Life (2010)

Keith Richards's memoir is approximately what you expect—entertaining, full of itself, and about gossipy enough. He explores his relationship with Mick Jagger in some depth at various points but never comes up with much that's satisfying (we still can't get no). He addresses all kinds of areas where we appreciate learning more, or anything, such as the roles of Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, Andrew Loog Oldham, or the Beatles, verifying or debunking old rumors. Oldham did force Jagger and Richards to start writing songs. I don't know what's more amazing—that they turned out to be so good at it, or that it was never their idea and someone had to make them do it. Richards makes it clear he doesn't buy the idea that the Rolling Stones were "really" Brian Jones's band. It's convincing to the extent that the catalog of originals by itself makes a case for the Stones being what they appear to be—Mick's and Keith's band. Richards also goes into his legendary drug use, which is more generally the "OK boomer" portion of the book. I ended up being more interested in him as a craftsman and artist. He calls "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Street Fighting Man" the best of the Stones, which I agree with, noting they have an amazing amount of good material in different eras. As with most memoirs and bios we're pretty much there for the middle—the beginning (grade school) and end (post-1980, off all highs) tend to drag. The drug tales and all the exotic travel and homes grow tiresome too—maybe Robin Leach narrates these parts of the audio book? I appreciated learning that a legendary change of blood to escape addiction and/or drug tests was only a legend after all. Never happened. I did wonder—the rich, after all, are different from you and me. Which reminds me, another reason I like Richards is he's one of the minority of Brits who declined a knighthood when offered, unlike Sir Mick and Sir Rod and a good many other Sir rebel rockers. He shares that choice with David Bowie, who Richards otherwise makes fun of and reminds me why I have a hard time liking him. Richards is a strange mix of working-class and rich-most-of-his-life, with his deepest commitment to rock 'n' roll and the blues as a sound that is made on a guitar. I could do without the outlaw drug stories, but I loved his recipe for bangers and mash. He's just that kind of guy.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Between the Buttons (1967)

(Requested by reader S.S.)

Between the Buttons falls in that trough of Rolling Stones albums between the original focus on rhythm and blues covers and the later turn as world's greatest rock 'n' roll band, from their most obvious period of aping Beatles moves, also known as "psychedelia." Generally I prefer Aftermath and on some days even Their Satanic Majesties Request. But it was good to revisit Buttons again and find something that sounds a lot to me now like Mick Jagger's first solo album—and a pretty good one too, full of inconsequential little songs about yesterday's papers, my obsession, my connections, who's been sleeping here, something happened to me yesterday, etc. Jagger's most foppish persona tends to be front and center, with the bluesy guitar impulses of Brian Jones and Keith Richards often retired well to the background. No covers either—all Jagger/Richards originals. Interestingly, Jagger claims now to still like only "Back Street Girl." But the album still sounds like a Jagger solo to me, with the student of economics way that it calculates and checks off, throwing high signs to the Beatles, Kinks, Who, drugs, preening fashion, and other usual suspects. Jones, perhaps at the beginning of his long slow fade, has traded in for vibraphone, recorder, saxophone, electric dulcimer, and oscillator, among other sounds he contributed. Busy busy. The main difference between the UK and US versions is the inclusion of a couple of big hits for the States album: "Ruby Tuesday" and "Let's Spend [the Night / Some Time, the latter at the famous special request of Ed Sullivan] Together." One of my favorites on Buttons, perhaps because it's relatively strange and fresh to me, was not on the US version: "Please Go Home," which revs up a real nice head. It's altogether tempting to dismiss Between the Buttons as a badly aging sellout, but that's a little silly. From 1965 to maybe 1968 (before going on to deathless editions of classic rock), Jagger and Richards turned out to be first-rate masters of pop songcraft, among the very best, and Between the Buttons is basically a collection of experiments, with varying results and no US hits on the Brit version. As I said I'm more for Aftermath, not least for the one-on-one between signature long album side closers: "Goin' Home" (a brief obsession I still adore when I think to play it) vs. "Something Happened to Me Yesterday," which sounds vain, coy, smug, with (uncredited) brass section—of a piece indeed with Bob Dylan's bawdy "Rainy Day Women," another song I don't like nearly as much as I think I should. It's not really psychedelic, for one thing. I might have benefited from knowing "Something Happened" when I first got into psychedelics. But I didn't, so it's "Tuesday Afternoon" and "Itchycoo Park" that still sound the better and more mysteriously meaningful to me that way. Between the Buttons is essential, of course, because it's the Stones of the period, but it's ultimately in the minor key in every way.

