same period, as groups took longer to record albums. It is also worth noting that for these years there is no need to invoke the album project scheme to organize the album content, since UK and US albums were identical in terms of tracks included, perhaps owing to this new focus on the album as a whole. Table 1.6 also indicates that Stones singles in the first half of the 1970s were all tracks contained on the albums released during the same general period, another indicator that singles were no longer the band’s primary focus.

As noted in the discussion of the Stones’ album projects during the 1964–68 period (and shown in Table 1.3), Beggars Banquet contains one version of a song previously recorded by another artist, Robert Wilkins’ “Prodigal Son.” Table 1.7 extends the listing of Stones albums to 1974. Note that each album contains one version with the remaining tracks being Jagger/Richards songs (except where indicated). The exceptions are Exile on Main Street, a double album that includes two versions, and Goats Head Soup, which includes none. The songs the band rework clearly gravitate toward the American rhythm and blues tradition (the songs and artists are listed in Table 1.7). While the first four album projects had included significantly more versions than these later albums, the relatively consistent practice found on these releases beginning in 1968 shows a significant return to roots for the band, especially considering the absence of such versions on the 1966–67 albums. A comparison between Tables 1.3 and 1.7 also reveals that the albums from the 1964–67 period were almost all produced by Oldham, while those from the 1968–74 period were mostly produced by Jimmy Miller.²⁸ The exceptions come at the end of each period, as Their Satanic Majesties Request is recorded during the break-up with Oldham (production credit is given to the band and Oldham’s name is excluded), and It’s Only Rock ’n Roll is produced by Jagger and Richards. And while production during the period up through 1967 was marked by increasing experimentation, often fueled by Jones’ introduction of instruments new to the band’s sound and novel in a pop and rock context, Miller’s productions more often exploited the virtuosic playing of Taylor, as well as that of other musicians such as saxophonist Bobby Keys.²⁹

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the Stones albums from the 1968–74 period strike a balance between the version-heavy releases of 1963–64, the musical ambition of 1965–67, and a return to a distinctive directness of expression that reaffirms their roots in rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and country music. Indeed, each of the six albums from Beggars Banquet to It’s Only Rock ’n Roll includes a relatively broad stylistic range of material, from acoustic ballads to blues-based rockers, from ambitious tracks that employ aspects of classical or psychedelia to those that highlight instrumental virtuosity, and from tracks that display a folk influence to those that engage the gospel tradition. It is also worth noting that while the Beatles began to come into their own, each as solo artists, during The White Album (1968), at about the same time the Stones developed a band sound that broke free of the influence of the Beatles, and ironically right after the most seemingly imitative album (Majesties).³⁰ Other chapters in this collection delve into these Stones albums in more detail; it is nevertheless worth emphasizing here how significant this series of albums from the 1968–74 period are in securing the Stones’ prominent place in the history of rock music. They are a logical point of stylistic arrival considering the music from 1963–67 that preceded them. And they are the musical points of reference for all of the band’s music that followed.

Guitar Slinger One: Brian Jones

For many of the original Stones fans, nothing beats the Brian Jones years, and a number who hold this opinion stopped paying attention to the band around the time of the 1969 Hyde Park Concert, which served as the coming-out party for the twenty-year-old Taylor. This type of fan values the blues purism of the early Stones and their rock and roll roots in Chuck Berry the most, while other fans of this period emphasize the sonic textures and diverse musical styles that the multi-instrumentalist Jones brought to the records of the mid-sixties. In the early days of the band, Richards and Jones spent hours trying to discern the various parts played by the musicians in their pooled record collection, but what really excited them was the overall sound of the music, the effect of the whole (ensembles and vocalists) that was greater than the sum of the individual parts. This is the direction that the Stones themselves followed on their own earliest recordings. The twin guitars of Richards and Jones are intertwined and almost indistinguishable from each other on 1964–66 albums like The Rolling Stones (UK, 1964), England’s Newest Hit Makers (USA, 1964), 12 × 5 (1964), Out of Our Heads (separate UK and US versions, both 1965), and December’s Children (1965). Their producer for these records was the inexperienced Andrew Loog Oldham, who was deeply under the influence of his mentor, Phil Spector. The Stones began to achieve more clarity in their recordings at Chess Studios in Chicago and RCA Studios in Hollywood, though Oldham’s production tastes leaned towards large amounts of reverb. So the Stones’ records of this period are generally awash in echo, and tend to have a dark and murky wall of sound, while Jagger’s vocals struggle to climb above it all to be heard.

The listening experience, however, is exhilarating. A prime example of the Jones and Richards guitar interplay can be heard on the original up-tempo blues, “Little by Little.” We know Richards is playing the brighter of the two electric guitars, because it is the one that slips into a solo at the beseeching of Jagger, who yells, “All right, Keith, come on!” During this solo, we can more clearly discern that Jones is playing the roots of the chords and some fine blues riffs. It is as if the two divide up the frequency range of the electric guitar, with Jones taking the low notes and Richards taking the high strings, instead of more clearly delineated rhythm and lead guitar parts.

The Stones, alongside the Beatles, set the template for the two-electric-guitar model for rock and roll bands. For most prior combos, a guitar was backed by drums, a bass, and maybe a piano. Or if there were two guitars, one was generally an acoustic strumming the rhythm with a lead player on electric (or in country and western, electric lap steel or pedal steel). A classic example would be the early Elvis Presley band with Scotty Moore playing single-note lines on his electric while Elvis strummed an acoustic. And with the Beatles, it was George Harrison who usually played the solos and riffs, while John Lennon was busying himself with strumming and singing. The Stones, though, were all about two guitarists playing interlocking rhythms and riffs, what Richards would later often refer to as “the ancient form of weaving.” It was a dynamic that he felt went missing for much of the Mick Taylor era, at least in live performances.¹ But it clicked back into place in full force with Ron Wood joining the band.

Another early recording at Regent Sound Studios was the Stones’ version of Slim Harpo’s “I’m A King Bee,” which offers a more delineated rhythm/lead guitar split. Here is Richards strumming an acoustic bed over the sturdy laid-back groove set down by Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman, who slides his note up to replicate the buzz of a bee. Jones breaks out of his low-note riffing with a bottleneck slide, stinging us with his high notes. With one fewer electric guitar competing for space and a relatively slower song, the track is one of the crisper mixes from the band’s early period: the drums cut through, the acoustic guitar is clear, and the vocal is heard up front and present. The bass and Jones’ riffs weave around each other in the same frequency range.

A more plaintive version of his slide guitar work is on “No Expectations,” from Beggars Banquet (1968), in which Jones offers a mournful, bottleneck part on an acoustic guitar. While Jagger’s vocal is sublimely doleful and heavy with emotion, Jones does more than merely underscore the melancholy; his opening guitar lines set the tone of the song more than words themselves could. Though Richards described Jones’ minimal contributions to Let It Bleed (1969) – a percussion part on “Midnight Rambler” and autoharp on “You Got the Silver” – as “a last flare from the shipwreck,” it is really this single slide part that was Jones’ last cry.²

These two trademark slide guitar parts are bookends to a rich palette of colors that Jones brought to the Stones’ recordings of the 1960s. He was easily bored, did not write music for the band, and did not sing. On each successive record, Richards increasingly overdubbed multiple guitar parts while Jones explored different instruments. His sense of wonder was piqued when the band was let loose at the RCA Studios in Hollywood, with huge rooms full of exotic instruments, leading to his playing sitar on “Paint It, Black,” dulcimer on “Lady Jane” and “I Am Waiting,” marimba on “Under My Thumb,” and harpsichord and koto on “Ride on Baby.”³ Though he has no songwriting credits on Aftermath (1966), it’s as much a Brian Jones record as one by Jagger/Richards.

Jones’ spirit of experimentation mirrored what was occurring across town at Abbey Road Studios on Beatles recordings. We must also point to such indelible parts as his woody recorder on “Ruby Tuesday,” use of organ on “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” and of Mellotron (a keyboard that plays tape loops, like an early analog sampler) on “2000 Light Years From Home” and “She’s a Rainbow.” Of course, this experimentation went hand in hand with drug use, and, like many of his colleagues, Jones slid from experimentation to drug abuse, falling into a downward spiral of paranoia and self-medication. He was officially fired in 1969 while the Stones were hard at work on Let It Bleed, and in a matter of days was found dead, his drug-addled body drowned in the swimming pool of his home.

Guitar Slinger Two: Mick Taylor

With most of Let It Bleed completed, the band searched for a suitable replacement. On the recommendation of the Bluesbreakers’ bandleader, John Mayall, the Stones invited twenty-year-old Mick Taylor down for a session. The first track he played on was “Live With Me,” on which he traded licks with Richards in real time at Olympic Studios during the actual tracking. Taylor said that he and Richards clicked immediately on the session, and according to Taylor, they would alternate playing rhythm and lead, but live there was more lead playing, which was given to Taylor.

Thus, the Stones’ sound was changed the instant Taylor was introduced to the band. Richards had played a few concise solos on the late 1960s sessions. One thinks of the memorable cutting solo on “Sympathy for the Devil” and the slowhand blues solo on “Gimme Shelter.” Taylor was already known among guitar fans as a virtuoso blues soloist of the B.B. King, Freddie King, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck lineage. The first time the public heard Taylor on a Stones recording, though, was the twangy country bends that introduce the chorus of the “Honky Tonk Women” single. The solo on that track is trademark Richards, with an unhurried pace and economical note choice. While known as a lead player, Taylor also relished the chance to lay down rhythm parts and riffs to suit and support the songs.

It was rather in the live arena that Taylor particularly shone. A lot had changed on the road during the years the Stones had not toured, and by 1969, live sound technology had grown exponentially. Sound systems now could fill arenas with relatively decent sound, with each instrument mic’d up, amplified, and mixed along with the vocals through the large PA speaker stacks that typically flanked the stage. Touring became a big business in and of itself, not just a way to promote records. Bands were now playing “concerts” with sets an hour plus in length. The influence of drugs and musical experimentation was now being played out in live performances as well, from Jimi Hendrix’s incendiary performances at Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 (literally setting his guitar on fire) and Woodstock in 1969, to the Who’s high-volume, instrument-wrecking affairs, and the Grateful Dead’s long jamming takes on psychedelic Americana. Now, the Stones were retooled for this new terrain, with long-form jams like “Midnight Rambler” and the usual encore “Street Fighting Man,” the mini-epic “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and “Sympathy for the Devil,” which could be stretched out for extended guitar solos. Such songs were reinterpreted each night. On the studio recording of “Sympathy for the Devil,” for example, the only guitar is Richards’ solos. The rest is piano driven. But on the live versions, Richards would generally start a chord progression with Watts tumbling in with a drum fill, Wyman falling in behind, and Taylor playing lead lines when Jagger was not singing.

