Here’s another album that I owned and used to listen to quite a lot. But one thing first, recall that Jagger is supposed to have claimed that The Flamin’ Groovies did modernized rock and roll better than this album – Mick, there ain’t no rock and roll/rockabilly tracks on here (he may have been thinking of Exile On Main Street - see later).
There’s a classical blues song, You Gotta Move, done very much in the old Mississippi style and sounding like an old recording – it’s a cover of a Reverend Gary Davies track, so the homage is clear. There’s also a country rock track Dead Flowers, with honky-tonk guitar work from both Keith Richards and the new guitarist Mick Taylor, with the lyric “I’ll be in my basement room, with a needle and a spoon” thematically linking it to the previous track Sister Morphine. This track, Sister Morphine, is a wandering and wistful art-rock track co-written with Marianne Faithful and Ry Cooder providing little grace notes of slide guitar throughout.
Most of the rest of it is either full on riff-driven rock, such as Brown Sugar (a “you can’t do that nowadays” track about the fine line between racism and fetishization) and Bitch, featuring some heavy horns to pump up the energy. The Stones slow things down for the ballads Wild Horses and the album closer Moonlight Mile, which I remember as being quite epic but it isn’t that long really – after the climactic section it devolves into a gentle mix of strings and keyboard, a calming end to an album.
There are a few other musical styles mixed in too. I’ve Got The Blues is not blues at all, but a slower soul track complete, again, with horns, while Can You Hear Me Knocking starts out kind of blues-rock before turning into a Latin-inspired jam with Taylor doing a very good impression of Carlos Santana.
It’s been a while since I last heard this album, and doing this project is a good excuse to revisit music from long ago with a wider range of experience and changed tastes. It’s still a pretty solid collection of tracks, and for me I think the best of the Stones’ albums so far, although how much is familiarity I couldn’t say. I almost forgot to mention that this is another interactive Andy Warhol cover that originally came with a working zip, and this is also where the Stone’s lips-and-tongue logo was first used.
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