(Printed below are the ‘'official" CREEM reviews of the Rolling Stones' albums. Since Boy Howdy! was born shortly before the release of Let It Bleed, the reviews begin with that LP and continue through our recent review of Emotional Rescue. Of the band's many greatest hits compilations, only More Hot Rocks— which contains an abundance of previously unissued material—is reviewed here. Both Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out and Metamorphosis were actually missed back then, and here they’re reviewed by current CREEM staffers Bill Holdship and J. Kordosh; otherwise, the original CREEM review is reprinted below, with running date duly noted. Time. uh. certainly flies. — Ed.)

ROLLING STONES Let It Bleed

(London)

There’s nothing mysterious about the new Stones album and that’s as it should be. Like the Stones themselves, it’s all right there, readily accessible to all of Us (if not Them). And, exactly because it’s so accessible, it doesn’t tell us anything new about the Stones; it merely reaffirms our knowledge and suspicions about what is probably the best rock 'n' roll band in the world. If the Beatles are the master brain-surgeons of rock, the Stones are its genius general practictioners.

There are three songs on this record that stand out enough to be worthy of lengthy comment. Since we’ll save “Gimme Shelter.” “Midnight Rambler" and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want ” for last; they also seem to have a tew common elements. All 1 can hope to do for you, anyway, is to suggest some ways to look at things; the Stones (on record at least) are above criticism, but not reflection.

“Love In Vain" is as good a starting point as any. As I've already noted, it presents us with nothing new. We’ve known for a long, long time that the Stones could play blues, that Jagger could sing, that Richards is an excellent guitarist. View "Love In Vain" then as an artifact, a present from a supremely cultural band. And, as a cult, they get away with things. "Love In Vain” is no work of great inventiveness; it does happen to be one in a series of excellent presentations of white bluesmanship. The Stones aren’t vanguard, in any sense, they’re merely the best.

Both “Love In Vain" and “Country Honk,” however, reveal something more about the Stones. That is their involvement with the electric now, what is in vogue or merely in. “Country Honk” is no real substitute for “Honky Tonk Women." "Honky Tonk” is the real version, the one they'll play on the radio in ensuing eons. Yet it is natural that the Stones would present us with a country tune on this record; true, they’d done “Dear Doctor" on Beggar's Banquet but country is doubly au courant this season.

It’s this very sense of what is hip NOW that makes the Stones what they are, at least to a certain extent. Their genius lies not so much in being trend-setters as trend definers. For further examples of that we can look back to both Their Satanic Majesties Requesfand Between The Buttons. Satanic, obviously, the prime example of late '67 pretentiousness (along with Bathing At Baxters) . Between The Buttons, not so obviously, an excellent example of Dylanesque folk-rock circa 1966. Thus, Mick Jagger can’t even remember where his head was at when he did that record. That time's done with and, and much as one may love Buttons. Let It Bleed is still the problem at hand. “Country Honk," by any estimation, will stand as an artifact of 1969 country rock influence, just as we can look fondly back to “Something Happened To Me Yesterday.”

In “Country Honk." we have once again the Stones' obstinate refusal to put their hits on LPs. Remember how long it took to have an album version of “Mothers' Little Helper” or "Dandelion"? We haven’t yet got “We Love You” (though it is on the British version of Through The Past Darkly). The anthology is, however, most apt between "Country/Honky Tonk" and "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing In The Shadows.” It was first presented on Got Live If You Want It, the live LP. changed to a certain extent much as "Honky Tonk Woman" is transformed here. And then on Flowers which, like Through The Past, consisted mostly of redone oldies. The Stones don’t care. Again, that’s old news and “Honky Tonk” or “Country Honk” is only a reaffirmation of their Teddy Boy stance.

Mick Taylor, like Brian Jones on the second side, makes his appearance only in two songs on this side. If this is to facilitate comparison, let’s just say Brian wins on points. “Country Honk” and "Live With Me" are both fine songs but neither had the totally withering effect of "You Got The Silver” or, obviously, “Midnight Rambler.” But Brian is dead and, significantly, the tour has overshadowed this album in which he makes his final appearance. “Live With Me” is the first Jagger sexsong of the record. “Doncha think there’s a place for you/in between the sheets” is the Dada of Jagger extended two years from “Let’s spend the night together/Now I need you more that ever.” And it really isn’t impossible that he might one day sing “Come on now baby and gimme some head.” This is one of the sleepers of the set. It has some of the same feeling of “Stupid Girl,” leading one to believe it may be fondly remembered and often played in the next few months.

“Live With Me” is only a warmup, however, for the ending of side one, “Let It Bleed." It’s significant, in a way, that it is Ian Stewart, a sort of sixth Stone, who plays piano on this cut. It was Stewart who played piano on the first album (England’s Newest Hitmakers). Or isn’t signigicant at all really, 1 just thought it was nice.

If one wasn’t familiar with synchronicity, he might almost think “there’s always someone you can lean on” predicted Altamont. “You all need someone you can cream on" is predictable Jagger sexual posturing. As usual, Jaggeris icecold, untouchable; “take my arms; take my legs/oh baby don’t you take my head." But “you all need someone you can bleed on” points at that something darker about the Stones that's been blatant since Satanic Majesties and was definitely present before (the earliest familiar example being “As Tears Go By” though “Paint It Black” is much more obvious). It’s also true that is has become more and more up front since Andrew Loog Oldham left (after Aftermath) though what that means I hardly dare guess.

Is “You Got The Silver” a vehicle for Keith Richards or a showcase for Brian Jones? In any case, it proves two things; in a group without Mick Jagger, Keith Richards wotild be as big as Eric Clapton. And in a group without Keith Richards, Brian Jones would have the acclaim, pre-humously, of a Paul McCartney. Jones' autoharp is nearly the lead instrument in this song. And Charlie Watts is still the finest straightforward, meat-and-potatoes drummer ever.

Bill Wyman, easily the most novice vibes player ever, is also the least charismatic Rolling Stone. “Monkey Man” is his song as surely as -was “In Another Land.” The vibes are an excellent touch, reminding me, in my more mawkish moments, of Miles' equally ethereal trumpet playing on In A Silent Way.

Lyrically, Jagger is back to being “a trifle too Satanic." If all of Mick’s friends aren’t junkies it certainly doesn’t hurt his image any to claim they are. The gibberish at the end, combined with the power of the lyrics, leaves you with the impression that rather than mere monkey-man, he’s a monkey-demon.

Now for the good stuff. “Gimme Shelter” doesn’t present us with any new concepts at all. It’s merely the Rolling Stones doing what they’re definably best at, hard white r’n’b. With the incredible added touch of Merry Clayton (who as it turns out is Bonnie Bramlett). (Come on, Dave —Ed.. 1981) Nothing hipper than Delaney and Bonnie, y’know.

“Gimme Shelter” is the most fitting possible choice for this record’s first cut. It almost makes the album seem a search for an elusive shelter, where you can’t be touched. And at time it does seem to be only a kiss or a shot away. But we all know what they decide at the end. Hard Knox and Durty Sox indeed.

And we’re about to come upon some songs where we might wish for shelter, at the very least. “Midnight Rambler” is a horrifying fantasy and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is more horrifying than that precisely because it destroys all of our fantasies.

“Midnight Rambler” is a siren call to suck us into a favorite fantasy. I’ve tossed around the notion that the reference might be to Eldridge Cleaver, the only rapist in recent memory who’s become “ a proud Black Panther." And it also might be the way in which Eldridge will return ...“Knife sharpened/tippy toe.” It’s certainly natural for the Stones to dig the Panthers; they’re definitely in vogue.

But “Midnight Rambler” says a hell of a lot more about Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones (but mostly Mick) than it does about anything else, including sexual fantasy. It’s a deadly song, done with the precision only the Rolling Stones have. The harp, the siren calling to the deadly enchantments of this peculiar rapist who is also “busy puttin’ on a rock and roll show”, Jagger. abouttotellusatale, with or without message; “Did you hear...? /Everybody got to know.”

With the phrase “listen when you hear him mo.an,” Jagger starts to build a startling portrait of a totally unregenerate, vengeful and malicious back door man. A prowler with super-lust.

But he’s still a rock and roll star and here is the realization that Jagger and the Midnight Rambler are inseparable. Whether Jagger IS the Rambler is insignificant at this point; he’s assumed the identity for the moment. Then Charlie and Keith and Bill pick the music up and begin to drive it home. (A headphone revelation; Brian’s percussion is tambourine/maracas). Then Mick "Don’t do that, oh don’t do that.” Just like “Going Home,” the rapist gloating over his prey—totally insane, of course and the more impressive for that. Jagger is either a superb actor or really a rambler of sorts.

That’s the climax. The harp becomes a whimper, then a moan. Then dies out and comes back as strong as ever as Jagger makes his proclamation of strength. He refuses to name himself outright (“Boston... WHAP”) What is it? A berserk Charlie Manson? Who else but Mick Jagger has the nerve to come on as a boastful Rosemary’s Baby? And it’s not sympathy for the devil he’s asking on Let It Bleed', this time he wants respect and, it’s true, fear. And the whole final sequence would scare the shit out of you if you really took it seriously. It scares the shit out of me, anyway. Because he finally admits it—I’m gonna smash down on your stained glass window and then finally, “did you see ME make my midnight crawl?" And you know, at this point, with an unmistakable shudder that Mick Jagger is fully capable of sticking “his knife right down your throat baby/ And it hurts."