“Midnight Rambler” provides an interesting case study as a song that Richards labored over in the studio, weaving together a couple of compelling rhythm parts on his own. He perfected the slide part alone over five nights, erasing each previous take and starting anew. Taylor was already playing torrid slide guitar solos in his début performance of the song at his coming-out party, the concert in Hyde Park in the summer of 1969. On the 1969 live album, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, Richards starts the song at a faster, galloping pace. Taylor joins him in playing a similar rhythm part, but swinging a bit from the relentlessly steady Richards part. It is the sort of tack that Brian Jones might have taken. The soloing is left for Jagger on the harp over the arrangement’s chugging parts. When the song breaks down in the middle, we can hear Taylor playing tastefully reined-in blues bends, freeing himself a bit more during the crescendo build-up in the final two minutes of the song. But “Midnight Rambler” took on almost operatic proportions over the next few years, so that by 1972 (as seen in the concert film, Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones) and 1973 (as heard on the Brussels Affair live album) the song reached lengths of ten to fifteen minutes. As experienced via those recordings, the guitar interplay epitomizes the particular strength of the Richards-Taylor tandem when it was working on all cylinders. Richards launches into some of his Chuck Berry-inspired two-note solos, while Taylor eases back and forth from bluesy single-note hammerings, picked flurries, and bends, into variations of the rhythm parts.

The sustained level of excellence from Sticky Fingers (1971) through Exile on Main Street (1972) offers myriad examples of why the Mick Taylor era is so highly regarded. We get early glimpses of Taylor’s versatility on Sticky Fingers, where at the end of “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” he evokes Carlos Santana with a serendipitously recorded, impromptu, Latin-tinged jam as a coda. We also hear Taylor’s poignant slide and electric riffs interacting with Jagger’s gentle acoustic licks on “Moonlight Mile,” one of the Stones’ most sublimely beautiful ballads. It is a song without a Richards guitar track; Jagger and Taylor handled all the guitar work at the session for the song. As the recording reaches its conclusion, we hear Taylor playing an ascending and descending pentatonic figure that gets picked up and elaborated upon by the string arranger on the recording, Paul Buckminster. It has been argued that Taylor should have received some writing credit for his contributions. What constitutes songwriting as opposed to arranging is a controversial topic among collaborative bands and it was seemingly a sore point for Mick Taylor, an official member of the band. It is easier for session players to accept that their contributions to a song’s arrangement, as hired guns, will not receive songwriting credit. For example, Nicky Hopkins was an almost constant presence on Stones recordings and live performances from 1966 through 1974. His contribution in arranging “Sympathy for the Devil,” transforming it from an ambling folk song into a raging samba, is accurately documented in Jean-Luc Godard’s film One Plus One (later retitled Sympathy for the Devil). In the end, all guitars except Richards’ lacerating solo are stripped away and the song is propelled by Hopkins’ piano and the rhythm section. But Jagger had the chord progressions and seemingly much of the lyric content written before they started. What we witness in the film is how significantly an arrangement can affect the end result of a song. In this case, the final product is about 180 degrees different from how it was originally presented to the group. The case can be made that such substantial arranging warrants writing credit, and over the years Bill Wyman, Mick Taylor, and Brian Jones could have laid claim to such credit, but very few songwriters would agree.

Taylor may actually have added more than arrangement ideas. Such contributions are difficult to extricate and measure when so much of the band’s writing came out of organic jamming. In the end, Taylor’s feelings on the subject were apparently one of the main reasons he decided to leave the Stones. “I’d seen him a few days earlier and he’d spoken excitedly about some songs he’d written with Jagger and Richards that were to appear on It’s Only Rock ’n Roll,” writes Nick Kent referring to the 1974 album. “When I told him that I’d seen the finished sleeve with the song-writing credits and that his name wasn’t featured, he went silent for a second before muttering a curt ‘We’ll see about that!’ almost under his breath. Actually, he sounded more resigned than anything else …”⁴

Some of Taylor’s final tracks before he left the group are among his finest recorded moments. He did not get many big, soaring opportunities on Exile on Main Street. Most of his work on that record is confined to second rhythm parts and concise solos mixed relatively low dynamically as part of the whole Exile gumbo. But he did receive a writing credit on the smoldering “Ventilator Blues,” which likely means he came up with the song’s insistent main riff, as the song sprung from one of the jams the band had in the basement of Richards’ rented Nellcôte villa on the French Riviera. We also heard Taylor spread his wings on recordings from the subsequent live tour. But on the next two records, Goats Head Soup (1973) and It’s Only Rock ’n Roll (1974), we are treated to heart-melting solos on the songs “Winter,” and “Time Waits for No One,” respectively. On the latter recording, Taylor got to stretch out for more time than was typically budgeted for on Stones studio recordings. For a band that would marinate song ideas in meandering, often directionless jams, the final products tended toward the succinct and economical, in service of the songs themselves. The first song recorded for the It’s Only Rock ’n Roll sessions, “Time Waits for No One,” is the final song on side one of the LP. “There was going to be a space for a guitar solo, it was a first take,” Taylor recalled. “I mean the backing track and the guitar solo is the first or second time we actually ran through the song, so the guitar solo was done live. It’s got a long sort of extended guitar solo at the end, which is because it was a good solo and it’s peaking. That’s how long the track goes on for.”⁵ The song would serve as the perfect swan song for Taylor, if the last song to actually feature him had not been the even more fitting “Till the Next Goodbye.”

Guitar Slinger Three: Ron Wood

Ron Wood had showed up in Munich to help out on the 1975 Black and Blue sessions, unaware that the Stones were holding auditions for a permanent replacement guitarist to fill the shoes of Taylor. When he arrived, he saw Eric Clapton, who was one of an impressive list of hotshots who had been called into the sessions in Munich (and other dates in Rotterdam). Names commonly associated with these sessions include Irish blues sensation Rory Gallagher, Humble Pie’s Steve Marriott (also famous as singer of the Small Faces), Peter Frampton (formerly of Humble Pie and now a rising solo artist), Muscle Shoals session guitarist Wayne Perkins, Canned Heat’s Harvey Mandel, and Jeff Beck, who claimed he was tricked into auditioning.

It seems that Beck was not the only one unaware of the audition nature of the session. Despite his ties to the Faces, Wood had showed up as if the gig were his to take if he wanted it, knowing that the Faces were floundering while their singer, Rod Stewart, was enjoying superstardom as a solo artist. “Clapton said to me in Munich, ‘I’m a much better guitarist than you,’” writes Wood. “I responded, ‘I know that, but you gotta live with these guys as well as play with them. There’s no way you can do that.’ Which is true. He could never have survived life with the Stones.”⁶

One of the main criticisms of Ron Wood from his detractors among Stones fans is that he is too much like Keith Richards and does not bring the musicality of Brian Jones or the virtuosity of Mick Taylor. But this misses the point. Wood has shown a significantly wide versatility, able to approximate the 1960s sounds that Jones brought to the table, the bluesy slides and bends that Taylor tracked, while offering distinctive contributions of his own, such as the unexpected pedal steel guitar parts on “Shattered” and other Some Girls songs, and the authentic American funk sounds he brought to the late-1970s Stones. In fact, prior to the Faces, Wood played bass in the Jeff Beck Group (in which Rod Stewart was the lead singer), and his funky/heavy blues-rock playing on that band’s version of “I Ain’t Superstitious” on the 1968 Truth LP was an early indication of his inventiveness. It is, in fact, the funk element that Wood brought in on his first session for Black and Blue. “Hey Negrita” was a funky riff with a reggae upstroke rhythm that he had been kicking around. “So all of us, independently and together, were into reggae, and it was also a mood of the time,” said Wood.⁷

Charlie Watts’ recollection about Wood confidently showing up with his own idea reveals the comfort level within the group and why he immediately fitted in.⁸ Watts had played in a band with Wood’s brother, Art, before the Stones. Ron Wood was more like family. When Rod Stewart left the Faces in 1975, the Stones hired Wood, though he did not become a permanent member of the band until 1976, and was not a full equal partner in the band until 1990.

Wood’s impact was felt immediately. While not on the level of Mick Taylor, he ripped out great solos, such as those heard on the 1975–76 Love You Live versions of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” and “You Gotta Move.” While Wood’s strident tone and style is not as distinctive as that of Taylor, whose parts were almost always immediately identifiable, his solos have often been deeply soulful, with an effortless-sounding fluidity that belied his ability. His parts generally fit in with the band’s overall sound. But his approach was not always at the expense of pyrotechnics, as the torrid ending of his solo on the live “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” demonstrates. But the most satisfying moments in Wood’s tenure have generally been the intertwining parts he played with Richards, picking up the “ancient form of weaving” that Richards and Jones had practiced. The two in each case made no clear distinction between “lead” and “rhythm” roles. If there is an analogy, the Stones of the Wood era are more like a dinner conversation in a big family, with people talking to, over, and around each other. As with those Chess records they cherished early on, it was more about the ensemble sound.

This is what we hear perfectly on Wood’s first start-to-finish album project with the Stones, Some Girls (1978). The Stones had weathered deaths, perilous financial straits, drug addictions, and arrests, including, with Richards, a charge of trafficking for the amount of heroin he tried to smuggle into Toronto while the band was rehearsing for a tour there. And while some critics had been writing them off since 1967, by 1977 the Stones did seem musically adrift and at times directionless. Whether or not listeners consider Sticky Fingers or Exile on Main Street to be the apex of the band’s catalog, most agree that the material started to fall off in quality thereafter. Many of us who came of age during the mid-1970s feel Goats Head Soup, It’s Only Rock ’n Roll, and Black and Blue to be fine, and even underrated records. And in hindsight, even some older fellow fans have warmed up to a number of those songs. It is clear that the group continued to push itself, mainly under the guidance of Jagger, to remain artistically and commercially relevant.

Jagger, rock and roll’s Peter Pan, was not about to go gracefully into that good night, or to accept middling reviews and sales for the band’s records while some young upstarts playing punk rock, which was just a garage variation of the sort of two-guitar, attitude-heavy, back-to-basics attack that the Stones made famous. “No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones in 1977,” sang Joe Strummer of the Clash. While Strummer no doubt felt as let down by his boyhood heroes as anyone – watching rock and roll morph into heavy and self-important “rock” made by bloated, jet-setting junkies and coke fiends – the Clash, Sex Pistols, and others merely understood marketing and the importance of distinguishing your generation’s music from the previous one’s.

But no musician has understood branding and marketing better than Mick Jagger. He embraced many of the surface elements of mid-to-late 1970s punk and so-called new wave. More significantly, he thrived on the energy of the music, and of disco and funk, as he trolled the clubs of New York, London, and Paris. When the band was gathering for rehearsals outside of Paris for the Some Girls sessions, he strapped on a Strat, plugged into a loud Mesa Boogie amp, and joined Richards and Wood in a three-guitar front line and kicked out the jams on the 1978 album. The sustained excellence of Some Girls proved the band remained a major cultural force, and could still make an album with not even so much as an ounce of fat on its lean twelve inches of vinyl.

