Apparently you’re not really allowed to have an opinion on rock music unless you’re au fait with foundational acts of the 1960s like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I’m already more or less familiar with the Fab Four, and so I dedicated the last month of my miserable existence to familiarising myself with the Stones’ vaunted imperial era run of classic albums which, from what I can gather, started with 1966’s Aftermath and culminated in 1972 with Exile on Main Street. As the individual album reviews indicate, I found the Stones’ body of work to be distinctly hit and miss – some genre-defining highs, coupled with an alarming quantity of almost laughable country music inspired guff. Overall, though, I’ve been forced to come to the grudging conclusion that the Rolling Stones perhaps did more than any other band, including the Beatles, to shape rock’s Dionysian, hell-raising master narrative, and that they contributed some of the best song’s in the history of the genre.
1. Paint It Black
To think that one of the darkest, most diabolical songs in the six-decade history of rock was conceived but a few years into the genre’s existence. “Paint It Black” is a malevolent, misanthropic anthem to the impact of depression; how irredeemably shit it makes everything seem, how completely insufferable other people become, and most tellingly of all, the socially unacceptable nature of the entire experience, as “people turn their heads and quickly look away.”
2. Gimme Shelter
“Paint It Black’s” vitriolic outpouring of Weltschmerz established the Stones as the sinister antipodes to the bright-eyed Beatles. “Gimme Shelter” confirmed this by tracing the dysfunctional interiority back to source; humanity’s innate savagery. Civilisation appears here as a feeble Hobbesian straitjacket, straining desperately to contain man’s base, murderous, rapacious nature, always “just a shot away” from unravelling entirely. Despite the subject matter, it’s a great pop song, and most intriguingly of all, the closing lines are slyly optimistic, as seemingly irresistible Thanos is quietly set against unquenchable Eros, which is “just a kiss away.”
3. Sympathy for the Devil
Who lies in wait to exploit these dark, primitive, aggressive instincts, in service to his never-ending war against God and civilisation? As always, Satan appears as an angel of light, and so “Sympathy for the Devil” is deceptively funky, a piano-driven pop masterpiece in which Lucifer dryly relates his role in a succession of historical disasters – the crucifixion of Christ, the Russian Revolution, the Nazi Blitzkrieg, the assassination of the Kennedys. It’s hard to imagine any other group of the 60s or 70s writing this song – the Beatles were too Apollonian, the Doors too dumb, Dylan too prolix, Lou Reed too scattered. It’s surely the Stones’ defining moment.
4. Rocks Off
The erratic opener to the thoroughly mental Exile on Main Street is a ramshackle anthem to the rock’n’roll lifestyle; careening guitars; shrill trumpets, shrieky lyrics about “zipping through the days at lightning speed” and ending up “splattered on the nasty street.” It’s utterly shambolic, at once jittery, distressed, and life-affirming. There’s no discernible tune or melody to speak of, and yet, strikingly, it remains radio friendly. How did they pull that off? I don’t know, but taken together, the crashing music and frazzled lyrics represent the very distillation of classic rock’s unapologetic libertinism.
5. Torn and Frayed
But if “Rock’s Off” signals a manic and exuberant, though erratic and unhinged, formative stage in the career of an inveterate hedonist, then “Torn and Frayed” is the inevitable comedown. It originates from a more jaded, more exhausted place, after long years of high-intensity epicurean self-destruction. The music is tired, plaintive, defeated; the lyrics compare the tattered jacket of an unnamed guitarist to the psychological state of an entire band. In short, clearly, the Stones were fucked by this point.
6. Bitch
For my money, Sticky Fingers is by some distance the best Rolling Stones album, the only one of their so-called “Golden Era” records that is consistently great all the way through, rather than comprising a hit-and-miss assemblage of superlative singles alongside mortifying country and western cosplay. “Bitch” is perhaps the album’s highlight; riotous and driving like “Rocks Off”, but more controlled and coherent, closed out by a euphoric, infectious horn arrangement, while a howling Jagger compares love and desire to an addiction or Pavlovian compulsion.
7. Let It Bleed
Sticky Fingers is better, but Let It Bleed glides gracefully by with a succession of crisp and easily digestible songs about, variously, sex addiction, serial killers, and mere anarchy loosed upon the world. Yes, on first listen, it’s tempting to dismiss the album’s title track as one among many baffling moments when the Stones attempted to impersonate guitar-twanging Southern hillbillies. But “Let It Bleed” is saved by its over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek, good-natured humour, emerging as an unexpected highlight of an eminently listenable album.
8. Under My Thumb
“Under My Thumb”, meanwhile, is anything but good-natured or tongue in cheek; it triumphantly narrates a taming of the shrew, the successful outcome of a sexual power struggle between Jagger and an unnamed “girl who once pushed me around.” It’s hard to believe that it was recorded prior to the release of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, because its innovative marimba-driven rhythm sounds like something that Brian Wilson (rather than Brian Jones) would have put together. Either way, it’s one of the catchiest, most concise, most deceptively dark songs in the Stones’ early discography.
9. You Can’t Always Get What You Want
This is the closing song on Let It Bleed and, arguably, of the 1960s as a cultural moment. It narrates the conclusive disintegration of the hippie dream of blissed out collectivist Nirvana. It sounds sad, jaded, defeated, but also grimly (and perhaps grinningly) accepting of that sadness and defeat. The Stones wearily come to the Freudian conclusion that there’s nothing sacred or even noble about our desires, and that the restrictions of civilisation make us miserable and repressed in the short-term, but allow us to escape the Hobbesian state of nature in the long-term. A mischievous levity is provided by the backing vocals of a school choir.
10. Moonlight Mile
“Moonlight Mile” is the final track on Sticky Fingers and it’s the proverbial lights-in-the-air, soulful, string-drenched rock ballad. The lyrics are very obviously about Mick Jagger’s problems with touring – his loneliness, his drug use, his “sleeping under strange, strange skies”, but it never descends into maudlin self-pity, and indeed, its outro is thoroughly rousing. A peculiar, fragile, beautiful ending to the best album the Rolling Stones ever recorded.