The absolute ending,“You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Perhaps the most remarkable song in the set, certainly the most ambitious and (surprisingly) the most successful. Each piece of the tune is in perfect context, all patterned to deliver the ultimate message, the antidote to “I can’t get no.” You can’t always get what you want but if you try sometime you just might find. Who’d have thought that “Satisfaction” would lead to this?

The choir, reiterating the title several times over, is desperate as Jagger on “Satisfaction.” Keith comes on with his guitar at exactly the same point as the choir delivers our release; “but if you try sometime ydu just might find you get what you NEED.” Kooper’s French horn solo is nothing short of beautiful, setting up Mick perfectly for the first verse.

If “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” has any comparisons available with previous Rolling Stones work, the song it matches up with is “Ruby Tuesday.” Dig Jagger:

“I saw her today at the reception

A glass of Wine in her hand

I knew she was gonna meet her connection

At her feet was a foot-loose man”

The same sob vocal that opened “Ruby Tuesday.” And the band doesn’t come in til after the verse. Exactly the same as the band doesn’t come in til after the first verse of Ruby Tuesday. Mick here against Keith’s guitar, the perfect doomsayer. But the band stays, doesn’t drop out again for the next verse as in R.T.

Now we’re brought up against the Stones’ politics. Politics which can only be characterized as the most blatant cynicism, a la “Street Fighting Man.” Mick again:

“I went down to the demonstration

To get my fair share of abuse”

Then the chorus, this time as a chant with the able assistance of the three young lovlies, Kooper begins to play those incredible piano/organ things that he hasn’t given us since Blonde On Blonde and Highway 61. And the significance of that final verse? Remember he went down to get YOUR prescription filled. Yet it is still his song he sings and the final response from Mr. Jittersjagger, who are eventually the same person (just like the Midnight Rambler) — Death. And you wonder about Altamont? ^

Jagger has the balls to proceed to SCREECH into the face of that oh so lovely choir. Absolute agony. And there are no illusions left:

“She was practicing the art of deception

I could tell by her bloodstained hands”

So that we are left with only the incongruity of a Jagger/Bach Choir courtship. Jagger is totally alone at the end of the song. (Note the change after the first verse to the accompaniment by the full band and from third to first person. And the change back again after the sequence with Mr. Jitters.)

A most desperate record, fully free in its creation and in the end stymied by Jagger’s recognition that he is exactly so accessible to so many of us because he is a part of our fantasies. He embodies them, just as Dylan did three years ago with Highway 61 Revisited.

Without carrying that analogy too far, one might see some parallels between the two albums. Both are somewhat desperate albums, both apocalyptic in their vision. Just as “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” embodies 1969 so-did “Like A Rolling Stone” appear as the

summation of 1966. And the

“Midnight Rambler” of Let It Bleed might be the “Thin Man” of

Highway 61.

Further, both albums come at the height of the artists’ careers. Another Side liberated Dylan from the strictures of folk as Satanic Majesties frees the Stones form white rhythm and blues. Thus we are presented with Bringing It All Back Home and Beggar's Banquet, both flawed to some extent but still remarkable, if the Stones’ next record can come up to the perfection of Blonde On Blonde, there is ample room to rejoice.

ROLLING STONES Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out (London)

Recorded at their two 1969 New York gigs several days prior to Altamont, this album probably captures the myth, magnitude and magnificence of the Stones better— or at least more consistently—than any other they’ve released. It was the greatest live rock recording of its time (the Who’s Live At Leeds now sems responsible for at least some of the heavy metal pomp and circumstance we’ve been plagued with ever since), and, for my money, still stands with James Brown’s 1962 Apollo show as one of the greatest live recordings of all time. The Stones not only had to live up to the LP’s modest introduction —“Is everybody ready? The greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world!’’— but they had to surpass the glut of quality bootlegs making the rounds in 1969, best exemplified by the slightly inferior Liver Than You’ll Ever Be.

If Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out has any major flaw, it would only be the lack of songs like “Gimme Shelter,” “I’m Free” or “Satisfaction,” all which the band performed during this tour. (In fact, the LP was originally to be a two record set, including performances byB.B. Kingand Ike & Tina Turner, who opened for the Stones.) There isn’t a song here that doesn’t cut the original studio verIsion all to hell: this is the definitive Stones as they were meant to be heard. Compare “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Stray Cat Blues” or “Live With Me” to the studio recordings, and the ^ound is rawer and harder which—in the case of the Stones— inevitably means better.

The LP is a perfect overview ot the Stones, including some of their finest songs from their (arguably) finest period and tracing the band’s musical roots as well, including classic blues in the form of Robert Johnson's “Love In Vain” and the Chuck Berry connection. “Carol” is perhaps the best Berry cover any band has ever recorded, while the Stones transform Berry’s “Little Queenie" from a teenage dance song into a leering anthem of primal lust. “Midnight Rambler” is as hot as any band has a right to be ("Goddamn! Goddamn!”), and Jagger turns the song into a theatrical tour de force, brilliantly demonstrating why the Stones were then considered an “evil” band.

Though Jagger's in top form and the world's greatest rhythm section never lets up. Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out truly belongs to Keith Richards. The Berry material reveals that Keith is not only the best Berry interpreter, but also the archetypal rock ’n' roll guitar hero Berry once prophesized in “Johnny B. Goode.” His powerful riffs on “Street Fighting Man’’ are nothing less than breathtaking, and Keith probably never surpassed his solo here on “Sympathy For The Devil.” one of the most threatening in rock’s history.

Someone once said that at least half of the Stones’ power in concert involves their interaction with the audience, and this album captures that beautifully: you can hear and feel the zealous hysteria the Stones evoked during this period of their career. Recorded at the height of the band’s messianic “bad boys” period, the lone girl crying out “Paint It Black, you devils!” right before the Stones burst into '“Sympathy For The Devil” couldn’t have been planned any better.

Get Your Ya-Ya's Out is more than a great rock ’n’ roll record. It's a genuine cultural artifact. The Stones would occasionally let us down in the years ahead, and Love You Live wouldn’t hold a candle to this teriffic rock ’n’ roll feast. But when future historians want to understand everything—be it good or bad. ■ cultural or political, romantic or real—that rock ’n’ roll represented during our lifetime, they’ll invariably turn to the Rolling Stones. And I'll wager that Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out will be one of the albums they turn to the most.

Bill Holdship

But what they have finally left us with (and, again, the similarity to what Dylan leaves is striking) is a portrait of a very desperate situation. Jagger and Company don’t want to lead us out of the wilderness either. Which is all well and good. We may not have received quite what we wanted but then again...

“If you try sometime, you might find

You get what you need.”

Dave Marsh (Nov. 1969)

ROLLING STONES Sticky Fingers

(Rolling Stones Records)

We were invited to a party the other day.

“What kind of party?” was the question.

“Dope and the Rolling Stones,” was the answer.

☆ ☆ ☆

Sticky Fingers is the long-awaited and at the time almost forgotten-

Stones, the greatest something-orothers in the world. It’s the most

garish throw-together since Flowers, half of the material dates’back over a year, some of it is stupid, and some of it just plain bad. I play it all the time, and the more I play it, the louder I play it.

☆ ☆ ☆

The Stones had to deal first with a pop scene that feels dispirited and with.their own absence from it. Zip.

You do look, right? It took Andy Warhol to make people relate to an album cover as directly as they might to the music it contains. The Stones won the first round; they organized the audience around their record, without even making them listen. The LP was stared at and glared at, talked about, passed around, and finally heard. All over the place. It took over the radio.

1*7 * *

Uh, Brown Sugar. How cum ya taste sogud?

Brown Sugar, just like a black girl shud?

Try that on Angela Davis next time you run into her.

The flip side.was called “Bitch.”

Disgusting stuff? It was disgusting, not only because it seems uncool this year, but because a lot of women are degraded when they hear the song come off the radio every hour like clockwork, especially when it comes from a group in which they have invested such affection and from which they have received such pleasure. Don’t the Stones have anything left but that regressive drool of the aging fop? Was the stuff they were peddling still worth anything?

A new album by the Rolling Stones is the inevitable soundtrack to the events of the day. It is what is played and what you hear. The real question is whether or not it can carry the weight of those events, without directly betraying them. In the last few years, the ability to carry that weight has been nothing less . than the Stones’ claim to a career.

☆ ☆ ☆

“Brown Sugar” was racist, sexist-, it threw me and a lot of other people and took the fun out of hearing it just as if the Stones had done “The Ballad of the Green Berets” and meant it. The music went flat as the theme of the song subverted its sound. The radio news broke just as the last notes of "Brown Sugar” faded and I heard Leslie Bacon speaking to a women’s demonstration just before the government put her away:

“...Nothingscaresthe u.s. government more than women getting together. J. Edgar and the u.s. government are making me a scapegoat for their insane and irrational paranoia &. their inability to catch those who bombed the capitol. Iam a political prisoner like women in the prisons of amerikan homes, schools, & factories. I think about Angela Davis. Erika Huggins. & Judy Clark a lot. knowing their situation is. worse than mine, but still feeling close to them. They are my sisters ' ...I have nothing but contempt for the amerikan government and incredible love for my sisters. ”

Those words blew the leer of "Brown Sugar” right off the radio.

☆ * *

But the music was good. My reaction to the words I automatically picked out of the song crippled its power. Still, the radio stayed on and "Brown Sugar” was unavoidable. If what Jagger was singing had no place in my life'there was no way to escape the fact that the music did. The conflict between the Rolling Stones ROCK OUT and so gud just like a black girl shud became absurd.