And while Jagger kicked them into gear, Wood was a significant contributing force of new energy to the group. He found the space between rock and roll’s finest rhythm section and its most identifiable rhythm guitarist, a trio of musicians who had developed their own sense of timing and groove-making over the course of fifteen years of constantly playing together. And Wood managed this while Jagger relentlessly pounded away on his own guitar throughout an album’s worth of material, for the first time in the band’s career. “Mick was bringing songs in and wanted to play the electric guitar,” said Chris Kimsey, the engineer and co-producer of Some Girls and a few subsequent albums. “His energy is very different than that of Keith or Ronnie in playing guitar. It is more, I suppose you could say punk rock. It’s just a very animalistic, basic way of bashing out the chord sequence … which kind of fits with his energy as a person, the way he moves and sings anyway.”⁹

Listening to the conversation between the guitars on Some Girls is a treat. While Jagger pumps up the adrenaline, Wood and Richards hang their loosely woven guitar parts around the tense core of the fast songs. But it is on the slower numbers, such as the ballad “Beast of Burden,” that a listener can really soak in the pleasure of interlocking guitar parts. Not coincidentally, it is one of the few without Jagger on guitar. There is plenty of space left and Wood and Richards use it well, rarely strumming a steady pattern. Instead, you hear the two listening to and answering each other, neither one anticipating their time to shine in a solo moment.

Versatility, and not virtuosity, has been the calling card of Wood. He had been used to playing with another great soul-influenced rhythm section in the Faces, Kenney Jones (one of rock and roll’s least-appreciated drummers) and Ronnie Lane. And here he is bringing that looseness of the Faces to the Stones – rather than resulting in redundancy, the Stones settled into its strength as a groove machine, which is how the band has remained for thirty-plus years.

Hired Guns: Key Contributors to Rolling Stones Recordings

While the changing three guitarists – all official members of the group – resulted in easily recognizable shifts in the sound of the decidedly guitar-driven band, each of the Stones’ hired keyboardists brought relatively less obvious, but nevertheless essential, personality and color to the group’s recordings and performances. Al Kooper brought a distinct and indispensable gospel flavor on piano and organ to his one-off contribution, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” And former Faces keyboardist, Ian McLagan, sat in with the Stones from Some Girls (1978) through their early-1980s touring. But for the purposes of this essay, we will concentrate on the four long-term contributors on piano and organ. As with Brian Jones, Mick Taylor, and Ron Wood, the band’s keyboardists correspond respectively with the Stones’ early, middle, and late periods. Ian Stewart was a constant presence in the band until his death in 1985, due to his role as a founding member of the group and his running of its stage management, touring details, and equipment inventory. But his playing is mostly associated with the Brian Jones early years. Nicky Hopkins entered the fray as the band transitioned through their brief flirtation with psychedelia and stayed right through the most classic recordings and tours of their golden era (1968–72). Billy Preston started working with the Stones on Goats Head Soup (1973) and continued through Black and Blue (1976). And Chuck Leavell joined them for the early 1980s and has remained with them since.

Piano Pounder Three: Billy Preston
– and Bobby Keys, Jim Price, and Merry Clayton

While Hopkins was conversant in gospel piano, Billy Preston was the real deal (see Figure 2.1). He played organ with Mahalia Jackson and James Cleveland, gospel royalty, at the tender age of ten. From there, he hooked up with Little Richard’s band, eventually touring England, and meeting the Beatles in the process. Preston went on to play with Ray Charles and returned to England in 1968–69 to sit in with the Beatles on Let It Be (1970). The Beatles also signed Preston as a solo artist to their Apple label. He nurtured his successful solo career concurrent with making stellar guest appearances with other artists, such as Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Delaney and Bonnie, and, of course, the Rolling Stones, as is discussed later in this chapter.

Figure 2.1 Mick Jagger with Billy Preston, Plaza Monumental, Barcelona, 1976.

Album/Francesc Fàbregas/Art Resource, NY.

Bobby Keys (saxophone) and Jim Price (trumpet) had also played in the Delaney and Bonnie & Friends band and came over to the UK at the request of George Harrison to work on his masterpiece, All Things Must Pass (1970). Keys met Jagger while in London and soon he and Price became the horn section for the Stones. Starting with the appearance of Keys on “Live With Me” (from Let It Bleed) in 1969, the horns added an indelible dimension to Sticky Fingers (1971) and Exile on Main Street (1972), as well as the tours supporting those records. The interaction between all of these musicians on the records and tours of Harrison, Joe Cocker, Eric Clapton, and the Stones was indicative of an overall back to roots movement heard in the immediate post-psychedelia late 1960s on such records as the Band’s Music from Big Pink (1968), Dylan’s John Wesley Harding (1967), the Stones’ Beggars Banquet (1968), and the Beatles’ White Album (1968). But with added horn sections and backing singers, some rock shows were resembling the soul revue-type ensembles of Ike & Tina Turner, Stax, and Motown. Jim Price eventually left the fold, becoming a producer, but Keys remained a loyal sideman to the Stones for decades, falling out for a few years due to drug abuse, but back in the fold from the 1980s to his death in 2014. His brassy sax solos are inextricable from such songs as “Live With Me,” “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” and “Sweet Virginia,” and, of course, there is his signature solo in “Brown Sugar.”

The Stones had famously covered songs by soul artists such as Otis Redding, Don Covay, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, and Solomon Burke, just to name a significant few. These influences crept back as the Stones entered the seventies. “Through that whole period, there wasn’t a whole lot going on in terms of saxophones and horns,” Keys told me, discussing the time period surrounding the Summer of Love. “Except for the soul thing: Stax, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and that whole bunch from Memphis. I really loved that stuff. But up until then, most bands were guitar oriented, except for a few. We were hearing some of the first Stax stuff up at Leon Russell’s house. Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn had come from Memphis to Los Angeles to do some overdubs. So I heard some of that stuff before it came out. And I was thinking this is definitely the wave of the future. It has all of these wonderful horns in it. So hell, I guess I am in good shape here.”¹⁵

The brassy element of this period is essential to the gospel-soul sound of the early-1970s Rolling Stones. Indeed, it seems that Jagger was influenced to write such songs as the Otis Redding-inspired “I Got the Blues” by his time spent enjoying Redding and other Stax records with Keys in the early days of their budding friendship, and, of course, the group had covered some of Redding’s songs on their early albums. There was an overall revival of the African-American influence – specifically gospel and its secularized offspring, soul – on rock and roll. I suggested to Keys that the horns were inspiring the Stones’ songwriting itself, with songs such as “Let It Loose” and “Shine a Light.” “Right, and Billy Preston brought a lot of that influence too,” he said.

Preston’s first appearance on a Stones record was on “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” followed by a searing, emotional Hammond organ solo on “I Got the Blues,” both from Sticky Fingers. As great as Hopkins, Stewart, Nitzsche, and the Stones themselves were at adding piano and organ, it is hard to imagine any of them ripping out something as authentically gospel as this concise solo. Preston only makes one appearance on Exile on Main Street, on “Shine a Light,” but it is another soul-stirring performance on both piano and organ, adding percussive and sweeping fills on each instrument during the transitions for verse to chorus. The difference in the individual styles that Preston and Hopkins brought to the Stones is obvious. Preston was also the organizing force behind the backing vocalists and the arrangements for vocal ensemble.

The Stones started adding extra voices to their records in earnest with “Salt of the Earth” from Beggars Banquet, specifically with a gospel feel in mind. Despite the addition of the Los Angeles-based Watts Street Gospel Choir, it does not come off as a gospel number, per se. But one can see the beginnings of the genre’s influence on the Stones, so that for the next album, Let It Bleed, the band took another swing and ended up with the epic “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” a song that begins as a folk-rock song but quickly becomes so full-on gospel that the group apparently felt it would be advantageous to undercut it with some irony. Instead of having the typical African-American Baptist choir, the Stones brought in the London Bach Choir:

“I’d … had this idea of having a choir, probably a gospel choir, on the track,” said Jagger, “but there wasn’t one around at that point. Jack Nitzsche, or somebody, said that we could get the London Bach Choir and we said, that will be a laugh.”¹⁶ [Richards explains the use of the choir]: “Let’s put on a straight chorus. In other words, let’s try to reach the people up there as well. It was a dare, kind of … And then, what if we got one of the best choirs in England, all these white, lovely singers, and do it that way? … It was a beautiful juxtaposition.”¹⁷

Also on Let It Bleed is the legendary star vocal turn from Merry Clayton, who gives a spine-chilling solo performance on “Gimme Shelter” – the first from a non-Rolling Stone on one of their recordings. Having written about this in detail elsewhere, suffice it to say her high-register attack, during which her voice buckles and then cracks as she soulfully pushes it even harder, is one of rock music’s greatest moments.¹⁸ It added a brand-new texture into a band which had been around for six years. On the scale of contender for greatest rock song of all time, the energy injected by Clayton’s performance tipped “Gimme Shelter” from competitor to grand champion.

As the Stones increasingly brought outside contributors to their recording sessions, they also grew more comfortable with expanding their core band into a touring ensemble that continues to characterize their live performances today, augmented by regular sidemen and women, and sharing the spotlight with guest stars. In addition to his appearances on Sticky Fingers and Exile, Preston was the mainstay keyboardist on the three albums that followed – Goats Head Soup, It’s Only Rock ’n Roll, and Black and Blue – and attendant mid-1970s tours. In fact, he was more than a mere sideman, sometimes sharing the microphone with Jagger on prominent vocal parts, and even a few turns singing one or two of his own songs.

Preston was still with the Stones in 1977, when they played the small Toronto El Mocambo Club (some of this gig is heard on Love You Live [1977]), and it was apparently there that he demonstrated the four-on-the-floor beat that formed the backbone of disco music.¹⁹ So while he is not present on the Stones’ next LP, Some Girls (1978), his influence carried through in Watts’ playing on the song “Miss You,” a smash single for the band at a crucial point.

Psychedelia, 1967, and Their Satanic Majesties Request

After the release of Between the Buttons in early 1967, the Stones devoted the rest of the year to recording their next album and a handful of singles. As mentioned briefly above, the band’s work during the year was disrupted by serious brushes with the law that saw Jagger, Richards, and Jones arrested and convicted on drug charges. In the summer of 1967, while the Stones were trying to record amid legal proceedings, psychedelia arose out of underground scenes in San Francisco and London and into mainstream culture, most visibly represented by the Monterey Pop Festival in June, which was attended by Brian Jones. Flower Power, it suddenly seemed, was everywhere and the Summer of Love was in full bloom.²⁰ While psychedelia manifested itself in lifestyle (fashion, language, behavior, and attitudes), it is worth considering how the music itself – thought of apart from these other aspects of culture – participated in this cultural shift. Elsewhere I have discussed how music can be psychedelic, placing emphasis not only on aspects of the hippie aesthetic (especially musical ambition) but also on the influence of drug use.²¹ Certain sonic features are clear markers of the psychedelic style, such as reversed tape effects, drones (heard most often in the bass) that underpin the music, melodic figures that evoke Indian music, and lyrics that engage philosophical, transcendental, spiritual, or political issues. These elements, however, are only part of psychedelia, though in some ways they are the most obvious features. At its core, psychedelic music is about the trip. Psychedelic music can either enhance a drug trip (and be designed to do so, as in the case of Country Joe and the Fish’s Electric Music for the Mind and Body), or it can itself provide a kind of trip (as the concept album was thought to do).²² In musical terms, this focus on the trip reinforces and fuels the hippie aesthetic, as bands work to create music that transports their listeners to new places using novel sounds, innovative recording techniques, and a broad range of musical styles.