Rolling Stones, "Jumpin' Jack Flash" (1968)

June 15, 1968, #3
(listen)

There are times I'm pretty sure this is the greatest rock 'n' roll song ever made. There are other times when it only seems overplayed and trite—the penalty for loving a song too much and too well perhaps, though to date it remains resilient enough to stage occasional pulsating comebacks every few years. Part of the reason I like it so well I'm sure is that it came of the Beggars Banquet sessions, an album that takes regular turns for me as favorite Rolling Stones album (trading off generally with Sticky Fingers and Out of Our Heads, though others butt in as well now and then). Why "Jumpin' Jack Flash" was not released on the album is anybody's guess, as far as I know. I'm willing to take the mythologizing route at this point and make the extravagant claims: It's too big to be contained on an album. It is an album. It rewired our brains and forced us to redefine the very concept of what an album is, etc. Yes, I know. But there is a tremendous amount packed into this three and a half minutes. It's the kind of song with the power to inspire one to sweeping statements. That impossible trebly crashing guitar, that stomping back beat, the way it finds a space that logically belongs to somebody else a long time ago and puts its stamp all over it, Grade AAA prime rock 'n' roll. It glides, it soars, it struts and preens. Can't take your eyes off it. Older than rock 'n' roll. Older than the 20th century. But work the focus and there it is again: the Stones, Mick Jagger a-leaping about the place, cranking out the mocking, jeering, irresistible sounds of bitter envy and revelry. For better and for worse. And in sickness and health too, for that matter. In other words, and to get right to the point, "Jumpin' Jack Flash is a gas gas gas."

Out of Our Heads (1965)

(Misbegotten first attempt here. Main song here.)

The Rolling Stones re-discovered Chicago Blues at a time when Muddy Waters was painting ceilings for a living. (Patrick King, Amazon review, 2006)

Gimme Shelter (1970)

USA, 91 minutes, documentary
Directors: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin
Photography: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Gary Weis
Music: Rolling Stones
Editors: Joanne Burke, Robert Farren, Ellen Giffard, Kent McKinney
With: Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Tina Turner, Hell's Angels, Melvin Belli, Meredith Hunter

In late 1969, the Maysles brothers (Albert and David), with Charlotte Zwerin, had already made their reputation as iconoclastic documentary filmmakers on the strength of their extraordinary Salesman from 1968 and other projects. The Rolling Stones, just then about to assume the mantle of greatest rock 'n' roll band in all history, had returned to touring after an interruption of a few years that was due to drug busts, turmoil inside the band, and other breakdowns. Also, Woodstock had just happened. Thus, the elements were in place for a first-rate and very interesting concert film. Then events stepped in to help make sure it couldn't be anything else. The more you look at Gimme Shelter now, the more eerie and weird and unfortunate it all seems, which the movie exploits almost perfectly with its dense atmosphere of dread.

The two sides were remarkably in synch from the start. The Maysles team only knew they wanted to make something "more than" a concert film. Mick Jagger, speaking for the band, kept laying down terms the Maysles were already abiding by or happy to comply with: no acting, no recreations of scenes, no voiceover narration, and none of "that Pennebaker shit." So far so good,  except the Maysles knew the last one might be a problem, depending on what Jagger meant by it. They kept nodding their heads and saying no problem, and they kept shooting.