Then one day as I took a turn “Brown Sugar” started up and I heard

Gold Coast slave...

That was all I heard. It threw me off again. I couldn’t make out the rest.

‘7 remember when I was very young, "said Mick once to Jon Cott, who was interviewing him for Rolling Stone, “this is very serious.

I read an article by Fats Domino which has really influenced me. He said ‘You should never sing the lyrics out very clearly. ’”

“You can really hear 7 got my thrill on Blueberry Hill, "'said Jon. "Exactly, but that's the only thing you can hear. Just like you hear 7 can't get no satisfaction.' It's true what he said though. I used to have great fun deciphering lyrics."

OK, Mick. I like your theory.

But what is this crazy song about?

I asked around. Everybody seemed to know what it was “about” but no one knew what the words were. So finally, just like Mick Jagger, six of us put our heads up against a pair of speakers and found out.

Gold Coast slave she'sbound for cotton fields Sold in the market down in New Orleans Scarred old slaver know it's doin’ alright

Hear him whip the women just around midnight Drums beatin’cold English blood runs hot [what a great line!]

Lady of the house wonders where it’s gonna stop....

[as we go into an orgy of colonial miscegenation]

... I'm no schoolboy but 1 know what I like You shoulda heard me just around midnight!

What / heard was a spectacular and definitive parody and reversal of the anti-woman currency these Stones have used for money all these years, shot through with a weird admission of the racial ambivilence of their own music. “Brown Sugar" seemed to be opening up the seamy side of white sexual fantasies and of white rock V roll, as the Stones used a black man’s music— Chuck Berry’s—to sing an ode to white racism, even including, in a line not quoted, a little black houseboy just to round out the picture. These fantasies—sexual and racial—come as naturally to the Stones as they do to their audience, and in writing a song set squarely in the colonial past of their own history and set as well in our own country, where racism is anything but history, they capture not only their own roots but our own crime, as it follows us into the present. English rake meets American host.

They take the roles of sexist buccaneers living high off the racial swamp of America, acting out a story too grossly vicious to accept at face value. Their role-playing allows us to see a certain reality and its rejection, in a parody of their own familiar posturings and of our own new sensitivities. It’s a very neat inversion.

Maybe it's too neat. None of this stuff may be true. Nothing has been able to convince me one way or the other. The leer may be a parody, but is it still a leer? This song seems to have two sides to it, and both... work.

The ambivalence released the music; nothing sounds better and nothing is more exciting to hear. Months after its release Top 40 still has it on the playlist because there is nothing else to play that rocks as well.

The gears of “Brown Sugar” change like a stick-shift Chevy going flat out on an open road and it kicks off the album. As with the two LPs that preceded Sticky Fingers, there is the opening hard rocker with wellburied lyrics, the ancient blues, the countryjoke, the lyrical statement of resignation, and the big production to close it out. This time around they also tied up the loose ends of their live material, added their version of an old number written for Marianne Faithfull and probably recorded more than a year and a half ago. and graced us with three numbers that may actually represent their current musical ideas, all arranged together in the last installment of a trilogy that may have more to do with habit and convenience than vision or inspiration. But than, that’s the thing about rock ’n’ roll art. It’s not very artistic.

The structure of Sticky Fingers may have a perfect formal correspondence with Let It Bleed but underneath the albums are altogether different. On the earlier record, it seems to me, things were very very clear: there were those astonishing first and last cuts that held the power of the band both as writers and musicians, a couple of very fine songs, a couple of forgettable performances, and a good deal of fooling around within a genre that both the Stones and their audience had long before defined as limited, but traditional. “Live With Me” or “Let It Bleed” were trivial and fun, the Stones’ version of good-time music.

This time it appears that the Stones’ image of themselves and their understanding of how that image ought to be used—an image which must be made up of the flimsier elements of their “tradition” or whatever one wants to call it—has entered into murky conflict with the power of the Stones’ music, their flair for rock ’n’ roll, and their ability to exert a certain defining pressure on our sense of the situations of the day. There seems to be an attempt to satisfy every possible expectation in virtually every song, to touch all bases at once. This kind of confusion, or self-consciousness, has to do with a real uncertainty about what it means, now, to be the Rolling Stones, and the resolution of that uncertainty is what the Stones will have to accomplish with their next few albums. What they have done with this one, though, is another story.

Because of the conflict between music and image the bad moments of this album tend to stand for the album itself, instead of merely fading into the background the way, say, “Country Honk” did on Let It Bleed. “Gotta Move” is a dumb joke and “1 Got The Blues” is monumentally contrived, but then, the reference of “Cousin Cocaine” in “Sister Morphine’’—which is a great image and a powerful performance—is also a bad joke that almost sinks the song. “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” Part I. is a definition of the music the Stones were born to play, but those lines about “cocaine eyes” and “speed-freak jive” are a contrived attempt to let the listener in on the secret that Mick really knows exactly where it’s at. This sort of insecurity sets up a situation where the fire of Keith Richard’s guitar and the commitment of his singing is fighting off the silliness of Jagger’s pose; and the difference between what can be communicated by this doper cool and a line like “the red ‘round your eyes’ shows that you ain’t a child” is the difference in impact between Alvin Lee yelling “1 Want To Ball You” and Mick growling “jump right ahead in my web.” The same thing goesfor“Moon!ightMile.” The song sets a scene and moves to draw the listener into it, bringing him to a place where he is conscious of his isolation and allowing him to draw real conclusions about how to act and how to live. The casual way in which they rattle drugs as if they were maracas does not really exempt them from the responsibilities of doing so any more than the equally casual treatment of the life and death choices implicit in those drugs by much of our own culture exempts that responsibility. But if the confusion of the Stones ultimately destroys their ability to hit a situation straight on, as when the silliness of “Cousin Cocaine” almost destroys the terror of “Sister Morphine,” that would be one we could hardly replace.

The amazing thing about this album is that this doesn’t happen. The confusion that manifests itself in a self-conscious tending of image, cuteness, hipster pretense, trickery and excess is fought off by the power Mick and Keith are able to derive from their way of dealing with the world as artists and it is ultimately dismissed by the music of the band. In spite of the moments when they seen to be trivializing their music it ought to be remembered that they don’t succeed. “Sister Morphine" stands as a chilling fragment out of our collective bad dream; first part of “Can't You Hear Me Knocking” breaks free of its coy patter because Jagger is singing that nonsense in a great Little Richard squeal that ultimately has to triumph over whatever it is given to s^y, and because the song rocks through its few minutes of glory like few songs ever have. If they eventually blow the performance by jerking the listener, as if someone had punched a button from WROK to WJAZ, into a pleasant and pallid excursion into what reminds me more of the Ventures than anything else, then again, this is part of their confusion and their inability to know what to do with their music, their talent, and their own best impulses. The album does have its sewer, beginning with the move away from rock and roll in “Knocking,” scuttling through “Gotta Move," bashjng away at “Bitch.” and faking it through “1 Got The Blues,” which sounds like a sop to the Stones’ very imaginative hornmen (“Whadda you guys play, anyway?” “Well, we do an outasight Mar-Keys imitation.” “Far-ooooot,” as Mick is reputed to put it, “You gotta hear me do Otis Redding.”) But then “Sister Morphine" wipes all that out and the album continues to the heights again.

“Moonlight Mile,” which is nothing more or less than our era’s “There Goes My Baby,” easily escapes its single flaw and builds into as fine a melodrama as Olivier ever played it; it sounds like a good theme song for his Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, as a matter of fact.

When the music is good on this album, as when the Stones are creating “Sway,” unbearably loud and with an accelerating intensity that really begs for the release that the strings finally bring, when they take the music away without really ending it (this song seems to fade up instead of out), then there is little that can interfere with the impact of the Rolling Stones. “Sway” is one of their finest performances, with a great title that made me think it was going to be a name-of-the-dance tune (you know, “come on do the Sway”); it may get lost like “The Singer Not The Song” or “She Said Yeah,” but only because it’s stuck between “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses,” which are so much easier to hear. But the halcyon noise of "Can t You Hear Me Knocking,” the crash of “Brown Sugar,” Mick’s edgy vocal on “Sister Morphine” and his satisfaction in “Moonlight Mile,” they all break out of the shoddy context this album sets up for itself and which it pursues, virtually song by song, from beginning to end. If only “Sway” and “Dead Flowers” escape the basic conflict of the album, it’s because they walk the line so well, Mick skirting "black magic” to create an overwhelming sense of being trapped in the first and joking his way through the graveyard of an underground where flowerpower has turned into funeral wreaths and acid utopias into grimy needles in the second.

Some find this album decadent. I’d say rather that it tries to be decadent, it tries to obscure the variety and the vitality of what the Rolling Stones are, and fails. Its context is decadent; the title, the cover, perhaps the gut meaning of “Brown Sugar,” the flaunt of a title like “Bitch,” the doper cool. That, for certain, is a matter of taking one element of what the Stones are and what they have come to mean and attempting to pass it off, live it out or play it as if it was the whole story. But it isn’t the whole story and the music on the album is the proof of that. Their music is still much stronger than their confusion about what it is or what it is for, and that confusion, like the themes of the album itself, reflects events that both we and they share: Altamont, a plague of drugs, an isolation that has followed the weakening of a basically passive counter-culture, and a fragmenting audience for rock ’n’ roll.

