The Rolling Stones: Dirty Work

THE ROLLING STONES: DIRTY WORK (1986)

1) One Hit (To The Body); 2) Fight; 3) Harlem Shuffle; 4) Hold Back; 5) Too Rude; 6) Winning Ugly; 7) Back To Zero; 8) Dirty Work; 9) Had It With You; 10) Sleep Tonight.

It is not disputable that the overall state of the band in the mid-Eighties was quite pitiful: not only were the personal relations between Mick and Keith reaching an absolute nadir, with Mick's egotism and Keith's conservatism getting the better of them, but then there was also the problem with Charlie Watts, a notorious slowpoke whose alcohol and drug problems finally caught up with him a whole decade after Keith's crisis. Even Wyman seemed to find more comfort pro­ducing movie soundtracks in that era than working with the Stones.

Now the Stones are known as a band that often seemed to work better in a time of crisis, capable of channelling their agitation, confusion, and tension into music — think back to 1967 or to 1972 for some classic examples. Unfortunately, their worst crisis (worst, because its main reasons were internal rather than external) took place not in 1967 and not in 1972, but in 1985-86, some of the least auspicious years, to put it mildly, for Sixties' and Seventies' veteran rockers in general; and although you'd have to be deaf and dumb not to notice all that tension reflected in the sounds of Dirty Work, this time around it does not help the music, it only makes matters more obnoxious. There is no tricking the hand of fate — it was 1986, and it was the Stones' destiny to come up with their crappiest artistic statement of all time.

What is wrong with this record? Well — almost everything. To produce it, they brought in one of the biggest stars of Eighties' production, Steve Lillywhite, whose impressive resume already in­cluded Peter Gabriel's classic third album and the first three albums by U2; incidentally, he also happens to be the guy often credited with pioneering the gated reverb drum effect (which, predic­tably, is used a-plenty on this album). The problem is, what worked fine and dandy for the new styles of music developed by Gabriel and U2 could hardly be expected to work for old school rockers like the Stones — and it doesn't: the combination of glossy, plastic production with tradi­tional rock'n'roll values pretty much wastes the gloss and discredits the rock'n'roll. This was already a big problem with Undercover, but here modern production values are applied far more systematically, and the constant use of reverb and echo gets obnoxious very quickly.

Stiff production would still be a minor nuisance, though, had the songwriting and playing been kept on the level — which they are not. Ronnie Wood is credited as co-writer on a whopping four tracks here, which is already suspicious, seeing how reluctant Mick and Keith had always been to share the songwriting credits with anybody else; this is essentially a sign of their not giving a damn whatsoever (for the record, ever since the 1989 comeback, poor Ronnie never got a single other songwriting credit). Even more ridiculously, ʽBack To Zeroʼ is co-credited to their guest piano player, Chuck Leavell — did the late Ian Stewart or the great Nicky Hopkins ever get even one credit on some of those tracks that would never work so well without their participation?.. Throw in two covers, and you can see how much of a mess the record really was.

But hey, perhaps, against all odds, some of these songs could turn out to be masterpieces? Well, miracles did not happen in 1986. A few of them rank among the worst piles of sonic shit ever committed to tape in the name of the Rolling Stones — including both conventional rockers and songs outside of the band's typical range. For instance, ʽHold Backʼ almost manages to sound like a contemporary hair metal anthem — big fat sound with a shapeless, meaningless riff and the entire song dominated by headache-inducing drum bombast and an endless stream of tuneless barking from Mick «Turpentine Butt» Jagger (which, by the way, is also a common problem with the record: the only style for Mick to sing in here is gurgle and bark, bark and gurgle, as if he wanted to compete in monotony with some bona fide hardcore punk outfit). ʽFightʼ, true to its title, is not nearly as shapeless as to what concerns the verses and choruses, but otherwise shares all the problems of ʽHold Backʼ — no good riff, no good vocal melody, and no true Stonesy dynamics to the playing.

With the non-rockers, the situation does not get any better: there are no well-made funky sur­prises like ʽToo Much Bloodʼ here. Instead, you have ʽBack To Zeroʼ, a messy dance-pop number that finds the band genuinely struggling to find a coordinated groove — one big reason behind this, perhaps, is that, according to most accounts, the band almost never really played as a band in the studio at the time, with individual members laying on their contributions one by one, a process that could work with Paul McCartney but never really with the Stones. (At least, never since the creative peak of the late Sixties, when Keith alone could work magic with his guitar overdub layers). Meanwhile, Keith gets re-engaged with his passion for reggae, producing a piss-poor version of Half Pint's 1983 hit ʽWinsomeʼ, retitled ʽToo Rudeʼ and overlaid with so much echo on everything that you get the feeling of standing on one side of a cave entrance while the band is getting it on on the other side. Sh-sh-sh-sh-shak-e-e-e! And pointless: who really needs to hear the Stones doing reggae?

A couple more of the rockers barely make it to the «mediocre» level due to slightly higher levels of tightness and catchiness (ʽWinning Uglyʼ; the ridiculously belated anti-capitalist rant of the title track), but on the whole, there are only three songs here that I would recommend salvaging for compilations — not surprisingly, two of these were chosen for single releases and were also the only ones temporarily resurrected for the 1989-90 touring program. ʽOne Hit (To The Body)ʼ, even with the stupid production and the barking vocals (here, they work though), is a good piece of ravaging rock'n'soul, again, with no decent riff to speak of, but at least a catchy chorus that does a good job of conveying the mixed love-and-pain emotion of love addiction. The most poignant bit about it, of course, is that the song's lyrics seemed to be more of an allegory for the love-and-hate relationship between the band's two members — as further confirmed by the half-hilarious, half-frightening pseudo-karate match between Mick and Keith in the accompanying video (no chainsaws this time, but Mr. Richards can get even spookier with a guitar). As a ques­tionable bonus, you can throw in a guest guitar solo from Mr. Jimmy Page himself — strange they didn't bring in Eddie Van Halen, who'd probably be even more suitable.

The same trick is also reprised on the far less known ʽHad It With Youʼ, which I have always held a soft spot for because of all the songs in here, it is the one that is least encumbered with bombastic production and, consequently, the most close one to reflect those good old col­lective Stones values. Apparently, Keith wrote the lyrics and Mick got to sing them, tacitly acknowled­ging the truth of lines like "You always seem to haunt me / Serving out injunctions / Shouting out instructions" and "You're a mean mistreater / You're a dirty dirty rat scum" — and putting his bark to good use on the pissed-off "I HAD it, HAD it, HAD it wich'ooo!" chorus. It is not a great song — it is simply a charming autobiographical moment, done in style, including, finally, a normal drum track from Charlie and a proper harmonica solo from Mick. Too bad they'd never dare perform this live in public, meaning that the song will forever dangle in obscurity, even though, in my mind, it deserves to be included in any comprehensive musical biography of The Rolling Stones.

Then, finally, there is their cover of ʽHarlem Shuffleʼ, a resuscitation of the old Bob & Earl hit from 1963 — probably just to see how well this «Lillywhite Stones» sound of 1986 could acco­­modate the old soul values from the young and innocent days. They made a good choice, because the bass-heavy original already had a shade of surprising darkness to it, which is here emphasized even further: the Stones' take lays it on even thicker in the bass department, and even the organ has a certain doom-laden atmosphere to it, so that most of the time it's not so much a ʽHarlem Shuffleʼ as it is a ʽHighway To Hellʼ (much less «happy fun» in spirit than the AC/DC song, for that matter). The good news is that the song was catchy from the beginning, and also that it is taken at a respectable mid-tempo rather than whipped up to crazy frenzy like most of the stuff here — and even Jagger's barking makes sense as he is playing a possessed figure with all those "whoah, whoah, whoah, I can't stand it no more!" Ironically, this is the tune that reveals the most psychological depth on the entire album — there's dancing as an allegory for the sex drive, and there's all those primal and hellish connotations for both, bringing back memories of how this band once used to set the tone in the art of on-the-brink temptation.

But are three songs enough to properly pull Dirty Work out of the Stones' asscrack where it has remained firmly wedged for thirty years now? I don't think so. Together with Emotional Rescue, these are the only two records in the band's catalog that, on the whole, have an offensive aura to me — even if they sound quite different from each other and offend in completely different ways. (Funny enough, both of them also end with an amorphous lullaby from Keith: ʽSleep Tonightʼ has a slightly more memorable chorus than ʽAll About Youʼ, mainly due to repetition, but overall is undistinguishable from the large pool of slow soul ballads written by the guy, not to mention just as poorly produced here as anything.) Simply put, with a few moments' exception, the band's heart was not clearly in this when they went ahead and did it — this is a record that never should have happened in the first place. Had Mick and Keith truly broken up for good after this, Dirty Work would have been a fairly pitiful way to end an illustrious career; as it happened, it ended up just being a time-marking embarrassment, a certified thumbs down record, only out there to prove the universal applicability of the term «mid-life crisis», even to superhumans, and to serve as yet another piece of strong evidence for the «mid-Eighties curse» from which not even Keith Richards was exempt. Perhaps if he'd still been on heroin though...

