Rolling Stones: The First Big Three: #3 THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES REQUEST

So, here we are at the end of this mini series. It's been a joy to shed a little more light on these neglected platters. Listening note: almost forgot this as it's become so much the norm for me. All three of these albums were heard for this writing in their hi resolution digital masters made available on the 2002 SACDs. To date, this the fullest and best format I've used to listen to this music. Sorry if you thought the photos used for illustrations I've put up here but I'm just not a fan of vinyl.

The first thing to deal with here is the charge that this one was a carbon copy of Sgt Pepper. Actually, I won't yet. I'll end with that.


This one was started just after the previous one was released in February 1967 but it didn't appear until December of that year. Between times there were drug busts, trials, setbacks, bloated social lives that found their way into the cogs and gears of the band's machinery. Andrew Loog Oldham, himself a force of barely controlled chaos, gave up in disgust and walked out of the studio and the band as a whole. Ruddlerless and wasted, the band somehow got this out. For decades Satanic Majesties has been regarded as a failure that should have gone unreleased, the year 1967 serving as a period of trial from which they emerged as the progenitors of the BIG FOUR. With that in mind you could also see the album as the rock bottom from which they rose to greatness. Me? I like it enough to leave on because the worst tracks are still interesting and the best are sensational.

Another reason this album is considered an annoyance is the notion that acid wasn't the Stones' drug and that the smoke and the speed of the first few could give way to the coke and the smack of the BIG FOUR and we'd all be happy. It's a kind of detour into shallow faddism before the band could find its feet and place in history. I think it was a record plagued by administrative ill health which yet revealed inspiration and delight. Again, this is one I can just leave on once it's playing. That's the album test passed for me.

The Stones made it to the end of their worst year of the 60s with a statement that felt like it had taken some knocks. They yet had the time for some good jokes and spectacular setpieces. The single that this album is closest to is the double whammy of We Love You and Dandelion. The first is related to the drug busts and trials that almost closed the shop for good. It is big and as dark as the prison corridor where it audibly begins. A quick piano figure rolls over a cliff to a huge expanse of accusation and relief. A heavy backing grinds and thunders below some ethereal harmonies that are audibly aided by Lennon and McCartney. Dandelion is sheer joy, jumping about on a spring day in a field in sheer drunkening freedom as harpsichords and Beach Boy vocal shimmers proclaim the return of the sun. Nothing but light and beauty, there. And then, much later, came the album.

Sing This All Together. The rot's there from the start. Maybe it's a sneer or a joke. The piano equivalent of a disembodied floating head appears centre stage as a chordal figure plays out like someone very drunk trying to remember a Rachmaninoff theme. This is interrupted by a big dissonant blare from the brass section. Encore but then with no regard for observing the tempo the song just begins with a ragger chanting room full of spiritually enlightened drunks signing about singing together to see where they've all come from as they thump piano keys, tinkle wine glasses and strum fifths on DI-ed electric guitars. Jagger, in much higher headvoice than sounds comfortable, whines in with lines about different "pictures of us" that evoke anything from a lot of parties to travels to lands far and flung for the acid and ravaged. Instead of a solo there's a long clinking, creaking central instrumental section that sounds like a yak-drawn caravan clopping and ringing its way through a mountain pass. Then the singing comes back and then it's cut short by another blare from the brass which collapses.

But it's good. It's good because the Stones sound like they're having fun with the subcultural pretensions at the same time as fulfilling them. It's also good because this is a Stones track but it sounds like Stockhausen's demo tapes. It's serious but not at serious as Pepper. It's fun and more fun than Pepper. And it sounds good.

Citadel. Without a gap Keith hammers a gigantic barre chord riff from his painted Les Paul Custom through tremolo with the intensity knob on ten. E-A-D-E. Then the whole band bashes into the song. Jagger, almost as buried as he was in 19th Nervous Breakdown or Standing in the Shadow lopes over the beautiful noise of it, talking about landing in New York like a crusader. The flags fly dollar bills. The shiny metal cars move through woods of steel and glass. Oh, Candy and Cathy, hope you both are well. Please come see me in the Citadel. An imaginative take on modern travel when you're destination is an expensive hotel room filled with Babylon. A reed instrument whines a luscious line through the metal of the verse chords, adding something oddly epic. The girl's names in the chorus are punctuated by the piercing ring like an anvil or closely mic-ed finger bells. The solo barre chords that play through once before each verse at one point miss a chord. It's probably editing but someone left it in. It sounds like the song is too powerful for itself and has to recover and get back on its feet. No one ever seems to mention this number but it's one of the fiercest and most infectious rock songs the band ever recorded.