Fragmenting or not, this has been the first album this year that one could hear without trying. It has been played constantly through FM tuners, screeched out of AM transistors and blasted out of windows until it is really public, because of that it is not merely a history of the things that affect and afflict us—a "reflection of the times,” as condescending critics of rock ’n’ roll like to put it—it is part of that history. It deepens and intensifies what we alreadly know, reminds us of things we might like to forget, allows us pleasure when nothing else will, and provides an excitement that matters to the way we get through the day and what we do with it. Because it is public— because while there are many who have not bothered with Joy of Cooking or J. Geils or Paul’s new one or whatever, there are few who have avoided the Stones even now—it recreated a certain sense of common values that we draw from few other sources. Because of that, the Stones are not only rhythmic historians but aesthetic politicians, and their album, while hardly apolitical, is a kind of a political event in our vague and aimless political community.

The possibilities of sex, drugs, frustration and satisfaction in Sticky Fingers and the rest of the Stones’ music are possibilities that some of us have rejected, some of us have chosen, that some of us are struggling with and wondering about. There is nothing monolithic about it. It is not the distance or the strangeness of the situations of Sticky Fingers that puts some people off and makes them call it decadent, but their closeness and their possibility. They may be playing dangerous games with risky material, but that is what artists are for, after all; they are not in business just to amuse the audience and pat them on the back like the divines behind Jesus Christ Superstar. Closing off certain options that have opened up on our streets is our job. not theirs. Their job is to emerge from the confusion and self-consciousness which mars this album and which would have destroyed it had there not been so much left. They have to come up with some tougher answers to the question of what it means to be the Rolling Stones instead of sliding on the most trivial elements of their past, elements we will eventually ignore if they don’t. When these options of smack and sexual sneer are closed off the Stones will no longer be singing about them, because true to their name they are not much for nostalgia, and they don’t look back.

Greil Marcus (Oct. 1971)

ROLLING STONES Exile On Main Street

(Rolling Stones Records)

I have nothing to say and I’m saying it.

— Allen Ginsberg. "America”

That seems to sum up the Stones’ position in theirnew album. The title and some of the songs suggest that they are trying to make some sort of statement about America, while some of the other lyrics attest to a new-found feeling of lassitude and uncertainty in the Stones. This is at once the worst studio album the Stones have ever made, and the most maddingly inconsistent and strangely depressing release of their career. I have been listening to it night and day since it arrived, trying to get at what’s wrong with it besides the inferior musical quality of some of the songs, because it is something deeper. And, even more, trying to find the strength in it that we’ve always depended on the Stones for.. The first time 1 listened to it, 1 became utterly depressed. Then I started to like it the second playing. Then it began to seem like it was falling apart the more I listened to it. Then I began to like it again for no particular reason, than that it did make noise. But the uneasy feeling has never quite left.

I detect a lack of feeling in much of even the most exciting music here, a detachment and sense of meaninglessness. Many of the songs don’t seem to be about anything in particular. But what's worse is that they’re not even meaningless in an agressive way. On Led Zeppelin’s last album they got away with things like “Ooh mama said the way you move, gon’ make you sweat, gon’ make you groove,” because the music was so big and viscerally compelling that you were swept away in the rush and the album was a motherfucker even if it did seem to come from a certain cynical superstar detachment. But the Stones have had trouble feeling enough for so long that they just don’t know what to tell us anymore, and are beginning to have serious questions about themselves. Which —even if it bodes well—makes this their There’s A Riot Goin' On at best, at worst a sort of auteur classic.

It’s a new music, perhaps. A lot of it can only be called downer music, and seems intentionally dense and detached. The lack of emotion on some of it is enough to make it a personal affront. Sticky Fingers had the emotion of its decadence, the loose, brassy self-destruction which so many of us got off on so vicariously. I was all set, before this came out, to write a piece about how art has a right to be amoral, and point to the Stones as the classic proof that it does. “Memo From Turner” and Sticky Fingers gave you kicks even if you weren’t a degenerate, or rich enough to play at being a degeneracy-dilettante. They were the razzberry in the faces of our assumptions about racism, sex and sexism, drugs, maybe even life itself. We’ve already come to expect this from the Stones on safer topics. That they drew so much wrath with Sticky Fingers was only indication of what direct hits they were making.

But Exile On Main Street doesn’t give many kicks. It's just a mass of admittedly scalding gruel beaded with Stones cliches, from old R&B (sounding at times close even to bands like Canned Heat) to uptempo cookers that seldom quite get there and don’t even have the strength or lunacy to be overdone. I expected it to be the Answer of the season, but it's not except insofar as this is the season for down music. Just compare “Tumbling Dice” to the directness and cohesion of "Let’s Spend The Night Together" or “Gimme Shelter” or "Brown Sugar”—in their terms it misses.

In terms of what’s available on the radio circa spring-summer 1972, it’s good enough to make Number One. The density, the comparatively draggy tempos, the buried vocal and the general sense of tiredness all indicate that this is the best possible right now from a bnad still possessed by genius but as tired as anybody or everybody else. Which is why it's a hit. You don’t feel “Tumblin’ Dice” like you felt “School Days” or “Paint It Black” or even "Iron Man.” You let it play if it’s on, you turn it up (always) tap your feet and nod your head; listen for the 98% of the words you still haven’t caught, think about it being a new Stones single.

But no matter how often you hear it, you don’t stomp and slam your palms against the car-doors and ogle passers-by with a maniacal and halfartificial (but so what?) sense of power. Corny as it may seem, you don’t find your life enriched much by either single or album. Though it smacks of the kind of how-muchdo-you-expect that Dylan’s Self Portrait occasioned, I expect more from the Rolling Stones, and I am damned pissed off that it isn’t what I thought it would be, in sound, content, impact, you name it. I once cut work the next day to drive 500 miles to see them at Altamont, not only because I was a drunken fan, but because I knew I could count on them for magic, and I didn’t even complain much when Altamont turned out like it did. For that alone, they owe me more than this!

* ☆ ☆

On the other hand, everybody gets tired (or old—a possibility that must be rather chilling for a Rolling Stone). Tired music seems to be the order of the day. But this is dense, cloudy tired music, and dense music should always be energized, even maniacal, so it rocks out from the fog to grab you by the lapels and shake you. Oh, they still know how to play fast, but the core is emotionally sterile, a vacuity that manifests itself in the most desultory type of music imaginable. It is especially strange for something that pretends (or tries) to be a party record at least part of the time. Well, one of my plays for rationalizing it was taking it to a party. People were wondering if there was something wrong with the record player.

It’s not even a matter of not believing Mick any more when he sings a line like “I need a love," or “heard the children crying," as much as that their cynicism no longer bears the same decadent glee. Like David Crosby’s it seems a depleted motion without any point whatsoever except to get a new album out. Which also makes this a different kind of failure from Self Portrait, because you and I know that Dylan always wanted to sing “Blue Moon” and Everly Brothers tunes, maybe even as wimpily as possible. Dylan bears a strong root love for everything stereotyped as Middle America. If he could make a record that Mom and Dad would dig, too, fine, even if it did turn out kinda muzaky. But the Stones bear love for—what, besides the Stones?

This record is loud, rocking mush for an indiscriminate audience. And it’s not even as much fun as mush. The Stones have always had a healthy love for trash —check Flowers—but this is trash without the hard edge of fury and humor and grossness that trash excels at. The Stones aren’t outrageous anymore, and they try to compensate with lines like “got to scrape that shit right off my shoes," and “Turd On The Run”—gratuitous obscenities without targets or contexts that leave you feeling empty and as cynical about them as they must be about

That said, it must be admitted that there are moments on this album where the murk clears slightly— long enough for us to get some unsettling glimpses from the lyrics of the way the Stones must be feeling today. What generally appears at those moments is a real sense of selfdoubt, fear and vague regret. I have heard that they are feeling extremely insecure about their importance now as voices and style-setters (they damn well should be) and are preparing for this tour with all the nervousness of kings whose domain seems likely to topple not from revolution but cancer. If that’s the case, this record is a desperate attempt to reassert their dominance, and everything about it down to the descision to make it their first tworecord statement is symptomatic of that desperation. But even then it remains, from composition to production, a set-up. A smokescreen. It takes you so long to hear the damn thing, and much of what's underneath the haze is so insubstantial, that you’re totally obsessed with the band. In which case, you plow on through, doggedly, through endless replayings and end up feeling pretty unhappy about the whole thing.

Six of the 18 songs, a full third of the album, come on as sheer R&B and “party” music with no particular message, intended just to make noise and promote a good time. Lots of them, noisy as they are, seem cold and dull in the weirdest way and are fairly easy to ignore. 1 think the production is probably intentionally designed to conceal the holes underneath it. Perhaps the most telling comment I could make is that solos by guitar or by any of the Stones themselves are few and far between—the saxes of Keys and Price probably solo as much or more than the Stones.

“Rip This Joint" makes great party music and the lyrics don’t have to mean anything—“Short Fat Fanny is on the loose” probably says more, after all, than "she’s a sweet black angel/Not a sweet black slave.” And the sax solo is okay, which is more than can be said for the one in "Casino Boogie,” which is decent filler, sort of like a messier “Parachute Woman” (but that was always a little too clean). It also contains a sort of guitar solo, mixed way down, that ain’t much.

"Hip Shake” has a good vocal and superb production—this one case where the hazy quality of the sound really works, imparting a smoky, sleazy club feeling. Only trouble—and I swear this is the truth — is that Love Sculpture’s (an English power trio fronted by Dave Edmunds) version of this song fucking cuts the Stones’! Even if Mick does fill the proportions of Slim Harpo better.

