BIG HITS (HIGH TIDE GREEN GRASS) THE ROLLING STONES @ 60

A great mess of growling guitars gets blasted by horns and the crazy wobbling disaster of Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow crashes to life. Buried vocals and frenetic pianos. Verses end in hazey harmonies. It's hard to know what's going on and things seem about to collapse at any second but it's just too much fun. Then you might be tempted by the middle eight to look at the words. A sudden calm, Jagger and acoustic guitar which intensifies as the band comes back in and the horn section rejoins:

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 Richards' 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 Richards 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. 

OUT OF OUR HEADS - THE ROLLING STONES @ 60

A slash of guitar opens fire with a sharply falling riff. As if it wasn't heard, it happens again. Jagger comes in with the rest of the band and they're off, swinging and loping around like a holy rolling preacher and his congregation except it's all about a girl and the pitch is already manic with the band rushing along with the shout of the vocal and the big thunderous guitar slowly guiding the whole show. When the backing vocals turn up they are somewhere between sweet doo wop and the snotty backing calls of The Yardbirds or The Who. If anything, this sounds like it comes from over ten years later, with the same amphetamine boost that drove The Dickies' crazy version of The Banana Splits. The original by Sonny Bono (yeah, that one) and Roddy Jackson was by Larry Williams who was one of the great early rock shouters and his take is a fine example of solid R&B. This time, instead of adapting a favourite, The Stones push it right out of its own envelope in a cover as tearing as the Fabs' version of Twist and Shout. If you didn't know This was The Rolling Stones, you'd think it was '70s punk. If they had done nothing else, they had learned how to start an album by getting everyone up to do the speed  and whisky frolic. All that in one and a half minutes!

And then you get Mercy Mercy and Hitchhike which is how they used to do covers. They're both fine, and if you're inclined toward the sound, you'll leave them playing. There's the big boom guitar that they'd been perfecting the big dual guitar arrangement started with the likes of It's All Over Now.

That's How Strong My Love Is is a cover of Otis Redding's torchy soul ballad, done with those big guitars and a forward momentum and a heartfelt Jagger vocal.Things mellow down for Sam Cooke's Good Times which the band delivers with a smooth sheen held up by strong bass and band-wide vocals. The arrangement puts rock instruments in where Cooke's original is more orchestral and creamy. It's more a tribute than the reinvention that the opening track.

The side ends with one of the few originals, Gotta Get Away. Bright guitars and a lower fuzzed out one sounding like a brass section and the band getting laid back, Jagger comes in with a plaintive and melodic tune about a breakup that really does sound like the last time.

Side two opens with Chuck Berry's Talkin' About You. The Stones ditch the frantic Berry pacing, opening with a precursor to the big Keith chord riff and getting on down the road with sleaze and intent. This is a band that doesn't suspect it's going to sound like a bigger and meaner version of this in about three years.

Cry to Me is not given with Solomon Burke's gymnastic vocals but something more reserved. It's a strong take with high emotion and good use of the twin guitars and backing vocals but, at best, it's a fine attempt at adding the swinging London cool to the storm of the original. It's the Stones pleasing a crowd. See also the net track We Got a Good Thing Goin'. It's there to let everyone know how the band could keep a venue warm.

Heart of Stone is next and completely outclasses most of the covers on this LP by showing how to learn lessons and still sound like yourself. A tight 6/8 lament with a snarl, this one uses the sinuous guitars of The Last Time and the baritone arpeggios of It's All Over Now, Jagger's increased emotional and vocal range, finally convincing falsettos in the backing and a stirring climb to the chorus that just makes you want more. One of the best early originals. 

The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man is attributed to Naker Phelge, the whole-band credit given to joke numbers like We Want the Stones on the "live" album. That sells it short, though, as it's a fine and funny mockery of the hangers-on of the Amercian style of the burgeoning rock music industry like this one with his toupee and seeya sucker suit whose too cheap to save a dime for the bus but full of his own merit and essence.

I'm Free builds on a fluid bed of tremolo guitars and a vocal approach that nods through an original to the glories they's just been playing to soul and R&B on this record. It's a worthy original but it's overshadowed. 

This is the band that had already released The Last Time and (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, pillars of riff rock that shake the walls of guitar shops to this day. A quick look (don't even listen) at any compilation of early Stones material and you'll understand that the prominence given to singles left their early albums emaciated. The Beatles third album was all Lennon-MacCartney originals and screamed global success. Out of our Heads feels pedestrian by comparison. Two years of US tours, mayhem and rampaging success and the result is so resolutely OK?