In Another Land. A brittle harpsichord and descending cello figure strides boldly before relaxing and we get not Jagger but Bill Wyman singing through Keith's tremolo amp from Citadel about wandering around an acid trip as the sounds of fairyland roll out before him. This is one of those songs that have their own colour palettes with the vermillions, golds and blues of the cover art moving across it like air paint. The melody is really lovely for all of Wyman's evident lack of confidence singing it. The chorus bashes in with a gang of strong vocalists (including Jagger and an audible-once-you-know-he's-there Steve Marriot). Wyman's lead vocal while hitting the notes with ease is a little too Ees Lunnon to really convince but that works for me as an installed flaw. I wish Mick had sung it but it offers variety and the textures are too pleasant to dislike it because he didn't. Delicious.

2000 Man. It wasn't until this was on cd that I realised the snoring that seemed to start it off on the LP was actually the last bit of the previous track. It makes sense but I still like the whimsy of putting the snores there (with a little bit of Gomper in the background). I liked to think it was Brian, again adding something unusual. Now I have to think it was Bill.

A lovely folksy figure on a bright acoustic plays the initial melody. Jagger supplies the tune when the guitar has finished with it. It's the year 2000 and the narrator is detached and confused, controlled by the technology that surrounds him before the song kicks into the Oh, Daddy chant with a middle 8 buried in there somewhere about youth and age. Despite the small melodic payback in this larger section there's plenty to ride on including a compelling guitar chug beneath a rich organ wash instead of a solo. We end on the original tune, grander, sadder, as the sustain 4th figure travels further away into the galaxy beyond the fade.


Sing This All Together (See What Happens). Flutes on the mellotron remind us of the intro to Strawberry Fields Forever before. Someone coughs. People talk and laugh in the background. "Where's that joint?" asks someone and we jump into more DI guitars playing the brass riff of the opening number. More clinky percussion and mellotron and we begin to understand that this is pretty much all we're going to get out of this track, jammy guitars and sound effects. It's like the dream that Aftermath's Going Home would have if songs themselves could dream. Jagger frequently shrieks and screams like a higher primate the way he would a year later on Sympathy for the Devil. Tempos and time signatures change because they can. Chants fade in and out. Wordless vocals, ecstatic or murmured appear and vanish. The brass section is still being paid so they hang around and blare now and then. If you leave it on and relax it works fine as a soundscape. If you are waiting for the snatch of chorus at the end you are going to be driven to fury. And, yes, there is a  Sgt Pepper joke just before the the oscilattor and shortwave woooooos kick in for the fade. I shouldn't but I really like this track

She's a Rainbow. A carny shouts over the crowd to spin a wheel. A quick fade and the piano figure starts, hesitant at first but soon straight into a gorgeous foretelling of the vocal melody with arpeggios played in the higher register. If you've already noticed how strong the keyboard playing on this album is you already have felt the benefit of adding session maestro Nicky Hopkins into the mix. The first of many collaborations with the band, his work brings light to the entire piece. Here more than anywhere else. Once the initial theme is established Charlie kicks the band into the pounding verse about a girl who comes in  colours all around. Acid and sex in constant collision. With the sparkling high piano, glittering strings from future Led Zep bassist John Paul Jones, the odd little girl harmonies in the backing vocals and the barely contained stream of consciousness inspired lyric this song is like the best boiled lolly you've ever had, near fatally sweet but almost sexually tangy at the same time. The Beach Boys might have sounded richer and more ethereal but their music never smells of anything to me. If you know the particular aroma you can sniff here it will make you smile.

The Lantern. Ominous distant bells. High Leslied organ and acoustic guitar playing a blues figure. A shimmer of electric guitar through tremolo. Hopkins' piano almost like cocktail jazz beneath. Jagger's clear but soft voice emerges from a cloud of octave and fifth harmonies for each line.