The Rolling Stones: Undercover

THE ROLLING STONES: UNDERCOVER (1983)

1) Undercover Of The Night; 2) She Was Hot; 3) Tie You Up (The Pain Of Love); 4) Wanna Hold You; 5) Feel On Baby; 6) Too Much Blood; 7) Pretty Beat Up; 8) Too Tough; 9) All The Way Down; 10) It Must Be Hell.

Gather round, children, and I'll tell you a story about little G. S.'s first taste of Undercover. It was something like late 1988 or early 1989, I do believe, and little G. S. was enjoying the first cultural benefits of perestroika — such as, for instance, being able to trot over to the nearest «Culture club» where some seedy dude would surreptitiously show you his album of... no, not pictures of naked women (although this was not totally out of the question, either), but titles of rock music LPs that you could get him to tape for you for an exorbitant sum that devastated all of your lunch money; but what was lunch in comparison to the ability to finally add Aftermath, or Between The Buttons, or Get Yer Ya Ya's Out!, to your already impressive (by the standards of the times) catalog of your Dad's classic Stones LPs?..

Another cultural benefit was being able to make your way to another «culture club», where equally seedy dudes (who must have made a real fortune with this), equipped with enviable VHS players and color TV screens, were just as happy to take your money for showing you pirated copies of movies you could previously only dream about — everything from Help! and Yellow Submarine to Jesus Christ Superstar and Woodstock... nope, probably not Woodstock, I think they still had a thing about nudity back then, even in a semi-underground setting like that. Any­way, what I'm getting at is that one of those days, little G.S. finally scooped together enough dough to gain entrance to the screening of Video Rewind, a musical program said to be focusing on music videos and performances by The Rolling Stones — nothing else was known beforehand about this, and so little G.S. happily went along, excited beyond measure at the perspective of actually seeing his beloved Get Yer Ya Ya's Out! come to life on screen, or something like that, at least. "Greatest rock'n'roll band in the world", remember?

What little G.S. saw on the screen that evening became one of the biggest shocks of his life, a childhood trauma that still resonates within him even (almost) thirty years later. Instead of seeing a great rock'n'roll band playing with (demon) fire on stage, he saw a bunch of clownish-looking freaks who spent most of their screen time entertaining viewers with dumb, cheap thrills. And at the center of this all were three videos that the freaks in question, as young G.S. properly learned only years later, shot for the Undercover album — a straightforward anthem to sexual arousal with focus on trouser buttons popping rather than the music (ʽShe Was Hotʼ), an equally straight­forward anthem to blood-and-guts with focus on red fluids, chainsaws and chopped body parts rather than the music (ʽToo Much Bloodʼ), and, finally, an ode to violence, guns, explosions with focus on Keith Richards shooting Mick Jagger through the head rather than the music (ʽUnder­cover Of The Nightʼ). It did not help matters much that the entire program was ran through the perspective of an awfully gynoid-like made-up leader of the band, or that one of the culminating moments was a video of ʽBrown Sugarʼ with interspersed bits of footage from the 1976 and 1981 tours, in both of which the leader of the band seemed to behave like a village idiot, justifying the worst Soviet stereotypes of what a «degraded rock musician» was supposed to look and act like. But the Undercover videos were really the cream of the crop, and life was never the same.

One thing that watching the video really did for me was make me pull the plug completely on post-1970 Stones for a long time (I think that my first listen even to Sticky Fingers, let alone everything else, did not come until the mid-Nineties or so), but what was even worse, I guess, was the odd realization that somehow, somewhere, in some dark corner of the subconscious I enjoyed what I saw — in, perhaps, the same manner as some people would feel about being acci­dentally exposed to a peep show. It was cheap, stupid, superficial, disgusting (and, of course, morally decadent, as befits an all-corrupting capitalist society!), but it was also disturbing, stimu­lating, and... fun, to some extent. In any case, it turned out to be unforgettable, and for a long time, visions of Anita Morris burning Mick to a hole in the ground or of Keith and Ronnie chasing after Mick with chainsaws through a grizzly stone mausoleum would haunt me in my dreams, no matter how much I tried getting away from them. But it took me many, many years before I'd actually allowed myself to recognize the legitimacy of that feeling.

These days, of course, it's all laughable. Nobody who'd actually lived in the West throughout the late Sixties / Seventies / early Eighties could probably experience such strong emotions about a bunch of titillating music videos in 1983 — even if they were banned for controversial reasons on stations all around the UK and the US, more because of the overall conservative trend in the Reagan-Thatcher era than because they pretended to set some new standard in TV violence and profanity. And yet, Undercover still remains an interesting chapter in Stones history — and an album that tends to polarize fans very much, with some seeing it more in the «little G. S.» per­spective (uninspired, stupid songwriting abusing modern technologies and focusing on hooligan­ry, not music) and others defending it as an unusually creative and experimental set, perhaps even as the last time when the Stones actually tried to do something innovative, instead of just settling, once and for all, into a stale formula.

The thing is, there's a bit of truth in each of these approaches. Undercover is a brave experiment, and it is also the beginning of a rotten formula. Undercover genuinely hits a nerve or two, and it is also cheesy and embarrassing. It shows that the Stones, when they really needed to, could move forward with the times — and it also shows that they could really suck at this. How many people actually bought the album just because it featured a seductive naked woman on the front sleeve? How many people did not buy the album because it featured a seductive naked woman on the front sleeve? (Or, come to think of it, how many people did not buy the album because it featured a seductive naked woman on the front sleeve with all the most important areas «under cover», har har har?) Mind you, this could have been a factor, particularly given that Undercover became the band's first album in a long, long time to not hit the #1 spot either in the UK or in the US. Guess the young G.S. was not the only fan to be disappointed.

Anyway, on to the music. This is where the Eighties finally hit us, with sampling, phasing, and other technotronic marvels of production actively employed during the sessions, probably cour­tesy of co-producer Chris Kimsey and recording engineer Bob Clearmountain — the worst ser­vice of all being paid to Charlie Watts, whose drumming is largely eclipsed here by the huge wall of electronic effects on the drums, not always abysmal, but usually effacing one of the most dis­tinctive elements of what makes a Stones album a true Stones album. Add to this Jagger's on­going fascination with new musical genres, and there are plenty of tracks here that hardly ever sound like Stones tracks — in fact, there's even one track, ʽToo Much Bloodʼ, where Keith is not present at all, with guitarist Jim Barber laying on the New Wave-style riffage instead.

Then again, this is, perhaps, not the worst feature of the album. Any true admirer of the Stones' musical ambitions should actually be happy when the Stones try not to sound like «the Stones» (were that always so, we would not have us any Satanic Majesties, or any baroque pop, or any ʽFingerprint Filesʼ or ʽHeavensʼ), and, in fact, some of the weakest songs here are precisely the ones where they try to sound too hard as «the Stones». Case in point: ʽToo Toughʼ, one of the first totally generic Stones rockers, of which they'd have at least a couple on each subsequent record, with unimpressive second-hand riffage from Keith and generic cockiness from Mick. And does anybody even begin to remember ʽAll The Way Downʼ? Imagine a ʽShatteredʼ without its characteristic riff, without its funny vocal bits, without its humor, and with a chorus whose only line forever stays in need of a good resolution — that never comes because they probably allowed themselves ten minutes to cobble the song together, at best.

More than half of the album suffers not so much from excessive overproduction or embarrassing cheap thrills as it does from sheer laziness of approach. Why does ʽPretty Beat Upʼ sound like a scuzzy vocal improvisation that Jagger performs over a stiff, monotonous groove whose basic riff seems to have been lifted by Keith from Pete Townshend's ʽEminence Frontʼ? (And this time not even the sax player can help them — where Sonny Rollins played massive, smoothly running, coherent solos to send ʽSlaveʼ into the stratosphere, David Sanborn here plays isolated, choppy, powerless licks, or, at least, that's the way they sound in the mix). Why does ʽIt Must Be Hellʼ recycle the riff of Exile's ʽSoul Survivorʼ, and keeps doing that in a manner that shows Keith completely chained to the basic chord sequence, doomed to simply replay the same phrase over and over and over for five minutes? Whatever happened to the glory days of ʽCan't You Hear Me Knockingʼ, when the band showed no signs whatsoever of this stiff paralysis?

Not all of the experimentation is successful, either. For one thing, Undercover includes what is probably the Stones' worst ever attempt at a reggae song — well, remembering ʽCherry Oh Babyʼ, they never really felt at home with the genre (despite being good pals with people like Peter Tosh and all), but ʽFeel On Babyʼ, featuring the then-ubiquitous dynamic duo of Sly and Robbie (who were also behind the stiff production of Dylan's Infidels), is basically five minutes of nothing, an unbearably slickified, groove-less groove with minimal melodic ideas and a «wet jungle» atmo­sphere that feels too humorless to be entertaining and too overloaded with production gimmicks to be taken seriously.

On the other hand, ʽUndercover Of The Nightʼ itself remains arguably the highest point in the overall tragic story of Mick Jagger's uneasy relations with modern technology. On this track, the groove is actually well established five seconds into the song, with Wyman's funky bass, while Keith lays down gunshot-like power chords that are a perfect fit with the song's overall message of violence, chaos, and anarchy in Latin America. Even the electronic percussion is a good choice here, made to sound like incessant barrages of machine-gun fire, and by the time the song gets around to the instrumental break, with Keith and Ronnie wielding their axes like a couple of homicidal maniacs, it is hardly possible not to get pulled in. Small wonder that this is only one of  three songs here that still crop up from time to time in the Stones' live repertoire.

The other relative success — although this time, the song is so un-Stones like that they never even began to think about bringing it on stage, as Keith would probably veto the decision — is ʽToo Much Bloodʼ. Corny and cheaply provoking as it is, with Mick's retelling of the Issei Sagawa story and all, it still has the catchiest refrain on the album and, more importantly, a top notch brass groove — probably the only song in Stones history which is totally made by the horns rather than guitars (the guitars, as has already been mentioned, were played by Stones roadie Jim Barber who was told by Mick to «do an Andy Summers» — I think he did more of a David Byrne, myself, but that's hardly relevant anyway). Unlike ʽFeel On Babyʼ, ʽToo Much Bloodʼ is actually quite entertaining — although, brushing off the cobwebs of childhood phobias and traumas, I'd say that it works even better in conjunction with the video, which, for my money, is downright creepier and more disturbing than Michael Jackson's ʽThrillerʼ (under whose heavy influence it was almost certainly shot by Julien Temple); at the very least, Keith never looked more believable than when wedging a chainsaw in the back of a chair where Mick was sitting just a couple seconds ago!

The third video was made for the only other Mick-sung Undercover song that would later be performed live (you can see it, for instance, in the Shine A Light movie) — ʽShe Was Hotʼ — and this is the closest they come here to creating a «retro-sounding», circa ʽStar Starʼ time, bawdy Stones riff-rocker with Chuck Berry-isms a-plenty. Aside from the hilarious realization that it had been only three years since the release of ʽShe's So Coldʼ (and all the possible ensuing jokes about a three-year period of global warming, etc.), and the trouser-busting antics of Anita Morris in the accom­panying video, there's not much to say about this other than that, if you really really really loved ʽStar Starʼ, you will probably also love ʽShe Was Hotʼ, but a little less. At least it's better than those completely lifeless rockers on Side B, not least because it features old buddy Ian Stewart in his most naturally comfortable role of the boogie-woogie accompanyist — alas, for the last time in his sweet short life.

To complete the picture, a couple of words are probably in order on ʽTie You Up (The Pain Of Love)ʼ, a song every bit as horrible as its title implies it to be, but one towards which I have always felt a strange and deeply dirty attraction. It's not the first time and not the last time when Jagger played the role of Mr. Sex Drive Incarnate, but something about this particular recording, electronic percussion and libido-choked roar and warts and all, echoes that old Stooges vibe — the rugged, braindead caveman yearning for release, release, release! Stupid, I know, but let us count this as a secret guilty pleasure. So good they never thought about making a video for this, though, or the little G.S. might have been driven to complete despair back in 1989, enough to throw all his hard-earned Stones tapes in the nearest Soviet dust bin or something.

So, as you can see, as a whole Undercover can be anything but boring, even if, in parts, it con­tains some of the least interesting and inspiring Stones songs written up to that point. Ironically, though, while it was the first album to clearly demarcate the differentiating zones of interest for Mick and Keith, and while it is usually Keith who is thought of as the integral musical engine of the Stones rather than Mick, it is the new Mick-style material that still holds up a bit rather than Keith-style material. At that point, Mick was already considering a solo career and beginning to seriously pander to mainstream pop tastes and all the crap that they brought with them — but as for the freshly cleaned-up and internally (though not externally) rejuvenated Keith, he seems to have been far more preoccupied with his new passion, Patti Hansen, than with writing good music: his only vocal number here, ʽWanna Hold Youʼ, is a pop-rocker with no signs of a decent riff and a chorus that is more of a perfunctory love mantra than a melodic highlight. (But if it played its part in getting Patti to marry him, who's to argue that a song like that cannot have a certain objective value?). Beginning with Undercover, it became more and more of a chore to get a truly great riff out of Keith — blame it on a happy family life, or on the absence of heroin, or both (can one have a happy family life and heroin? only if your wife is Courtney Love, I'd guess), but the fact is, the well had really run dry, and therefore, blaming Mick for making the Stones to sound less like the Stones and more like the Mick Jagger Experience, which Keith did a lot in those days, was a bit hypocritical.

Still, if you want to have at least a mildly positive impression of the album, it is best to think of it in the context of its times (where it sounds quite kick-ass next to much, if not most of the stuff, that the Stones' peers were doing at the time) than in the context of the band's overall career. At least it is not as grossly self-parodic and lightweight as Emotional Rescue, for which we probably have to «thank» the production team, and even if ʽToo Much Bloodʼ is like Psycho II to the original Psycho of ʽMidnight Ramblerʼ, the level of titillation on this record is somewhat higher than the locker-room-level humour of the band around 1980. This understanding is not enough to earn it a thumbs up — honestly, if you have not heard Undercover, you are not missing much — but it is enough to soothe those childhood traumas, thirty years after the fact.

The Rolling Stones: Still Life

THE ROLLING STONES: STILL LIFE (1982)

1) Intro: Take The 'A' Train; 2) Under My Thumb; 3) Let's Spend The Night Together; 4) Shattered; 5) Twenty Flight Rock; 6) Going To A Go-Go; 7) Let Me Go; 8) Time Is On My Side; 9) Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me); 10) Start Me Up; 11) (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction; 12) Outro: The Star Spangled Banner.

It was a bizarre thing, that whole Stones tour of America and Europe in 1981-82. Their last before an almost decade-long break, and yet also their first where they played almost exclusively in huge arenas and stadiums to massive, record-breaking crowds. Their most dynamic and energetic ever, with tempos driven to surrealism and any softness or sentimentality banished for good, yet also the first one where you could look at all that rush and sigh, «man, these dudes are actually getting old and pitiful». Their last one where they seemed to be adamantly refusing to rest on past glories and insisting on their ongoing relevance, yet also the first one where you'd look at the setlist and go, «come on guys... no, seriously?»

Yes, formally the tour was in support of Tattoo You, but in spirit it looked more like a tour in support of Emotional Rescue — the self-parodic, clownish atmosphere of that record permeated the stage, and although you could still have fun watching the band, it was all but impossible to take it seriously. In 1978, the show was punkish: Mick sported quasi-working class clothes and pulled stern, angry faces, while Keith and Ronnie played it as mean and gritty as possible. By the early Eighties, that style had all but evaporated, and now Mick spent most of the time running, running, running around the stage in stupid oversized sports gear, sometimes looking more like a hopelessly drunk quarterback than a rock star — and his guitar-toting friends followed suit, now also setting their minds on having as much stage-hoppin' fun as possible, and, perhaps, steal just a tiny bit of the spotlight away from their hypercocked-up frontman.

It was also the first Stones tour to be exceedingly well documented — as of now, there are at least three commercially available videos, including the original Hal Ashby movie Let's Spend The Night Together and two recent from-the-vault releases (full shows from the Hampton Coliseum in Virginia, December 1981, where some of the Still Life recordings also come from, and from the Roundhay Park in Leeds, July 25, 1982 — the last show of the tour and the last Rolling Stones concert for seven years). The Hal Ashby film, with the exception of a few moments, was dreadful, a bungled and stupid edit probably intended to present The Rolling Stones as an unstoppable force of nature, but instead presenting them as a bunch of dorks with ants in their pants, whose only purpose was to rush through all the songs as fast as possible and get back home just in time to catch the late show. The two from-the-vault releases are much stronger and allow the band to recapture some face at least — but, unfortunately, the accompanying live album is closer in spirit to Let's Spend The Night Together, and, up to this day, arguably remains as the band's most em­barrassing live release, closely followed by Love You Live.

Unlike Love You Live, it is a single, not double, LP, and considering the insane tempos at which they drive home most of these tunes, it gives the impression of a rushed job delivered by disin­terested people even more strongly than the Hal Ashby movie. The Rolling Stones are not the Ramones, and breakneck speed was never a crucial trademark of theirs — their songs are too melodically complex to allow for that much slurring without tragic results, and even though Keith was all cleaned up and ready to go, he never had that strong technique which would allow him to play fast and clean at the same time. Besides, as I already said, this was the first tour where both he and Ronnie started getting hyperactive on stage: Keith as the ardent, expressive, obsessive Don Quixote of rock'n'roll, and Ronnie as his loyal bouncy Sancho. That made it fun to watch, but it didn't exactly help to improve the playing style, and we are, after all, talking about an audio piece where watching is out of the question.

Thus, if the idea of listening to a ridiculously sped up runthrough to classics such as ʽUnder My Thumbʼ and ʽLet's Spend The Night Togetherʼ appeals to you — if you are ready to forget what it was, exactly, that provided the magic in the first place, and just accept them as Superbowlish warm-up anthems to keep those pulses beating and those limbs thrashing, then Still Life is OK. Actually, that's not a condemnation: I myself occasionally find a craving for these «let's get physical!» aerobic versions of the songs, accepting their temporarily disemboweled status. And in a way, starting those huge stadium shows with ʽUnder My Thumbʼ was an interesting gesture: with dozens of thousands of people swooning and swaying to the sounds of Keith's fanfare riff and Mick's triumphant, finger-waggin' "a change has come, she's under my thumb!" exclamations, it was almost as if the message was directed at all those people — you're under my thumb — and somehow, they still were, no matter how ridiculously dressed that lead singer was and how much he wanted to pass himself for an aging athlete, desperately set upon proving to the jury that he should still be given his last chance for the upcoming Olympics.

But yes, both the videos and the album clearly show how deeply in the pangs of their mid-life crisis the Stones found themselves at the time. All this insanity, all this rush, all the barking, all the sweating, all of it served one purpose: show the world that The Rolling Stones still «got it», that they were immune to the disease of aging and the danger of becoming irrelevant — and the more actively they tried, the more obvious it became that they weren't at all immune. On Still Life, this becomes painfully evident when they launch into ʽTime Is On My Sideʼ: the song is no longer a love ballad, but an attempt to affirm their own longevity — but if so, why does Jagger oversing it so comically? Less directly, it is also evident when they reach out for a golden rock­abilly oldie, Eddie Cochran's ʽTwenty Flight Rockʼ, and butcher the verse section while trying to go for an odd time signature at top speed — takes Ian Stewart on the chorus section to set them back on track with his marvelous boogie-woogie playing (in fact, Ian, for whom this would also turn out to be his last tour, sounded like the only musician on this tour to have been fully commit­ted to music — even Bill Wyman looked a little lost and out of his usual element).

A brief run through the few saving graces of this record. The cover of Smokey Robinson's ʽGoing To A Go-Goʼ is not sped up as ridiculously as everything else, and is actually performed quite tightly and with the same joyful revelry as the original, including a blissful solo from saxophonist Ernie Watts (who was replacing Bobby Keys for most of the tour). Same goes for ʽJust My Ima­ginationʼ, also much embellished by the sax. And, ironically, even though the only song included here from Emotional Rescue is ʽLet Me Goʼ, this is the one instance when toughening and spee­ding up actually helped the material — this version sounds angrier and punkier than the lazier, fuzzier, muddier studio original. Perhaps they should have capitalized on that and simply recor­ded an Emotional Rescue Live instead, so that our basis for comparison would be with one of their worst studio records and not with the Rolling Stones legacy as such.

Still, no thumbs down. Once again, as time goes by, it gets easier and easier to simply regard this collection as the musical equivalent of an adrenaline overdose — an embarrassment that is still fun, in a certain way. At the very least, one thing you cannot accuse the Stones of, at this time, is stagnation: this was a period when each new tour brought about an image shift, sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better, but always with an element of curiosity. This, too, was an impor­tant milestone in their career, well worth getting to know if only for historical reasons: for in­stance, it is instructive to compare the chronologically concurrent «last» tours of the Stones (who never intended it to be their last one, but almost ended up that way) and of the Who (who did in­tend for their tour to be the last one, but fate decreed otherwise) — The Who were grim, tired, pessimistic, and seemed to represent the cruelly dark end of an era, whereas The Stones were joyful, boundlessly energetic, radiant, and seemed to represent the obnoxiously lightweight end of the same era. When both bands, against all odds, re-emerged on stage at the end of the decade, they would be coming back as revenants altogether, and life would never be the same.

The Rolling Stones: Tattoo You

THE ROLLING STONES: TATTOO YOU (1981)

1) Start Me Up; 2) Hang Fire; 3) Slave; 4) Little T&A; 5) Black Limousine; 6) Neighbours; 7) Worried About You; 8) Tops; 9) Heaven; 10) No Use In Crying; 11) Waiting On A Friend.

But see, this is why you can never properly give up on the Stones. In 1976, they seemed gross, antiquated, and ridiculous — and they could still groove better than most of their competition. In 1978, they proved capable of riding the new trends under a bittersweet sarcastic sauce — and thus re-ensured their survivability. In 1980, they recorded a lazy album of renovated outtakes — and fell flat on their faces. What would be the next logical move? Why, naturally: record yet another album of even more deeply rooted outtakes — and end up with an absolute winner. Whoever thought that ʽWhere The Boys Goʼ was a sign of a formerly great band in its final death throes, was in for a pleasant surprise.

Not that Tattoo You could ever hope to recapture the attitudes and atmospheres of the band's golden age — even if it tried, it couldn't, and, wisely, it does not even try. In fact, Tattoo You does not try much of anything: it is oddly de-personalized, and, apart from the opening track, does not focus too significantly either on Mick's swagger or on Keith's riffage. The entire album, as it happens, was quickly cobbled together from various leftovers (mostly selected by associate producer Chris Kimsey) as an excuse to go on tour — there was no time to rethink the image, to put together a statement, to suck in any of the latest trends; the only «conceptual» element of Tattoo You, other than Mick's and Keith's Polynesian mugs on the sleeve, is the separation of the material into a «rockier» Side A and a «balladeering» Side B (which, surprisingly, turns out to be quite a good sequencing idea in this case).

And this, apparently, is precisely what they needed at the time. Already with Black & Blue, it was quite obvious that «overthinking» their records was generally a bad idea for the Stones, since it usually led them to a give-the-people-what-they-want attitude, and, consequently, to songs that sounded more like silly impersonations of others than proper Stones material. These songs, how­ever, were unearthed by Kimsey's well-discerning eye, glossed up a bit to match current produc­tion standards, and released before Jagger had a proper chance to rethink them as mock-synth-pop, pseudo-hardcore punk, or suave disco. They're just... songs.

The «rocking» side, first and foremost, is striking in terms of diversity — even on Some Girls, you had songs like ʽLiesʼ and ʽRespectableʼ that were genristic clones of each other, whereas here, all six have their own identities. ʽStart Me Upʼ, the record's best known and most radio-friendly classic, is unimpeachable as perhaps rock'n'roll's finest aerobic number — it's almost impossible to resist its stop-and-start structure, although as far as classic Stones rockers go, this one is one of their most toothless ever: it's not so much about sex per se as it is about using sex as an allegory for push-ups and sit-ups (I think even the accompanying video sort of reflected that). ʽHang Fireʼ is punk-pop like all those failed attempts on Emotional Rescue, but here it is made good by a tight, catchy structure, infectious falsetto harmonies, and a welcome return to social provocation ("In the sweet old country / Where I come from / Nobody ever works / Nothing ever gets done" — hey, that doesn't quite sound like The Clash, now does it?). And while many people seem to cringe at ʽNeighboursʼ, one of only two songs that was largely written during the sessions rather than before them, I don't get it — not only is it an extremely catchy pop rocker with great sax solos from Sonny Rollins, but it is also a hilarious look at the problem of living like a rock star in the middle of everyday people. It's tight, it's danceable, and its sneer and bark is smarter and funnier than, say, ʽSummer Romanceʼ.

At the other end of the spectrum, there's ʽSlaveʼ, a riff-based blues-rock jam dating back to the Black & Blue sessions and also featuring Sonny Rollins on the sax. Keith's riff here is probably one of the best things about the entire album: slow, gruff, loose, and mean, perhaps the slowest and gruffest since the days of ʽHonky Tonk Womenʼ, and the band jams around it like crazy. Trivia bits such as Pete Townshend providing backing vocals for the sessions aren't nearly as important here as the realisation of how tough and cool the Stones could sound even on complete autopilot in the heroin-soaked mid-Seventies — and the inclusion of this track adds a nice, chilly feel of that old sexual menace, already practically non-existent on Some Girls and turned into toilet humor on Emotional Rescue. Next to this, even Side A's weakest track, the Keith Richards solo spot ʽLittle T&Aʼ, sounds more respectable than it would have on Emotional Rescue, for which it was originally recorded — texturally quite close to ʽShe's So Coldʼ, but even less poli­tically correct in terms of lyrics (even Keith Richards in 1981 can hardly be excused for referring to a lady as "my tits and ass with soul"); still, I'd rather have a dirty, but tight rocker from Keith than a shapeless sentimental ballad like ʽAll About Youʼ.

The truly neglected gem on the first side is ʽBlack Limousineʼ, a song that few people pay atten­tion to just because it is a generic 12-bar blues (16-bar blues, actually) — in reality, it is way above generic: a tight, concentrated blast of spite and loathing... self-loathing, one could even say, if you allow yourself to not interpret the song in the key of ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ (Mick taunting a former flame for wasting away her life), but as one that refers to the Glimmer Twins them­selves: "look at you and look at me!" is basically Mick addressing Keith, which is only natural, conside­ring that if you looked at Keith's face in 1981 and compared it to Mick's, you'd clearly see who of the two got more beat up by Mother Nature for a life of sin. What's even better, the whole playing team gets behind Mick — Ronnie gets a flurry, scorching solo, Ian Stewart's piano lines never sounded better, and then Mick himself blows some of the most shrill harmonica blasts since those early days. Arguably their best pure blues number here since 1972's ʽStop Breaking Downʼ, and perhaps the last great pure blues number they ever did.

The second side, meanwhile, incidentally turns out to feature a weird spiral — with three num­bers in a row that go from strange to stranger to strangest ever, far from your average platter of Rod Stewart ballads. ʽWorried About Youʼ, also dating back to the Black & Blue sessions (in fact, they'd already played it live at El Mocambo in 1977), features Mick in full-fledged falsetto mode (more accurately, slowly winding his way from falsetto to growling, handling this quite masterfully), not to mention a great solo from Wayne Perkins (the same guy who also played lead guitar on ʽHand Of Fateʼ). Then there's ʽTopsʼ, an outtake from Goats Head Soup — for some unexplainable reason, this great song was left off in favor of rubbish like ʽHide Your Loveʼ, but now it gives you a chance to hear some more lead guitar from Mick Taylor, as well as an odd mix of recited ad-libbing and sung verses; they tried to make a Spinners-style soul number out of it, but with Mick's barking and Taylor's bluesy symphonies, it becomes significantly more dark and dangerous, a ballad straight out of hell, if I might say so.

And then there's ʽHeavenʼ, which is, hands down, the weirdest piece of music from the Stones camp since... well, probably since 1967 or so. I have no idea where it came from, and even less of an idea where it is going. I know they also began recording it during the sessions for Emotional Rescue, and I'm almost glad they never put it on that album — sitting in between ʽWhere The Boys Goʼ and ʽSend It To Meʼ and all that crap. It has no Keith on it (it's mostly a Jagger / Wyman collaboration, with Bill on synth and guitars, and should have been credited as such instead of the usual Jagger / Richards credit), it almost has no discernible vocals, it's all drenched in special effects, it's totally unrecognizable as a Stones song, and it totally rules. Take the lyrics literally (once you locate the sheet, that is), and it's a love ballad: "smell of you baby, my senses be praised...". Take them figuratively, and it's a religious anthem: "nothing will harm you, no­thing will stand in your way". Disregard them completely, and the song is a bona fide psychedelic experience — is this the Rolling Stones or the Cocteau Twins? With those guitar tones, those phased vocals, the soft kaleidoscopic electronic tinkling in the background, it creates an atmos­phere of «mortally dangerous celestial beauty» that is as art-rockish as they come, and up to this day remains one of the most bizarre and overlooked sonic gems in the band's catalog.

Next to this psychedelic oddity, ʽNo Use In Cryingʼ is a return to more traditional R&B balladee­ring (and also bears an uncanny resemblance to ʽHeart Of Stoneʼ in its basic chord sequence), but the perfect final touch is ʽWaiting On A Friendʼ, a song that, for the first time since ʽMoonlight Mileʼ, ends a Stones album on a deeply positive note — though not necessarily on a deep note, considering how ʽMoonlight Mileʼ gave you the atmosphere of final blissful relaxation after a torturous journey; ʽWaiting On A Friendʼ just gives you an atmosphere of relaxation as such, and not particularly blissful — still, it might be one of those perfect, straightforward buddy anthems that get you with their simplicity and open-hearted nature (in the accompanying video, we saw this personalized in the form of Mick actually waiting for Keith down at St. Mark's Place, and it just isn't possible that anybody who saw this video at the time could have previewed the deep rift between the two that had already begun to spread open).

And really, that's what Tattoo You is all about. It's a simple, fun-lovin' record, tempered with a bit of intelligence and spiced with a couple weird surprises. There's no agenda to it, no special conceptuality, no intuitive understanding and artistic expression of their «band on the run» status as there was on Exile, and no conscious selection of songs according to the principle of «let's include this because it makes us sound like 15-year olds peeping in the girls' bathroom». There's just 45 minutes of non-stop good music, for the last time ever in Stones history. Thumbs up.

The Rolling Stones: Emotional Rescue

THE ROLLING STONES: EMOTIONAL RESCUE (1980)

1) Dance (Pt. 1); 2) Summer Romance; 3) Send It To Me; 4) Let Me Go; 5) Indian Girl; 6) Where The Boys Go; 7) Down In The Hole; 8) Emotional Rescue; 9) She's So Cold; 10) All About You.

I must confess: I have absolutely no idea how an album like Emotional Rescue could have been put together in the Stones' camp right on the heels of an album like Some Girls. For all their fluctuations, the Rolling Stones rarely leave me baffled and bewildered, but even after all these years, forcing myself to relisten to this total pile of crap (at least, by the average Stones' standard of the time) is as uncomfortable as looking at Mick Jagger with a full-grown beard, no matter how well he tries to hide it on the thermographic picture on the front cover. Goats Head Soup may have been a disappointment, and It's Only Rock'n'Roll may have been an unpleasant exer­cise in debauchery, and even Some Girls was more comical than rebel-rousing, but Emotional Rescue is the first — and, in fact, the only one of just two — Rolling Stones albums that flat-out sucks. Essentially, it sounds like a parody on the Rolling Stones, written and recorded by a bunch of guys who have no idea how to make a proper parody on the Rolling Stones.

What's really puzzling about this is that the record began life as an attempt to repeat the winning formula of Some Girls. Like its predecessor, it flirts with disco (twice now, first on ʽDanceʼ and then on the title track), country (ʽIndian Girlʼ), slow blues (ʽDown In The Holeʼ), New Wave-influenced pop-rock (ʽShe's So Coldʼ), and punk rock (ʽSummer Romanceʼ, ʽLet Me Goʼ); in fact, much of its material comes from songs that were first tried during the Some Girls sessions and then rejected in favor of better material. That, in itself, is a warning sign — for some reason, the Stones did not bother to prepare a fresh batch of compositions before going to Nassau and then back to Paris to start work on the new album. But it is not the main problem, either.

The main problem is that Emotional Rescue just sounds... dorky. It is one of the few Stones albums where I honestly wish to strangle Mick on every second song — and where, which may be even worse, I barely recognize Keith on every second song. If you listen to early versions of such rockers as ʽSummer Romanceʼ and ʽWhere The Boys Goʼ from the 1978 sessions, they're still mediocre songs, rightfully rejected in favor of much stronger tunes like ʽLiesʼ and ʽRespec­tableʼ, but at least they clearly sound like classic Stones. The sound on Emotional Rescue, mean­while, is blatantly wimpy, with Keith in particular — for no reason at all! — taking a liking to the kind of contemporary rhythm guitar playing typical of, say, Ric Ocasek: a thin, nerdy, «clucking» sound that was perfect for The Cars, but is simply ridiculous in the case of the Stones. It's the tone you hear at the beginning of ʽLet Me Goʼ or ʽShe's So Coldʼ, as well — see, it's good for ʽMy Best Friend's Girlʼ, but not the creator of ʽCan't You Hear Me Knockingʼ. In the end, this sound does not even let them preserve the biting sarcastic qualities of the rock'n'roll of Some Girls. It just makes them sound like jokers.

But the situation is exacerbated with the «shit-artistic» inclinations of Mick, who must have written and recorded all his parts in some odd drunken haze, because with his lyrics and vocal deliveries over Keith's skeletal riffs, most of this record is the pop-rock equivalent of taking your pants down in the ladies' bathroom and posting the results on Youtube. No previous Stones record had ever contained that much toilet humor and flat sexual braggadoccio reflecting the mental level of a 14-year old hick. In the place of a rough, offensive, politically incorrect, but smart and meanly aggressive ʽWhen The Whip Comes Downʼ, we now have ʽWhere The Boys Goʼ, offi­cially one of the top three or four worst Stones song ever, a limp variation on ʽLiesʼ whose only goal is to wind itself up to the triumphant barroom sloganeering at the end — "where the boys go, for a little piece of ass! where the boys go, for a little piece of cunt!". («Hey, Mick, guess what? We're now allowed to say ʽcuntʼ on record! Goodbye for good, 1964!» «No kidding? Go for it, quick, before they change their mind or something!»).

ʽSummer Romanceʼ, well fit for a soundtrack to one of those dumb teen sex comedies of the Eighties that only worked as an excuse to see some boobs, is hardly any better — no decent riff, a weak drive, and a laughable imitation of uncontrollable adolescent lust by somebody who used to be a subtle and devious Casanova, but has now willingly reduced himself to the image of a drunk flasher, scaring little girls with his bad breath rather than his midnight rambling. The sex drive extends to other genres as well — ʽSend It To Meʼ, the band's first original experiment with reggae, is an anthem to mail-order brides who could be Rumanian, could be «Bubarian» (? does he mean Bulgarian?), could be The Alien, and, in any case, seem to represent a socially relevant, artistically important topic to cover for the 1980 incarnation of the Rolling Stones. At least if they gave it to somebody like Randy Newman, he could probably find the right tone for this tune: Jagger almost makes it sound like he's serious, and in the process, ruins a bad joke by making it even worse. The only consolation here is that the band members probably understand very well how inescapably idiotic all these tunes are — when was the last time you ever saw them doing any of this stuff in concert?

The disco bits are equally disappointing. With ʽMiss Youʼ, you actually had to remind yourself that you were listening to a disco tune — so peripheral was its bassline to its general atmosphere of longing and yearning. Here, we get ʽDanceʼ, which is not even a song: it is just a dance groove, peppered with boring Jagger ad-libs. At some point, it turns out to be a less memorable variation on the funky ʽTrampled Underfootʼ rhythm, but at no point ever does it turn out to have a riff as memorable as, say, the one on ʽHot Stuffʼ, and at no point does it ever sound like something that could not have been churned out by half a million funk/R&B outfits, black or white, around the globe. Meanwhile, the title track is truly an attempt at crafting a totally superficial, suave, sexy disco-pop song, with Mick embracing Bee Gees-ish falsetto and ad-libbing stuff about being your knight in shining armor on an Arab charger. Clearly, it's all tongue-in-cheek, but it's only clear if you place it in the overall context of the Stones — on its own, it is just a bad disco song, trying to woo you over with yet another falsetto vocalise; but where the "whoo-ooh-OOH-ooh ooh-ooh-ooh" of ʽMiss Youʼ combined sexiness with a pinch of pain and yearning, the "uh-UH uh-uh uh uh-uh-UH" of ʽEmotional Rescueʼ is merely the projection of the rhythm of the lead vocalist's throbbing dick, trying to break free from the knight's shining armor, which is not that easy to do while you're being borne full speed by an Arab charger. Stupid!

In the middle of all this puerile bacchanalia, unexpectedly come two decent songs that sound so totally out of place here, it's like some other band replaced them for a brief while (or, more accu­rately, it might be the band briefly coming out of paralysis to shoo away their evil grinning twins, usurping the studio). ʽIndian Girlʼ, while still probably at the bottom list of their escapades into country, is a sweet-and-sad rumination on Latin American politics, largely restricted to just one repetitive melody line, but still poignant; and ʽDown In The Holeʼ is a slow, dark, harmonica-driven, socially-critical blues with Mick in surprisingly fine and fiery form — making it almost impossible to believe that this is the very man who has just spent twenty minutes entertaining you with toilet humor of the lowest variety. He still overbarks it, but I'd rather take this overbarking, thank you very much, in the context of a bitterly wailing harp and Ronnie's and Keith's equally bitter, soulful interplay, than in the context of a never-going-anywhere ʽSummer Romanceʼ.

On a sidenote, I admit being somewhat partial to ʽShe's So Coldʼ. Although the song dutifully fits the dumb sexist pattern of the rest of the album (this time, we find Mick complaining about the frigidity of his partner — what's next in line, ʽShe's So Not Into Analʼ?), it features a lighter, poppier tone than ʽSummer Romanceʼ or ʽWhere The Boys Goʼ, and with a slightly slower tempo, lengthier instrumental passages, and a generally more quiet Mick, gives Keith and Ronnie a good chance to practice their weaving technique — I might like it even more if it were completely in­strumental, but even as it stands, there's a bit of charm and genuine humor about it that I find completely lacking in the other raunchy songs on the album.

On a mixed note, though, the album closer ʽAll About Youʼ, handed over to Keith, returns us to the world of mushy Keith ballads that was born with ʽComing Down Againʼ seven years before and is usually appreciated by those fans to whom the very idea of «soulful Keith», singing com­pletely out of tune but completely with his heart on his sleeve, is enough to forgive everything else. Personally, I think Keith's ballads work fine when they are fully shaped and hookful, like ʽSlipping Awayʼ, but ʽAll About Youʼ is basically just a groove and a long, long string of tune­lessly delivered lyrics that may or may not be about his breakup with Anita Pallenberg (or, if you think deeper, may or may not be about his impending breakup with Mick Jagger). Nice, but Keith could probably cut a dozen pieces like that in a single session.

Bottomline is: I have managed to find plenty of redeeming factors for post-'72 Stones albums over the years, going from one-time total rejection to provisional or even unconditional endorse­ments of much of the stuff that I once thought of as «below the belt territory». It is, after all, hypocritical to confess to liking AC/DC and at the same time condemning ʽIt's Only Rock'n'Rollʼ or ʽCrazy Mamaʼ for not being «deep enough» or something. However, even now it remains very hard to find anything redeeming about Emotional Rescue — a total misstep that could, perhaps, only have originated in the turbulent, value-redefining atmosphere of transition from the 1970s to the 1980s (and it is no coincidence that 1980, after a brief period of convalescence, also brought a veritable turn for the worse in Jagger's scenic image, but you will have to wait for my review of Still Life to hear more on that). Again, it is hardly surprising that, with the exception of ʽShe's So Coldʼ, perhaps, not a single song from this record so far has managed to earn itself even a tem­porary spot in the band's post-1982 live repertoire (barring a few occasional performances of ʽDanceʼ and the title track, mostly out of boredom) — kudos to Mick and Keith for implicitly recognizing, on their own, how stupid and wasted most of this stuff has sounded from the begin­ning. Alas, a major thumbs down here, folks.

The Rolling Stones: Some Girls

THE ROLLING STONES: SOME GIRLS (1978)

1) Miss You; 2) When The Whip Comes Down; 3) Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me); 4) Some Girls; 5) Lies; 6) Far Away Eyes; 7) Respectable; 8) Before They Make Me Run; 9) Beast Of Burden; 10) Shattered.

Let's smooth it out a little bit: Some Girls isn't really as terrifically great as the music-press-lore would have you believe, nor are the three studio albums that preceded it as horrendously bad as the same lore would have you believe even stronger. The «canonical» view is that after Exile On Main Street, the Stones sank into addiction, decadence, and self-parody, only to re-emerge as a rejuvenated, modernized, sharp-toothed and sharp-tongued, punk-and-disco-inspired tight outfit in 1978, proving, once and for all, that there was no inevitable rock'n'roller curse associated with the age of 30, and triumphantly restoring their artistic quality and reputation against all odds. The reality, as usual, is a bit different from the myth, though.

Clearly, the Stones were facing a challenge from a new generation of rockers; clearly, they were in danger of being considered irrelevant and antiquated, even if each of their subsequent LPs still loyally skyrocketed to the top of the charts — I mean, maybe people were not really listening to Black And Blue, but they still went out and bought it, because, hey man, it's the Stones, they probably suck like hell now but it's still the Stones. Clearly, Mick felt all that change in the air, and his mind was sharp enough to understand that the days of the Big Inflatable Dick were over, and that people were looking for something different now — faster, tougher, tighter, angrier. But at the same time, the Stones did happen to morph into careless, spoiled millionnaires, and it would have been totally laughable if they were to take their clues from The Clash now, or even from The Sex Pistols, who, despite all the marketing tricks that put them together, were still a bunch of young, brash, angry slum kids.

Consequently, it would not be fully accurate to call Some Girls the Stones' «punk album». If you think of 1978 as the era when Mick and Keith jumped upon that bandwagon and tried to compete with all the young Turks, the impression will end up wrong: the Stones could not truly be railing against the establishment since they were a vital part of that establishment (yes, even Keith was, despite his dragging his own rules into the establishment rather than politely following others'). «Rich playboys trying to pass for young angry punks» — a reaction that I have seen quite often, and one that tends to really spoil one's impression of the album; certainly not the right way to go about it.

In reality, I think the coolness of Some Girls lies in that it is one of the most satirical Stones albums ever made. From 1973 to 1976 (not to mention earlier), they had placed plenty of laughs, jabs, and pricks in their songs, but the songs themselves usually sounded too sloppy, chaotic, generic, or over-the-top to be appreciated as truly «sharp». Some Girls not only picks itself up in terms of tightness (which was only natural, since it was the first of the band's albums with Wood as a legit member, and he was still willing to oblige), but also in terms of being mean-lean-and-mighty-unclean. In some irreverent Saturday Night Live kind of fashion, the band here sends up everyone and everything, leaving nobody unoffended: politicians, bourgeois, radio preachers, gays, white girls, black girls, even Puerto Ricans, all get their share, making Some Girls into the band's (arguably) least politically correct album ever. Yet they are not poking fun for the mere sake of poking fun — for the most part, this is intelligent humor, even when they are dissecting stereotypes, and at times, it's also humor mixed in with some real pain, despite the relative lack of straightforward soulfulness and sentimentality on the record.

The SNL reference is not really that arbitrary, not just because the Stones themselves promoted the album on the show, but also because, as is well known, Some Girls is their «New York City record»: ʽShatteredʼ gives a brief impressionistic overview of the Big Apple, ʽWhen The Whip Comes Downʼ specifically relates to its seedy underbelly, and ʽMiss Youʼ... well, ʽMiss Youʼ was sort of specifically targeted at its clublife, a result of hanging out one too many nights around Studio 54. Great or, at least, pungent art is often triggered by unhealthy times, and considering that the late Seventies were fairly unhealthy for NYC, to say the least, the Stones' attraction to that place was both natural and artistically healthy; except they did not stand around the city's problems and weep bitter tears, they just sank their teeth in them, which might not be polite, but is often more efficient than being polite. In other words, Some Girls has focus, and that, indeed, is the big reason why it is often called a major comeback for the band after Exile On Main Street (which also had focus, but an introverted one — here, they go all-out extravert).

In terms of songwriting, not all the songs are equally excellent. Some are still little more than grooves: ʽWhen The Whip Comes Downʼ, for instance, does not have a distinctive riff and even less of a distinctive melody (Jagger simply recites the verses, and gang choruses of the title hardly constitute a great hook), but it is still a good showcase for the newly emerging Richards-Wood sound — the two guys did not yet have a chance to play together at that particular fast tempo, and it also seems to me as if Keith was just rediscovering the power chord here, and having fun with it: the song sounds grumblier, heavier, more serious-about-its-business than almost anything since at least ʽBitchʼ. Adding to the impression is the fact that you never really understand if the lyrics are making fun of the poor gay guy who is "filling a need, plugging a hole" or sarcastically advertising the coming of the new liberal age — "when the whip comes down, I'll be running this town" — and thus, even though the song is decidedly not «punk» in spirit («mock-punk» at best), it cuts harder and harsher than many famous punk songs of the time.

But sometimes you get that same attitude with a great instrumental hook to boot — ʽShatteredʼ features Mick in the same ragged-word paradigm, alternating between singing, rapping, reciting, and going crazy, but he can do whatever he wants to as long as he stays anchored to Keith's weirdly phased riff, never faltering, always pushing forward in a highway-driving style; the whole thing is really a touching love-and-hate anthem to New York where the riff symbolizes the strong, steady general life pulse of the city and the scattered, tattered, shattered lyrics are the chaotic mesh of its particular aspects and events. I sometimes try to imagine what Talking Heads would have done to a song like this — somehow, the idea of David Byrne taking over Mick's role on this one does not look at all unnatural. But then Byrne would probably do it like a paranoid, ostrich-in-the-sand-kind-of insider, whereas Jagger, on the other hand, offers a decidedly out­sider's look on the situation — bewildered, yes, but also amused and cool-headedly sarcastic, a real Englishman in New York if there ever was one.

Next to these two, ʽLiesʼ and ʽRespectableʼ work like less deep-cutting, simple-fun pieces of pop-punk (with ʽRespectableʼ, though some people thought it was a swipe at Jagger's wife, actually being a self-swipe: "we're respected in society, we don't worry about the things that we used to be"). They aren't really angry — they're fun. It's simply joyful to hear Keith and Ronnie go so fast, so fluent, and to hear Bill and Charlie hold them together with such a tight grip. I do believe that Keith's solo on the first break of ʽRespectableʼ is one of his last great arch-Berry-style passages, as his lead guitar playing would almost inexplicably begin to significantly deteriorate very soon afterwards (as if to prove us that it was all really fueled by heroin), and Ronnie's high-pitched solo on the second break is also one of the last times he'd play with such precision at such an insane tempo. It ain't much of a punk rock sound — it's punk-inspired classic rock'n'roll — but the mixture has always sounded far more intoxicating on a sheer gut level to me.

The having-fun attitude also permeates the slower pieces on the album: ʽFar Away Eyesʼ, as everyone knows, is a flat-out parody on redneck country-western, albeit still with a bit of senti­mental empathy for the jokingly mysterious "girl with far away eyes", and ʽBeast Of Burdenʼ, though technically a ballad, is really one of those I'm-free-to-do-what-I-want-any-old-time de­clarations like ʽTumbling Diceʼ, etc., with the entire band in relaxed, nonchalant mode. (As a sidenote, ʽBeast Of Burdenʼ was one of the highlights of the generally lackluster 1981-82 tour, where it wisely slowed down the usually breathless tempo and played out as an ardent anthem to personal freedom — there's a great moment in the Hal Ashby movie when Keith, in the middle of the instrumental break, walks towards the edge of the arena and falls on his knees while playing, crowd going wild and all, that, for some reason, makes me tear up every time). The Temptations cover, here reimagined as a rowdy, excited number, is a major improvement on the buffoonery of ʽAin't Too Proud To Begʼ — and the title track is nothing special musically, but... Mick Jagger pulling the feminist movement by the whiskers? Count me in for a laugh. (For that matter, I do believe the man was pretty sincere when writing about how "black girls just want to get fucked all night" — hey, who are we to mistrust one of the world's leading practitioners of the art of bedding?). In any case, the best musical aspect of that track is Sugar Blue's insanely melodic harmonica playing: don't miss it next time you're in town.

And then, of course, there's ʽMiss Youʼ. Again, leave it to the Stones to bend the disco groove to their purposes: here, they use it not so much to send the audience into the dance trance as to in­troduce an air of desperation and determination to the song. It is quite a desperate tune, really: the old theme of yearning for that one true love in the midst of cheap surroundings and empty temp­tations — and it's all the more weird how such an obvious statement of deep loneliness and suffering could work so well as a club-oriented dance tune. In concert, at least all the way up to the 1989-90 tour, ʽMiss Youʼ was performed in a significantly harsher and louder arrangement than the studio version, which worked to its advantage: by the time Mick got around to the "I guess I'm lying to myself..." part, he would almost literally be foaming at the mouth and gnashing his teeth, delivering the "I miss you girl" bit as if somebody was tearing out parts of his flesh with red hot irons. Here, it's softer and subtler, more realistic, perhaps, and quite possibly rooted in the man's real love life at the time (dating Jerry Hall while not yet fully divorced from Bianca). In any case, the disco arrangement is mostly just a tip of the hat to 1978's musical fashion — the main melodic line of the song is far more reminiscent of, say, ʽMother's Little Helperʼ, than any of the disco hits of the era. That's why it is so cool — once the Stones decided to move really deep into the realms of disco on their next album, that is where they began to truly suck at it.

Rounding it all out with Keef's first completely solo tune since 1973, Some Girls complete the picture with a nice set of personal touches — Mick's love life in focus on ʽMiss Youʼ and Keith's drug and law problems on ʽBefore They Make Me Runʼ, the man's second cocky, arrogant statement of character after ʽHappyʼ, but this time with a touch of humility and acceptance of fate: saying goodbye to "another old friend" (Uncle Heroin) and "gonna walk before they make me run". Funny, isn't it? A Keef rocker that sounds rebellious if you don't listen to the words, but is actually quite submissive if you do. For some reason, it still sounds less banal and more honest than something like Aerosmith's ʽMonkey On My Backʼ — Keith has this really uncanny ability of conforming and compromising while still looking like a total badass guy. Man, that open G tuning really works wonders, doesn't it?..

That said, Some Girls is not immaculate. Like I said, its relatively light, satirical attitude almost always succeeds, but it also makes the album almost always sound superficial — a bit of disco psychologism in ʽMiss Youʼ, then rock, rock, rock your boat all the way until the end. Nothing here really creeps under your skin like ʽFingerprint Fileʼ, or triggers that «old sinner» vibe like ʽMemory Motelʼ, or evokes certain subliminal fears like ʽ100 Years Agoʼ — the point being that they adopted this tongue-in-cheek attitude at the expense of even trying to dive somewhere really deep in your soul; not that they succeeded at that too well from 1973 to 1976, but occasionally, they did. Some Girls, much like its front sleeve, is essentially a smart joke of an album: a great smart joke, but a joke nevertheless, and that would continue to be the base attitude for the Stones until at least Dirty Work (where they tried to get more serious, but trying to get serious in 1986 after having not been serious for ten years was a sure recipe for disaster). This is why I would never put the record on par with the 1966-72 period — but then, if we have to be saddled with the Rolling Stones as a bunch of clowns for a while, I'd rather have them as smart, sarcastic, sexy clowns rather than unfunny buffoons, and Some Girls gives me precisely what I need. (For an example of how the clowning attitude did not help out a bunch of aging dinosaurs in a similar context, check out the Kinks' Low Budget — sort of an answer to Some Girls, but far less efficient for its own reasons).

Naturally, this gets a big thumbs up, much as I am disappointed, though, with the 2011 deluxe edition of the album: like Exile, it is one of those strange experiences where they took a bunch of old outtakes (including the infamous ʽClaudineʼ, a mean boogie about Claudine Longet that was left off the original album for legal reasons), left some parts, and completely re-recorded others, in­cluding all of Mick's lead vocals. There's some good stuff out there (including a bunch of blues and country numbers that do not at all sound like the average material on the main album — more of a throwback to the 1971-72 era), but do seek out the original bootlegs if you are really interested.

The Rolling Stones: Love You Live

THE ROLLING STONES: LOVE YOU LIVE (1977)

1) Fanfare For The Common Man; 2) Honky Tonk Women; 3) If You Can't Rock Me / Get Off Of My Cloud; 4) Happy; 5) Hot Stuff; 6) Star Star; 7) Tumbling Dice; 8) Fingerprint File; 9) You Gotta Move; 10) You Can't Always Get What You Want; 11) Mannish Boy; 12) Crackin' Up; 13) Little Red Rooster; 14) Around And Around; 15) It's Only Rock'n'Roll; 16) Brown Sugar; 17) Jumpin' Jack Flash; 18) Sympathy For The Devil.

Somehow, the Stones never got around to releasing a live album that would chronicle their «ripe» years with Taylor — there had been plans to document both the 1972 American tour and the 1973 European tour, but for some reasons, they never came to fruition at the time, much to the joy and profit of bootleggers worldwide. However, by the time that Ronnie finally became a full-time band member, Mick and Keith finally decided not to waste any more opportunities, and released this lavish, two-LP package, capturing the band in what was arguably its most garish and deca­dent state ever, right in the middle of the emerging punk-rock era. Oops!

For a long, long time, Love You Live was probably the most maligned live document from the Stones ever (Still Life got its share of jabs and kicks, too, but it was a smaller affair, and besides, by 1982 nobody really cared any more). Black And Blue, which was also heavily criticized upon release, may have been a harmless little jam session with sparks of creativity, but the same could hardly be said about the Stones' tours of 1975-76 — messy, chaotic, with Keith at the height of his drug dependence and Mick having completed the transformation into a total self-parody, jumping around the stage in half-clownish, half-homeless garb, struggling with giant inflated dicks and almost completely abstaining from singing in favor of a pseudo-drunken bark, because, you know, it's only rock'n'roll, and what sort of person wants singing at a rock'n'roll concert? Not in 1975 they don't — which, come to think of it, was the one thing that could link the man to the burgeoning punk aesthetics, but somehow it still did not.

Needless to say, Love You Live is no Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!, and if you are as much of a fan of the latter album as I am, then it might take you a long, long time to even begin giving Love You Live its own chance. The first step in this procedure is a well known one, and it has to do with the alleged quarrel between Mick and Keith over which tracks to include on the record — Mick wanted it to be representative of their basic theater tours of America and Europe, whereas Keith was more sympathetic towards the occasional smaller gigs, most notably the small shows that the band had played at the El Mocambo Club in Toronto on March 4-5, 1977, right on the heels of Keith's latest and biggest drug bust. The result was a compromise that made the record look strange, but helped it save some face with the critics — the El Mocambo tracks were universally acknowledged as the album's saving grace, and sort of remain this way up to now.

The actual El Mocambo setlists consisted of a mix of Stones classics, new material from the last two albums, and several golden oldies, nostalgically carried over from the long gone days at the Crawdaddy — but it was only the latter that made it onto the album. Obviously, the combination of the small, sweaty, claustrophobic environment with the vintage spirit of Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Howlin' Wolf, and Chuck Berry (might as well call this the Stones' «Play Chess» expe­rience) is auspicious, even if Mick still tends to bark and growl in a fairly silly way, but if you are looking for a magical transformation of the 35-year old Stones into their 20-year old equivalents, do not get your hopes too high. Brian Jones is not there to turn ʽLittle Red Roosterʼ into a magic affair, and Keith is already beginning to mess up his formerly perfect Chuck Berry licks on a still energetic and fun, but slightly stuttering, version of ʽAround And Aroundʼ. In short, for all that this side has to offer in terms of excitement, it also offers an unfair comparison with the fresh young Stones at the height of their «interpretative» period.

For the other three sides of the LP, this is a non-issue, but, of course, those three sides have their own issues as well. A lot of the tracks comes from the infamous June 6, 1976 show at Les Abattoirs in Paris — the very night that Keith had learned of the sudden death of his infant son, yet went on playing all the same, and while I certainly do not blame him, he does sound kind of stiff on these tracks... come to think of it, he sounds a bit stiff on the other tracks as well, so chalk it all up to heroin rather than horror. He still manages to get a decent funky sound going on ʽHot Stuffʼ and ʽFingerprint Fileʼ, but without the sleazy vibe of the former and the sinister shade of the latter — and his Berry-style solos on ʽIt's Only Rock'n'Rollʼ and ʽStar Starʼ also take a beating, though not as much beating as Mick's singing (slurring? slurping?) on either. And while the song tempos have not yet been sped up as insanely as they would be on the 1981-82 tour, classics like ʽJumpin' Jack Flashʼ still suffer from sounding sloppy and rushed — even if this was the first tour on which the Stones had begun playing relatively lengthy sets that could accommodate both the contemporary material and the obligatory classics, both the classics and the new stuff were given the same, thoroughly inebriated, musical treatment.

Amazingly, the true saving grace of many of these performances is Ronnie — the new guy, who still had to prove himself with the band and spent most of the show standing relatively still and actually playing his guitar. In but a few short years, he'd be mastering the mach Schau! principle better than Keith, and with each subsequent tour, would invest more and more into his legs rather than his fingers — but in 1975-76, the man had to convince the fans that he was worthy of Mick Taylor's legacy, and several of his lead parts here truly save the day. There's a long, winding, climactic solo on ʽYou Can't Always Get What You Wantʼ, culminating in a shower of cheap thrills, uh, trills, that still sound exciting. There's an excellent take on ʽBrown Sugarʼ that, for this particular tour, was completely deprived of Bobby Keys' saxophone solo (Bobby actually sat this tour out due to his own substance abuse problems), and Wood plays an admirably fluent and melodic break, the likes of which you will never hear from the man again.

The record ends on a long and grand-sounding version of ʽSympathy For The Devilʼ, resurrected for the 1975 tour (and then buried again for a while) that is closer in spirit to the original than to the Ya-Ya's version, with Ollie Brown supplying the additional Latin percussion and Ronnie showing that he had actually carefully studied Keith's lines on Beggars Banquet — where on Ya-Ya's Keith and Mick Taylor held a competition between the two on who could nail the finest solo, here the emphasis is on weaving, and during the climactic coda Ronnie and Keith choke each other in a hysterical guitar barrage that even manages to drown out Mr. Jagger for a while. It is a completely different experience from 1970, but it has its benefits.

On the whole, as much as I «detest» this record in theory, I still give it a thumbs up. It is a pretty good reflection of what the Stones were about at the time — giving a great show despite all the odds. Never mind the corn, the drugs, the garb, the makeup, the chaos, the inflatable penis, Love You Live is all about giving you a good time through all that, because the kernel force of the band is still intact. The good news about the Stones live is that (a) until the 2010s at least, when old age really started showing, the Stones never gave a truly bad show, (b) until the 2000s at least, each new Stones tour brought on something new and fresh with it, (c) time heals all wounds, and what used to sound embarrassing and disappointing decades ago now sounds amusing and some­times even endearing. That said, unless you believe that all the best rock'n'roll is drunk rock'n'roll, period, you will probably have to symbolically wear out your digital copy of Ya Ya's fifty times before finding alternate solace in Mick's, Keith's, and Ronnie's antics at the height of their glam-rock period.