Tell me a story about how you adore me. Live in the shadow. See through the shadow. Live through the shadow. Tear at the shadow. Hate in the shadow and love in your shadowy life.
Then it's back for another verse of cartoon madhouse before it finally collapses into more beautiful mess of electric guitar mire. Whatever this is about, it feels both mocking and dark. There is a video for this song made up of the band fleeing fans, getting noticed walking around the streets, and at their noted photoshot for the promo of this song in drag (supplemented by the same kind of images of them in their groovy normal gear lest anyone should get that wrong).
This song comes and goes in the Stones' catalogue. They got harder, more psychedelic, raunchier and darker but never before or since recklessly decedent. It could be the effects of a summer at the peaks of fame in Swinging London or the darker, more exhausting, trials of the road but what it does, pretty much for the first time is show a rock band glorying in the rock star lifestyle.
This opener is the first I'd heard of The Rolling Stones as a teenager beyond the hits and memories on the radio. My sister Anita bought this compilation for my birthday. She'd been there when I found the Yardbirds compilation the year before which put the hook in me about '60s music. When she saw me pick this she asked if I really wanted it. We were a Beatles household but something had happened one afternoon while napping to the radio after school. More on that later. But I had a yen for The Stones and it had to be satisfied. I insisted, put the record on and here it was, this giant schmozzle. At first, I took the brass as indicating the mooted Beatles ripoff strategy but this wasn't like anything the Fabs had done. It teetered and clanged and caterwauled. It's mess was its message.
Back in 1966, that was the point of front loading this best-of. Instead of a staid timeline approach, someone, probably manager Oldham, put the big, bad new ones on first. You could wait for the oldies at the end of the sides. Oldies, here, meant songs from the previous two years. Also, when The Beatles put out compilations at this time, they always started with Love Me Do. This one slaps the fan around a little, yelling, "hey, snap out of it, it's today!"
After this is Paint it Black (sorry, not putting the comma in) which blew my little mind apart with his Eastern Europe rhythm and further Eastern sitar. The song is about a profound grief that drags the narrator into a monochrome cosmos. The racing heartbeat of the bass and percussion, the traded licks of guitar and sitar with Jagger's alternating croon and scream force anyone who hears it to look into its heart and join the mourning. Proto Goth? Why not? It's all there: death, misery and despair. By the time the outro pits a hummed verse melody with Jagger's anguished cires for everything to be blackened, including the sun, there is nothing but darkness. I made cassettes of this record for a few school friends and they were all a little freaked by it. The song is still one from the band's catalogue that I will find and play for its own sake.
Thunder! Twin guitars playing big chord riffs in unison, going through the same amp with a ton of reverb. As someone who's worked with limited tape space I know that the intro to It's All Over Now was done separately before the song began. there's some limited percusion and a lot of bass supporting the big rumbling guitars but it was done, like the intro to Shadows, to get your attention. After two run throughs we're neatly in the land of a Stones track in country mode with pecking rhythms and clucking solo and a mean voiced Jagger at the centre. Everything lifts for the hamonies of the chorus and it's bright as sunshine before falling back down. There's no more room for the intro guitars but there's an echo of them towards the last choruses when a big dark chord sounds at the start of each line and resolves into the chicken pickin' rhythm. A great recording of a sleek and cheeky song. The Stones' first UK number one.
The Last Time was the first time the band released a single with an iconic riff. Played high on the board, this nagging figure stands its ground until the chorus and then can't wait to get started just before that's over, crawling back in under the rug. Any guitarist who hears this for the first time can't wait unti it's finished to work it out. It's a lot less obvious that it appears. For good measure, Keith Richard's solo uses it as a starting point and provides his own responses. Jagger's vocal is on the bassier side which fits with the emotional gravity of the lyric (grave for the age group he and the fans were part of) about a doomed relationship. The chorus backing spares down for the crucial lines in the chorus when the words, "maybe the last time I don't know" have a moment before the riff twangs back and the band bash into life again. The outro is Jagger screaming what he's already said in frustration as the backing vocals almost mock his hesitation by repeating, "maybe the last time." This was the Stone's first originally written single, a number one hit. There is a similarity to note between the chorus and that of The Staple Singers' This May Be the Last Time but, really, it's only very superficially similar. Neither song detracts from the other.
Heart of Stone, another original, wasn't a single in the UK but could easily have been. It's a torchy blues rock ballad with lots of seventh chords falling on the dominant below that way fourths do in hymns. The progression and structure spice it up with some extended minor key passages, falsetto backings and a tidal chorus. A guitar figure below the swell, uses a wobbly amp tremolo to great effect which serves as a kind of truthtelling undercurrent to Jagger's swaggering claims of living like a lothario before the chorus has him protesting far too much before hanging himself on the title phrase in his baritone range before the next verse. Keith's fiery solo does the rest, a twanging blast to highlight the self admonition of the lyric.
Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away takes us further back in time to the early attempts at hitmaking. The Stones tear through it, pushing all the force out of their dual acoustic guitar attack, Jagger's screaming vocal and blues harp over a restless swell of percussion hammering the Bo Diddley pattern. When the electric guitar comes in for the solo it models itself on Hollys own chord crunching but at the punkier speedy pace of the version, like an amphetamined heart beat breaking the china. This is how you do a cover.
The time machine races all the way back two years for the first attempt at a single with Come On. See also Not Fade Away in that this is a gutiar forward speed up of the original. Chuck Berry's track is a mid paced rocker played and sung with a knowing smirk of a guy having a bad day ever since he broke up with his girl. The Stones put another chordy riff front and centre with hot clean guitars in unision and a big harmonica for accents. Jagger's vocal is a kind of lift from Berry's but like the rest of the souping up it's a young man's impatient response. There's a key change for the last verse which features a kind o fanfare from the harp that signs its death warrant as being anything but conventional showbiz (along with the key change itself). This reminds me of those very early publicity photos from the time manager Andrew Loog Oldham tried to get them decked out Beatle-style in matching suits. That lasted. This was probably added here at the end of side one where anyone listening might have found it a charming folly, but I also think their first number one was omitted so its Lennon MacCartney byline and royalties wouldn't be a problem. Then, when the contemporary listener got up and turned the side over, the advancement of a single year would become a giant thing.
Da Daa Da Da Daaaaaa. The fuzztone climb from a B on the A string to the D will live for evermore. Keith dreamed it and imagined a horn section playing it. Oldham claims to have suggested he try his new fuzz box but that sounds like a scene from a biopic. However it happened, after several uninspired takes the one with the fuzz box worked. And it sold all the fuzz boxes that Gibson had on sale and had bedroom guitarists overdriving their amps to get there, too. After this, the opening plea sings the title: "I can't get no satisfaction." Underneath that is a strong bassy dual guitar attack on a bedrock bass and a restless drum kit. Then the verses. Jagger is hitting out at everything, commercialism, useless information from the radio, contracts and showbiz ... biz, and even the good things like the fame and all the sex get tarnished by money and bad timing and he just can't get satisfied as the riff insists that all of this will just keep going on and on. The middle eight is big, heralded by a change in the drums and features a stadium sized chant, "Hey hey hey, that's what I say!" as that riff rolls on. And Jagger sounds like he's powerful enough to snap his fingers to stop it but it just is not going to happen. It's less about him than the fans, though, whose satisfaction in a briefly rising affluence clued them into wanting satisfaction in the first place, instead of accepting the kitchen sink lot of the generation gone. This is an anthem to the youth he was and sang to. Like The Who's My Generation, it never gets old.
Get Off Of My Cloud begins with a drum hook that keeps to a two barr pattern with the semiquaver ratatat at the end. When the guitars come in, playing big accents with the snare and then the same ratatat at the finish. The bass keeps a stubborn I IV V pattern and, if you listen, Brian Jones plays a connecting figure on an electric twelve string. Jagger's vocal is an extension of the call in Satisfaction, this time, telling the suited and uniformed world to keep out. While he didn't live on the ninety-ninth floor of a housing estate tower as he says, he could guess at the stress. Everyone's barging in complaining about the noise, offering a five pound prize for having the right detergent, and even when he goes for a drive and pulls over for a sleep, he gets so many parking tickets on his windscreen that they look like a flag. The vocal standard is lifted into the melody that Satisfaction dispensed with in favour of a rallying shout and is the better for it. When the call and response chorus that tells everyone else in the world to get lost, the monotone shout comes back and sounds right. This is how you follow up with something same but different.
Then we dip right down into introspection and acoustic and strings ballad territory. As Tears Go By was the first Jagger Richards song. It was never a UK single but was given to Marianne Faithful to take to the top of the charts swaddled in strings and Spector percussion. The Stones' own version has a gentle and lovely acoustic twelve string intro and backing before the strings enter to swallow everything but the vocal. Jagger sings it straight with genuine emotion as his twenty year old narrator looks ruefully at ten year olds playing the way he used to do. It's not made of much but it works every time. The biopic scene plays Oldham as instigator, locking Jagger and Richards in the kitchen until they came out with a hit. The still signature R&B band didn't think much of it (three of them aren't on it) and thought that putting it out would be like copying The Beatles (whose Yesterday had only just appeared.
Then there's 19th Nervous Breakdown. A big bright chord figure keeps plinking out until a rising octave bounce crawls under it soggy with tremolo and growls until the whle band come it with a rollicking account of a society deb, old and jaded before her time who doesn't respond to anything the narrator tries to help her with. It's one of many songs Jagger wrote about what he found in the upper echelons of Swinging London. These observations pepper the Aftermath and Between the Buttons albums but this one really gets it right first time. The unstoppable force of the verses and the Chuck Berry style descending vocal melody do plenty but then there's the stop start chorus: "You better stop! ... Look around" (huge distorted guitar bend) and the rising Eastern floavoured chant of "Here it comes, here it comes here it comes. Here comes your nineteenth nervous breakdown." The middle eight interrupts the song but gains the ground back instantly with the harmonies and chugging guitars. On to the fade with Bill Wyman's dive bombing stutter on the bass.
