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..
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.
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