Well, this is awkward. I’m two albums into the Rolling Stones’ so-called “classic run” and I’m already distinctly underwhelmed by it. We’re dealing here with the doyens, the very progenitors of rock’n’roll, a group which arguably did more to shape the foundational Dionysian (self)-image of the genre than any other act. This includes the Beatles, musical geniuses and pioneers but besuited stiffs whose debaucheries never came close to the reported Emperor Nero-like excesses of Messrs Jagger, Richards, and whatever the other two are called, or three if you count the dead one.
The Rolling Stones were not so much artistic as attitudinal trailblazers, the architects of rock’s Bacchanalian master narrative, throwing televisions out of hotel windows while off their faces on whatever drugs they’d been offered in the preceding ten minutes by cynical road managers or school age groupies, dabbling in Satanism, getting arrested in dawn raids, and generally raising hell, all while taking sexy guitar music back to the top of the charts, with a little help from their more talented (but less interesting) frenemies.
Why, then, is so much of the music on their formative albums such complete and utter tripe? So far I’ve listened to Aftermath (1966), Beggars Banquet (1968), and Let it Bleed (1969). The blueprint is already painfully obvious and frankly not very appealing; kick the record off with the most interesting, the most distinctive, the most quintessentially Stones-sounding song (“Paint it Black”, “Sympathy for the Devil”, “Gimme Shelter”), and then punish the listener for the remaining 30 minutes with twangy redneck country and western cosplay which, from the perspective of 2025, sounds almost like a parody of an already contemptible musical tradition.
Why, oh why, did five skinny little scrotes from the Thames valley persist in impersonating straw-chewing, shotgun-packing Alabaman bumpkins? Songs like “No Expectations” and “Dear Doctor” admittedly have some amusing lyrics, but they literally sound like they were recorded in a Kentuckian trailer park by a group of art school clowns who were deliberately taking the piss out of the genre and the benighted hillbillies that played it. The Stones’ 60s albums are positively bursting with stuff like this, and it’s utter rubbish, unforgivably naff, and I simply cannot accept that they were being serious. The high comedy reaches its zenith with “Jiggsaw Puzzle”, a musically stultifying and lyrically nonsensical attempt to ape the monstrously overrated Bob Dylan, and which, at almost 7 minutes, lacks the usual redeeming brevity of other, comparably baleful Stones songs.
And yet, frustratingly and characteristically, the Stones manage to create just enough sinister intrigue to preserve their reputation as Founding Fathers of rock’n’roll nihilism. The aforementioned opener is a remarkably upbeat, ahead-of-its-time, piano-driven pop song about the role of the devil throughout world history, while the proto-sleaze rock of “Stray Cat Blues” is so catchy and coherent that it’s tempting to briefly overlook the eyebrow-raising amorality of its lyrics.
Equally endearing is that, with “Street Fighting Man” and “Salt of the Earth”, the Stones offer some hard-edged and withering takes on the faux-revolutionary climate of 1968, whereby a bunch of deluded and narcissistic middle-class social science students pretended to be Lenin and Trotsky for a few tiresome months before they inevitably graduated, got hired by law firms, and then essayed belated and pragmatic reassessments of their lightly-worn anti-capitalist belief systems. The Stones’ refusal to jump on the boring Bob Dylan-fronted bandwagon of performative social justice, their insistence on remaining detached and obscenely rich libertines with only a passing interest in the fortunes of the damned of the earth, remains an enormously appealing aspect of their music. It’s certainly more interesting than the Beatles’ mortifying retreat into half-baked postcolonial spiritualism, an embarrassing episode for which we can blame George Harrison, the mad twat.
Any way you slice it, though, it remains baffling to me – staggering, even – that rock music aficionados still ramble on about these two prehistoric legacy acts. Yes, they were seminal and they got the ball rolling, but their musical back catalogues have long since been left in the dust by more contemporary artists, and I see no particular reason to revisit them, aside from the handful of fantastic singles that they imparted to us. So why am I doing it, then? Beats me, but I suppose everyone needs a hobby.
Overall rating: * * *
Standout track: “Sympathy for the Devil”