The story is out of Tennyson, Lefanu or Poe. Lovers make a pact that whoever dies first contacts the other from beyond the grave. He asks her to bear light for him to see her, whether awake or asleep. The block harmony of the word "please" shimmers like a chandelier. Both spooky and warming and expertly mixing blues tonality with classical orchestration (a beautiful soft figure on the horns stands in for the first few lines of the last verse as the lady appears) and romantic narrative poetry. No one ever seems to remember this song in the back catalogue. They are ripping themselves off if they skip it, though.

Gomper. Organ. Tremolo flutes, tablas, an electric 12 string and sitar in tandem. The props room ws empty while this one was being recorded. Vocal harmonies from some distant clime describe a scene of flowers by a lake. A beautiful woman swims to the shore and dries off in the sun. The jamming takes over and eventually finishes. Sounds like pseudy porridge but it's actually quite beautiful. If anything or anyone else comes to mind here it is not the Beatles but the Pink Floyd of Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Not a rip off, just simliar territory.

2000 Light Years from Home. I like all of this album but it is dominated by three indestructible numbers: Citadel, She's a Rainbow and this one. Citadel reshot a modern city as though seen by someone from ancient history. She's a Rainbow mixed its psychedelia with the sex all too often left out of the monastic weirdness more typical of the sub genre. 2000 Light Years adds a kind of whispered horror to the romance of space travel, a kind of journey that Moebius might illustrate or Jodorowski direct (part of the team at the centre of a failed attempt on Dune, in fact).

Backwards piano chords loom from darkness. Someone plays the piano strings like a cembalo, randomly, dissonantly as more backwards chords fly in gravity-free. A muted picked bass plays a chunky statement of the tonality. A rude knocking from the drums, slipstream ride cymbal and it's take off as Jagger breathes the progress in a very economical lyric. Mellotron strings shimmer like the speeding starfield. We keep getting further away. Between 600 and 1000 light years there is an instrumental break with a guitar so distorted its chords are beyond identification. They  discharge rather than play like bursts of rocket fuel. A shimmer of echo tail passes from one side to the next like a comet. We land somewhere and everything rests (the mellotron sighs to a stop). A radio whine or a theremin wails out of control while the bass riff from the start gets things working again and we're off again on Bell flight 14 for a rendezvous on Aldeberan with its green desert sand. Now we're 2000 Light Years from home which means we are never going back. The vocals are further away, stronger but reverbed and down in the mix. The announcement, made a few times is followed by more of the creepy struck piano strings, warped distorted guitar bends, accents on the toms and a dissipating mellotron. Whatever the narrator now sees is wondrous and terrifying. A quiet waft of echo tail crosses the stereo image and fades like the dying signal.


On With the Show. A doorman informs what I always see as a bowler hatted city worker of the delights in the club. "Yes sir, they're naked and they dance." A cool jazzy riff from Keith's Les Paul and Jagger is the MC, welcoming the audience through a megaphone. A breakdown  returns to the sinister classicalism of the verse but with Jagger in full voice, a lot closer, assuring the patrons that if they get too pissed during the naughty show and are beyond paying for the delights beyond closing time that the club will look after the cab. Then it's back to the MC with the megaphone. The tone is niether satirical nor judgemental here. Rather, there is an opportunity taken with the kind of London club of the song's physical setting. If Back Street Girl was a kitchen sink movie then this one was made by Hammer. It might even be a goodbye to the club scene that now, beyond its youth had become a closed meat market or more understandably for these men in their mid twenties, boring and predictable. The song ends but the piano keeps up the boogie woogie until it too, has to shut its covers and leave. End.

So, is this an ersatz Sgt Pepper? Yes and no. Mostly no.

Remember that outside of what the teen mags would have their readership believe the Beatles and the Stones were friends. They were the closest in fame levels and the only ones who could release anything and get it close to number one if not at the very top. And camped on the twin mountains of the height of 60s rock fame they almost only heard each other. "So who are you getting do your cover? Michael Cooper? We'll give him a go, too, then." They went to the same parties and recording sessions (which could be the same thing) and shared everything they could. Beyond touring, they formed the most exclusive club in the cultural world, a kind of pop culture Illuminati. If one did something the other was going to have a taste, too.

