THE ROLLING STONES: GOATS HEAD SOUP (1973)
1) Dancing With Mr. D; 2) 100 Years Ago; 3) Coming Down Again; 4) Doo Doo Doo
Doo Doo (Heartbreaker); 5) Angie; 6) Silver Train; 7) Hide Your Love; 8) Winter; 9) Can You Hear The Music; 10) Star Star.
I do not think that the Rolling Stones «broke
down» as a larger-than-life creative force the minute they set foot in that Kingston
studio in November 1972; I do believe that even a brief glimpse at a few
highlights from the Ladies And Gentlemen
movie, shot during their mid-1972 tour of the States (and let us not even
mention the far more infamous schizomentary Cocksucker
Blues, shot behind the scenes of that tour), is enough to demonstrate that
the breakdown occurred earlier — that somehow, as they emerged from the dazzled
seclusion of Keith's French villa back into the limelight once again, bright
lights big city finally went to my baby Mick's head, and plunged the Rolling
Stones into a world of glitz, kitsch, comedy, and self-parody. Deep down
inside, they remained serious musicians, and their channels to divine (or
devilish) inspiration remained technically open, but their social priorities
had shifted, and not in a divine way at all.
Although the musical aspect of the tour
remained great, as Taylor was constantly progressing as a musician and Keith,
even despite all the heroin problems, had to match expectations, Jagger had
embarked on a downward slide — taking his cues from the glam/shock-rock
explosion of 1971-72, he was now placing his full trust into (a) garish costumes,
(b) androgynous make-up, (c) the idea that, somehow, singing no longer provided such efficient entertainment for the
people as did barking, slurring, and (figurative) spitting, and that energy,
flash, and extravagance mattered far more than precision and subtlety. Subsequently,
a Stones live show could still be great — but it could no longer be
transcendental, skipping over the conventions of show-business and digging into
something much deeper (and scarier). Even ʽMidnight Ramblerʼ went from musical
drama to musical vaudeville — and since it seemed that that was just what the
world wanted, that the world got tired of too much musical drama and opted for
vaudeville instead, Mephisto Mick had no problem switching to Muppet Mick.
Unfortunately, once the switch took place on
stage, it became hard to leave it switched off in the studio as well. Working
conditions in Jamaica were clearly not as beneficial as they were in their
French seclusion: even without Keith's obvious deterioration as a creative
musical force (Goats Head Soup is
the first record since the Stones' arrival as songwriters to not feature even a
single «classic» Keith riff), they'd somehow lost — or, perhaps, intentionally
dropped — most of that preciously introspective vibe, the ability to offer us a
sweet insight into that world of decadence, decay, misery, trouble, and
redemption so vividly depicted on Sticky
Fingers and Exile. The songs
could still be fun, but they could no longer be so easily relatable, and where
there used to be an enchanting underbelly of self-irony, muted pain, and calls
for compassion behind the surface coating of decadence and hooliganry, too
many songs on Goats Head Soup simply
contain nothing beyond that superficial coating.
This is not to say that Goats Head Soup is a bad album — in fact, it has an odd scent of
mystery about it, and is far more difficult to crack than, for instance, It's Only Rock'n'Roll. Like Exile, it is a mess, only this time,
anything but a coherent mess — more like a transitional effort that never
manages to decide if it still wants to be soulful and serious, or if it just
wants to give you a good sleazy time. It is a record where silly embarrassments
easily go hand in hand with underrated masterpieces, where I can wish to
strangle Mick Jagger one moment and go cry on his shoulder the very next one.
It is totally unpredictable in its choice of styles, directions, even in its
bizarre sequencing of the tunes (who was the idiot, I wonder, that did not choose ʽWinterʼ as the final track
of the album?). Above all, it is certainly not
a musical disaster, as one could easily conclude from reading too many critical
reviews — it is more of a marking time album, one where The Rolling Stones
cease to be musical gods and demote themselves to the status of ordinary,
well-meaning, still-talented musical citizens.
Perhaps the record would not go down in such
heavy flames in musical history, though, were it to begin with something other
than ʽDancing With Mr. Dʼ — arguably the single worst Stones song since the
beginning of their peak period. Again, it's not a bad song, but its vibe agrees far better with the vaudevillian
shock-rock of, say, Alice Cooper than classic Stones. Perhaps Mick was thinking
of it as a sort of «localized» Haiti-voodoo-version of ʽSympathy For The
Devilʼ, but the idea did not merely backfire, it was dumb from the very
beginning. It is almost symbolic that the song's riff, which probably wouldn't even
make it into the top 100 Richards riffs, was inverse to the riff of ʽJumpin'
Jack Flashʼ — it really sounds as if somebody's going against the grain here,
and that massive energy charge that usually accompanies any great Stones rocker
is nowhere to be found. The only purpose of the tune is to shock and titillate
— ooh, dark, spooky, is that Jagger man trying to really creep us out?