ROLLING STONES More Hot Rocks (Big Hits and Fazed Cookies)

(London)

Wonder what mastermind thought up the title of this album? Andrew Oldham, maybe? Well, anyway it’s great because the Stones have been getting pretty flakey lately and everything about this heap’s perfectly appropriate to their present ambience. Like, they were always ones to throw a stew pot pie your way and make you love it. Even their scraps were brilliant, so Flowers was a better album than Sgt. Pepper.

Nothing the Stones ever recorded is too bad to release, we like the rotgut misses as well as the hits, so More Hot Rocks—ideally—ain’t just shekel-grubbing product but a brilliant concept album that will live forever in its porous disorder. The Stones puke it all up indiscriminately, and in tossing away any pretensions about the selectivity of the Artist they become perhaps the only truly profound artists we've got. They sling it out with the same almost improvisatory sense Dylan had back when he’d shoot up a buncha speed and dash the songs off, throw “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands” together in the studio, call the sidemen together and not even hardly rehearse with them, and get a perfect jewellike first take.

So More Hot Rocks has the right idea, and it measures up on the sleazograph—blah title, clutter of pix and not many new ones, cover a psychedelic negative Between The Buttons. Even dogdunce Loog Oldham liner notes for the final touch of shod, just like the good old days.

But this ain't half the scurve it could be. It makes sense that London gotta put some recognizable reruns on. because there’s plenty recently immigrant Stones fans who don’t have all the original albums and need a copy of “Not Fade Away." One nice thing is that they put most of the previously unreleased stuff on one side so you don’t have to skip around so much. You can get a clear fix on the Stones’ absolute beginnings when they were at least as tattered and loose as they are today; there’s at least two songs here that are definitive masterpieces both in the Stones story and the steeplechase of the Sixties. “What To Do" presents the essential problem of being alive these years:

Maybe when the TV stops Fading out on the epilog Watch the screen just fade away And I really don’t know what to do

There’s nothin' to do And nowhere to go You're talkin’ to people That you don’t know You’re sick and tired Of just foolin’ around"

The last two lines are what really catch it and make this song as heavy a distillation in its way as “My Generation.” because it’s about the complacent frenzies when you come out the other end. One answer is provided in “We Love You,” the album’s other semi-obscure masterpiece. It came out just when it was needed, ■ in the garland-lulled summer of ’67; if the jail doors slamming in the intro are ominously prophetic of the later “Gimme "Shelter” realities in a by-now banal counterculture sense, the whole sound gist of the record was just what the newly pacified children needed exploding in their faces: “We love you. Of course we do!” All of it snarling forward with demonic thrust, heart hammering raw malevolence; only Brian Jones could make a moog synthesizer ooze hate and brimstone fury.

The other stuff is all fine, too, but you’ve probably heard most of it so many times already that you’ll throw it on to wash dishes by.

Meanwhile, there’s STILL MORE brilliant also-ran sides on the shelf: “Sad Day,” the great funk slush crash “Who’s Drivin’ My Plane," the original primeval murk drek “Stoned.” “I Wanna Be Your Man.” and probably some more that’ve slipped recall just now. Not to mention such treats as the long version of “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love" from the British Rolling Stones. 'Vol. 2 and the five minute “Out Of Time ” which was forsaken here in favor of the trucated version from Flowers. There were a lot of business hassles getting this stuff out and all, and I hear tell that part of the deal that permitted More Hot Rocks specified no more future Stones repackages from London. So it looks like we’re gonna have to scrabble in musty collectors' shops or do without the final remnant of the Stones' subterranean blasts from the past.

Which also makes it worth mentioning in passing that the double live album of the Stones ’72 American tour expected from Atlantic/RoIlingStones Records will never see our turntables, because it had three songs on it to which Allen Klein owned the publishing rights, and he wouldn't let 'em loose, the Stones didn’t want to break the show's flow, so nada. So the fan loses out all the way around. But even if you can’t always get what you need. More Hot Rocks is worthwhile.

Lester Bangs

(Apr. 1973)

’ Gideon Music (BMI)

But “Stop Breaking Down” is the killer king of the jive sides here, with harp work which is again masterful and a fantastic vocal. It’s one of the few songs on the album that demands that you move with it. The ensemble work is full and strong and distinct for once—Jesus, you can hear everything! Wham! This is the Stones! Energy and conviction and the raw sass we’ve always loved ’em for.

The songs that seem to be about something more than just letting the good times roll include a number of rocking scorchers among the aimless eviscerated dribblings and sheer dreck. “Rocks Off” is a perfect opener in the Stones’ tradition, and one of the most successful things here —even the brass sounds good—but there are no solos except for a bit of guitar that seems to come curling out of the rolling ball of noise just seconds before the fade. The lyrics, occasionally distinct, are some of the album’s best. They bear a strong undercurrent of uneasiness. “1 always hear those voices on the street/I want to shout but I can hardly speak” would seem to sum up almost perfectly the Stones’ dilemma uis a uis about themselves and this record. You can't help being moved by the passionate struggle with their own weariness:

The sunshine bores the daylights out of me.

Headin for the overload

Stranded on a dirty road. .

I can’t euen feel the pain no more. '

Where the album really begins to break down is in the ballads and slower, more moody and supposedly "serious” and ‘'meaningful” songs.

"Sweet Virginia” is one of the worst, with some Dylanish harp, a bit of mandolin, and an awful, tired vocal. The lyrics pretend to mean something, and want you to think that some sort of statement about America is being made, neither of which is true. Lines like “Thank you for your wine California.. .yes, I got the desert in my toenails.. but come on down Sweet Virginia” are totally fraudulent. The sloppiness is just sloppy (although the horns are nice).

"Just Wanna See His Face” has great upright bass work by Bill Plummer, almost reminiscent in its capacity to haunt of Charlie Haden on early Ornette Coleman things. The song itself is somewhat adventurous in a weird avant-gospel way On one level, you get the feeling that the Stones, trendy as ever, just wanted to write a song cashing in on the current Jesus-rock fad. On another level, they seem to be saying that they’re not believers: “I don't wanna talk about Jesusjust wanna see his face.” Big deal.

“Sweet Black Angel" also rings false, like a sop to the people who criticized "Brown Sugar” on racial grounds. Arrangement, performance, and production are all okay, a little clearer than most of the rest. ,

And the whole thing runs out of gas about 2/3rds of the way through.

In the end, there are two things that must be said about this album. First, it really isn't bad, with certain exceptions. A decent run-of-themill record. But the Rolling Stones have hot been noted for decent r-o-t-m’s. Most of side one is really great and all of it listenable, and 3/4ths of the last side really makes it. too. But side two alone amounts to a vast, unremittingly horrible graveyard.

The second thing that must be said, as if you hadn't guessed from reading the preceding tangle of selfcontradictions, is that Exile On Main Street inspires endless ambivalence. One day you think you’re beginning to love it. the next it’s almost a total bummer. What it lets you feel, constantly, is mistrust and sadness.

I hope against hope that the Stones aren’t going to drag all those goddamn horn players and sidemen along on the tour, although they undoubtedly will, since they're so prominent on the record. Maybe they should, to help keep us from noticing the decline of Keith’s imagination.

It’s all so strange. 1 almost wish the record hadn't come out, so we wouldn't have to confront the decay of the Rolling Stones. Maybe this is the only way they can find to begin confronting and reversing it themselves. In which case this album is as important and necessary as There's A Riot Goin' On and Self Portrait.

Then again, maybe it's just the natural process of growth and decay taking its toll at last on the final holdouts from the initial mid-Sixties explosion. Nobody, but nobody, ever said any rock 'n’ roll band was suppposed to last forever. And just maybe the next few albums from Dylan and the Who will complete the cycle begun by the Beatles and Stones, and we really will have to begin to look to the younger bands in a serious way. It wouldn't be any particular surprise.

Lester Bangs

(Aug. 1972)

ROLLING STONES Goat's Head Soup

_(Rolling Stone Records)

Way before this record came out, 1 had a dream about it. I dreamed that the entirety of Goat's Head Soup was 40 minutes of “Dancing With Mr. D.,” which consisted of a rhythmless sizzle of electric sitars, over which Jagger talked to and answered himself. He was divided into 4 Micks, and each of them was cloistered in one of the turrets on the corners of this aould rotting castle somewhere in England’s green, and he was calling out to himself: “Heyoah, isevahthan okah ovah theah?” “You bayut, chief!”

Sure. I was as full of nervous anticipation as you were. Every new Stones album has to plow through such expectations that the Second Coming would flop first hearing. Witness mass turnabouts re Exile. And this one’s no exception. Hit the CREEM office, we hopped it fireeyed, slapped it on and a guest commented w.ryly: “Not exactly hot. ”

Well...the first thing you notice is that, beyond “Angie” which really grows into a rocking horse winner, there's no center-stunner to piece it all together. Just a lot of nice compentent music that says them well enough to pass for octoroon, but. Prose by pros. But not the Stones setting you on your ear.

The second thing you notice, of course, is how all that seemingly prosaic music keeps growing and grpwing, how whether by its inner strength or the dogged attentions of the total fan, you keep playing it in spite of how run-of-the-watermark it might initially seem. And even though it’ll never leap your back with phosphor claws and ride you to nova, it reveals as expansive richness that promises to sustain in the face of all your reservations. So you’re confused but happy.

You can see where they're coming from right away, though. It became fashionable for a while to record whole albums about how wasted you were, and the Stones never missed a train in their whole lives, so Exile brimmed with entropic wastedome grandstanding between the plain obscurantism. It was There’s A Riot Goin’ On for white pubes.