Rolling Stones, "Gimme Shelter" (1969)

(listen)

At this point, it's probably fair to say it's the title that's most famous about this song. It soon after became the title of a documentary which stands still as a generational monolith. And its primary sentiment—the urgency of the "gimme," the nature of the request—was widely and acutely perceived as shared in that historical moment. You will notice the author of the mashup video I'm pointing to, posted October 5, 2009, would seem to agree, focusing on all the history being made within its general vicinity. So with everybody in agreement this way, it can be a little surprising to sit and listen to it, to figure out what it is and what it does. What matters most is how it feels. More than anything it sounds exhausted, or that's the wrong implication—it sounds like exhaustion. It sounds like how exhaustion feels. The words are not quite there, a rumbling, wailing blur, though "it's just a shot away" is clear enough, ringing out by Merry Clayton. I can't tell you how it makes me feel when I reflect this was recorded only weeks before Altamont (only weeks after Woodstock), particularly when I think of the scenes from the documentary. But I suspect it provokes feelings in others as well. Those tender, tentative notes Keith Richards picks out to open it, the soaring background vocals as the elements start to kick in, the way it assembles itself by pieces, until finally it is a rock song, if still somewhat shambolic. It's never loud, no matter how much you turn it up. It is a great and powerful whimpering, and can leave one a little sick and usually quite uncomforted. A remarkable document.

Rolling Stones, "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" (1971)

(listen)

I'm not about to attempt sorting out better from best among the Rolling Stones albums from the late '60s and early '70s. It's arguably their best period, when they seemed to effortlessly achieve status as world's greatest rock 'n' roll band. For sentimental reasons, I still tend to prefer the 1964 to 1967 period personally. But if forced to make a choice, 1971's Sticky Fingers is usually the one I want to name from the great run. It's no knock on Let it Bleed or Exile on Main St.—it's just that the album with the zipper cover designed by Andy Warhol was the one I owned and thus tends to remain the most familiar. But there's also the matter of this amazing song, which truly closes the deal. It starts as classic crunching Stones electric guitar blues riff, up there with "Brown Sugar" and "Tumbling Dice" and all those. Then, at about the halfway point of a 7:16 length, it wanders off into "Layla" territory with another song entirely, one obviously built out of an impromptu jam led by Mick Taylor's lyrical guitar play, Bobby Keys's barrelhouse saxophone, and a band capable of locking into solid grooves at will, as second nature. There's little else like it across the Stones' entire catalog, and even as it strays a bit into the prog-inflected territory of the times (a feature I like about it as much as any other, as the Stones have always been slaves to fashion, which often plays out comically) it remains unmistakably a product of a greatest rock 'n' roll band: raunchy, swinging, funny, hairy, evocative, and beautiful. Look for it at the movies in Blow, Casino (in its entirety), and The Fighter, among others.

23. Rolling Stones, "Street Fighting Man" (1968)

(listen)

A friend and I were agreeing the other day that over the long haul of the decades it seems more and more that the best Stones albums, the ones we most tend to return to again and live with, are the early half dozen or so—Now! and 12 X 5 and Out of Our Heads—and less so that more typically lionized run of the late '60s and early '70s that started with Beggars Banquet and finished with Exile on Main St. They really were a remarkable rock 'n' roll blues band before they were signifiers for a generation or anything else, and track by track those early albums still sound almost impossibly fresh. Yet, even so, one way or another, I never find myself drifting too far from Beggars Banquet, which is somehow deceptively less than the sum of its parts. But taken one item at a time it houses what seems to me to be their enduringly best, not the least of which, indeed the greatest of which, is this ratatat, irony-inflected paean to political street demonstrations of the times generally, and more specifically to Tariq Ali, a radicalized British Pakistani who has remained relevant long beyond the immediate life of this great, great song. Everything about it is rock hard, and rocks hard: Charlie Watts hits the drums impossibly hard, even for him, and the strange off-rhythms of Keith Richards's opening acoustic guitar are nothing less than electrifying. So that accounts for the first 10 seconds, and it only gets better from there. Jagger's melody lines crease with ferocity, keyboards and whining electric guitar and strings and other things steal in. It's potent with visceral energy, climaxing lyrically with the question, "What can a poor boy do but sing in a rock and roll band?" It's the one thing by them I would save if ever forced to such an extremity.