Released in December 1967, Their Satanic Majesties Request is the Rolling Stones’ most pronounced engagement with psychedelia. The elaborate cover, featuring the band dressed as colorful wizards and troubadours, is clearly inspired by the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover.²³ This emphasis on album packaging is not new with either album, however. One can trace an attention to album art in the Beatles’ music back at least as far as Rubber Soul, and in the Stones’ releases as far back as the 12 × 5 cover and subsequent ones shot by both David Bailey and Gered Mankowitz. But both Pepper and Majesties especially draw attention to their packaging. Both albums also use reprise to organize the tracks into a larger whole. With Pepper, the opening title track returns just before the end of side two, announcing the end of the “show” and leading to “A Day in the Life.” Majesties begins side one with “Sing This All Together,” which then returns to close that side of the album. Both albums suggest a kind of musical trip, enhanced by the segue of certain tracks and very much in keeping with psychedelic practice.

The individual Majesties tracks continue to extend the musical ambition and innovation of the band’s previous work. “She’s a Rainbow,” for instance, picks up once more with the use of classical idioms.²⁴ The song employs a contrasting verse-chorus form, but in a very interesting and novel way. The first three times the eight-bar verse occurs it is played instrumentally, with emphasis on a classical piano figuration (here played by Nicky Hopkins); it is thus not clear initially that this section is functioning as a verse in the form. A ten-bar sung chorus then follows each instrumental verse except the third (where the chorus is also instrumental), and it is not until Jagger enters singing this verse on its fourth appearance that the listener understands that what might have been heard previously as an interlude has actually been a verse all along. The use of chamber strings and harpsichord further reinforce the reference to classical music established by the piano part.²⁵ If “She’s a Rainbow” invokes eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classical music, “2000 Light Years From Home” draws more on avant-garde classical elements. Beginning with an eerie introduction making use of electronic sounds and atonal, atmospheric piano and then a menacing guitar riff accompanied by Brian Jones’ mysterious lines on the Mellotron, the track sets the stage for lyrics describing a space journey that ultimately arrives on the distant star Aldebaran – the singer’s space journey takes him 100, 600, 1,000, and finally 2,000 light years from home.²⁶ The Stones may have been inspired in this instance by Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” or “Astronomy Domine,” which were staples of the Floyd’s live show and appeared on their album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn in the late summer of 1967 (a live version of “Astronomy Domine” appears on the group’s 1969 double LP Ummagumma). But the electronic sounds on “2000 Light Years From Home” are perhaps also reminiscent of an EP released in 1960 by legendary British producer Joe Meek entitled I Hear a New World: An Outer Space Music Fantasy. Meek’s EP is filled with otherworldly electronic “space” sounds.²⁷ In any case, the Stones, the Pink Floyd, and Joe Meek were all engaging practices that were current in the avant-garde electronic and tape music of the time.

“We Love You,” a single recorded during the Majesties sessions, perhaps provides the best example of the psychedelic peace-and-love ethos influencing Stones lyrics. The tune was recorded at the height of the Jagger and Richards legal proceedings during the summer of 1967; correspondingly, the song opens with the sound of a prison door slamming before introducing a driving piano figure played by Nicky Hopkins. Featuring help on background vocals from John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the song declares love in the face of persecution. Employing AABA form without reprise, the track ends with an extended coda, blending various music-textural layers together into a sonic collage reminiscent of “All You Need Is Love,” though “We Love You” is more menacing than the Beatles’ single. These kinds of sonic collages were made possible to a significant degree by advances in recording technology, which allowed for parts to be layered over one another. With “We Love You,” one can see the Stones taking full advantage of this technology. “Dandelion” appeared as the flipside to “We Love You” and, like the choral interlude in “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” suggests a Beach Boys influence. The harpsichord once more appears on this Stones track, while Brian Jones plays both Mellotron and saxophone.²⁸ The lyrics are inspired by nursery rhymes and seem to suggest that when one gets hung up on the pressures of adult life, remember the dandelion, which is able to go wherever the breeze takes it with seeming unconcern. The song’s compound AABA form employs a verse-chorus pair, each eight measures in length. The contrasting B section, however is seven bars, making for an interesting though not uncommon asymmetry. “We Love You” and “Dandelion” provide distinct examples of the whimsical elements of psychedelia that the Stones would soon reject, while also including important elements that would remain in the group’s music for years to come.

Promotional videos directed by Peter Whitehead were made for “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and “We Love You.” Whitehead’s engagement with the band began with his film of the group’s first tour to Ireland in 1965, Charlie Is My Darling, and he also directed videos for “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow,” and “Lady Jane.” Michael Lindsay-Hogg directed videos of “2000 Light Years From Home” and “She’s a Rainbow.”²⁹ Whitehead’s video for “We Love You” is at least partially conceptual: Making reference to the Jagger and Richards trials, it casts band members and Marianne Faithfull as figures in the famous indecency trial of Oscar Wilde, and was subsequently banned from viewing by Top of the Pops.³⁰ Of the videos by Lindsay-Hogg, only the one for “2000 Light Years From Home” is available. The Stones appear performing the tune in psychedelic garb, with Jagger in a hood and wearing face make-up. The use of images nicely captures the mysterious and otherworldly atmosphere of the song without adding any additional narrative. Along with the album art, these videos underscore the growing importance to musicians concerning how the music is presented. Rock musicians increasingly began to think of their music as including more than just the recording: The music began to become conceptual in its various modes of presentation.

Surveying the Majesties period, it is clear that the hippie aesthetic is in full force for the Stones in 1967 (see Figure 3.1). The album art and video presentations expand our understanding of the music beyond the actual recordings themselves, the lyrics and music are ambitious, there is increasing use of non-rock instrumentation as well as studio effects and sonic experimentation, and there are numerous and substantial earnest references to classical music, a characteristic that – in the 1960s at least – increases the sense of artistic seriousness of the music. It is also clear that the album is meant to produce a kind of musical trip (though it is equally obvious that many fans may have used it to enhance a trip). The psychedelic aspect of this music is difficult to separate from its engagement with – and even extension of – the hippie aesthetic, and especially since that engagement begins with music by the Stones that is not generally considered to be psychedelic. The Majesties music is a logical progression according to a stylistic trajectory the Stones had followed since 1964. The album itself is psychedelic, but the hippie aesthetic is a constant element present both before and after Majesties.

Figure 3.1 The Rolling Stones, 1967.

Courtesy HIP/Art Resource, NY.

The New Sound, “Jumpin’ Jack,” and Beggars Banquet

We can now return to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and the important shift this track signaled in rejecting the psychedelia of Majesties and marking a new way forward.³¹ Clearly the opening guitar riff drives “Jumpin’ Jack” in a visceral way, and as the drums, bass, and additional guitars enter, the song rocks forward in a manner more grounded in the band’s blues-rock roots than in their recent ambitious experimentation.³² There are two aspects of this track, however, that continue the band’s psychedelic practice. The first is the way that “Jumpin’ Jack” ends: After the compound AABA form of the main song is presented, a longish coda occurs. These last forty-five seconds of the song feature a harmonically static texture made up of layers of music: guitar lines, organ chords and then melody, bass, drums – all combining into a kaleidoscopic swirl of sound that recalls the last ninety seconds of “We Love You” (or “All You Need Is Love”). Of course, the Stones had retained the long ending of “Goin’ Home” on Aftermath, but these later psychedelic endings are of a different kind – they do not dramatically drive the song forward so much as simply float, encouraging the listener to relish an expanded moment of musical stasis. A second psychedelic aspect of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” concerns certain elements in one of the two promotional videos made for this track; for clarity, these are sometimes distinguished as the “make-up” and “no make-up” videos.³³ In the “make-up” version, the band performs on a dimly lit stage, with a barefoot Jagger wearing a sort of “war paint” on his face while sporting a circular watch medallion painted on his bare chest and stomach. Watts and Wyman also wear make-up, though theirs seems more androgynous, perhaps recalling the cover photo for “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow.” Jones wears bright green sunglasses and orange lipstick, while Richards wears dark glasses and a richly embroidered tunic. The overall look of this video is not as markedly psychedelic as the one for “2000 Light Years From Home,” but it is also clear that director Michael Lindsay-Hogg has not rejected the psychedelic elements of the Majesties video in this one for “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” While the static quality of the song’s ending employs a psychedelic musical texture, the video retains psychedelic images and fashion.

“Child of the Moon” appears on the flipside of the “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” single and it has its beginnings in the recording sessions for Majesties. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that “Child of the Moon” also retains elements from the band’s most psychedelic LP. In fact, the static nature of the harmony and vocal harmonies of its verses is not only reminiscent of “We Love You,” but also of the Beatles’ “Rain,” making this song seem perhaps more indebted to 1966 than 1967. As he has done before, Brian Jones performs on a new instrument, this time the soprano saxophone. The lyrics once again describe a free-spirited woman, as in “Ruby Tuesday” (Richards’ lyric) or “She’s a Rainbow.” The Lindsay-Hogg directed video, like the one Whitehead directed for “We Love You,” is conceptual – even if the exact concept is difficult to discern. The video opens with Jagger perched in a tree, as other band members stand along a country road. Later Jones will be shown peering out from behind another tree. Three women in turn approach the spot where the rather menacing-looking band is positioned along the road: a young girl (holding an apple), who stops and seems unafraid, but scurries back into the bushes; a young woman, who stops and turns back; and an elderly woman, who stops for a moment but then walks directly past the men. The theme of the video suggests that there are different choices one makes (or perhaps threats one perceives) at various stages of life, though a more precise meaning would be difficult to support. The precise interpretation of the video, however, is not important in this case; it is far more significant that the video seeks to explore a serious and philosophical question: in so doing it directly engages the hippie aesthetic.³⁴

Like “Child of the Moon,” the genesis of “Street Fighting Man” reaches back to 1967, perhaps even to late 1966. According to Richards, he had the music for the song but not the lyrics; these would be supplied by Jagger and prove to be quite controversial.³⁵ The track employs a contrasting verse-chorus form. Each ten-bar verse is driven by Richards’ layers of guitars and keeps squarely within the blues-rock style. The choruses, however, open onto a slightly more exotic soundscape, as Brian Jones enters with the drone of the Indian tambura and Nicky Hopkins’ acoustic piano helps push the song forward.³⁶ When the chorus appears a third time, the tambura is absent, though it reappears in the coda that follows, along with a sitar (also played by Jones) and an Indian horn called the shehnai, played in this instance by guitarist Dave Mason. The result is an expansion of the chorus that results in forty seconds of the same kind of static, psychedelic swirl that appears at the end of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “We Love You.” Jagger’s provocative lyrics arose from his political feelings of the time: He had attended an anti-Vietnam War rally in London’s Grosvenor Square in March 1968 and was inspired to make his own statement, placing special emphasis on the idea of revolution. Released as a single in the USA at the end of the turbulent summer of 1968, the song was banned by some radio stations, who worried it might incite even more political violence.³⁷ “Street Fighting Man,” therefore, brings together lyrics on a serious theme with extended moments of psychedelic music-textural stasis.