WIth their chief rivals on a roll that would go many years and through so many creative ceilings, no one could pretend that albums were the stocking fillers of the rock world. While the band's singles would continue to rip holes in the sky, it would be nearly half a year of waiting until their own first home grown killer LP. It's almost as though they were watching the clock with this. It's all prefectly stated and includes some inspired moments but against their rivals in chief and up and comers like The Kinks and The Who ripping ahead with their own recordings it feels like treading water.

Then again, this also is probably due to static management as much as it is to low creativity. Wunderkind Andrew Loog Oldham wasn't the only manager of the band. There was a lot of old showbiz stasis happening to all the music making in the U.K. industry. Oldham's flair with the directions of the singles and his slavish devotion to Spectorism certainly pushed the stunning list of bangers the band released on 45rpm and, himself, probably considered the LP a second thought. Rubber Soul and Pet Sounds were on the horizon to change everyone's mind on that idea. Meanwhile, there were these kinds of albums that reminded fans of the clubs and pubs and promised hints of the new and, as long as they looked as good on the sleeves, provided some cool decor to the batch pad of swinging London. 

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.

1969@50: LET IT BLEED: THE ROLLING STONES

A plinking guitar figure. It's gentle but the sustain note quietly insists on urgency as it repeats down the scale, C# B A. The drums slide in from the second play and between the two a snake of guitar bends high on the board, waking. A distant falsetto ooh sounds a lament. The band crashes in with bass, extra guitar on the chords but the falsetto is still quiet and the snaking lead guitar confidently intensifying until it strangles around the rhythm for the start of the storm. Jagger comes in from kilometres away, singing of disaster looming and threatening his very life. And then the chorus, female and powerful but still distant bursts into the chant: War, children. It's just a shot away, just a shot away. A brief respite is messed up with some fiery blasts of bluesharp before a big bold guitar break takes over and then, oddly crawls down into the mix to slither. But then with a distant yell from Jagger Merry Clayton screams the centrepiece: "Rape! Murder! It's just a shot away, just a shot away!" Three times and on the third it's so urgent and pained her voice breaks on the word shot and then splinters for the last cry of murder. The storm continues and Jagger, much closer than before sings of love being just a kiss away. The last words are taken up by the women and repeated before they fall under the waves of thunder which rolls and bashes until the fade, moving on to new ground.

Just as Sympathy for the Devil was a revelation to any of its first listeners that the band thought of as the second in command of the British invasion had bloomed into something quite other to how it started, Gimme Shelter took that further. There are reasons for this and one is the transition that was happening between guitarists. Brian was on the floor and got in some maracas for one song and some auto harp on another before being picked up and carried back to Pooh Corner. Mick Taylor, fresh and almost illegally young, entered for only two album tracks and then didn't play in the style that would characterise his contribution to such acclaim in future efforts.

So, with Brian completely out of the picture and the new boy not yet given a defined role, the Jagger/Richards takeover was sealed. This is the first Glimmer Twins commanded production in a way that the previous one was like a refinement of the then current state with all the pop influences discarded. So, while it was fine to kick Beggar's Banquet off with something from the dawn of humanity, the follow up needed to rage as the band had never before. There are some precedents, of course; Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby and Citadel but the chaos of the first was unsustainable and force of the second too beginner to base a sound on. As it's almost entirely Keith on guitar here it's his hot clean tone that dominates and the sinewed textures of the lead lines in Gimme Shelter and further explorations that will colour these songs more than anything else. The big four (Beggars through to Exile) are thought to consolidate the Stones sound to the effect that anything they have tried since is not just judged by those records but discernably slight departures from them. If there had been nothing Beatlesque about Beggar's Banquet, Let it Bleed is the sound of a great muscularity shambling to the stage and dominance.

After the storm a gentle acoustic arpeggio introduces Love in Vain. It is joined by a solid hot slide guitar, brushed drums and bass. Jagger's vocal is plaintive and full throated after its burial alive in the opening track. But there's a problem. On original pressings of this album the song was credited to Jagger-Richards. It's since been recognised as the work of Ur bluesman Robert Johnson. This happened on the previous LP with Prodigal Son. It was happening a lot in Zeppelin-ville, too. Things would catch up but for now... The version, let's say, is a good one, though, slow as a hot afternoon and pining.

Country Honk is an acoustic rendition of Honky Tonk Women which was recorded as a single during these sessions (and features Mick Taylor in full flight as a lucid and lyrical guitar maestro). Here, starting with street sounds, car horns and studio chatter, a shambolic singalong shines with impromptu good humour.

Live With Me begins with a classic Keith bass line and kicks quickly into a lean rock song. I used to skip this one as what I could get from the lyrics seemed too play dough macho. Much later, finally reading them, I keep it on when I listen. "I got nasty habits," sings Mick. I bet you do. Hold forth. "I take tea at three." Yes, it's actually much more of a piss take at themselves and their reputation. Even the lines about the maid and footman later on have a kind of knockabout whimsy. Even the faux in faux decadence is camp and wide eyed. It's also the first track that sax guy Bobby Keys added his own dialogue and to great effect.