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (1984)

Stanley Booth is an American music journalist from the South. He happened to fall into the orbit of the Rolling Stones shortly after the death of Brian Jones, and was on hand for a good deal of the band's first extensive tour in several years in 1969, including the ill-starred show at Altamont in December that year. Even the Stones formally recognize and acknowledge the legitimacy of Booth's reporting in a brief, vaguely mocking letter to him, dated October 21, 1969, which is reproduced in my 1985 paperback edition (I'm not familiar with the 2000 edition, which reportedly contains minor revisions and an afterword that discusses the writing of the first edition): "This letter assures you of the Rolling Stones' full and exclusive cooperation in putting together a book about the Stones for publication," and it's signed by Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, and Mick Taylor. It's fair enough to call this book a labor of love, but the emphasis there must fall on the "labor," as it took Booth some 15 years to complete and the language feels well worked over, honed and buffed to a point where it's occasionally a labor to read as well. But I don't know of anything better anywhere on the Stones, or particularly on Altamont, and it makes an excellent companion piece and counterpoint to the Maysles brothers well-known documentary Gimme Shelter; each is a nice tonic to the excesses and deficiencies of the other, and both offer converging yet significantly differing points of view that harmonize well. Both have also earned colossal burdens of reputation, hailed as landmark works about the times—figures of no less stature than Harold Brodkey and Robert Stone, for example, call Booth's book the best single volume on the '60s. OK, fair enough. I'm inclined myself to put that on a few other volumes first (Dispatches, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Manchild in the Promised Land, or Catch-22 come to mind immediately). But I see how it works. And if I'm going to indulge hyperbole of my own here, it's for the 50-some pages that Booth devotes to the Altamont show proper, which open with a section of transcript from the discussion between Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips on the epistemology and ontology of evil, and hell, in the context of the song they are attempting to record, "Great Balls of Fire." It's an earnest and serious discussion, at least on the part of Lewis, steeped in old-time Christianity. Just so, I have never encountered anything anywhere that penetrates so deeply into the simple facts of what was happening that day at Altamont as Booth's book (and that includes Gimme Shelter, which I have always counted as impressive and important)—nor, more importantly, any more powerful, simple, and nuanced suggestions of "what it all meant." There are no easy answers here, and not much comfort. I should get that 2000 edition, if only to find out for sure what held up the writing of this for 15 years. But I have a feeling I might already know.

In case it's not at the library.

"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" (1965)

6. Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" (June 19, 1965, #1, 4 wks.)

This is virtually a no-brainer for a list like this, an easy and obvious pick. Not only does it have the merits of being a great rock song, propelled by Charlie Watts's claptrap drumming, that hits hard and brings a nasty subversive mocking punch, but it was also all over the place in the summer of 1965 when I first tuned in to AM radio in a big way as a 10-year-old. True enough, the thing was over my head, and honestly kind of gave me the willies. All that mumbling and speech slurring by Mick Jagger, the caustic sarcastic twist he works into the first lines and throughout just by dropping his voice slightly—why can't he enunciate, I thought, and be straightforward about the whole thing? And then there was the big fuzz tone of Keith Richards's commanding guitar hook, which confused me. I thought it was a saxophone for the longest time. So if I grew into the song slowly over the years, as my understanding and grasp of it deepened and ripened, it nevertheless had me in its visceral claws from the first seconds I heard it. It made my skin crawl, disturbed and quietly upset me, with the same effect that horror movies would have once Romero set the terms in the late '60s, as something that caused me a desperate uneasiness but from which I could not ever turn away. This is something that happened every day for most of that summer. And even if, in many ways, it sounds a bit childish to me now as so many of the favorite songs of my childhood do, it still retains a sultry, overweening dignity, it still rocks sweet and hard, and it can still get right under my skin.

Sticky Fingers (1971)