“Sympathy for the Devil” was perhaps the most ambitious track the Stones had recorded thus far and much of the ambition of the song is centered on the lyrics. Jagger assumes the persona of Lucifer as he moves through two thousand years of history, from the crucifixion of Jesus and the Hundred Years War to the Russian Revolution and the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. Jagger’s devil is a wealthy and refined man; and the key to this master of deception’s diabolical success is the obscuring of right and wrong, making one seem like the other and driving humankind to evil, history-defining deeds. Jagger seems to have crafted his particular angle on Satan after reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, and the idea of creating an extended track (more than six minutes) based on history, religion, and literature is deeply sympathetic with the hippie aesthetic.³⁸ The actual recording of the track in May, 1968 was captured by director Jean-Luc Godard as part of a film engaging revolutionary politics. Ultimately released under the title Sympathy for the Devil (1970/2003), the film provides a rare glimpse into the transformation that can occur as a song is developed from its incipient creative idea into the finished product. The recorded version is in contrasting verse-chorus form, with five appearances of the seventeen-bar verses, each followed by an eight-bar chorus.³⁹ The accompaniment to Jagger’s vocal is fairly straightforward, with Richards once again on bass, as well as lead guitar, Hopkins at the piano, Watts on the drums, and Wyman on the shekere, a West African percussion instrument. Rocky Dijon provides the distinctive conga part, while the Stones, three of their girlfriends (including Marianne Faithfull), and engineer Glyn Johns sing the back-up “devil’s chorus” (“woo-woo”) beginning with the third verse.⁴⁰ The track ends with almost two minutes of coda, but this is not the static psychedelic swirl found in “We Love You,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” or “Street Fighting Man.” Instead, “Sympathy for the Devil” employs the kind of rhythm and blues extensions that can be found on Stones versions such as Otis Redding’s “That’s How Strong My Love Is” from Out of Our Heads. About the only aspect of the accompaniment to Jagger’s lead vocals on this track that resonates with psychedelia is the persistence of the music: The repetitive forward push of the rhythm suggests a ritual, with the group chant of the back-up vocals supporting the voice of the devil as he sings.

In terms of the music alone, “Sympathy for the Devil” – aside from its ambitious lyrics – does not suggest much lingering psychedelia. The performance of this track, however, brings with it a new dimension. In late 1968, the Stones filmed a television broadcast entitled The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.⁴¹ This project was a continuation of the band’s previous work with director Michael Lindsay-Hogg and featured a line-up including the Stones, the Who, Jethro Tull, Marianne Faithfull, Taj Mahal, and the Dirty Mac (John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Mitch Mitchell, Keith Richards, and Yoko Ono). The Stones’ set consists of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Parachute Woman,” “No Expectations,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (without choir), and finally “Sympathy for the Devil” as the set closer.⁴² Throughout the performance Jagger has been clad in maroon pants and a red shirt and this is how he performs most of “Devil.” When the band gets to the song’s extended coda, here lengthened to four minutes in comparison with the album version, Jagger goes down on his stomach and then to his knees facing the crowd, placing the microphone between his legs and bending down to the floor to sing improvised phrases. He then bends his head all the way down to the floor and begins to remove his shirt. The crowd reacts, expecting that he will emerge shirtless. When he does stand up, it is immediately clear that this is not merely a gesture of rock and roll sexuality: Perhaps shockingly, he has tattoos of Lucifer painted on each arm and across his chest.⁴³ This dramatic bit of theater, intimately bound up with the theme of the lyrics, is a clear extension into the live performance realm of the conceptual approach that had previously been a key element in the “We Love You,” “2000 Light Years From Home,” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” videos. While this performance is not in itself psychedelic, it extends an approach to performance developed in the band’s psychedelic music. Of course, the circus setting of this television program already leans in the direction of psychedelia; there is, after all, a circus parade, trapeze artists, and a fire eater, and plenty of bright hippie clothing. The Stones’ performance of the “Sympathy for the Devil” finale further reinforces that psychedelic inclination while simultaneously extending the band’s own engagement with its recent psychedelic past.⁴⁴

As mentioned above, the album cover design for Majesties had been markedly psychedelic. The initial design for the Beggars cover, by contrast, was thoroughly existential and transparently provocative.⁴⁵ When the record company rejected the initial images of a filthy toilet and graffiti-filled walls, the replacement design was one imitating an invitation to a formal banquet. The black-and-white simplicity of the replacement Beggars cover, like the original restroom design, might seem a rejection of the excessively colorful sleeve for Majesties. As a consequence, the Beggars cover might constitute a rejection of psychedelia in general. But both designs for the Beggars cover, in fact, are markedly conceptual, and their content is much more integrated with the music on the album than is the case with Majesties. The Beggars cover, then, is actually more faithful to the hippie aesthetic than the cover for Majesties, even if it is less psychedelic in its use of color and image.

Surveying these examples from Beggars Banquet, it is clear that there is a much more pronounced aspect of continuity with Majesties (and the band’s earlier music) than is often acknowledged. That continuity is primarily driven by the hippie aesthetic, which as we have seen can be traced back to 1964 and finds its most obvious expression in the psychedelia of 1967. But it is not only the hippie aesthetic that continues to play a role in the band’s “new sound.” Specific psychedelic features recur in the band’s music from 1968: the static endings of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Street Fighting Man,” the sitar, tambura, and shehnai of “Street Fighting Man,” the trippiness of the “Child of the Moon” video, the performances of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Sympathy for the Devil” – all of these suggest that psychedelia, while no longer the focus of the band’s music, remained within its stylistic palette.

Psychedelia Continues to Linger

Elements of the hippie aesthetic – and thus, in a certain sense, psychedelic elements – also recur in the albums that follow Beggars Banquet. In some ways “Gimme Shelter,” from Let It Bleed, is a reworking of “Sympathy for the Devil,” though this time constituting an ambitious track originating from Keith Richards.⁴⁶ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” from the same album, employs a concert choir, continuing the use of classical features in Stones music.⁴⁷ The extended jam that makes up the second half of “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” – with virtuosic solos from Bobby Keys and Mick Taylor – shows that as late as Sticky Fingers aspects of the hippie aesthetic were still a part of the band’s musical approach. The strings on “Moonlight Mile” add a classical touch, and the last ninety seconds are static, atmospheric, and trippy, perhaps meant to suggest the quiet of a late-night bus or train ride to the next show (and perhaps even recalling the quiet sections of “Cool, Calm and Collected”).

The recurrence of some aspects of the hippie aesthetic in the Rolling Stones’ music after Beggars Banquet further reinforces the idea that, while 1968 saw a significant change in the band’s stylistic emphases, it did not mark a rejection of the group’s previous work, nor all aspects of Their Satanic Majesties Request. In retrospect, there is more continuity in the band’s development than discontinuity. Majesties may have been a moment of maximum experimentation and experimental looseness, but it was only one stop on a road that led forward to the band’s music in the 1970s and beyond. Elements of psychedelia indeed lingered long after the wizard and troubadour costumes had been discarded.

Exiles and the Tent Show Queen

The subversive language of “Casino Boogie” is syntactically exclusive to the Stones, and serves to identify and ally the outsider, who is the exile, peering in, and his encounter with others along his journey. Here, it is the characteristic voice of the exile firing cryptic assaults on establishment, convention, and hippie idealism by using the decoys of rich, American gamblers squandering millions in the luxury slum of Monte Carlo’s casinos. Indeed, according to Janovitz, the song’s lyrics depict “casual disdain for authority, drug-bust martyrdom, and the band’s pressure to ‘exile’ themselves,” with the last two lines “captu[ring] the essence of Exile on Main St: surreal rock & roll, jet-set sexuality, decadence, and boredom with the tired themes of the 1960s.”¹³ As a punitive means, exile was imposed on those who could do the most harm, and it recognizes high standing. But exile is also self-imposed, for it is within the “sanctuary” of exile that writers find a powerful voice that is the product of roaming and resistance. It is at once the voice of banishment, homelessness, and encounter with a new world. Linguistically it draws on forms, accents, and syntax that bridge high and low, and finds power and inspiration in dialect and popular forms.

In 1971 the Stones, debt-ridden, literally went into self-exile in the south of France, due to the high taxation laws in the UK that left the group unable to meet their income tax responsibilities. Their exile was also the conclusion to years of systematic arrests by the police on often-fabricated drug and indecency charges that are widely believed to have been part of a particular vendetta against the group. The qualities of exile described above appear throughout Sticky Fingers, in which the poetic squalor of practically all of the songs suggests distance and travel. Musically, they call out from elsewhere through an intentional stylistic apartness: the orientalism of “Moonlight Mile”; the long instrumental jam, unique in the Stones’ output, at the end of “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”; the Stax-influenced “I’ve Got the Blues”; and, as noted earlier, the solitary withdrawal of the victim in “Sister Morphine.” With Exile on Main Street, conceived amidst the rich opulence of the French Riviera, the group moves on to employ a variety of musical styles that take the form of “dialects” that are effectively used to speak in code while simultaneously asserting the Stones’ personalities as Others and transients. Within this multi-vocal setting, the Stones employ gospel as a way to mask sex songs (“Let It Loose,” “Loving Cup”), country influences to tap into the deep American roots songbook that became more authentic – in tone and technique – through the influence of Gram Parsons, Calypso for a protest song about Black militant Angela Davis (“Sweet Black Angel,”, sung in “Caribbean” dialect), and blues for traditional attacks on high-class pastimes.

Exiles and the Circus

Satan was the first exile (Revelation 12.7), followed across the ages by Odysseus, the Holy Family, Dante, Solzhenitsyn, the Dalai Lama, Marvin Gaye, and … the Rolling Stones. Historically, the condition of exile is associated with banishment – both real and imagined – the exiler becoming a verbal target for reprisal, cryptic assault, and condemnation by the exiled. Whether the result of intense political opposition (Dante) or tax evasion (Gaye, the Stones), the sentence of exile amplifies displacement and protest through the use of vernacular dialects, subversive themes, and ancient texts. Nostalgia, mobility, alienation, linguistic variation, encounters with Others, religious themes, and recourse to Scripture are recurring exilic themes. With the Stones, references to the outsider, the use of different voices, vocal delivery, genre, choice of lyrics, stylistic diversity, and sound contribute to this autobiographical notion of exile. Even their recording conditions, in the form of a mobile studio (see Figure 4.2) beginning with the Exile sessions, are critical to the decentralized, “exilic” sound and songwriting strategies of the Stones during this period, as they create their own rural musical space in the image of the legendary studios of the American south like Muscle Shoals and Stax.

Figure 4.2 Author in front of the 24-track Helios console inside the Rolling Stones Mobile studio, 2016.

National Music Centre, Calgary, Alberta (photo by Tom Knowles).

Reflecting on the end of the group’s first American tour in 1964, Keith Richards wrote that he thought the group had “blown it”: “We’d been consigned to the status of medicine shows and circus freaks with long hair.”¹⁴ Ironically, the image of the circus act is a recurring image in the group’s music and overall self-perception between 1968 and 1972. Although the Stones’ period of exile is a physical reality in 1971 with their move from England to France, the roots of their displacement can be found at the beginning of this period of creativity, most visibly in the Rock and Roll Circus of 1968, a fully realized project intended as a BBC television special that was eventually shelved until its official release on videocassette in 1996.¹⁵ Using the backdrop of a “big top” circus tent (with Mod accents, to be sure), the project features performances by many of the most popular and emerging British rock and pop acts of the day – the Who, Jethro Tull, the “Dirty Mac” supergroup with John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Mitch Mitchell, along with appearances by Marianne Faithfull and Yoko Ono – interspersed with conventional acrobatic routines by authentic circus acts (funambulists, fire breathers, lion tamers, etc.). Intentionally or not, the Stones project here the idea of the rock concert as a circus, its performers likened to trained acts to play before audiences seeking their own vicarious thrills, living perilously on the edge of success and failure, and marginalized – as Richards recounts from the 1964 tour – as a circus act.