"Then I saw the flesh just fall off her bones / The eyes in her skull were
burning like coals", man, that's some groovy B-movie shit out there. I
don't deny the entertaining value — I can even sing along to the tune if I'm
feeling clownish. But for a band that used to open their records with ʽSympathy
For The Devilʼ and ʽGimme Shelterʼ, or even ʽBrown Sugarʼ (which at least
managed to elevate vulgarity to an arrogant anthemic level), this kind of
opening is a total disgrace.
The other two «stereotypical» blues-rockers
captured here are marginally better. ʽSilver Trainʼ is basically a
run-train-run sequel to ʽAll Down The Lineʼ; musically, it is distinguished by
some great slide work from Taylor, features one of the best train-whistle
harmonica imitations ever produced, and manages to gradually bild up excitement
with more and more musical overdubs and more and more hystrionics from Mick —
his getting into character on this
track does not offend me in the least, though it is still a step down from the
lyrical and musical quality of ʽAll Down The Lineʼ, more of a generic ramblin'
man tale now than a personal prayer for a shot of salvation once in a while.
ʽStar Starʼ (today, I believe, they prefer the song to always go by its
original title of ʽStarfuckerʼ, which they sing all right in the chorus but did
not dare put on the album sleeve) is a cheap, vulgar shot at groupies and
socialites, but it also works at your basic Chuck Berry level — without
focusing on the lyrics, I merely admire the tightness of the band, including Mick, who makes a pretty pair
with Keith indeed, ripping through the words with proto-punkish swagger and
audacity... well, if it was good enough for the New York Dolls, why shouldn't
it be enough for Mick Jagger? It's just a lil' old comic rock'n'roll number.
Oh, and kudos to good old Stu for his barrelhouse piano on both tracks — lil'
old comic rock'n'roll numbers just aren't the same without his thick, nimble,
well-meaning fingers on the keys.
The problem with ʽDoo Doo Doo Doo Doo
(Heartbreaker)ʼ, apart from its title (which sort of suggests that "doo
doo doo doo doo" is more important than "heartbreaker"), is that
the Stones never used to be that
straightforward about social issues. It's as if Mick had listened to one too
many Curtis Mayfield / Marvin Gaye / Bobby Blue Bland records and said to
himself, "Hey! Where's that funky anthem about police brutality and
teenage drug addicts that should have been in the Rolling Stones catalog years
ago?" So, presto-changeo, we come up with some glaringly evil situations
("a ten-year old girl on a street corner / sticking needles in her
arm"), dress them up with dark clavinet, funky horns, falsetto harmonies,
and there you have it — readymade for the very next blaxploitation movie to
come along. It's like a poor man's ʽGimme Shelterʼ, but, funny enough, Mick did
not have to scream his head off on ʽGimmie Shelterʼ to contribute to an atmosphere
of surrounding dread, whereas here, this atmosphere feels very much contrived.
Again, if you just think of the song
as a piece of gritty funk-pop, it's okay — but it never really fulfills its
basic goal, and neither Mick nor any of the musicians sound as if they really
meant it. "Heartbreaker, heartbreaker, I wanna tear your world
apart", he roars, but we don't even know whose world he is singing about
in the end (it seems that the song eventually switches gears from lamenting
about social injustice to lamenting about a cheater), and whoever it is, the
exhortation rings empty. Good groove, bad vibe.
And yet, at the same time, every once in a
while, Goats Head Soup suddenly
turns around and delivers — with strong echoes of the old classic soulful
Stones. Arguably the most underrated song here is the quasi-nostalgic ʽ100
Years Agoʼ: "quasi-" because, while its lyrics seem to deal with
memories of good old times, the song itself reeks most strongly with a feeling
of being lost and confused in the present. Coming right off the heels of the
ʽDancing With Mr Dʼ spectacle, it is a thousand times more serious — an ominous
pop-rocker, driven by Billy Preston's clenched-teeth clavinet lines and, for
once in his life, featuring Mick Taylor really breaking out a sweat on a fluent,
funky, hyper-aggressive wah-wah solo, the only problem being that the song
begins to fade out just as he is really hitting his stride, and that Mick was
probably so envious of the man taking away the spotlight, he had to have the
lead guitar mixed under his endless
stream of ad-libbed barking rather than over
it. Still, flawed as it is in terms of execution, if there is one song on the
album where «Mr. D» really makes a
personal appearance, it is ʽ100 Years Agoʼ — perhaps the one Stones song to subtly
display deep fears of aging and loss of relevance, and, in that regard,
comparable in terms of impact even with Pink Floyd's ʽTimeʼ from the same year
(though I am certainly not suggesting that ʽ100 Years Agoʼ would ever stand a
chance of winning).