Nik Cohn had this relation perfectly. While the Beatles were perceived to balance each other out from the motherable Ringo to the ascerbic John the Stones didn't balance they were nasty heavy, shook off the matching suits and glared at their audiences. If you take Sgt Pepper with its Good Morning Good Morning to add sour to its Lovely Rita then you can expect Satanic Majesties to follow the dissonant opening number (featuring John and Paul on rowdy, un-fabslike backing vocals) with its even weirder formless reprise at the end of the side. If the Lantern was long so was the chirpy jam with a mini song in it that came straight after. Sgt Pepper was the Beatles 1967 album. Satanic Majesties was the Stones'. That's really it. The Beatles put a doll in a Stones fan jumper. The Stones imposed tiny copies of the Beatles from the Pepper gatefold in the decor and costumes of the SM cover.

But there's something else. If you play both albums together you might get the impression that you are listening to the apex of the summer of love's pop music. The real picture is that the groundswell of newer and younger acts had made it to their own studios and staged their own psychedelic happenings by the truckload. From the accessible like the Move or Syd's Pink Floyd to the obscure, avant garde and dangerous from the realm where being a force in the local underground scene and being a local star could be indistinguishable. The Captain Beefhearts, Arthur Browns or even the rapidly rising Jimi Hendrix were assuming the centre of the performing world that the two at the top of the oligarchy were directly threatened by. The rivalry felt at the top of the mountain didn't just go horizontally and the response to it had more panic than magisterial confidence.

Rolling Stones: The First Big Three: #2 BETWEEN THE BUTTONS

If Aftermath was a celebration of the arrival of the band in the Swinging London aristocracy Between the Buttons is life looked the morning after. The glasses and bottles piled like bombing rubble, unfamiliar bodies slumbered naked in some beds as the warmth of hasty exiting bodies faded from other beds, a lot of promises made at three a.m. formed like patchwork quilts on the dawn walk home. They were still at court and it was still fun but there was business, a lot of business and all of it had to be documented.

The Beatles had stopped touring because they could. They locked themselves in at Abbey Road and worked on translating the sounds from outer space that they would polish for the coming year. The Stones also eased out of their live shows, playing the last contracts and settling in for the trappings of majesty before getting hounded by the constabulary in 1967. This album was recorded in the last half of 66 and came out in January 67.

Where it stands in the ether around the compilation track listings is the bit where they get to Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow. Compare it to the one preceding Aftermath and something interesting happens. Paint it Black (I refuse to put the stupid comma in) is a lean, mean and spooky chant of grief. For all its sitar lines, extra bass and Gregorian modality it's something the fabs would never have done. It's a rock song that sounds like it was first performed in 1458. As such it has more to say to Black Sabbath than the mop tops.

But Shadow, Shadow is different. If you listen very hard you will discern the basic track that might have begun as a kind of romping rockabilly two beat stinger like 19th Nervous Breakdown but by the time the production and extra and extra and extra arrangement ideas got to it it was like a gigantic tenement block only just held together by the rats in the walls and the gaffer tape on the corners outside. Snatches of brass sections blare out from the party on the twentieth floor. Bodies fall about (maybe that's what's left of the drum track). You don't want to know what's happening on some floors, however much fun they sound like they're having. A quiet middle eight goes wonky after the strange request: "tell me a story of how you adore me". Then it's back to the rattling filthy well of reverb and the shaking of the walls until the collapse beyond the time signature in the last few moments. A few death throes and then the dust cloud rises. It's like nothing before or since by the band and, catchy though it can be, seems to have visited from a deep Lovecraftian well somewhere in the alley by the Ab Lib Club.

If the compilation is in chronological order you'll head on to Ruby Tuesday and Let's Spend the Night Together, released at around the same time as Between the Buttons, very early in 67. The first is one of the few moments of fascination the band had with classical music. Piano arpeggios swing gently beneath Brian's butterfly recorders as Mick croons about one of the beautiful loonies that seem to spontaneously generate wherever creative scenes form. That's Keith on the bow and Bill on the fingerboard of a double bass (seriously). And Charlie comes crashing in for the choruses. Night is only slightly hotter than Ruby with a babadaba backing vocal somewhere between the Beach Boys and Motown and Jagger sounding younger and more honestly lustful than at any time in the first few years of worldly blues affectation. There are no guitar parts for these songs by this two-guitar line up. A gorgeous double A-side that leads us into..

Yesterday's Papers starts with an odd syncopation on the drums that tells us a couple of things: Charlie's insisted on his jazz roots and: Charlie's found his toms (no, really found his toms; they are all over this record). The bass is huge and then the gentle vocal comes in over a flutter of vibes. It's rock. It's jazz. It's neither. There is guitar. It's fuzzed and tremolo but tiny, only emerging for an eensy chord break that doesn't qualify as a solo but provides a perfect textural change at just the right time. The dismissiveness in the title reminds us of Out of Time but the odd frenetic bustle underneath makes us think of movie themes from the time, especially with the decidedly unrock 6ths and 9ths in the call and response vocals. Quite a lot of this album feels like we're at the movies, come to think of it.

In My Obsession Jagger plays a young man who, weary of the easy ways of the scene, tries some more vintage sophistication by pursuing an older woman. She plays him like he's played the dolly birds until he's a nervous freak. There is an odd stop start structure to this one which resumes from each verse with the same Taxman style part and slidey bass riff. Wyman uses his home made fretless and overdrives it for sustain rather than raunch. The effect is of a strange wave-like foundation that can change from drone to rhythm on a beat. Again, a tiny guitar presence chunking out some chords before it's gone. The vocals complete an already out-of-stones experience. Jagger's in good voice with some bluesy shouting but in the second part of the verse the harmonies are high and minor key, each verse is capped by a strange varying Eastern harmony around the fifth. The song wears out its welcome after two verses and goes for another two but that's what being the victim of this stalker might well feel like. The idea is to give his state of mind which works but musically, I always stop digging it after two.

Soft as they feel in Stones terms the first two tracks feel like a storm as the fragile beauty of the arpeggio acoustic guitar and finger cymbals play the main chord progression. Jagger comes in near the top of his head-voice, singing the reverse situation of My Obsession. The rich married man from the City cautions his Back Street Girl to be discrete. Stanley Baker in a bowler hat and pinstripes opposite a devastated and devastating Judy Geeson (Google, ye sluggards! Google!). This is Lady Jane as a kitchen sink movie. The politeness of the vocal is the grimace beneath the stiff upper lip as the filigree waltz is burgeoned with an accordion or harmonium (they can sound identical in a given range). Don't call my wife. Don't call. He even tries the class divide. There is no approval of what's going on here but there is more than a little enjoyment of carrying it off. The classical-flavoured arpeggios trickle off down the grey cobblestones of the lane behind girl's council house as our hero steals away to the Jaguar he's parked two streets away. Roll credits.

Connection is a swinging bright rock song about touring and the business. Airports, searches, TB shots. This is why they gave it up for club land and the studio. Again, the guitar is a garnish on the side of the plate as the piano does the driving. In the outer reaches of the fade you can hear the kind of babadaba vocals from Night.

Then we're somewhere else again. A BIG church organ riff rolls with the drums and bass into a brisk waltz as Jagger unironically worships the woman at the centre who is less a piece across the room at the club than the centre of his life. He wonders at her inner strength and is reduced to a childlike warmth when She Smiled Sweetly and said don't worry. No guitar here, either.

Cool Calm & Collected begins with more of the piano we've been hearing so much but this time it's straight out of the musical and pub singalong. Exceptions to this scheme is that the melody and chord structure steps out of the diatonic pen and then for the Eastern sounding chorus Brian gets his dulcimer out of the case and adds more chime and tang before horsing around with snatches of folk or show tunes before the next verse crashes in. A kazoo solo after the second verse comes and goes nowhere and soon we're noticing that the song is slowly getting faster. And then after the third verse it starts cantering and galloping and blithering on to the big too fast to play anymore and collapses into exhaustion. She's so affected. Cool, calm, collected. The icy scene queen is too fast for everyone. Who shall try shall finish with his face in the dust. There's a cheek to the vocal that feels like the opposite of the sneering in the petulant parts of Aftermath but here the sneer is from a position of control. He's telling someone else not to go there but enjoys the show when they do. No guitar.

End of Side One

All Sold Out opens with quavers on the toms and plunges into a big loping chord progression that circles with a big bass and lower register piano. Keith's having fun with a fuzz pedal. Jagger jumps around with the chords as the backing vox stab in with heyheys which could be like soul or bubblegum. Minor key chorus, scratchy solo and then a really big outro on the piano that kicks into rock mode with the bass fuzz guitar and heyheys. Again, it strikes me as a movie theme. A crane shot glides down from the second floor in the west end of London. Everyone's wearing paisely and ruffles. Hywell Bennett fakes a smile at a dollybird and then turns to the audience as his face relaxes back into its malconent scowl. The title Sold Out appears in blinding yellow, the font is the loopy vulgar one that is now probably called Groove. The rolling progression and the great idea to play it on the bass end of the piano really compel this song. You always want it to be louder, though, denser and bigger. Still, when it's on I turn it up.

Please Go Home. After a couple of industrial chords driving a Fender or Vox amp tremolo we tumble straight into a solid Bo Diddley sutter. That's Brian on guitar and it's the toughest sound on the album so far and when Jagger comes in it's with a short but melodic phrase which ends in the title phrase in long descending fifths with the word home splattering into tape echo. Keith comes in with a whining Eastern flavoured mini drone at the end of each vocal phrase. Charlie is all tribal toms and cymbals. Brian's on an oscillator which I thought was a theremin but which like someone playing with a radio (which brings us back to doh!). It's irritating at first, cutting through with it's hard electronic whistle. This adds a strangeness to the song's already urgent impulse. The lyric is yet another boy to girl putdown.

Who's Been Sleeping Here? Folky acoustic and poppy vocal that falls into a series of Dylanesque lists to a big chorus with that ubiquitous piano and a Bobbish harmonica. Keith puts some tasty volume pedal roars in under the niceness of the acoustics. The solo and fade look forward to the longer sections in the later Beggar's Banquet. The title tells you the whole song, really, except that it's more role playing rather than directly experiential.

Complicated. Fuzz drone and piano shuffle with a wordless backing vocal that has a kind of Eastern Europe vibe. Charlie punishes those toms. Jagger's serious vocal about a woman whose independence disturbs him. Then again by the time he gets to the title line at the end of the verse he's resigned. Keith ups the ante on the chanting, adding a third above which sounds both bubblegum and avant garde. A strange small scale song but served with great flavour.

Miss Amanda Jones. With the Chuck Berry overdrive on 11 this starts out as an odd throwback but quickly joins the rest of the album with its big keyboards and change to the minor for the middle 8. A girl from a good family plays around the scene as her prospects and marriageability take a hit with each kick. The satire has the gentleness of both the nouveau worldly and the aspirant. The middle 8s caution rather than taunt. This is a prototype for the more jetset portraits from the BIG FOUR but here it's dressed for the Scotch of St James rather than the L.A. Riot House.

Something Happened to Me Yesterday. A big mash of old time dance bands and a vaudeville swagger. Jagger changes roles from rock star, country whiner, and dance band band leader as he sings about the same experience that he and everyone he called acquaintance was talking about. Lysergic Acid Diathilemide 26 hit everyone in his scene in the year this was recorded and this song cleverly eschews the more typical far out psychedelia of Eight Miles High, White Rabbit or Tomorrow Never Knows and chooses to sound more like something from their parents' generation. The jazz band with its wailing saxes and burping tubas is both Rainy Day Women and Dead End Street but not Got to Get You Into My Life. The narrator like the experience but recognises its strength and the need for caution in talking about it, thus expressing the joy and paranoia and commenting on it at the same time. Keith comes in with his first shared lead vocal duties in the second section of the verses referring to Jagger's character in the third person. Jagger closes the song and album with a spoken outro which is a total pisstake. He refers to their producer (Andrew Loog Oldham) as Reg Thorpe and finishes up with a London bobby's "Evenin' all" as the band leads the dance into the fade. It's a good joke.

Jagger didn't wait too long to trash the album, affecting only Back Street Girl as salvageable. He complained that Oldham's ambitious production, involving so many 4-track bounce-downs, buried the force of the ideas until it sounded soft and flavourless. I beg to differ about the result. The Stones would never make another album like it though it's position forms a clear bridge between the darker pop of Aftermath and the whacko psychedelia of Satanic Majesties. Taken out of that context, Between the Buttons is a delight from go to whoa, offering a wealth of textures in new instrumentation, the courage to abandon the two guitar onslaught so central to their sound for glissandi on the vibes or organ and piano where the guitars would have been. Jagger explores the possibilities of his role further than he ever had and continues with the sturdy melodism already established with the previous album and the singles around both. It's a real achievement.

As is the cover art. They are huddled in a park at about eight on a freezing winter morning. These guys have been up all night and are so zapped they probably won't be heading to bed any time soon unless it's more of whatever happened to them yesterday. Only Brian smiles, burying himself in his heavy coat and scarf, haggard and ancient, he is either crazy from sleep deprivation or has found the joke that the others are too tired to see. Neither band name nor album title are in clear evidence until you look at Charlie's buttons which are tiny. They look as though they've lived through everything Jagger has sung about in the dozen songs in the set. A dozen movie concetrates of life of fleeting privileged mega-hedonism and its consequences. Here is a briefly lucid portrait. The blur of the photo's periphery is soon to eat into their faces and bodies. This wasn't offered as a concept album but boy does it play with a few.

Rolling Stones: The First Big Three: #1 AFTERMATH

It's always the big four, Banquet to Exile, as though that's all they ever did. After that it's dilution into stadium autopilot and before it's all ersatz Beatles. New Stones compilation albums appear almost annually, churning out the same old masters with a few shakes from the more recent stuff that will be inoffensive if unwelcome. But nothing of the song sets that The Stones offered in the first era.

Couple of reasons for this. Singles were the statements. Albums were for the fans who were ok with the filler after the hits on side one. This was hard to appreciate if you started buying records in the mid 70s when albums were presented with inordinate reverence. New Queen album? Let us pray.

The reason that the first extended listen to the Rolling Stones I ever had was the 60s comp High Tide Green Grass was that nothing before Beggar's Banquet was in the shops. It was a revelation. Not only was the charge of Beatle copying point-missing but as soon as I experienced the hifi mixes of Satisfaction, Paint it Black or Get Off Of My Cloud it was irrelevant. Later, I learned that none of those songs made it on to the albums of their time and was stunned.

But it just wasn't done that way in the UK in the 60s as the assumption was that anyone who shelled out for the LP already had the 45. I can't imagine record companies in the 70s tolerating that notion let alone now but there it was. So, what was on the forbidden sides that never made it on to the greatest hits sets?

I wouldn't know until the 80s. Punk made a lot of little differences. Rather than cause a youth revolution (the deepening world of post punk did something more like that) it made people think twice about the difference between what they heard on the radio and what they could find in the record shops. The back catalogues of the big names were reissued in original format and compilations served as degustations for everything under the radar. So, it was Pebbles Vol. 7 and The Soft Parade, Nuggets and The Madcap Laughs. And as an early 80s undergrad in a heavily late 60s influenced band I first came to hear Aftermath, Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesties Request.

Here is a mini series on those three albums, may they be neglected no more .... by the people who read this blog.

AFTERMATH

 

From the get go there is something wrong. From Jagger's vocal it's clearly The Stones but it sounds like the Kinks. It's not a love song or even a sex song. It's a satire. A bored housewife staggers through her upwardly mobile somatic days with the aid of doses of speed in Mother's Little Helper. If the Leslied guitar and sitar seem at odds with the Cockney knees-up there is a cultural fit as they are as faddish as the furniture. And then there's the fishmarket Oi as a finish.

Someone (I wish it had been me) pointed out that Stupid Girl sounds mostly like what a little brother would sneer behind his sister's back rather than a clubland court jester jibing a crowned dollybird. The softness of the rock with its acoustic guitars and chunky Hammond organ provide more new textures for the band.

Lady Jane begins more beautifully than any Stones song to date had a right to be. Acoustic guitar that sounds like a harp broken by a glittering dulcimer playing the vocal melody. When Jagger enters stage left he sounds like an Elizabethan courtier but sings it straight.  From halfway through things get more impossibly gorgeous with a harpsichord taking over the arpeggios from the guitar. Some read Henry VIII into the lyric but to me it just sounded like a swinging London stud settling down (perhaps to satisfy the conditions of his inheritance; Swinging London was a privileged pursuit).

Under My Thumb plays a Motown riff on marimbas as the (barely) grown up version of the kid in Stupid Girl has taken control of his girl. As studly as it sounds there is a melancholy to this number. The subjection he has achieved is loveless and I've always heard a kind of self-punishment in the lyric and the vocal, as though the relationship will only be regulated by the approval of the jilted party. It's not meant to but it reminds me of Anthony Quinn and Guillietta Massina in La Strada.

Doncha Bother Me is a kind of proof that this is the same band as the previous albums and singles, A-merican blues learned through style. Doesn't float my boat but, oddly the jam that follows kind of does with all its moods and textures. Going Home is like the kind of thing the Doors would soon specialise in o'er the ocean, minus the Blake and Nietzsche lyrics. It goes for over ten minutes but I always leave it on.

Flight 505 begins with Stu on barrel house piano. A joke reference to Satisfaction and we're into a routine Stones groove with some added fuzz bass and the first of the kind of hot afternoon country laze that they'd get more into in the big four. If Flight 505 had some country in it High and Dry loses itself deep in them woods with a 12 string Leadbelly riff and Jagger adding a few too many yeps to convince us he's totally comfortable with the rootsiness of it. A less self consciously cool vocal might have driven the track into richness. As it is it's a good enough listen with a nagging lack.

Out of Time brings the marimba back for a figure that sounds more like Mozart-era opera. A kind of lounge version of the Lady Jane Story that tells a penitent bitchface that the singer has moved on. There is far more gloat here than in Under My Thumb but the sheer texture of Jagger's intentionally polite vocal, the woodblocks, plaintive distant backing vocals are too delicious for me to care too much. It's a little like chomping down on a gourmet soft centre chocolate called Fuck You, Fatso. I should say that this version does last a verse too long and I prefer the strident string section version done as a demo for Chris Farlowe (it's on a few compilations).

It's Not Easy is a kind of apology for the perceptible misogyny of a lot of what has preceded it. A straight up boogie says it's hard to cope with life once your baby leaves you because you've been an ignorant pig. Sits well in the set but I wouldn't seek it on its own.

I Am Waiting is as gorgeous as Lady Jane but darker for being mysterious. They're waiting but won't say for what or why. The singers of the band perform a close low register harmony as the dulcimer chimes in the back like a glittering second-hand. The mystery and the constant understatement give this one a real beauty. Could be waiting for death or just the acid to come on. Not declared so it still works.

Take It Or Leave It is the kind of strident but contained ballad that the Walker Brothers were riding on and the Bee Gees soon would. But the angelic harmonies here aren't the stuff of the Wilson brothers, having much more Sam Cooke or Smokie Robinson in them. Odd to hear The Stones attempting (and getting away with) this kind of thing but there it is. Almost never returned to but smooth and effective.

Think. More of that big fuzz bass. More soul influence mixed with more of the Kinks effortless style bending pragmatism. Sounds good in passing. What To Do ends the set with more Sam Cooke stylings with delicious high harmonies and contemporary boredom. That's the last word from one of the biggest bands in the world at the time. Did they think no one would make it that far in the album? It's filler but it's funny and has a few flavoursome moments and then it's silence.

Before Aftermath Stones albums were almost entirely cover versions and delivered in a hard edged white boy R&B. Aftermath was much more like the singles of the time but delved deeper into what contemporary pop music was offering. But if anything is ruling the songs and their sound here it is the lifestyle. Aftermath is a document of Swinging London from the point of view of its creamy top. for all the cor blimey Kinksian bompf of Mother's Little Helper the target is the curses of the young bourgeois matron rather than anyone on Dead End Street. The cool lounge druggy cruise of the marimbas of Out Of Time or the ornate David Bailey directed gorgeousness of Lady Jane are from the cultural aristocracy who might well have danced to Route 66 but sounded much more like I Am Waiting.

The Stones were growing into their roles in the lifestyle and the colours, textures and declarations here are a studied step up from nouveau riche price-tagged culture. No scrumming around on the street for good times here, it's all the premature world weariness of the aesthete. It's the candour of Norwegian Wood without the naughtiness. It's the Eurobanity of Michelle without the self-importance. In fact, on that kind of thing, if you want a junction between the two giants it would be Drive My Car which, with a very little stretching, either band could have done and which serves as both an infectious bright rock song which tells a pretty funny joke.

Aftermath, above all, for me is the late night slice of this privilege where the pleasures of sophistication can sour into the puerility at youth's insistence. The characterisations in these songs were a development from the strutting or plaintive jilted bluesmen borrowed from the first stage of the career and while those offered a starting point the Aftermath songs took on life as they feel life drawn, the day to enviably busy and adoring day of rock stars at the top of the world who yet can find drama to motivate words and music. I don't think any of this was design as it feels so much more like unwitting compulsion. This album is Swinging London because it had to be.