Indeed, the circus performer is a classic “exile,” especially if in the sideshow. Classified as “misfits,” humans with physical deformities, unusual physical abilities, biological difference, and birth defects were leveraged as circus acts alongside other sideshow performers of specious authenticity. The connection between these circus performers and the Stones comes full circle with Robert Frank’s cover for the Exile on Main Street album, which, taken from photographs he had shot for his legendary book The Americans, and in close collaboration with Jagger about the design, featured black and white photos of various circus performers exhibiting their unusual abilities, with some images used individually to promote the 1972 tour (see Figure 4.1).¹⁶ As Richards remembers, “Exile was a double album. And because it’s a double album you’re going to be hitting different areas, including D for Down, and the Stones really felt like exiles.”¹⁷

Sacred Exiles

Sacred references are frequent in the Stones’ music from these years, as they are in Delta blues, not only through allusion or quotes from Scripture, but in the use of sacred sound and style. In the song “Far Away Eyes” from Some Girls of 1978, the media-driven tele-evangelical movement in America is cleverly (and acutely) parodied through Jagger’s drawl, the mimicry of the radio preacher seeking $10 tithes, and the signature pedal steel parts played by Ronnie Wood, but there is nothing really sacred about the song.¹⁸ Earlier, however, the allusions were more sober, probing, and authentic. The Stones incorporate sacred idioms from sources as diverse as the English choral tradition, American gospel, and the small-town Salvation Army funeral procession, that, drawing on the emotional arc of the gospel service, provide climactic and conclusive moments within the songs.

“Prodigal Son” (text drawn from Luke 15:11–32), on Beggars Banquet, is a moralizing story, a version – calling it a “cover” does not do the song justice – of Rev. Robert Tim Wilkins’ “That’s No Way to Get Along” that he originally recorded in Memphis in 1929 but later (and after having renounced the life of a bluesman and joined the church) rerecorded as “The Prodigal Son” in 1964.¹⁹ It is this latter version that draws specifically on the story given in Luke and is the immediate influence, both in the guitar work and the lyrics, for the version by the Stones. Appearing on an album whose opening track recounts the destructive history of Satan (“Sympathy for the Devil” [BB]) and his contemporaneous killing of the Kennedys, “Prodigal Son” reaches back to the rural style of its author, Jagger mimicking the old bluesman’s voice and Richards patterning his strumming in E-tuning after Wilkins, against a duo of harmonicas and a clutter of makeshift-sounding percussion. The effect is that of a street-corner performance somewhere in the Delta for a retelling of the best known of Jesus’ three parables, this one foregrounding the themes of greed, reconciliation, family, and ultimately forgiveness. In the end, the song is unlike any other original blues arranged anew by the Stones due to its raw, rural sound, as if one were suddenly listening to one of Alan Lomax’s important field recordings of southern Blues.

It is the American gospel tradition, though, that is the most pervasive influence on the Stones in this period. Gospel techniques create call-and-response textures (heard, for example, on “Tumbling Dice” [EMS]), they reference gospel’s musical progeny, R&B, and they further create climactic moments that recall the rapturous conclusion of gospel church services, heard at the ends of “Salt of the Earth” (BB), “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (LB), and “Shine a Light” (EMS). But the exhilarating crescendos of heavenly gospel textures are also used to celebrate sex (“Loving Cup” [EMS]) and, more darkly, sexual surrender (“Let It Loose” [EMS]). At a formal level, the fact that “Salt of the Earth” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” – the final songs of Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed, respectively – both conclude with high-energy gospel choruses, suggests that the organization of the albums themselves draws on the plan and rhythm of the gospel service in which confession and community are ultimate themes. Thematically, both albums begin by a stark acknowledgment of evil and tragedy, but they eventually conclude with the same choral exhilaration that accompanies the arrival in the gospel church of the Holy Ghost. In “Sympathy for the Devil” (BB) Satan introduces himself by immediately speaking over the macabre, samba-like rhythm of a Totentanz, while in “Gimme Shelter” (LB) the distant howling (vocalized by Merry Clayton) in the foreboding introduction and relentless three-chord descending progression underlie the premonition of storms, rape, and murder. Halfway through Beggars we hear a “sermon” about the Prodigal Son and the lesson of forgiveness; in the case of the much darker Let It Bleed, it is rather the grisly fulfillment of the foretold rape and murder by the appearance, halfway through the album, of the Midnight Rambler. In the end, however, both albums banish their evils musically and textually by uplifting gospel choruses.

“Salt of the Earth” (BB) – a song that was powerfully revived by Jagger and Richards at the Concert for New York City following the 9/11 attack – begins, as its title suggests, like a boozy, closing-time song in a worker’s pub, in which everyone, arms around each other, eventually joins in. It continues the proletarian theme, already introduced by “Factory Girl,” to raise a glass to the working class and “lowly of birth” – socialist folk sentiments persuasive enough for Joan Baez to decide to record her own version of this song a few years later. It is often said that those looking for actionable messages in Beggars Banquet will not find them. “Street Fighting Man,” which would seem to be the most incendiary of the songs on this album, with its megaphone, front-of-the-pack vocal charge, and the driving march of the IV–I chords, recedes into apathy: “But what can a poor boy do/but sing in a rock and roll band?” “Salt of the Earth,” too, seems to give a pass to those watching on the sideline: “Spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter/His empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows/And a parade of gray suited grafters/A choice of cancer or polio.” After verses sung individually and together by Jagger and Richards, the song builds to a climax through short, pungent bursts of slide guitar (similar to what takes place in “Jigsaw Puzzle” [BB]), until the Watts Street Gospel Choir of Los Angeles enters at the end of the second refrain. Taking over the chorus sung by Jagger and Richards, the choir suddenly (and characteristically gospel) kicks the tempo into double time for a foot-stomping, sway-in-the-aisle conclusion. “Salt of the Earth” is an exile commentary about honoring “workers” over the owners, and it could just as easily be a rant against the record industry, the “workers” being the artists under contract.

The Theater of Exile

Richards has cleverly described the song “Midnight Rambler” (LB) as an unintentional “blues opera,” with its Boston Strangler libretto – many lyrics were taken literally from the confession of the actual Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo²⁰ – and the horrifying, still, recitative section in the middle of the song where the killer, in a whisper punctuated by thrusts of the knife, torments his victim. This kind of dramatic presentation pervades other pieces of the period, as the Stones become more adept at “staging” their songs almost as small one-acts. In “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (LB), they employ gospel and sacred sound to force multiple contrasts: the present against the past, England vs. America, black vs. white rhythm, and the black vs. the white church, all theatrically mounted on a sonic “stage” for this seven-minute-plus finale to Let It Bleed. The nostalgic opening of the song is one of the most beautifully written moments the Stones ever produced. The curtain is raised with an Anglican-style “hymn” sung by the London Bach Choir, that, despite some rather awkward text setting (the two-note descending figures given to the one-syllable words “hand” and “man,” for example), opens up a spacious and sonorous dimension of time, distance, and memory. As sung by the choir, the scored hymn section provides the day’s lesson in an authoritative, didactic fashion. Emerging out of the final note of this first choral refrain is the I–IV strummed riff of Richards’ E-tuned capo’d acoustic that appears from yet another seemingly distant part of the space, coupled with Al Kooper’s French horn solo sounding, too, as if from the distance, like the off-stage horns we hear in Mahler. Thomas Peattie has written about “distant sound” in Mahler’s works as being part of a theatrical moment in which instrumental music becomes linked with opera.²¹ When the conclusive words (“You get what you need!”) of the refrain return after Jagger’s first verse (2:01), the transformation is complete: The Anglican choir now gives way to the gospel singers for a joyous community celebration. The refrain, first sung ex cathedra, is now familiarized stylistically for the vox populi. But, more importantly, it signifies a deepening, a celebration, even the primacy of African-American idioms in the Stones’ music – an influence that was present at the beginning (the name of the band, of course, comes from the title of a Muddy Waters song), but is now dramatized with a narrative that invites commentary about the Stones and race. Returning to the song, for the next two verses the Bach Choir is silent, but following the bridge section (4:17) the exciting coda unites both the Bach and gospel choirs in an ecstatic gospel ending that is propelled – as we heard in “Salt of the Earth” – into the fadeout by shifting into a quick two-beat double-time rhythm.

The spiritual “You Gotta Move” (SF), a group arrangement of bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell’s song of the same name (an earlier version he may have known is the Original Blind Boys of Alabama’s recording of 1953), is another excellent example of the theatrical imagination of the Stones and how they brilliantly conceive a dramatic and historical narrative out of an acoustic blues. McDowell’s riveting performance, recorded in 1965 at the end of the folk/blues revival, features him doubling his vocal line on slide guitar and adding instrumental breaks between the vocal verses, suggesting many adaptable options for the Stones, now with Mick Taylor comfortably integrated into the group. The exilic, dialect vernacular of spirituals is made for the Stones. Spirituals contain irresistible hooks, and many popular R&B songs like Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” and Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” were written in the mold of spirituals and freedom songs, as was much of the work of Aretha Franklin and others. That this music became the soundtrack of the civil rights movement was understood by the Stones well before 1971, and other selections on Sticky Fingers, like the Otis Redding-inspired “I’ve Got the Blues,” with its signature Stax 6/8 meter, crisp rhythmic shots, “sad” doppler-effect horns, shift to the minor subdominant key for Billy Preston’s organ solo, and “pleading” outro, are homages to the classic R&B tradition.²² Jagger is no Otis Redding, to be sure. But this is no longer a mere cover, as on the early Stones albums, but a new song executed with the authenticity, techniques, and above all performance of the classic R&B tradition.

Equally attractive to the Stones in “You Gotta Move” is the Lord’s egalitarian judgement: “You may be high/You may be low/You may be rich, child/You may be poor/But when the Lord gets ready/You gotta move.” It is God who decides when your time is up, and you can’t pay for your seat in heaven as did the corrupt “kings and queens” during the Great Schism who “fought for decades/for the Gods they made” referenced in “Sympathy for the Devil.” But the most interesting part of the song is the theatrical setting they construct for it. Where McDowell’s version is rendered in the venerable Delta manner of a solo guitarist singing the blues, the Stones make the song into a Salvation Army funeral procession marching down Main Street of Small Town, USA. With McDowell’s original riffs in tow, played here on a twelve-string, improvised harmonies are added on the spot, as are other, spontaneous vocalizations. As the song – and the procession – progresses, more and more instruments are added: A bass drum and clapped hi-hat provide the slow beat of the funeral march as it makes its way, along with the wail of Mick Taylor’s electric slide parts (on a vintage 1954 Telecaster, no less) that bring to mind the lacrimose emotions of witnesses to the funeral.

Another excellent example of a staged song drawing on historical references is “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” (SF), a loud retelling of the troubadour alba in which the exiled poet arrives at the foot of the castle tower for his rendezvous at dawn with his lover. Here, however, he is outside the house trying to smash his way in, weaponized by one of the highest-caliber riffs in Richards’ arsenal coupled with Jagger’s six-beat window- and door-pounding refrain: “Can’t you hear me KNOCK-ing?” With the song’s long, suggestive instrumental coda of solos by Mick Taylor and saxophonist Bobby Keys – at times rhythmic and funky, elsewhere bluesy and dreamy – it becomes clear that our troubadour succeeded in entering through the window … and stayed awhile.

The final, and most creative example of the dramatic, historical settings the Stones can mount of a Delta acoustic blues is with their staging of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain Blues,” a song recorded twice by Johnson in his only recording session in 1937. Johnson’s original, like all of his surviving recorded works, features only him singing and playing. After a short introduction and characteristic chromatic turnaround, Johnson sings three verses without an instrumental break (which he rarely takes on these recordings anyway), followed by a final verse that is vocalized. His guitar accompaniment draws heavily from country blues traditions, with the chord shapes and fingerpicking style, as well as the accented “walking” tempo, emphasizing a light shuffle beat along with a percussive accompaniment achieved through his right-hand strumming and muting technique. The harmonies do not stray from a conventional I–IV–I–V blues scheme, and overall it is one of the most restrained songs, technically and vocally, of Johnson’s recorded output. His vocal delivery, perhaps because of the sorrow implicit in the lyrics, is not, like many of his other works, prone to extremes of pitch, shouting, or the use of different “voices.” In all, it is a beautiful though sedate song by Johnson, showing off his more lyrical rather than demonic side.

The Rolling Stones make the song into something much different, enhancing it dramatically on many levels. While retaining essential features of Johnson’s original, they incorporate country, R&B, and even classical influences, creating a small staged piece of musical theater to evoke the images of travel, loss, and sorrow embedded in the lyrics. Johnson’s words are some of the most beautiful in his output, and there is reason to believe that they are autobiographical. In John Hammond Jr.’s 1991 documentary The Search for Robert Johnson (UK, Iambic Productions), among several informants who had been in supposed contact with Robert Johnson, Hammond interviews an elderly woman named Willie Mae Powell, who stated that she was Johnson’s girlfriend in the 1930s. She must be the “Willie Mae” whose name one can hear Johnson sing off-mic in the final vocalization verse of the recording.

The song opens in the first person with Johnson, carrying a suitcase, following his girlfriend to the train station. Is it her bag that she will take with her when she boards the train, or is it his suitcase because he intends to follow her? We don’t know. The second verse opens with the train arriving into the station, and Johnson, sensing that this may be his last chance to patch things up, “looks her [straight] in the eye.” Concluding the verse with this line, but offering no resolution, Johnson brings us to the emotional climax of the song within an imagined clamor of steel and brakes as the train stops. In the final texted verse, it is Johnson who stands alone on the platform watching the train depart from the station, taking account of the two lights of the caboose, one blue, the other red, fading into the distance. The verse ends with Johnson musing that the blue light was “my blues” but the “red light was my mind.” The final, untexted, verse featuring Johnson vocalizing (and moaning the name “Willie Mae”) thus achieves significance as the narrator weeping, shouting, or otherwise emotionally distraught and unable to speak. The whole story, all told in only six individual lines, exemplifies the power of the blues lyric and its well-known themes of travel and loss.

For the Stones, the sentimentality of the verse, its ambiguity, and the rural imagery all inspired a country approach to the piece. Like Johnson, they begin with an introduction on guitar, but instead of the 2/4 shuffle rhythm of Johnson’s original, Richards shifts the tempo to a 6/8 rhythm, like a classic R&B ballad, though in this case tilting more towards country music. In addition, his introduction moves beyond the three chords of Johnson’s conventional twelve-bar blues setting by adding a minor vi chord before the turnaround (the Stones’ version is up a minor third). The addition of the vi chord is a stroke of genius (the progression actually relates to a standard country two-beat scheme of I–vi–IV–V–I), that opens a window “outside” the standard twelve-bar I–IV–V–I progression, similar to the way “Wild Horses” (SF) begins on an “unexpected” B-minor chord in the key of G. As verse one begins, using just guitars and voice, we begin to hear the distant train whistles as played on a slide guitar by Keith Richards. The train’s arrival into the station in verse two is captured musically by the entrance of the rhythm section, while the train whistles (slide guitar) get louder and more frequent. The Stones’ penchant for theatricality is no more apparent than in what happens next: Interrupting the second and third verses, they add an instrumental verse featuring a mandolin solo, played by Ry Cooder, with Jagger singing verse snippets in the background. Although this section is basically instrumental, it provides a crucial explanation to the story. The mandolin is traditionally related to serenades and balcony scenes in Italian opera and usually played by the male lover or seducer: In the seduction aria, “Deh vieni alla finestra” in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, for example, the Don accompanies himself on mandolin (though modern productions usually have someone in the orchestra to play it). Its use here, in the train station, at the point where Johnson’s lover is about to board the train, is a clever adoption of an historical tradition, and it further carves out dramatic action in the absence of words. In the third verse, the full band, including mandolin, accompanies Jagger, who alters a few words (“blues” to “baby”), and the final vocalized verse concludes with a departing train whistle in the distance.

***

By 1973 the group had reached the end of their exile, their narrative of travel, distance, and plurality of voices singularized into language of the city. Their next album, Goats Head Soup, recorded back at Olympic Studios in London, revealed fissures that became increasingly visible over the next decade. “There was just this feeling through Goats Head Soup that the whole thing was falling to pieces,” recounted producer and drummer Jimmy Miller; “It was no longer Mick and Keith’s song – it was Mick’s song or Keith’s song.”²³ The 1972 tour barreled across America – Jagger in a jumpsuit and on the cover of Life (see Figure 4.3), doing anything and having everything – the basement sessions and their exilic voices that were made far away in Nellcôte now being sung to thousands of fans. The tour exhausted the conceptual period of exile for the Stones; the coarseness around the edges of the tour, as documented in Cocksucker Blues, now giving a preview of the group’s next phase, in which the landscape of New York City emerges in both theme and sound. The new album initiated a distinct urban period, as the Stones moved from the stories of exile and the redemption of gospel to an often vulgar and more immediate commentary of urban America and its decadence. Wah-wah pedals, increased guitar distortion, the sounds of Leslies, phase shifters, electric clavinet, and blasphemous takes on the innocence of ’50s rock (“Star Star”) are the new sonic expressions for songs about street shootings, overdoses, and groupies “givin’ head to Steve McQueen.”²⁴ The New York of Some Girls was coming into focus, while the memories of California – the metaphor for paradise in Mick Taylor’s elegiac song, “Winter,” that closes Goats Head Soup – receded into the distance.

Figure 4.3 Cover of Life magazine (July 14, 1972) published during the 1972 tour.

Grybowski Collection, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum.

The Stones in the Mid-1970s

Their early albums from the 1970s, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street, are often cited as their finest works, concluding the “core” quartet of albums that began with Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed. The albums immediately following are held in much lower esteem. Rolling Stone founder and Stones confidant Jann Wenner, in a lengthy interview with Jagger in 1995, pointed to a string of weak albums, namely Goats Head Soup (1973), the generally uneven It’s Only Rock ’n Roll (1974), the compilation package Made in the Shade (1975) released to coincide with their 1975 tour, and Black and Blue (1976). Asked about the state of the band in this period, Jagger observed:

While recording Goats Head Soup, Richards recalls being generally upbeat but becoming “exhausted. You get busted. For a long stretch, I was either on trial or had a case pending, or we were going through visa problems. That was always the backdrop. It was sheer pleasure to get in the studio and lose yourself.”⁹

Music critics in the 1970s were preoccupied with the aging of the Stones and their ability to remain relevant, frequently lamenting that they once “meant” something (although often failing to explain what it meant to “mean” something). Lester Bangs, after musing on whether Goats Head Soup would be received as “their latest triumph or the epitaph of old men,” posed the following question for Stones fans: “Q: What if the Stones no longer pay off? A#1: You desert ’em. After all, they’re justa buncha old men. A#2: What kind of friend are you? You grew up with these cats! Christ, are there no values left in this lousy culchuh?”¹⁰ He continues, “There is a sadness about the Stones now, because they amount to such an enormous So what?,” taking several shots at other emerging rock royalty and declaring his disillusionment with mid-seventies rock in general: “Bowie is a style collector with almost no ideas of his own, Reed’s basically just reworking his old Velvets ideas, people like Elton John are reaching back into nostalgia but that’s a blind alley, and everybody else is playing the blues. So unless we get the Rolling Stones off their asses IT’S THE END OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL.”¹¹ Again there is the notion of the Stones as survivors charged with the burden of continuing the rock legacy of the 1960s. He was similarly dismissive of 1974’s It’s Only Rock ’n Roll: “The Stones have become oblique in their old age … This album is false. Numb.”¹² Bangs’ hyperbolic reference to “old age” pointedly illuminates how rock culture was struggling to contextualize rockers over thirty as anything other than nostalgia acts.

The next album, Black and Blue, was recorded piecemeal for more than a year between late 1974 and late 1975, and released in April, 1976. Between financial and other business complications, the unexpected departure of guitarist Mick Taylor, the band members living in diverse locales, and Richards’ heroin addiction, the group was in disarray. Former Faces guitarist Ronnie Wood, who the Stones all knew well from various side projects, joined the band full time, signaling a new era for the Stones. Critical reception was mixed, but, not unexpectedly, Lester Bangs was disappointed, citing two things to be said: “one is that they are still perfectly in tune with the times (a.k.a., sometimes, trendies) and the other is that the heat’s off, because it’s all over, they really don’t matter anymore or stand for anything, which is certainly lucky for both them and us. I mean, it was a heavy weight to carry for all concerned. This is the first meaningless Rolling Stones album.”¹³ Again, the rhetoric emphasizes the Stones’ apparent obligation to somehow encapsulate the times as they were perceived to have done in the 1960s, indicating, perhaps, that the problem was not so much the Rolling Stones as it was the “times,” insofar as Bangs acknowledges that they remain perfectly in tune with the era.

Albums were not the only concern. Stones concerts after the 1972 (Exile) tour were often rambling affairs, usually starting very late, plagued by bad sound and desultory stage presence, but compensating with stage props and lighting. Melody Maker describes one concert from the tour accompanying Black and Blue, which saw the band reach into their repertoire of older songs and blues covers, as utterly lacking energy or commitment: “[they were] unable to produce a version of ‘Route 66’ with half as much vitality as the bands then playing the pub circuit.”¹⁴ To top things off, Richards’ heroin use landed him on New Musical Express’ top-ten list of rock stars most likely to die, a position he proudly held for ten years.¹⁵

Some Girls

By October 1977, the Stones were more than ready to get back to the studio. Richards describes the sessions for Some Girls as having a “following wind” from the beginning, a “rejuvenation, surprisingly for such a dark moment, when it was possible that I would go to jail and the Stones would dissolve.”¹⁶ Wood describes the album as “a celebration of getting Keith back,” as Richards was taking steps to manage his heroin addiction.¹⁷ They moved into the Pathé Marconi studios in Paris with nothing prepared. No other musicians were on hand either; that would all be added later. “It had an echo of Beggars Banquet about it – a long period of silence and then coming back with a bang and a new sound.”¹⁸

This was their first album produced by Chris Kimsey, though Kimsey had prior experience with the Stones as assistant engineer to Andy Johns for most of the Sticky Fingers sessions of 1969 and 1970.¹⁹ Richards recalls that “We had to pull something out – not make another Stones-in-the-doldrums album. He wanted to get a live sound back and move away from the clean and clinical-sounding recordings we’d slipped into.”²⁰ They recorded in the smaller, less sophisticated rehearsal studio with a 1960s-style, 16-track console (the same board EMI had designed for Abbey Road).