But all that ostentatious -wreckage’s an implicit dead end, so this year it’s hip to trot out how together, how reintegrated you are in spite of all auto-assaults. Now Sly’s trying to tell everybody coke and erratum’s behind him, and while Goat’s Head Soup ain’t as gauchely reformotrumpeted, it convalesces from 60s demolition derbies in the same rosewallpapered neighborhood.

Just cop a taste of “20 Years Ago” where in a vocal which schizos between Van Morrison and Robbie Robertson, erstwhile devil-dog Mick assures us that he

Went out walkin’ thru the woods the other day

And the world was a carpet layin’ there forme...

And then, in a sheer Stephen Foster move that really throws you:

Call me laaaaaaaaaazy-zee bones

Please excuse me while I hide away...'

But what really makes it a curve ball is how the ironic tension of the instrumental part butts antlers with the lyrics and vocal: Charlie hitting brown counterblam like stubbing your Penrod toe on a boulder, an upsurge of looming batlike guitar that threatens to cruch the whole pastorale under its rusty wings, the rhythm section churning up angry and whipping the whole last minute of the song out of the hayloft and onto the blacktop with a sustained jackboot kick.

That’s genius. But it doesn’t come through right away, and neither does the rest of the album, which bids fair as the most angelically restrained Rolling Stones set of all time. Where’n Gehenna are those mean mojovators hard on the ■ highway with lickspittle lust burning down yer li’l sister’s drawers and enuff toothy freelance malice—to split you wide open? Sheeit, just now when hardly nobody’s bad anymore, you’d think we could at least count on the Stones to tromp true.

But the hurlyburly’s fading, hopefully not forever, mainly replaced by a mellow strength you can bask in. Best indication of a new Stones’ unprecedently laidback posture is that Johnny Winter’s Still Alive & Well cover of “Silver Train” cuts the Stones' orig here with a boilerfulla more of that oldtime steamthrottle kneegroin english. “Starfucker” is fun if not outrageous, and “Mr. D.”...forgive us, Mick, we wuz led to expect latest Heavy Statement in this here deck, like maybe you guys were knockin’ on heaven’s door and gargling proudly about it, but instead we got a mediumgrade blueshunker with gumbo lyrics and the garnish of some stinkfinger guitar.

But that clears the jump tunes outa the way, now we free to stick our puds deep into the gruel of the good stuff. “Angie” is one of the best Stones ballads ever, and finds Micky mustering more emotion than on any of this TV dinner’s rockers. Tremulous witlfc)assion, poignanceof helpless loss in the face of real love. “Can You Hear The Music” is calculated mesmerism that’s pulled off with austere grace, in spite of a rather ponderous vocal, possessing a magic that contrasts well with the literalness of “Winter,” which is a salute to the original Four Seasons from Mick's Christmastide afterglowhearth. What drool! And damned if you don’l break down and just wallow in its warm mush after a few listenings, just like you learn to love “Coming Down Again,” (Keith’s one spot to shine vocally since he plays damn little guitar on this set) even though it sounds utterly eviscerated.

Nice, nice. nice. Maybe, for all its pleasure, that’s what drags you about this album: its air of resolute complacency. Much of Mick’s singing simply lacks the intensity of yore, and the album isn’t about much. The Stones are still consummate entertainers, but somewhere along the line we began to expect something more than entertainment from them. In Beggar's Banquet and LetltBleed, the Stones began to tell us what was going on. And we began to count on them for that. They were suddenly no longer merely beloved but a light clarifying the times we shared with them. That was the special intensity of Exile-. “Soul Survivor.” And that’s what’s missing in this very durable record.

And beneath that knowledge is the wonderment at how that durable expertise carries on in the face of disintegration. The Rolling Stones are no longer a quintet but now such a perfect corporation that you don’t even think to complain when you get expert sax solos instead of Keith’s lowslung, lunging forays. A lot of covering up going on, and they’re good as it, so Keith’s fade and the Stones' cruise into future muzak doesn’t hurt at all. You expected more, you won’t again. Gotta be disappointed, but you gotta rationalize yourself into love too, ’cause you’re a trouper. So are they. So what?

ROLLING STONES It’s Only Rock ’N’ Roll

(Rolling Stones Records)

Hey, it’snot bad—not a( a/// Coming on the heels of a single that’s merely lame, and before that an album distinguished solely by the fact that is was undistinguished for the Stones, this one comes up a real winner, one of the finest LPs this year, with more than a taste of the bite and the fire that once backed up that title of World’s Greatest Rock And Roll Band.

For one thing, they sound like a band of interacting members playing songs that they care about, rather than faceless session men layin’ down some tracks. They seem to have something to say this time out; these songs are about something.

Now I’m not naming names mind you, but in one way or another, nearly all of them refer to a romance on the rocks. “ Workin’ all day just to keep you in luxury,” the reggae takeoff. “If You Really Want To Be My Friend.” “Too bad/She’s got you by the balls.” “Time waits for no one/And it won’t wait for me.” Even the inclusion of “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg, ” originally recorded for a sincescuttled oldies album, points to same. (They could've instead included “Drift Away,” recorded at the same session, y’know.)

Mick sounds angry, bitter, confused, mortal, as if there really V was something at stake. So does the I band. The best Stones’ music has ' always been the most turbulent Stones music. Not only does this lend more credibility to the softer ballads, which sounded so vapid last time, but it frees Mick to take on the personnas he’s assumed so enticingly in the past. As on “If You Can’t Rock Me,” which finds him prancing the stage with convincing arrogance, sizing up the sexual prospects in the audience as the band blazes on, in a performance that recalls “Stray Cat Blues." That song opens the album with the kind of immediate impact that “Sympathy For The Devil” or “Gimme Shelter” did, but it meets its match in “Dance Little Sister,” another straight ahead stamper that has Keith spewing out nasty clusters of notes like in the days of yore.

Which isn’t to say that this is an unqualified triumph. While it sounds better in the context of the album than as a single, “It's Only Rock ’n’ Roil,” with its ghoulish lyrics (“a Mick and Keith parody that didn’t work,” says Mick Taylor) and assembly line riffs'is still a self-con-' scious blunder best forgotten. And “Fingerprint File” doesn’t even measure up to that.

But for the first time in ages, this mortal finds himself relatingvto the Stones again. Ladies And Gentlemen. The Rolling Stones laid the biggest egg in my neighborhood theater since The Great Gatsbv, slinking out of town after a week of playing to an empty house. If they can’l rock you. somebody else will; they acknowledge that fact on this album, and accept the challenge. They always were better fighters than lovers.

John Morthland (Dec. 1974)

Allen Crowley (Dec. 1973)

ROLLING STONES Metamorphosis

(London/Abkco)

Well-known bassist and amateur soothsayer Bill Wyman described this album perfectly on “In Another Land,” when he posed the question: “Is this some kind of joke?" There are no other six words in the English language that describe Metamorphosis so succinctly...but, fortunately, at least there’s a reason for this terrible blunder. First, the music, though.

What we have here is a sanctioned bootleg of out-takes, slop, and possible blackmail ammo against Messrs. Jagger and Richard. Typical among the rejectamenta are another version of “Out Of Time” (hey, I actually like the song, but it isn’t exactly “Hey Jude”), “Some Things Just Stick Out In Your Mind” (but not some albums), and the theme song of Metastasis, “Try A Little Harder.” Unluckily, the sound quality of the album isn’t too bad, which means you actually have to hearthin guitars, off-key vocals, and milksop arrangements.

A few tunes are not quite unendurable, particularly, “Memo From Turner,” “I’d Much Rather Be With The Boys,” “Jiving Sister Fanny" (a later effort than most of this mess), and “Family," which is about as Beggars' Banquefish as Metacarpus ever gets. Which isn’t much. “Memo From Turner," of course, was the second-best song on the Performance LP (distant to Randy Newman’s “Long Dead Train,” but what wouldn’t have been?). “Boys" in the venerable women-are-chumps Stones tradition, diluted one part to fifty thousand with Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. It’s sort of a clue as to what the Stones might have been, had they been tunafish instead of people. “Jiving Sister Fanny” at least offers some decent guitar work by Mick Taylor, which almost automatically makes it the best “song” on this thing. And “Family” might’ve eventually evolved into an interesting song if anybody had cared enough to work on it—but don’t get me wrong. I'm not blaming 'em. So you’re a washout. That’s why 1 like you now. I identify with the wretched of the earth, like any self respecting liberal, beyond that all my vicarious fantasies are numb nullnodes, and damn if you haven't haven’t qualified some time now. So welcome to the museum, jump and shout work it out goo goo wah wah pedaling backwards. All the uptempo “numbers” on this album with the exception of the course by now obligatory “reggae" humbah and the disco chant which is not so droll nor offensive as plain palatable like okay you wanna reduce yourself to the level of the most banal music around because you’ve always tried to keep up. fine, but all the other rockers sound like waterlogged “Brown Sugars” and even that’s okay because what the hell you know I mean they’re good guys even if they did fuck up.Ron Wood apparently because even last tour last summer he played such monstro chunka wailout guitar with the Faces (in such contrast to how blithely he blended into the general lifeless woodwork of the Stones tour), whom he apparently hated (nobody with sensibilities intact could like Rod at this point anyway) and maybe that was why he was so good therein at least at the end, but now he’s slapping palms foreheads synapses collapsed with his idol Keith (which makes him Nick Kent) and the result is that, going strictly by this album, Ron Wood is no longer a raucket guitar hero. He’s succeeded in becoming as dead and anonymous as Keith. Take a gander at the cover and realize they’re even coaching him in the art of looking grim, I mean you cannot be a trueblues badass Rolling Stone and SMILE, which is further loggings of toobad blues, because Ron Wood has proven himself one of the great smilers of all time. It’s like he’s in Keith school, and at this point the smartest move missah Richard(s) could possibly make would be to start a mail correspondence course sent off matchbooks to look sexily defunct.

The "real" truth behind this collective non-entity is that the Stones owed Decca an album, and Wyman gave ’em a twelve-song set that we might just guess was more interesing that Meta-gating Circumstances. (Wyman’s choices includtd actual songs like “Bright Lights/Big City” and live versions of “Little Red Rooster” and “Down The Road Apiece.") Sadly, Stones’ manager Allen “Gimme The Beatles” Klein put together the eventual package, with no regard for chronology, quality, or (perish the thought) Stones' fans. In retrospect. Klein is distinguished by putting a Stones’ album in the bargain bins—a hilherto difficult task—and in record time at that.

To sum it up, the Stones probably wanted this album released about as badly as you want to piss up a rope. Forget it.

J.Kordosh

ROLLING STONES Black & Blue

(Rolling Stones Records) There are two things to be said about this new Stones album before closing time: 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, and thank god. No rationalizations—they can now go out there and compete with Aerosmith, or more precisely, since just like the last two before it this album’s strongest moments are Jagger singing ballads, the “adult pop” market. Barry Manilow, even.

This album is so good I don’t even hate it like the new Led Zep, which admittedly is unworthy of hatred from anybody except a true patriot who expected more than what you knew you were going to get—what you get here is sweet flow muzak dentist office conversation piece bright eyes shining in the face of nothing at all which they will not even confront and more power to ’em. Yeah, 1 watched him die. Shit, don’t even feel like a voyeur, twas all done is the name of art or the roto swagger or something, soda sokay Mick, I still like you like an old dull friend who you keep around for purely compassionate (empathetic?) reasons and because you remember when. Like whoever it was that started the Velvets. You're stuck in a retread, stomp on it, no, not good enough, I hear you growling but you can’t barge in, especially since you insist on invoking Jamaica/Reggae which you mighta been there but on the recorded evidence you know nothing about or at least can’t translate as you used to godamightydosowell.

Because Keith is just a dumb shit who never figured out that there was anything good to be said on guitar after Chuck Berry, the worst kind of oldies-fetishist, fuck his image, you could look like that if you were a rich junkie too, outlaw my ass, he’s boring, a word I seldom invoke because there’s too many good books to read to ever get bored and too many fine records to listen to to but this ain’t one of them.

I won’t even comment on the lyrics because they don’t mean shit. They’re stupid and deserve to be. Not even “Memory Hotel.” which I could get a cheap shot off by saying the line “You’re just a memory that used to mean so much to me” applies to the Stones, but I don’t believe that. I just love ’em for getting wasted, as they are, and slowly dying with such immaculate sense of timing, I mean they still can do no wrong, except if you really are dumb enough to expect a Statement, well, NO STATEMENTS HERE. They even copped out on the S&M cover packaging originally envisioned, for which actually I am glad, gladder than about any of the music herein, because there is plenty enough too much ersatz plethora of S&M freaks probably gotta resent the Stones for not really contributing to it but always playing at the most chichi trendy formulaic cuffs of bondage. When really they were always in bondage to some stupid idea of themselves. I mean, Jagger and Townshend— who cares if they're 30 years old? Even a single reader of this magazine? No. Nobody gives a shit about their hangup about that but Jagger and Townshend. Patti Smith is 30, the author of this piece is 27 and still stands upon his head on occasion cartwheels for the party, Charlie Mingus is 54 and still breathing fire in his stance if not his most recent music. He learned the obvious lesson that old can mean Duke Ellington mellow, not the garbage heap, but the Stones want to be on the garbage heap, where else you gonna pitch outlaws, but sorry, 1 can't take it for anything but product, a year and a half in the making too, ha, what a joke, what a great laugh, what a band what a group what a charge what a rock V roll band what a band what a band what a band, goodbye.

P.S. (of course)

But and then at that time also, I recall with my old bud Mick, swam out scenes a good drifter cannabissalt off the boardwalk entirely, and we listened a tune or time or two and to conclusion we did come, most specifically that this here makes hay jump and spindly-leg jeckyl hustle because it’s funny and good as gone can be—"Hot Stuff"—when Mick comes on with that jive Rasta growly blab and actually nerves up to "Allayoupeapalinnyaksitay. I know yall goin' broke, to everybody in Jamaica, livin’ workin’ in the sun, yer hot stuff," yeah, hot hicks wack down, let those Jaymochan rude boys get their mitts on your gullet dad, they’ll squeeze till you forget about tryina be anybody's badass, but slopfingered wimp as you are you’re all right. Because for one thing we figured out that Bianca is smarter than you and it blew your mind that such a phenomenon could exist so you write all these mushy love ballads your last alpees while she fucks off with Ryan O’Neal. “Hey honey would you like to get something to eat...?” Chick sal san on rye. quick or slow don’t make no. gone bleared kid you are in the age you have declaimed yourself. hand of fate sureshot horseshit. you still could if you would but you won’t but that's okay because we love you for what you are. Less than nothing, because you were something once. So thank you for not aspiring: you are an inspiration to the blank generation whole.

Lester Bangs (July 1976)

ROLLING STONES Love You Live

(Rolling Stones Records)

I imagine that I should state right at the beginning that if you took all the songs on Coat's Head Soup. It’s Only Rock 7V’ Roll, and Black And Blue, there wouldn’t be more than a handful that in any way affected me. The last Stones album that I liked was Exile On Main Street and it was the urgency and the claustrophobic power of it, those qualities that have been present in each and every Stones album right up until Exile that made it that way. Since then. though, something snapped inside me and cut loose that cord that held me near the Stones’ music. I’m not sure that I can even explain it properly—it has something to do with the Hollywoodization of rock in the Seventies and also something to do with the Stones following trends rather than making them by ignoring them. When It's Only Rock TV’ Roll came out, all I could see in my head was a newspaper headline in bold block letters: WORLD’S GREATEST ROCK ’N’ ROLL BAND SAYS “IT’S ONLY ROCK ’N’ ROLL." Although I realized that the Stones never asked for that albatross of a moniker and were rather annoyed by it, the music on that record seemed to say, more than anything else, please leave us alone. As for Black And Blue. I couldn’t even get through a whole side of it as any one listening, and what was worse, I didn’t really care. I know people who sat for months grappling with the album until they finally liked it, but that kind of consciousness, namely listening to something a hundred times until you like it, just revulsesme.

As I sit here writing this review. Love You Live is not playing in the background. And point of fact, it’s not even in the house. I’ve only heard it once, in a conference room at Atlantic Records. And yet. most of the two-record set is still spinning around in my head. There are no new Stones songs here—of the 18 included, only two have never been recorded by the band before and neither of those are original tunes— but there’s an ease and a grace to this set that is simply irresistible. Through four sides of live music, three of which were recorded in Paris and regular concert settings and one during the infamous stand at Toronto’s El Mocambo Club, the Stones function as they have not functioned in the studio for five years, having a great time, loose, relaxed and full of energy. As far as comparing it to their other live albums, there simply is no comparison. It sounds great, unlike Got Live If You Want It. and there’s none of the decadent undercurrents of GetYouYa-Ya'sOut

There’s just so much more here that it’s useless to get into blow-byblow descriptions. The weakest tracks are, not surprisingly, the newest Stones songs—nothing could save "Fingerprint File" or “Star Star.” although "Hot Stuff’ isn’t quite so repugnant as on Black And Blue. Yet the transformation of some of these songs in a live setting is astounding: ‘Hfs Only Rock ’N’ Roll," with Ron Wood and Keith Richard forming an impromptu backup chorus and Ian “Jerry Lee" Stewart elbowing the ivories, is just amazing. Similarly, "You Got To Move" finds the. Stones out on the chain gang with instruments and voices as picks and your head as the rocks and gravel.

The El Mocambo side is really the heart of the matter, though, with the Stones easily taking a sound that’s been stuck in arenas and stadiums f; >r far too long into a small club and pulling it off masterfully. The between song banter has been left in (complete with introduction of the band and Mick casually inquiring as to whether “everything's all right in the critics’ section") The reggae rendition of Bo Diddley’s “Crackin’ Up" is probably the best single track on the entire set—Ron Wood playing a canter melody line while Keith rips it up on the other side of the stage. And "Little Red Rooster," wilh double-slide guitars and Jagger tossing out some bonafide Howlin’ Wolf moans, is, also a high point and shows, when you come right down to it, how little the Stones have strayed from their original roots.

It’s really almost impossible to complain about anything here. And if you fail to be moved by any of the solid version of such classics as "Brown Sugar.” “Tumblin' Dice” “Honky Tonk Woman,” "Happy,” "You Can’t Always Get What You Want," “Get Off Of My Cloud,” etc. then you're reading the wrong magazine. I suppose the most fascinating thing about Love You Live is that it is so much against the grain of the general atmosphere of the last few Stones albums. Maybe it’s because this band that has meant so much to rock ’n’ roll isn’t worrying about anything, but is just doing it by instinct. And maybe their contention that they really do care more about playing live than about making studio albums is a bit more valid than previously thought. Whatever, that cord seems to have been patched while I wasn’t looking. I don’t know how long it will last, but it’s great to feel close to the Stones once more, if only for these few fleeting moments, which is—after all—what live albums are all about.