Still later on, we stumble across ʽWinterʼ — a
song that could be legitimately regarded as a faint copy of ʽMoonlight Mileʼ
(and certainly string arranger Nicky Harrison is striving to ape the work of
Paul Buckmaster as closely as possible), and also as one that has its own
autonomous function here, rather than being the grand climactic finale for a
journey of hedonism and suffering; but I can't help thinking of it as a sincere
confessional moment anyway, and Jagger's "sometimes I wanna wrap my coat around
you" is the very last time we will see him in his deeply humanistic
emploi, a ricochet effect from ʽShine A Lightʼ if there ever was one. Again,
Taylor joins in the fray with verve, contributing a suitably soaring solo, and
I find myself caught up in the song's grand textures, almost enough to forgive
Mr. Jagger for having just wasted four minutes of my time on the limp piano
blues improv ʽHide Your Loveʼ (now there's
a piece of shameful filler we haven't seen since... actually, have we ever seen such a shameful piece of
filler?).
The other two ballads on the first side are
somewhat more notorious: ʽComing Down Againʼ is historically important as the
first in a never-ending series of soulful-shapeless Keith Richards ballads that
are loved by all the fans of Keith Richards' immortal soul (I, personally,
prefer a bit more shape to songs written and/or sung by Keith Richards), and
ʽAngieʼ is, well, ʽAngieʼ. Overwrought, insincere, theatrical, narcissistic,
but still infused with a deeply melancholic spirit, no thanks to Mick — the
best part about the song is Nicky Hopkins' majestic piano, anyway.
So, yes, confusion is the word of day. A
drug-addled Keith, a glam-ridden Mick, a trip to Jamaica that was probably confused
with a trip to Haiti, and still, behind it all, broken shards of soul and some
deep, dark emotions that could not be wiped out or concealed by a thousand
dance parties with Mr. D or "tricks with fruit" (God I don't even want to know what was really meant by
that line). There is no denying that the Stones really lost it here, but Goats Head Soup still retains its
fascination after all these years, just because you can actually witness the
process of losing it — see the flesh just falling off the bones, with eyes in
the skulls still burning like coals. That said, don't blame it all on Mick's
big ego and Keith's big needle, either — pretty much every Sixties hero was
beginning to lose it around that time, as musical and general artistic values
began shifting so drastically that even the most talented people no longer had
the stamina to keep up. Look at Mick Jagger in TV appearances circa 1973 — it
is so obvious that he wants to be David Bowie, yet he is only aping Bowie's
fashion and Bowie's outrageousness, without ever having a go at Bowie's, um,
«conceptual framework». On Sticky
Fingers and Exile On Main St.,
the Stones were still the Stones; on Goats
Head Soup, Mick Jagger got the idea that time, waiting for no one, does not
want the Stones to be the Stones any more — and so he began transforming the
Stones into a mix of David Bowie, Alice Cooper, and Curtis Mayfield, with
predictably tragic results. Something tells me he never did that much poking around into other
people's dressing rooms circa 1968-69.
Predictably tragic results, yes, yet also
unpredictably intriguing ones, which is why the record still gets a thumbs up,
despite all the harsh criticism. With Goats
Head Soup, The Rolling Stones downgrade themselves to the level of
«entertainers» rather than «visionaries»; however, unless you have something
against «entertainers» in general, Goats
Head Soup is still top class entertainment — the only two songs on it that
have never worked for me are ʽComing Down Againʼ (sorry, Keith — I still love
you, baby, everywhere I look, I see your eyes and wake up in a cold sweat) and
ʽHide Your Loveʼ (with Ian Stewart, Nicky Hopkins, and Billy Preston all present, what sort of moron could let Mick Jagger
behind the piano?), and the rest are all good, even ʽDancing With Mr. Dʼ if you
put on plenty of blackface, and even ʽHeartbreakerʼ if you admit that its
lyrics got there by mistake, so they do not distract you from dancing the night
away. I certainly do not subscribe to the idea that these post-Exile albums have no lasting value, or
that latter day Stones should only be accessed by way of compilations — on the
contrary, most of the accidental gems on these albums were not in the form of
singles; is there even one Stones compilation out there with ʽ100 Years Agoʼ
on it? The way I see it, Goats Head Soup
is not so much of a «soup» as it is a tasty cheesecake with a couple cherries
on top — and a really strange aftertaste that still makes you wonder about any
hidden ingredients that you might have missed.