That Some Girls is an urban, “New York” album is widely acknowledged. The city was on the verge of bankruptcy in the mid-1970s, with crime, poverty, and political dysfunction at their peak. Jagger observed twenty years later:

Richards has said that he believed that Jagger was interested in recording a disco album, a claim Jagger emphatically denies.²² “I just had one song that had a dance groove: “Miss You.” But I didn’t want to make a disco album. I wrote all these songs – like “Respectable,” “Lies,” “When the Whip Comes Down.”²³

The (Very) Mixed Reception of Some Girls

The rock scene around the time that Some Girls neared completion in summer 1978 was focused on several stylistically diverse artists, reflecting the multiplicity of popular genres toward the end of the decade. Melody Maker, the UK’s premier weekly rock music newspaper in the late 1970s, was scarcely able to release an issue that year that didn’t have a short teaser or announcement related to Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen.³⁹ With Some Girls representing the Stones’ first major product in over a year and a half, they ramped up the publicity in the trade magazines. Melody Maker of June 3, 1978 featured consecutive full-page ads for the group’s pre-album-release single, “Miss You,” and its B side, “Far Away Eyes.”⁴⁰ The other full-page ads went to Springsteen’s just-released and bound-for-glory Darkness on the Edge of Town, the Alan Parsons Project’s Pyramid, and Hall and Oates’ Livetime – a rather eclectic mix of genres, likely more reflective of the advertising budgets of their respective labels than any true barometer of scattered public taste. However, the next week’s issue was dominated by the Stones to coordinate with the album’s June 9th release. In addition to Chris Brazier’s guardedly optimistic feature review of the record, there was a small teaser that the Stones might do a few intimate “surprise” concerts at the Rainbow Theatre in London (where Hendrix had first set a Stratocaster alight ten years earlier), and other surprise gigs in the UK between American concerts scheduled to begin June 17th. Melody Maker’s weekly charts listed “Miss You” at number seventeen, behind Boney M’s number one “Rivers of Babylon,” Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta’s number two “You’re the One that I Want,” Darts’ number three cover of Leiber and Stoller’s “Boy from New York City,” and the Bee Gees’ number five “Night Fever.” The disco groove of “Miss You” was therefore in good company amongst these dance-pop numbers, even if its lurking malevolence comes from somewhere else. Toward the end of the issue, the “What’s New” singles column featured “Miss You” as the first of its list of twenty releases, ahead of new work by Springsteen, the Boomtown Rats, Dusty Springfield, Maria Muldaur, Jackson Browne, and Dolly Parton. Similarly, the adjacent “What’s New” albums list had Some Girls in second position behind the post-punk stylings of Magazine’s Real Life – even if the post-punk label itself was still some years in the future. In short, there was considerable rock-industry buzz surrounding the highly anticipated appearance of a new Stones album at the apogee of disco, and the brief flourishing of punk.

Nonetheless, Melody Maker’s review was lukewarm. “When the Whip Comes Down,” “Lies,” and “Respectable” were described as typical Stones “brag and strut,” with some interesting guitar-play between Wood and Richards, but the album as a whole was burdened by excessive repetition, absence of melody, and Jagger so low in the mix that his lyrics were inaudible. “The only track which brings Jagger and his lyrics upfront is the title-track, which is of musical interest only for the spit ‘n’ spite of the first guitar solo and for the hint of blossom in the chorus.”⁴¹ However, Brazier calls out Jagger for his “increasingly ridiculous preoccupation” with his jet-set persona, and for the overt racism – which led to public protests of the album (see Figure 5.2) – of stereotypically sexualizing African-Americans. On a more positive note, the review singled out “Miss You,” “Shattered,” and “Far Away Eyes” as tracks signaling that it was too early to “write off the Stones,” thus making Some Girls “worthy of investigation.”⁴² Ironically, these are the three songs that stray furthest from the governing “policy change” of Some Girls, namely returning to a classic Stones style.

Figure 5.2 African-American protestors of Some Girls outside Warner Communications, New York City, 1978.

Jeff Gold Collection, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

Some of the repetitiveness that Brazier and other critics sensed on Some Girls may come from structural characteristics influenced by the rawness of contemporary punk. Several songs are comprised of verses that alternate between symmetrical iterations of I and IV, which tends to blanch harmonic interest. Jeff Beck alludes to this when, unbeknownst to him, he was auditioning to be Mick Taylor’s replacement – without anyone else from the band present – by laying down some demo tracks, allegedly stating that, “in two hours I got to play three chords – I need a little more energy than that.”⁴³ The first four songs, “Miss You,” “When the Whip Comes Down,” a cover of the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination,” and “Some Girls,” are almost exclusively alternations between the tonic and the subdominant, two very closely related sonorities which, depending on one’s music-theoretical inclinations, might amount to an essentially static tonic harmony decorated with two upper neighbor tones. A well-known example of this is the opening riff to “Start Me Up” from Tattoo You, which began as a reggae number during the 1975 Black and Blue sessions in Munich.⁴⁴ The Stones could not make it work despite “forty or fifty takes. We would be nagging at it again two years later [Some Girls], then four years after that – the slow birth of a song whose perfect non-reggae nature we had discovered in one passing take without realizing it, even forgetting we’d done it.”⁴⁵ However, this is absolutely standard R&B and lends itself to explorations of groove, an element that text-oriented critics often undervalue.

Paul Nelson’s feature review in Rolling Stone was also tepid. It opens with the usual litany of the Stones’ advancing age, rock music’s creeping state of decline, and the suggestion that the Stones bear an ill-defined obligation to do something to reverse this:

With Bob Dylan no longer bringing it all back home, Elvis Presley dead and the Beatles already harmlessly cloned in the wax-museum nostalgia of a Broadway musical, it’s no wonder the Rolling Stones decided to make a serious record. Not particularly ambitious, mind you, but serious. These guys aren’t dumb, and when the handwriting on the wall starts to smell like formaldehyde and that age-old claim, “the greatest rock & roll band in the world,” suddenly sounds less laudatory than laughable – well, if you want to survive the Seventies and enter the Eighties with something more than your bankbook and dignity intact, you’d better dredge up your leftover pride, bite the bullet and try like hell to sweat out some good music. Which is exactly what the Stones have done. Though time may not exactly be on their side, with Some Girls they’ve at least managed to stop the clock for a while.⁴⁶

He later suggests that Some Girls is to Exile what a made-for-TV version of Rebel Without a Cause without James Dean would be to the original. The mixed metaphor of handwriting on the wall smelling like formaldehyde (used to preserve corpses), the references to wax museums and leftover pride, as well as a hackneyed reference to the Stones’ 1964 cover of “Time Is on My Side,” are typical of Nelson’s reviews in that they are literary, evocative, and provocative, but often do not make much literal sense. Nonetheless, it is clear that these established critics expect the Stones to do something about the state of rock. He continues, acknowledging that there was widespread agreement that this was a return of sorts to classic Stones style, but that it lacked the “passion, power and near-awesome completeness” of Exile: “Gone is the black and white murk, and the vocals are way up in a nicely messy but pastel mix … Some Girls is like a marriage of convenience: when it works – which is often – it can be meaningful, memorable and quite moving, but it rarely sends the arrow straight through the heart.”⁴⁷

Nelson’s penchant for metaphor begs the question of how to reconcile his perception of the vocals “way up” with that of Brazier in Melody Maker, who found the vocals too buried, save for “Some Girls.” Despite the stripped-down instrumental forces, it seems that seasoned Stones listeners were a bit baffled by the soundscape of Some Girls. Elsewhere, Jagger addressed the vocal mix, observing, “With a song like ‘Shattered,’ however, I thought we had to hear the words a bit, so … it’s not really just a question of loudness, it has to do with clarity of diction – whether I enunciate properly. And if I don’t, you have to have it louder, and even then people don’t understand what you’re saying.”⁴⁸ The vocals on “When the Whip Comes Down,” however, are clearly difficult to discern, and they are indeed buried in the mix. Ultimately, one wonders how much time various critics spent actually listening to the album.

Jagger was so incensed by Nelson’s review that the Stones revoked the press credential for Rolling Stone’s tour reporter.⁴⁹ To smooth things over, Jann Wenner penned a glowing review of the album and associated concerts in pointed rebuttal to his fellow Rolling Stone journalist Paul Nelson (and likewise Dave Marsh regarding Bob Dylan). He proclaims Some Girls “a masterpiece,” and much of the review suggests that the senior critics are subconsciously blaming sixties icons for the loss of the sixties themselves.

Ironically, one of the reasons why Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh and Paul Nelson panned Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones with such invective is because these critics care so much – not only about Dylan and the Stones but about the entire spectrum of rock & roll. They grew up with it in the Sixties, so maybe it’s now necessary for them to slay their figurative fathers and look for new heroes.⁵⁰

Wenner further criticizes them for calling punk the music of the seventies, presciently predicting that the genre will not make it to the eighties, which it arguably does not, at least in the musical mainstream, being superseded by New Wave and post-punk. Having nurtured a very close, but ultimately complicated relationship with Jagger, Wenner defends the group, concluding that “Critical discussions – historical, social, moral – that ultimately revolve around the point of things not being what they used to be are useless. To argue otherwise is to deny the aging of the observer and the observed and to ignore the fact of change.”⁵¹

Postlude: Emotional Rescue, Tattoo You and Undercover

After releasing Some Girls in June, 1978, the Stones were in the studio off and on throughout autumn 1978 to early 1980. In that period, they recorded approximately forty songs, actually finishing twenty-five – more than enough for a new album – and ultimately selecting ten for Emotional Rescue.⁵⁹ By 1980, Jagger’s take on New Wave and punk was that they were no longer new. Referring to the Police and the Clash, respectively, he said: “The music isn’t new. It sounds very old … I quite like the Clash … but they really sound old fashioned … London Calling’s a great album. But I prefer Elvis Costello’s songwriting.”⁶⁰ Jagger describes his and Richards’ songwriting as following no set pattern in terms of who contributes what. In some cases, the songs are written quite separately, whereas in others they are collaborations in highly variable proportions, but all are credited equally. The older tendency for Richards to arrange and Jagger to write lyrics had largely broken down as well. In cases where other members made a significant contribution, such as Wood to “Dance,” a co-writing credit was added.⁶¹ When asked by Jann Wenner whether Emotional Rescue has “a lot of resonance,” Jagger responds that it does not, and that many of the songs were leftovers from Some Girls.⁶²