"Can't You Hear Me Knocking" With the studio album before it (Let it Bleed) and the one after it (Exile on Main Street) making a virtually seamless Himalyan peak of an already impressive career—outdoing themselves at every level, put it that way—this comes with a pedigree you can take straight to the bank. Recorded at Muscle Shoals, it's the most relaxed and rollicking of the three. The various pleasures arrive fast, deep, and manifold: The original cover, designed by Andy Warhol, which famously came with a functioning zipper. A raunchy #1 hit in "Brown Sugar." A minor hit in the ultimately affecting "Wild Horses." A woulda-shoulda-coulda hit in "Bitch," which likely failed even the attempt by virtue of the title. Naughty Stones! The outré drama of heroin addiction of "Sister Morphine" (somewhat overplayed, or is it really a joke?). More ridiculous drama in "Dead Flowers," the Altamont song; more tuff-style rockin' in the cover "You Gotta Move." But the absolute peak for me is the elaborate "Can't You Hear Me Knocking," which starts as one of their more effective rave-ups (and they have always been good with the rave-ups) and then turns with almost no warning into an atmospheric Junior Walker by way of War kind of rhythm & blues-inflected essay at jazz, complete with congas, chattering tenor sax, and guitar solo straight out of Blind Faith, courtesy Mick Taylor. Try that, Beatles. Oh, that's right, your career was over by then.

Beggars Banquet (1968)

"Street Fighting Man" In which the curtain goes up on the world's greatest rock 'n' roll band 1968-1972 (though I suspect the Stooges challenged them in their latter supremacy, but that's a discussion for another time). Having spent several years persistently and purposefully dogging the shadows of the Beatles—up to and including a "retirement" from touring, if you can believe that now, though for vastly different and even slightly sordid reasons (but we wouldn't have it any other way, would we?)—and having effectively sidelined their one non-traditionalist, founding status or no, the Glimmer Twins and crew here step out with all the confidence they were born with and otherwise accumulated, and simply play. Loud. Menacing. Cocky. Slick and rough all at once, like virtually nothing anyone had ever heard before, though all the sources remain transparent enough. Some of the transition may be glimpsed intermittently, through the fabled glass darkly like, in Jean-Luc Godard's typically infuriating quasi-documentary art film of the time, Sympathy for the Devil, where they are seen slowly woodshedding the details of the title sound—the title of the movie, I mean. But even though that odd 6:26 workout would open the album and seem to indicate a statement of purpose, it's the 3:18 romp that opens the vinyl side 2, "Street Fighting Man," that's more the genuine article, certainly in its attack and implicit statement of purpose. The lyrics are the usual pack of lies, as they are throughout the Stones' catalog. That's just what they do, and likely why Jagger prefers mumbling, muttering, and all the other strategies he uses to obfuscate what he's "saying." That doesn't mean, however, that it doesn't work. Remember: you must never underestimate what this band is capable of.

12 X 5 (1964)

"Time Is on My Side" One of the things that never fails to astonish me about the Stones is how quickly they sounded so self-assured—and so good. This is only their second album (approximately: as with the Beatles and other transcontinental artists of the time, their US and UK releases run down two separate, imperfectly matched trails) and they are basically all the way there, a first-rate blues band with a knack for the surprising effect, well past simply aping the old 78s and Chess singles they had spent their brief lifetimes collecting, whether it's the sounds Keith Richards and Brian Jones casually wring, the odd vocal conceit of Mick Jagger's that is unfailingly dead-on, and always, always the solid bottom of the rhythm section, which even in 1964 was clearly going to be one of the all-time best in the business. (For comparison, see the Animals of the time, or even better, or worse, the Who.) Already the Stones had no place to go but down, but incredibly, they had a long road ahead of them of continuing to go up. Consider: this album was just about the point when manager Andrew Loog Oldham had begun to convince Jagger and Richards, who would eventually become their own personal hit-making factory, to even try their hand at songwriting. Except for three fledgling efforts, this is an album of covers. But I defy anyone to point to any album of covers not by the Rolling Stones that is even remotely as confident and accomplished. (What's more, they've got more than one of these from the early days.)

Out of Our Heads [US] (1965)

"The Spider and the Fly" Somehow just owning this felt illicit and transgressive and darkly mistaken. So Goofus starts out strong. The album came in a batch of record club LPs. My brother and I hadn't given much thought to how the only place we could play them was on the living room console. Consequently, we never heard it as frequently as I would have liked, meaning only once or twice a day. Thanks, Gallant. But with everything so neatly compressed, focused and tight and funny and knowing, and good in every way at anything it attempted, the bad messages even so were impressed deeply upon me. Can't be a man if he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me. This may be the last time I don't know. Gonna hitchhike 'round the world, etc. Goofus, on points.

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