I woke from an afterschool nap one day to hear this plaiyng from halfway through on the radio. I didn't know it nor guessed at who it was. All the time, the messy perfection of it was sculpting a resolve in my brain: if I ever form a rock band they will sound like this. It was back announced and I needed my own copy. As for the band that sounded like 19th Nervous Breakdown. Ah, you can't lose 'em all.
Lady Jane follows with more about Swinging London, this time set in a kind of Elizabethan mating game. Gentle guitars and a ringing dulcimer provide the time machine as Jagger bids farewell to a number of ladies, announcing he's decided on Lady Jane. The name refers to female genitalia in the "scandalous" novel Lady Chatterly's Lover which would serve a sense of irony, given the delicacy of the music. True or not, the song only develops out from its beginnings when an expansive harpsichord part beds the instrumental section. I like the dark and light of it, the high and low, even without the gorgeous music. After Breakdown, it's a gently numbing rest.
Time is on My Side is a lazy and taunting blues ballad that starts (if you have the right version) with a lovely wailing guitar played high and leading into the chorus. This deep cut from the second album is modelled on Irma Thomas' original (i.e. original with a full vocal) but set within the band's context. The organ keeps things smooth as Jagger effectively jibes at his departed love (even going into a petulant spoken word section) and assuring her that she'll just keep running back to him. I've never loved this one but it's effective. Caution, some compilations put a version on with a dirge-like organ intro that will have you putting the jug on and coming back.
If you do come back you'll get a perfectly chosen closer, Little Red Rooster. Willie Dixon's sly blues taken up by Howlin' Wolf is a slow burn and intense workout of nuance and raw indolence. No surprises that The Stones would adopt it. They pare back on Wolf's passion and tension for a much cooler walk through with Brian providing illustrations on his slide guitar. There is a quiet threat in Jagger's reading. He's not trying to scare you the way Wolf does, but if you listen carefully, you should be scared. It's a late night with intoxicants take and a great way to end side two.
So, why have I done all this writing on a compilation album? Aren't they oversupplied with comps? A new one seems to surface every other year with the same songs on it. Sure but this one really is different. First, this was the first time most of these tracks had appeared on LP. At a time when albums were only just coming into view as cohesive statements, this provided one from singles and first explorations. It came out mid-'60s, at the start of an electrifying career and showed what they could do with fame and access to wider culture and the possibilities of songcraft and the studio. The journey from blues standards to proto-psychedelia alone is pretty extraordinary.
It's a good answer to anyone determined to push the old fiction that the band only aped The Beatles by front loading each side with tracks that only they could have taken to such extents. You want sitar like in Norwegian Wood? How about putting one in a dirge of grief that ends in a humming chorus and cries of despair? You want horns like Got To Get You Into My Life? Try them in the weird ramshackle Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby? The Fabs did lots of playing around with guitar arrangements but never to the extent of the real orchestration between Richard and Jones in most of their songs at this time. This album is a training manual for that. Would The Beatles have ever done anything like Satisfaction, Cloud or Breakdown? With that ferocity? No, they didn't need to as they were a different outfit and did things their own way. All the players in that rich period of pop music knew each other, dropped in on each others' sessions and drank at the same wells. This is a potent early testimony to that.
Also, it got me thinking about how you put rock songs together. The guitar orchestrations I talked about above were the starting point. If you play guitar, this feature of the early Stones will strike you straight away. So many of the tastemakers laud the advent of Brian replacement Mick Taylor for his fluid melodymaking as a lead player and they're right, but for me, The Stones were at their most arresting when it all sounded like a big soup which every last shake of spice could be clearly tasted. I defy every dual guitar rock line up to do this as well as this band at this time.
This record came out after their first fully band-composed LP Aftermath. I first heard it about ten years later. I can still hear Nita trying to turn me off the purchase and I can still feel the joy of going against that. From that birthday until I started buying the reissued early releases, this collection was always near the front of the stack.
Listening notes: as I long ago gave my copy of this to a friend and later the CD, I compiled it from the HD version of The Rolling Stones Singles: The London Years. This is a superb compilation that simply puts the A and B sides of all the UK singles until the Sticky Fingers era. As a CD it's three discs of mostly mono mixes (as they would have been on 45 discs). I cheated once and took the non-organ-intro Time is on My Side from another compilation as the guitar intro was the one on this article's compilation. The audio quality of this set as a hi-res package is stellar to the extent that it can be. It faithfully replicates the original mono masters which means it didn't get beefed up for the kids o' today. I put the songs in the order that they appeared in on the 1966 LP. So, it's not a pure experience but my point was that the sequence added up to greatness at a time when I couldn't have cared less as to the quality of audio reproduction or the sample rates. It's just a great set of songs.
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