THE ROLLING STONES: NOW! (1965)
1) Everybody Needs Somebody To
Love; 2) Down Home Girl; 3) You Can't Catch Me; 4) Heart
Of Stone; 5) What A Shame; 6) Mona (I
Need You Baby); 7) Down The Road Apiece; 8) Off
The Hook; 9) Pain In My Heart; 10) Oh Baby (We Got A Good Thing Going); 11) Little Red Rooster; 12) Surprise, Surprise.
Released hot on the heels of the UK's The Rolling Stones No. 2, this US
release is essentially a heavily modified version of that album, omitting the
songs that were already issued on 12 x 5
and replacing them either with older material (e. g. Bo Diddley's ʽMonaʼ, which
was originally deleted from Newest
Hitmakers in favor of ʽNot Fade Awayʼ), or newer material (ʽOh Babyʼ, which
would only make it to the British Out Of
Our Heads), some of it exclusive to the American market (ʽSurprise,
Surpriseʼ). On the whole, it's all tolerable, except for two gripes: first, in
the process the American catalog somehow managed to lose hold of an excellent
cover of Muddy Waters' ʽI Can't Be Satisfiedʼ (with a fine example of Brian's
slide playing), and second, there are actually two versions of ʽEverybody Needs Somebody To Loveʼ out there — the
original three-minute demo, released by mistake on Now!, and the longer, officially sanctioned, five-minute finalized
version on No. 2. Subsequent CD
pressings of Now! corrected that
mistake and swapped the short demo for the long master take, but here's the
rub: I actually like the demo far more than the master take — the latter clings
way too loyally to the optimistic, party-spirit tone of Solomon Burke, which
I'd rather have from Solomon Burke himself, but the former is unusually much
darker, more echo-laden, stuffed with weird ghostly vocal harmonies, and
basically feels like a special Halloween version or something. To me, it has
always seemed to agree much better in spirit with the delicious nastiness of
the ensuing tracks — so I'd advise you to be tenacious and track down the
three-minute version, which isn't that hard to do in the digital age anyway.
Anyway, confusing details aside, this is a
fairly accurate reflection of what the Stones were all about in early '65 —
only just beginning to cut their songwriters' teeth, but continuing to polish
and deepen their atmospheric darkness in new, exciting ways. On a song-by-song
basis, this is arguably the best release of the early Stones period; for the
rest of 1965, there would be a slight dip in LP quality, as records would
become more and more populated with early Jagger/Richards originals that still
suffered from «greenness», but Now!
strikes a very good balance between proper covers, self-credited «rewrites»
(new words for old tunes), and just a couple high quality true originals — and
there's hardly even one unwise choice among the lot.
Soulful R&B, one of the Stones' biggest
loves at the time but also their unquestionably most vulnerable spot, is kept
to an absolute minimum — Allen Toussaint's / Otis Redding's ʽPain In My Heartʼ
is the only track on the album that could be brushed off as an inferior
imitation of a masterwork, but while I won't be defending Jagger's vocals
(they're okay, though), the band still comes up with an inventive guitar-based
rearrangement of the brass-based original, and Wyman's fuzz bass tone gives it
a bit of a new face. But the other time that they intrude onto slow Southern
territory, with a cover of Alvin Robinson's ʽDown Home Girlʼ, they hit the
jackpot — while it is quite obligatory for everybody to seek out the original
version (Robinson has a great grizzly Southern voice with a near-unique
timbre), this is a tune that Jagger was simply born to sing, never mind the
fact that he'd never even seen a proper «cotton field» before, let alone tried
walking in one (and what about «doing the second line»?). To hell with it — the
sneer in his voice is priceless, and the way Brian mimics it with his
bottleneck triple-note «ha, ha, ha!» is even more so. This is one of those
moments where even a patented defender of woman rights might want to throw his
feminism out the window and grinningly revel in the putdown (to be fair, ʽDown
Home Girlʼ is not really a misogynistic song — merely an intelligent swipe at
the average rustic poseur, arrogantly «adapting» to the big city).
As good as ʽCarolʼ and ʽAround And Aroundʼ used
to be, Now! is also where they reach
the top with their modernization of the Chuck Berry sound — for some reason,
both ʽYou Can't Catch Meʼ and ʽDown The Road Apieceʼ fell out of their live
repertoire fairly early, but maybe they just couldn't live up to the speed and
tightness they show here. As befits the title, ʽYou Can't Catch Meʼ zips along
at the fastest speed they could get at the moment, with Bill and Charlie
setting the frame for a performance that really imitates the spirit of a
breathless car race — again, with much of Chuck's humor taken out and replaced
by gritty efficiency; plus, there's that odd whiff of something dark and
mysterious all over again, exemplified by... oh, I dunno, what's up with that
weird «dripping» touch they add? That one lonely "ping!" that comes
in at regular intervals like a water splash from a leaking faucet? I have no
idea whose idea that was, or even what instrument is producing that, but it's
goddamn weird to have something like that in the song.