Billy Altman (Nov. 1977)

ROLLING STONES Some Girls

(Rolling Stones Records)

Don’t come sniffing up the leg of this review, you necrophiliac kids, this is no obituary; the > Rolling Stones are still alive and on target. Not that Some Girls is as morally incisive as Let It Bleed, or even so permanent a Statement as Exile On Main Street. But it’s undoubtedly the best studio album the Stones have made since Exile. The tedious pseudo-reggae of Black And Blue has given way to refreshing kinetic rock ’n’ roll, played almost entirely by your basic Stones.

So punk’s earned its keep, all right, if for no other reason than making these (relative) geezers get off their clouds and bust their asses for rock’n’ roll one more time. Some Girls handles the New Wave competition less by head-on confrontation (which would be suicidal) than the by the Stones’ tried & true gambit of running out their own impelling vissions, while the lumpenrock masses thrash away at "trends" across the tracks. The Stones seemed a lot more threatened by the competition from David Bowie in ’73 (when they responded with the dreadfully inbred “Angie”), than they have by the contemporary punkers (who swiped most of their bete noir readymades our of the Stones’ stylebook, anyhow).

Some Girls features a die-cut cover (a la Zep’s Physical Graffiti) which enables the casual listener to slip the liner-borne visages of the Stones and other jetset celebs in and out of an essence-of-sleaze wig display ad direct from the black pages of Ebony. The reverse of the black jacket lists the song titles, and all the inspiring technical data, floating among the bustout merchandise of an equally-gamy bra ad. So just whose fetish is being gored, huh, Stones? Yours, or ours?

Packaging aside, Some Girls is less a concept album than a collection of disparate songs, just like those fabled LPs of our youth. The Stones have already begun to have a double-sided radio hit with the single “Miss You”/“Far Away Eyes,” and those tunes lead off the respective sides of Some Girls. “Miss You” almost pogos back to the lazily-syncopated yearning of Black And Blue, but pulls out a touch of class with a sardonic talking break (“...some Puerto Rican girls just dyin’ to meet you”) by the irrepresibleMick.

Yet “Far Away Eyes” is such a cheap, dopey shot that it could become the biggest lowest-common-abdominator hit since “Short People.” Check it out: Limey-eyed Mick is ostensibly passing through Bakersfield, CA, and manages to patronize some stoopid C&W shitkicker he catches on his car radio, and at the same time he caters down to the ersatz-cuntree tastes of the Pacifica Culture (thanks for that term, Gov. Jerry) with all this romantic “far away eyes” blather.

But after all, Mick is less of an American than you or me (never thought of that, did you?), so how could he possibly understand the whys and wherefores of our indigenous folkways? He and his bloodbrother Stones fare better by working out on the N.Y.C. scene, as in “When The Whip Comes Down,” an obscure allegory about a gay garbage collector (?) learning all the ropes (so to speak) of the Big Bad Apple. All the S&M is in the staccato beat itself, but that’s plenty enough. ‘Shattered” kids Lou Reed in the way he should have been kidded all along, re his family’s probable Judeo-Capitalist ethic (“Don’t you know the prime rate’s goin’ up-upup!”)

Okay, moving on down through these cuts—“Some Girls” may be the best groupie-celebratory alma mater yet, Mick doesn’t mess with cheap sentiment, just totes up all the ladies of the universe he’s had (“Some girls give me children...” etc.). There, but for the grace of niggerlips, go...(sigh). “Lies” and Respectable” are yer basic Chuck Berrry riffs this time around, with the later as much of a comment on Margret Trudeau as we’re likely to get from Mr. Jagger at this late date.

“(Just My) Imagination” is the Motown remake, more carefully soulful than 1974’s “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg,” and “Before They Make Me Run” is Keith’s say, a notso:oblique reference to his impending legal troubles (vocal cocky and skeered all at once). “Beast Of Burden” (knew the Stones were going to write a song around that title sooner or later) is the old "Under My Thumb” domination toned down to at least a draw in the dom/sub exchange, in the spirit of modern liberation.

So it’s only rock ’n’ roll, but I never stopped loving that. And yeah, the Stones’ll always be smarter than the vast majority of their competitors. Always.

Oh, almost forgot, Ron Wood’s guitar is meshing into the ensemble sound more and more aggressively, but the reason he wears that goofy non-Stone Grin in the group photos is that l)he still can’t believe he’s really a Rollin’ fuckin’ STONE; and 2)Keith is goosing him off-camera.

Richard Riegel

(Sept. 1978)

ROLLING STONES Emotional Rescue

(Rolling Stones Records)

Without embarrassment or default this could easily be the album of the year, but true to recent form, the presentation has been a little hard to take. As seen from the corner of W. 8thSt. and 6th Ave., the delivery of a new Stones LP—the first in two years, as we are constantly reminded—is a textbook exercise in leisure industry capitalism. Five songs a year is hardly an honest reflection of the band’s productivity. Rather, it more accurately mirrors the unfortunate influence of international tax laws, capital management, contractual obligations, and marketing strategies. And the attendant hoopla—the instant gaiety and forced punditry—is no more attractive. Consider New York Timesman Robert Palmer, the best working rock ’n’ roll reporter, driven by the journalistic feeding frenzy around him to posit a more humane, less hermetic Rolling Stones because Mick was seen hailing his own cab and Keith was actually sighted walking (that’s right-on his own two feets) between two downtown clubs! Let us be thankful that no one but me saw Ron Wood, rag in hand, researching funk at the car wash as Houston and Crosby. Who knows what claims might have been made for the band’s sensitivity to the quotidian problems of the downscale New Yorker?

Which is not to abuse the lads for circumstances they can concoct but cannot control. If Howling Wolf had to deal with this lunacy could he have made a record as good as Emotional RescueP The only remaining figure of equivalent longevity and magnitude, Bob Dylan, just chucked it all with a cooling (and numbing) cannonball into Pat Boone’s pool. (Dylanologists, if there are any left, will note that this is not the first time in a long and often mean-spirited career that Zimmy is no longer talking to last year's "close personal friends,” cf. “Positively 4th St.") Through • it all the Stones manage to roll on with a peculiar grace and sometimes faltering but never failing single-minded momentum that only the greatest—and perhaps the only—white blues band can maintain.

On Emotional Rescue that singleminded momentum attains a ferocity and, simply, an excellence that marks this as not just one of the best records of the year but, more importantly, the finest and most consistent Stones work since Exile On Main Street. Excellence, complexity, and discernment would seem almost impossible to still strive for in a word where nearly everything and everyone exist to make things “simple” for the “star” —a world that they have lived in nearly half their lives—but the Stones’ collective triumph is their renewed struggle with stultification and self importance, a struggle rarely as vital or sharply documented as it is here. Take, for example, the two typically blunt Stones kissoff songs, “Summer Romance” and “Let Me Go,” in the first, amid razor sharp guitars and a unique two note solo. Mick rudely denigrating their passion and with more than a hint of self mockery. On “Let Me Go, ” with its richly expressive vocals (The very nearly perfect way that Mick and Keith have sung together' for 16 years has rarely been appreciated in print.) the hint becomes an arch cariacature: “Maybe I’ll become playboy/hang around in gay bars/and mo-o-o-ve to the west side of town.” If that sounds like someone you’ve read about in The Star, right down to the new Central Park West co-op, you’re beginning to see the light. (N.B. Caveat lector: all lyrics approximately, none guaranteed. This is, after all, the Rolling Stones not Billy Joel.) On the ironic reggae plaint, “Send It To Me,” a disconsolate and companionless Mick begs for any and allcomers, “...could'be Australian/ could be the alien/send her to me. Best of all. over the spare, churning pulse of “She’s So Cold,” pleads so convincingly it actually seems plausible that he is being not merely denied, but totally ignored. This from a fellow who has been denied little and never ignored since he turned 20. So much for the corruptibility'of art. Through these tunes and “Dante (Part 1)” and especially “Where The Boys Go,” the playing is as sharp and compelling as it was on Exile, with Keith’s renascent excitement and concentration and Charlie’s always astonishing drumming being the special standout on the album full of fine work.

For me, the most remarkable song on the record is “Indian Girl,” the tale of a young Indian “from Nueva Granada” (The Spanish colonial name for Colombia and part of Central America) who survives a massacre and grinding poverty to metamorphose into an almost mythical guerilla, “...scooting down planes with M-16’s amid laughter," while her parents fight first “...in the streets of Masaya...” (the 5th largest city in Nicaragua— Hi Bianca) and then with the Cuban brigades in Angola. Building up from a standard Stones country ballad frame, mixing marimba with Floyd Cramer piano (Ian Stewart?) and mariachi horn accents, they create a disturbing miniature glimpse of our romantic, relentless, and implacable enemy.

Over the fade of “Dance (Part 1)” Mick shouts, “I still stand accused, "a soul echo that, I think, points in affirmation and desperation to generations of reasons for rocking on in a style even better than the one to which he’s become accustomed. The Rolling Stones are not just good copy like Son of of Sam, wonderful to look at and hear about like Lauren Hutton, an odd assemblage of characters like the Boston Celtics, or walking cultural (and sexual) history like Jackie Kennedy (and Warren Beatty). They are, when all hands are present and off the injured list, the best rock & roll band in the world.

Jeff Nesin (Oct. 1980)