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.