Maybe it's time to stop plucking the rapidly decaying carcass and move on to greener pastures? The Kinks, the Who... the Zombies, perhaps?
ReplyDeleteThe Kinks sucked much, much harder in 1973 than the Rolling Stones ever did.
ReplyDeleteFrom the same year, a few much better albums: The dark side of the moon, Catch a fire, Raw Power, Innervisions, The houses of the Holly ... and I can mention more. I know this is not science. But your opinion is biased with the Stones at this point of their career. Before that I can agree with you regarding their greatness. No es personal. Sólo una opinión de un fanático como tu. ENRIQUE CHADICOV.
DeleteJust to clarify if this has been somehow lost in the depths of the review: The review does not state that Goats Head Soup is the best, or one of the best, albums of 1973. Nor does it state that Goats Head Soup is a "great" Stones album on par with the 1966-72 period. But to get a thumbs up, a piece of music does not need to be great - it needs to be enjoyable, and I enjoy GHS perfectly fine, for some of the reasons described in the review as well as others.
DeleteHope that helps.
Please George, thumbs up?. With Keith totally invalid because of drugs consumption (and Mick Taylor being a heavy consumer too besides they didn't get along), plus Mick living for the jet set and as you said trying to be Bowie, GHS was a real disaster. Especially for the Stones standards. It is not a valid point to say that in comparison to other Artists this was better. Angie is the only classic, not a brilliant one. Heartbreaker a very good song. Winter a bad copy of Moonlight Mile, fake and soulless. The rest is not good. Exile was the last true classic, with Keith interested in artistic achievements. You know, following Gram Parsons, etc. GHS es una mierda. ENRIQUE CHADICOV
ReplyDeleteThis sounds a little too much like the generic critical-consensus-point-of-view on the album. Drugs and jet sets do not automatically discredit the artist - look at Led Zeppelin. It is better to listen to GHS without preconceptions and try to come up with your own perspective.
DeleteI cannot help wondering why you think Sympathy for the Devil sincere and Angie not. The first one is as theatrical, overwrought and narcissistic (Jagger impersonating Lucifer, yeah). Disclaimer: I think both songs excellent and being theatrical, overwrought, insincere and narcissistic is part of it. And of course I'm not a fan. I think the fan favourite Jumping Jack Flash an inferior rewrite of Satisfaction, a song I already called flawed. It's songs like Sympathy, Like a Rainbow and indeed Angie that force me to admit that the Stones were a lot better than I'd like to admit.
ReplyDeleteAn inappropriate comparison. Angie is a heart-on-sleeve lyrical ballad, and Sympathy For The Devil is a piece of satire, first and foremost; the criterion of sincerity/insincerity hardly applies to it at all. It would make more sense to compare between 'Angie' and, say, 'Wild Horses' - a song that, in my view, has a far more sincere ring to it.
DeleteWhat a smart - if sad - analysis. Once again, I will listen to an old album with new ears.
ReplyDeleteI like this album, precisely because of the non-attempt at greatness George notes. It's the Stones just being the Stones, back when it meant something. They rock a bit, get a little dirty, a little spooky, and throw in some pop for everyone to like.
ReplyDeleteI agree on "Coming Down Again" and "Hide Your Love" being the zeroes. But it's not like they are holding you up. If you are listening to "Goat's Head Soup," you are pretty much passing the time anyway. They are just boring filler, as opposed to the fun filler which in my view makes up the bulk of the record.
Great review!
ReplyDelete"The Kinks sucked much, much harder in 1973 than the Rolling Stones ever did."
ReplyDeleteIndeed.
I kinda love this album. Definitely not where someone should start w/ the Stones, but it's got so many delightfully underplayed gems for the true fans. Raucous rockers, drugged out nightmares, and two beautiful ballads.
Maybe it's the sequencing that drove folks away? "Dancing w/ Mr D" truly is one of the worst Stones openers, and to put it in such close proximity w/ "Coming Down Again" is a real vibe killer. I feel like if the record opened with "100 Years Ago" you'd get much closer to what "GHS" is all about, i.e. eclecticism, confusion, wistfulness, rockin, etc.