A swampy slide intro gives way to a big strummed chord progression for the title track. The slide will re-enter throughout, adding great texture to the message and the humour of the song. Is it Ry Cooder? He's officially on mandolin and there are stories ... I don't care either way but I do know that the voice of it fits what Keith was establishing already in the sound. The lyric is mainly a series of statements about needing the equivalent of shoulders to cry on that stretch into sex and drugs and rock and roll for six verses with Jagger finally calling: "you can come all over me." It's a massive washing tide of knowing flowing over the exhausted bodies of the fast living and the victims altogether and, while it is delivered in clear humour carries a lot of weight.

Flip the disc and after a few chugging electric notes like a key igniting an engine Midnight Rambler begins to strut from the speakers with a confidence made of a solid bass line, steady drums and stinging guitar as Jagger delivers the manifesto of a career criminal. The second verse intensifies this before a sudden stop. The guitars rise and fall in slippery waves until Jagger intones, "well, you heard about the Boston - " THUMP! He's just revealed which bad guy he's talking about. After a few more lines of slapping musical violence the grind behind him rises and swells as he tells us how he could be everywhere, in your hallway, on your stair. Reaching breaking point, the band push back into the rock blues groove of the first two verses  as Jagger continues with the criminal's arrogant snarling confession until it's too much for even him and he stops in a kind of stuttered climax.

I first heard this full album in 1982 and had been well versed in all manner of theatrical rock music as well as the more violent aspects of punk, and late '60s rock. Nothing of that was as intense or quite as powerful as this epic. And it wasn't like Dazed and Confused or In a Gadda Da Vida. There were no flashy solos, let alone overlong ones. There were, however, instrumental passages that felt more like scenes of sleazy night life from movies yet to be conceived by the like of Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola. The seriousness and assumption of character is more akin to mid-'70s Bowie than anything on a Sabbath record. The haze of wilful evil in this track still gets to me. Jagger on all four. Richards on texture and mood and the will to do it all with just three chords.

You Got the Silver is Richards' debut as a lead vocalist. More edible slide in the intro before Keith's much feebler voice comes in with the first hesitant lines of a straightforward love song that circles around a three chord honky tonk workout. But there are dynamics, it doesn't just begin, go and finish. The first lines are couched in a kind of shy admiration and wrapped in the sinewy electric slide before the rise of confidence brings a robust celebration out of him and the band. It's not a lot of song but it works.

Monkey Man begins with one of the most intriguing instrumental introductions the band or anyone of their contemporaries did. A piano glistens with a rising arpeggio over an ominous organ playing minor chords, pulsating bass and funky chord descent on guitar. This kicks into gear, the guitar switching to a more ragged rock attack before Jagger belts in lines about desperation and decadence as the guitar blasts and breaks back into the frenetic figure. A gorgeous instrumental break in a major mode plays the guitar against an octave slide figure and more glittering piano before Jagger comes back in, screaming about being a monkey. It's a kind of Jumping Jack Flash revisited with the sophistication that jet setting and a return to touring bestowed. It takes a few listens to mean much but once it gets to you it's there forever.

And then we come to one of the saddest and most achingly beautiful anthems of this anthem-heavy year. As they never had nor ever would again, The Rolling Stones begin with a choir. Not, a soul church congregation nor a battery of mighty women like on Gimme Shelter but a classical choir. It sounds funny to hear the high boys voices at first as they sing Jagger's lines about an old flame making a connection, with perfect pitch and clipped diction but the second listen on gives it the sadness it began with. A gentle acoustic strum rises as the choir finishes and Jagger comes in with a world weary voice with lines about women to meet, old friends who share time (and what they get from the Chelsea drugstore) and stories about other friends, of protests in the streets of the turbulent late '60s all of which fall into the refrain that while you can't always get what you want, if you try sometime you can get what you need. Trite? Only if read on a page without the music. The music rise in force to massiveness but it's not like the storm of Gimme Shelter, it's both merciful with building and cleansing choirs, raindrop piano figures, filling organ chords and soaring vocals. The old decade is grinding to a close. Everyone's a little scarred and torn, everyone's exhausted, everyone can't go on but the next ten are around the corner and everyone has to. As the storm of Gimme Shelter roared over the distance the great earthly heaven of this greatly forgiving song takes us with it into the peace it leaves behind. What a way to end the '60s not with the Fabs cooing about love and peace but the bad guys who had finally found their bad and a kind of sagacity as well. "you get what you neeeeeeeeeed!"