ʽDown The Road Apieceʼ is clearly less
mysterious — an old roadhouse boogie that goes all the way back to the days of the
great Amos Milburne, but the Stones, naturally, are once again exploiting the
Chuck Berry version, and, once again, are elevating it to a whole new level of
excitement: not only is the production thicker and tenser, but Keith is given
free reign in the studio, and he profits from that by extending the song by almost
one whole minute, just so that he can demonstrate his complete mastery of
every single Berry lick, which he glues together in a seamless sequence (the
song only begins to fade away once he exhausts the pool and begins repeating
himself) and polishes to perfection; additionally, every once in a while he
engages in call-and-response dialog with Ian Stewart, banging away like there
was no tomorrow in the background — yes, there is a clear feeling here that
they are intentionally sweating to beat Master Berry and Master Johnson at
their own game, but you know what? They might just be succeeding at that (Chuck
himself is noted to have been properly amazed when he saw them recording the
thing at Chess Studios in mid-'64).
In the 12-bar blues department, they hit some
high points, too: ʽLittle Red Roosterʼ is an early highlight for Brian, having
a lot of fun doing animal impressions with his electric slide, but my personal
favorite has always been ʽWhat A Shameʼ, another re-write of something Jimmy
Reed-ian where the band just sounds so admirably tight — every single musician,
including the rhythm section and the pianist, contributing on an equal level, all
melodies sharpened razor-style (gotta love Keith's ascending bass line at the
end of each verse) and with perhaps the single best case of «guitar weaving»
between Keith and Brian on the entire record. Of special interest, actually,
are the lyrics — seems like a first, timid attempt at writing something
socially relevant, proto- ʽGimmie Shelterʼ style: "What a shame / They
always wanna start a fight / Well it scares me so / I could sleep in the
shelter all night"... "shelter", get this? Nobody paid proper
attention at the time, I think, but yes, this was, in fact, the first time
they'd used the spooky potential of their blues-rock sound to accompany an
alarmist message.
And then, in the middle of it all, comes the
band's first original masterpiece; I wish I could be original myself and award
that award to ʽOff The Hookʼ, but as groovy as Keith's crunchy riff is, the
repetitiveness of the song ultimately works against it (maybe a decent bridge could
have been a better choice than the endless "it's off the hook, it's off
the hook, it's off the hook..." vamp), so I still have to go along with
ʽHeart Of Stoneʼ. Curiously, it seems like it may have begun life as a
variation on the aforementioned ʽPain In My Heartʼ (they share plenty of
similarities in all aspects of melody, structure, lyrics, etc.), but the Stones
have turned the tables and made life more complex — now it's not about a girl
who's breaking the protagonist's heart, it's about a girl who is not breaking the protagonist's heart,
and yet, at the same time, you can sort of feel that the protagonist's heart is
on the breaking point anyway, so there's an added level of psychologism here:
"...this heart of stone" is delivered by Jagger in such a way that
you most definitely understand that this is an exaggeration. Keith plays the
wailing guitar solo like a man gone crazy with grief, and Mick gives his first truly
great theatrical performance; it would still take him a few years to become a
consistently first-rate voice actor in the studio (an ability that,
unfortunately, he was never able to take with him on stage), but the modulation
range on ʽHeart Of Stoneʼ is already quite impressive — from the cockiness of
"there've been so many girls that I've known..." to the puzzled
intonations on "what's different about her?" to the pleading of
"don't keep on looking..." to the desperate self-denial of "you'll
never break this heart of stone, oh no...", this shows the Stones already
adhering to that one maxim that made their classic period so, well, classic —
you may not believe in the stuff you write, but it is your sacred duty to make
it believable for everybody else.
And so, while maybe the record was not nearly
as fabulous as to allow you the infamous moral right to "see that blind
man knock him on the head, steal his wallet and have the loot" (ah,
where's an Andrew Loog Oldham these days when you so desperately need one?), it
was still totally cutting edge for early '65 — maybe the «shape» of The Rolling
Stones was not yet completely formed, as they still had to borrow other
people's skeletal structures instead of supplying their own, but the «spirit»
was just as vibrant and flamboyant as it would be at any later point of their
finest decade. For the rest of 1965, they would go on to be an A-level singles
band and more of a B-level albums band; but Now! is just amazingly consistent from top to bottom, and remains,
as always, my first and foremost, thumbs up-approved recommendation for a thorough,
multi-sided acquaintance with the first phase of the band's career.
Keith is given free *rein in the studio
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome.