THE ROLLING STONES @ 60

It might be hard for anyone born from the '70s onward to imagine forming a band and releasing an album almost entirely composed of covers. Also, the cover versions on the album were concentrated on a particular niche of music from the recent past. Imagine getting together to not just play covers of Black Midi or Slowdive but to populate your first record with their songs. But then, I'm already using concepts long abandoned and it's hard for me to imagine any musical ensemble bothering with the antique paths of showbiz given the kind of tesseract that music in public has become. But, even thinking within the old box, why would five lean and hip young players waste their first LP on a bunch of oldies? I mean, even The Beatles had wedged a big serve of originals in their first one. Was it just their live set without the audience?

When approaching the writing of this entry, I baulked, knowing that I would have to describe a kind of music for which I have very little empathy and that it was being played by people who hadn't earned anything like the privilege to play it. Blues, rhythm and blues (with the original meaning), soul, all those flashes of true life poetry and groove that rang defiantly through the white bread mask from sea to shining sea, all that had the weight of history in every note. Keith Richards' schoolboy acne seemed to defy any attempt at credibility this playlist might have offered. But I'm getting a few things wrong here and that's what this article will be about.

So, take the opening track. Route 66. From Nat King Cole's breezy jazz source point, through Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters' swing take, to Chuck Berry's early rocking walk-through, the song does propel. The Stones' version is all hormonal raunch, taking its cues from Berry but tearing at its fabric to a highway gear. The piano and guitar of Chuck's version are assumed by the dual guitar lineup which doesn't cruise so much as careen, violating the white line and growling forward. Jagger starts with Berry's wry delivery but loses it as he seems to recall how he'd started to shape it in front of a crowd in a breathless and sweating London pub. Keith injects a big dollop of Chuck Berry figures than Chuck himself put into his own cover. If you'd been eighteen and got to one of those gigs, you're head would be shaking like a demon in Jacob's Ladder, too. Does it still have that effect? No, of course not; the decade it was helping to lift from the blandness of its locale's '50s would front up with ever more demolishing approaches to the R&B model. But, also, crucially, it doesn't sound like the purists playing Leadbelly at the campus jazz club either. It sounds like beer and dancing and whooping and sex. Just put the punters back in.

I Just Want to Make Love to You had been done by both Muddy Waters and Etta James with hard, stomping urgency. James's version using the brass riff from Man With the Golden Arm, adding major steam. The Stones rip the song's clothes off with a horny velocity. It almost has a Bo Diddley chug but it's too fast for that. Jagger screams over the spiking speed of the guitars and rhythm section heading straight for the crucial intersection. Brian Jones adds a wailing blues harp, daring to approach Little Walter's turn on Muddy's take. He doesn't get there but everyone else does.

Honest I Do sees the band stepping back from the rush of the first two tracks to try a blues ballad. Jimmy Reed's original is a 6/8 plea with a pained, begging vocal. Here, perhaps, there is a stumbling moment. Will they or won't they fall on their faces. The sound is live without the audience and Jagger sounds uncertain of himself. It gradually warms up (helped by Jagger's harmonica) just in time for the fade out. It's really not a patch on Reed's but the effort is noted. 

Mona is a song by Bo Diddley which he wrote in libidinous celebration of an older exotic dancer. The original recording says a lot in the simplicity of its arrangement and the sheer determination of its performance. Bo runs his guitar through heavy amp tremolo and bashes out his trademark five accent beat until it sounds like machinery with a few bolts loose, pumping on but so wobblingly that it might explosively dismantle at any moment and it keeps on heating up. Under this, without bass or drums, is an echoed foot tap or shakers. Over all of this is his searing bellow calling out from the audience, from his daydreams and his night: Heeeeeeeey, Mona! To listen to it now you might puzzle at it even being called rock and roll but the charging genital roar of it and steady onslaught should set you straight. Bo is so impatient to get it finished he plays his chord solos without any other instrumental accompaniment, he just switches into it. What The Stones add is a drum kit and a bass. If Diddley was clear in his intentions and seemingly roaring from the most basic ingredients, this take wanted to leave no doubt, forcing the door kicking beat of it from beneath and both guitarists crashing the stuttering chords as one big engine. Jagger over the top of this doesn't out do Bo but by this stage he doesn't need to. It's a tribute with a raw youthful punch. 

Now I've Got a Witness is an original of sorts. It's credited to Nanker Phelge, the joke name the band gave to group compositions. It is a barely organised jam on the Marvin Gaye hit Can I Get a Witness with the chunk-chunk chunk-chunk chunk-chunk chunkachunk rise and fall to the 7th. It's an instrumental workout lifted by Brian Jones's harmonica wail and a conpspicuous organ workout. It's the kind of thing you can imagine going down great at a gig. It does feel too long even at two and a half minutes but it's not hard to live through. Keith Richards' solo presages a lot of his '60s breakouts. Even Bill gets a few bars with the bass up front. You can almost hear Jagger announcing the lineup: "... on drums ... !" 

Little by Little is another cover. This time is the Nanker Phelge boys joined by the luminary Phil Spector. It's a decent R&B workout and earns its place at the end of side one and on the B-side of Not Fade Away. It owes a lot to Jimmy Reed's Shame Shame Shame but not enough to call it a ripoff. Effectively, it follows from the previous track and might well have been kindled in the same session. Both Gene Pitney and Phil Spector were there at some of the sessions which is a testament to teenaged manager Andrew Loog Oldham's unbridled networking and songs like this would only have been encouraged. It keeps the vibe up.

I'm a King Bee is a loping blues with a knowing Jagger vocal and a sliding bass figure that propels. Good solos on guitar (Jones) and blues harp (Jagger). It's a rejig of Slim Harpo's original including the looby bass ejaculations (but here done on a fretted electric rather than an upright). The sneaking pace adds a sly kind of strut to the narrator's confident insistence and his wish to come inside. For all its lifting of the arrangement it brings a youngster's sense of mission. This is kind of the opposite of older folk getting to the mic with You're Sixteen, You're Beautiful and You're Mine, claiming musical quality before anyone has asked. It not so much ages Jagger's vocal performance as adds a worrying worldliness. Great track.

Carol is a Chuck Berry workout done a lot more urgently with the signature Berry lead licks played breathlessly. Berry's original might sound oddly casual in pace and tone but the story of it is about a boy and girl growing into a grown up scene as he takes her to a hip club to dance. Neither of them can dance but both can "dance". It's a happy song of learning respect along with the good times and is worth hundreds of nostalgic teen coming of ages movies. The Stones turn it into a hormone raid but that would have been how it sounded to them.

Tell Me (You're Coming Back) is the album's only Jagger-Richard original (the terminal S to Keith's surname was extracted in a now bizarre effort to link him to the then super popular Cliff Richard). It begins with a gentle figure on the 12 string acoustic. Jagger comes in at the low end of his range with a plaintive line of wanting his girl back, knowing that he's difficult to be with and other too-late confessions, before launching into the chorus with a demand for her to tell him she's coming back. Short of outright gaslighting, this kind of lyric is a one way trip to bad things and its author's, as young as they were and living in the era of strutting blues and youth running wild, knew the machismo of the words. When I first heard this, over ten years after its release, it felt like arrogance. Musically, it is poignant and the wide arrangement with dramatic booms and cymbals at crucial points and the glistening acoustic guitar in the verse and the muted electrics in the chorus, charm. But this is someone demanding a relationship on his terms and is delivered without a breath of irony. To understand is not to forgive.

Can I Get a Witness begins like the Marvin Gaye original with a bright piano figure, tambourine, slight drums and group singing. This is a stripped back version from its model and, oddly, brings the song back to its gospel, Southern Baptist, sources. Gaye's original is a big stately strut which builds with choruses and brass to a moment of pop glory. To call The Stones's version diminished is to miss how it would have sounded live. A lot of the keyboards on this record were provided by the original member who didn't make it into the cover art or liner notes, Ian Stewart. Too dowdy to be shown with the slender street kids around him (arf arf) his playing nevertheless followed them into the studio until his death in 1985, choosing to be part of it, however out of the spotlight for his career. The driving piano here, left unaccompanied by guitar or bass, is perhaps the earliest tribute to his resolve. It's not a solo spot but it can't happen without him and his input is left essential.

You Can Make it if You Try, Gene Allison's torchy hymn of encouragement, feels the most out of any of the covers like this particular band is putting its personality on a standard. Allison's uplifting vocal workout needs only percussion and organ to carry it, such is its power and assurance. The Stones put the whole band to work and Jagger climbs above the cool kid approach to his lead this time. He can't do Allison so he only does himself. The inadvertently ethereal wordless backing vocals were not aided by the members of the Hollies who turned up for other songs but by the band themselves as an unintentional presage of future singles.

Rufus Thomas' Walking the Dog was a wry blues stroll that blended nursery rhyme lines with other kinds of lines. The arching 7th note riff comes in after a pretty big intro of the opening of the wedding march. The Stones would have been aware of this and might have been thinking of it, if only to mask the more recent Merseybeat stomping version by The Dennisons. The Stones's version is conspicuously cooler and lower key, adding nuance where The Dennisons went Palladium size. It's a poignantly downsized reading given as though to say, it goes more like this. That didn't stop Brian Jones adding whistles and even backing vocals. It's a fitting end to this set as it struts its way off with a promise of more.

I had no idea I would have this much to write about this record. I, too, long considered it the kind of covers showreel for the band's live career. Listening to it again and, having read Andrew Loog Oldham's two autobiographies, I had to reconsider. The Stones were established in the local circuit and had a following that warranted a record contract. Oldham, the kind of dilettante who used his frustrations from being unmusical to project on to this group, gave a lot of legitimate guidance to them and shaped a band to rival the biggest name in showbiz by appearing to be its opposite. The Beatles and the Stones were personal friends by this point and it was George Harrison who pushed the Stones's name into Decca's ear after that label had embarrassed itself for all eternity by rejecting The Beatles. All Oldham had to do was insist on a kind of arms race, Soviet vs USA, Officer Dibble vs Top Cat, Beatles vs Stones. It worked perfectly.

Take the cover art. With the Beatles had featured the fabs in monochrome half light without their characteristic smiles. Hard Day's Night blew this up by emulating contact strips of multiple expressions. The cover of The Stones's debut went one step further. The band, flanked by Jagger on the right and the blonde mop of Brian Jones on the left, are lighted, light and dark, with brooding expressions against a soft gradient that goes from black to a lighter blue downwards. No uniforms, everyone either suited or tieless (Brian doesn't even have a jacket). It the fabs balanced out in their public personae, this band didn't, they were less controllable. Then, for Oldham's masterstroke, the band's name does not appear on the front cover. The only concession to convention is the Decca logo top right corner. Dig? They don't care if you haven't heard of them, they're going to play anyway and if you don't like it, move on.  

Also, if you want to understand why people bought into the hype of Beatles vs Stones at the time, go and listen to the originals of these covers (YouTube makes this easy). The source points are different and the intended result follows that direction. In the Beatles' debut, Please Please Me, the big bright originals traded side space with covers of anything from the previous decade's R&B, girl groups and show tunes reframed into the kind of Merseybeat rock that made the originals had to distinguish. They came in sounding like showbiz. None of it conveyed the dues paying development of months in Hamburg and then back in Liverpool because the polishing that George Martin effected made all that sound as though the band was ready to be loved by the citizenry of the Greater Milky Way. 

The Rolling Stones is a record that is happy to lurk in the shadows of the London alleys, lugging in and out of pubs not designed for rock bands, of clubs poky and dripping where you could shake your head or stay unmovingly cool and smoking at the edges. You didn't have to know about The Beatles chunging between strip shows in Germany, in sweaty leather to enjoy the embrace of their early records, but you couldn't argue your way out of the sly, wry learned from records scholarship that winked and frowned from the stage or the record player as these standards groped their way out into the light.

It would take The Stones years before they shook cover-heavy albums (they still record them). Once they hit the charts (with a Beatles song) they launched into a mass of singles that repeatedly fill an unending string of compilation albums, each worthy of turning the volume up. But it began here, organically, savvily, with something between youthful push and reverence for the magic in the dark of the margins.

REPLICAS @ 45

The first few seconds of this album contains the universe of its artist's approach for the first part of his career. A curly modal figure sounds high on the keyboard of a synthesiser. It's joined by a staccato beat on rock instruments. It drops a tone for a few plays then returns as the vocal enters. A high register, thin and cold, sings of a strange crisis. He can't recognise his own photograph. He might be speaking to himself or to some form of other, perhaps a doppelganger. And the last line of each verse states the title: Me, I Disconnect From You. The song ends on a big rock chord but the opening riff decays and slows to a quiet stop.

As the  album progresses, the machine like precision of the arrangements, the reedy vocals and the icy scenarios of the lyrics, we feel the theme surfacing. A dystopian sci-fi world of androids and humans with a mounting alienation and nihilism spreading through the nightscape. While the songs have the quality of cinematic scenes and suggestions of narratives within themselves, they can also break out and refer to each other until the world takes form. 

Are 'Friends' Electric bursts on stage as a stadium sized factory of synthesised architecture. A grounding riff pumps a pattern of fifths as a descant sounds a partial seventh. When the cold, thin vocal appears it's delivering half of a conversation between a character and his home delivery replica sex worker. The only problem is that the human has begun to extend his feelings beyond the replica's function and it's starting to feel like love with all the pain and alienation that can entail. The massive grinding arrangement pauses for a kind of middle eight with bright keyboards circling around sevenths and the vocals change to spoken word. It hurts and he's lonely. This gives way to a soaring, blissful restatement of the circular figure but higher on the scale. When the factory grind reappears it feels like more of the same of this isolation. A shorter verse features the title and the aching realisation: "and now I've no one to love". After another middle eight ("I don't think I mean anything to you") we leave on a fade with the melody of the "no one to love" repeating to silence. 

This extraordinary sci-fi dystopia story was released as a single and made it, without a singalong chorus to number one. The song is a weighty downer but anyone who heard it at the time with an inclination to the new and the unusual heard electronic music that bore no resemblance to familiar forms the way Kraftwerk's later '70s work did. Are "Friends" Electric is closer kin to Donna Summer's barnstorming trance I Feel Love than Autobahn or Trans Europe Express. And this includes the other factor that Gary Numan persisted with in his initial run of success: rock instrumentation. It was cold and spiky rather than cock rock overdrive but it was rock music. The guitars, drum kit and bass are all audible along with the electronics but they are not dominant, there is no sense that the synthesisers are a red faced gimmick and there is nothing of the gymnastics of prog rock: the united front of rock band with committed synthesis is presented with full power. It felt like a first. It had precedents galore but this lean fusion had not been heard before. It was cinematically compelling and offered a credible path out of the dust of punk's crushing demise.

The Machman begins with a guitar riff that sounds like a routine genre figure until the vocals and synths arrive. The replica's encounters with the living are cryptic and paranoid in an urban nightscape. Praying to the Aliens does something different again by  preferring an electric piano with a slapback echo (which always reminds me of Bowie's We Are The Dead from Diamond Dogs) which creates a nervous energy. More technoir with statements about sexual identity and function without a clear speaker position. The stuttered Rhodes figure constantly flits around the arrangement as confusion swells. While the sense of concept album is clear throughout the record, it's application is often reduced to a kind of stream of consciousness account, not intended to further a narrative but continue the flow with a disjointed scene like both of these. If this album were a movie it would be Blade Runner as directed by Zulawski.

Then we come to the big one. I can recall speeding along the South East Freeway in a friend's car, seeing the towers of the Gold Coast form on the horizon in 1980 as the booming knells of Down in the Park rolled out of the speakers. It put me into the movie and until the next person spoke I was speeding towards intrigue. Big tolling notes on bass, synth and electric piano form a seven note sequence. A shiny descanting synth figure comes in. Another night scape. The vocal comes in after two iterations calling out images and statements that are picked up like litter on the set. The War, rape machine, a friend called Five. It's a walk through of an underworld of brutal entertainments that can leave their human participants dead. The verses are sung over the nearly unchanging ground of the opening figure but there are bright and flowery inserts which add more modal melodic material with a carnival feel. After each of these the main theme is played out as a slow, heartrending instrumental in the synthesised strings. Most of the imagery made it on to the album art, with Numan, platinum blonde and pale, standing like a mannequin in a dimly lit room as his reflection looks at him in a way not possible with the angles. Another man (probably from Are "Friends" Electric) is looking through the window. In the distance outside, a neon arch forms the letters The Park. After the storm of the main song has passed we're left with a repeating figure from the relief section that finally, lands with a big droning bass from below. A perfect side closer, by now you are immersed in the world.

Side two starts with a grumpy rock figure in the guitars. It even starts with a drumstick count in. There's a synth drone to add some texture and colour but this is the Tubeway Army as they thought of themselves to begin with. The driving overdriven riffs continue the album's pattern of playing persistently between vocals, often just insisting on a single chord. Where in Johnny B. Goode or even Breathe, this carries the mood whether rocking or dreamlike. On this album and throughout Gary Numan's earlier years, spare bars of guitar band sound more like an idling machine, grunting at attention for the next use. The vocals sing a quite  bright melody that leads to a chorus of the title. The kind of entertainment of the Park is seen up close with live sex and violence with generous dollops of surveillance. And with this comes the understated flow on effect of the indifference to the humans at the results of the brutality. All that in an upbeat rocker.

The title track takes us back to the cinematic magnitude of Down in the Park and "Friends". A bass throb plays a constant heartbeart while banks of humming and groaning synthesisers form a bed for a lyric about isolation. The narrator walks outside through crowds of nameless figures. There is a sense of shame in his non-conformity. He turns on the crowd but at best they treat him with the caution of crowds faced with irregularity, violence, delusion, and smile nervously. When the police arrive, he pleads guilty but is allowed to walk away. Between the verses the synthesis blooms to a poignant figure that is both cold and heartrending, as though a machine were trying to emote or a human was trying to be mechanical. The song ends as the heartbeat slows and a persistent howl falls into reverberation.

It Must Have Been Years starts with the same instrumentation playing the heartbeat but this is quickly obscured by loud riffy rock with nary a keyboard present. The vocal is the most rock like of the whole album. The warmer approach to the arrangement tells us that the observer of the stagnation he's describing is not a machman. However, the verses are like a day in the life of a machman sex worker. This one is either at the end of their career or in such a state of intense overuse that they are headed for landfill. Is the title/chorus a passing but repeated occuring thought that the figure at the centre has lost track of time but figures their career had begun wholecloth years before. The sole instance of a guitar solo is as frantic as the rest of the song and heightens the sense of panic before ending on a downward bend before vanishing. Just another spasm hitting its shelf life. I used to get annoyed at the rock of that solo. How could it belong in such a richly new field, sounding like some schoolkid ace guitar player  with a Gibson copy and a fuzz pedal. Really, it works. It does sound like the playing of a young musician aiming to impress but it also expresses the emotional content of the song. In an album that was met with criticism for its apparent coldness, these few seconds of flashing lead guitar spike and give the lie.

When the Machines Rock a chirpy synthesiser workout that breaks for a grandeur as big as the factory floor. I Nearly Married a Human begins as a druggy version of the synth line of the opening song but adds textures like an emulated drop and ripple effect as well a small number of motifs for development with the electrodrums coming in in sections. The music develops between the two figures with bright hazes of swells and piercing glissandi. This sounds like it started as an afternoon's noodling on the keyboard but Numan takes it well beyond that. Add an evocative title and the rest is up to you, a romatnic montage between two figures before the penny drops and all we are left with is the fading two element rhythm. And in the end the data you give is equal to the data you live.

Replicas gave a younger audience what Bowie had started but kept going until cities rose from its grooves and an adventure of sadness and action awaited. As punk's bonfire was settling into ash and the suits were trying to replace its figures with newer, easier to control units, we knew we could do much worse than listen to this. Gary Numan said he was in a music shop one day and walked past a synthesiser. He stopped and pressed a key. It had been set up with a fat bass sound that resonated through the building. In that moment all the things he'd been thinking about as he walked under the clouds and the towers, all the books of crashes, high rises and dreaming androids bloomed before him. The mechanical punk of Tubeway Army gave way to something that sounded like those ideas and felt as big as a tower block.

I didn't get all the words and I was in Townsville where the rain meant monsoons and smelt of mangoes and mosquitos and I still got it. And that was just as I'd got the thrill of seeing the Saints and the Sex Pistols on tv a few years earlier. This was different but it came from the same place. Music seemed to be changing every month until you stood back and realised it was just getting wider. This record was one that clung to me, though. I still have no hesitation in calling it one of the best of its era. And driving back from the Coast to Brisbane with the rain stinging my eyes while I pushed my head out the passenger window for as long as I could, the song was thunderous in the car and I was yelling the chorus:

You are in my vision!

You are in my vision!

Listening notes: I walked around with this in earbuds, hearing the hi-res download but at home listened to a late '90s CD with extra tracks. Both versions are free of the brickwalling compression of the loudness wars and have a joyous, dynamic clarity.