1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 173. The Rolling Stones – Let It Bleed (1969)

 

The Stones get a little bit gospel on this album, with the opening and closing tracks Gimme Shelter and You Can’t Always Get What You Want featuring choral/gospel elements. The  refrain “Rape, murder [which I’ve always heard as “Bladerunner”] are just a shot away” from Gimme Shelter are sung with great angst and force from singer Merry Clayton, who was pregnant at the time and later miscarried, an event blamed on the emotion that she puts into this song. It’s probably unlikely to be causal, but it’s a dark little frisson that suits the track well, if you're happy to gloss over personal tragedy. As is the fact that the increasingly erratic Brian Jones wound up dead in his swimming pool while the album was still being recorded.

I do wonder if, tragic though these sudden deaths are, there isn’t a sigh of relief among band members when the drug-crazed loose cannon is finally out of the picture and the rest of them can get on with making music again. Because despite the general reputation of musicians, there’s a lot of hard graft and dedication that has to go into recording and performing where you can no more arse about high as a kite all the time than if you were a bus driver.

Elsewhere, however, the Stones don’t go as dark as they did on Aftermath or Beggar’s Banquet, with either return to the old blues feeling (especially Midnight Rambler), or moving more into Gram Parson’s style country – Country Honk, for example, being a honky-tonk country version of Honky Tonk Women, which makes perfect sense when you think about it.

The other notable thing for me with this album was the frequent use of session musicians to provide specialist instruments that the Stones themselves didn’t play. Not only Clayton’s soulful backing vocals on Gimme Shelter, but also for example Byron Berline playing fiddle on Country Honk, or Bobby Keys playing sax on Live With Me. This gives the tracks a lot more variety and doesn’t limit the music to the instruments that only the main band members can play, ramping the level of sophistication up yet another notch.