The Rolling Stones - Blue & Lonesome

xp - wow I might as well just read mark s
wouldn't say interpretation is wrong -- but it doesn't account for why the Stones are different than, say, the Yardbirds or John Mayall. The Stones clearly wanted to be (and were one of the chief architects of what it means to be) rock stars. Their love of blues notwithstanding, my idea of who they are doesn't really include a reverent adherence to making "authentic blues".

ah god sorry it's not "I Got the Blues" it's their cover of Mississippi Fred McDowell's "You Got to Move" that I originally meant. Sorry, don't mind me. I hate that song so much I deleted it from my music library so I had a bit of a misfire trying to recall it

xxp

What could be more adorable than a bunch of British teens in 1962-63 getting all wrapped up in the authenticity of the blues? This look back benefits from the added wrinkle of the participants now being more wizened and jaded than Howling Wolf et al. were when the Stones were trying to copy their songs.

lol yes thx JoeStork

xp

(I actually like "Love in Vain" okay but "I Got the Blues" bleeeccchh)

lol

jones was a big blues guy but it wasn't long before all he wanted to do was f around w/sitars & the master musicians of joujouka

i think it's pretty obvious to anyone who's actually listened to the stones at all that they weren't blues purists because of all the music they made that wasn't purist blues

has anyone else listened to "just your fool"? it sounds like it is in mono to me.

I never said they were purists!

also worth recalling there was a SUPER-FIERCE politicised folk faction operating on the london club scene in the early 60s, who were very aggressively arguing that the only music that wasn't totally tainted was the exact sound of yr own deep-historical local tradition complete with uncorrupted accent as of 100 years ago -- and jagger et all wd have been well aware they couldn't end-run this argument by performing electric version of music by black americans… aware bcz someone like ewan mccoll was very loudly telling them so in magazines they read

hence doing what they were doing had to be justified as a form of play-acting (whether or not they then recognised that black american music -- and all music -- was also about performance and technique and roles and working audiences etc) (which jagger certainly did by c.1967)

remember that jagger and jones especially engaged with arguments in the pages of music magazines -- they were alert to critical discourse and enjoyed taking part in it (keef somewhat less so i assume)

also of note is the live 1965: charlie is my darling live album also on spotify which i hadn't heard, it's pretty fun stuff, lots of crowd noise that may be fake (? though i guess these shows were p nuts) but i've really grown to love the tuff little bratty blues band that they were, never used to really rate anything earlier than the singles and then aftermath and on

the baby Stones records are some of their best

I didn't know about the mono box or Charlie is My Darling being on Spotify, my weekend is set

unsurprisingly the early albums esp sound way better in mono

i thought his chapter on the folk blues of Aragorn was pretty great

Ha, whoops. (I'm FB friends with Elijah Wald, which makes that typo even more embarrassing.)

The Stones were definitely more of a singles band prior to Aftermath, but what singles they were.

between the buttons really struck mono just blew me away when i listened the other day. Let It Bleed surprised - didn't expect a 1969 album to sound so much better in mono. Don't know why there's better separation,(is it in the mix? i dunno, but the difference is striking and makes some of my all-time fave albums sound more sublime

xxxpost

Definitely wanna hear the earliest stuff in mono, but isn't Let It Bleed a fold-down? Or was there a dedicated mono mix?

(not that a fold-down wouldn't sound great)

(and these mono dealies are all being released as standalones in 2017)

I think Beggar's Banquet and Let It Bleed are both fold-downs

The UK version of Between the Buttons is such an underrated collection of songs, IMO. It seems to be one of those albums where every track is a deep cut. The out of tune bass on 'She Smiled Sweetly' will always be irritating, and Jagger loathes the record, but I think the songwriting on it is great!

oops yah i forgot abt between the buttons, that uk remaster from about a decade or so ago is crewsh

"Jagger loathes the record" really? fucking nut. I love both the UK and US versions of that album.

this new song is great. been listening to the stones a lot all summer.

read this the other week re: LiT/mono:
No less a Stones vinyl collector extraordinaire than John Rutherford has always insisted the mono Let It Bleed is dedicated, and he calls it sublime.
taken from :
http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/rolling-stones-in-mono.117377/

xpost:

Yeah, really! He even described the album as "more or less rubbish" at one point.

oooh a hoffman board mono debate!! nice

Satanic Majesties was the last Rolling Stones LP to be released in mono in the US, so "Through The Past Darkly", "Beggar's Banquet", and "Let It Bleed" can only be found in mono on UK pressings. There may have been mono pressings of those three titles in Brazil or Indonesia (for example), but they were very likely fold-downs of the stereo masters.

yeah that's the good hoffman stuff right thurr

Jagger in 1995:

rank Zappa used to say he really liked it. It's a good record, but it was unfortunately rather spoiled. We recorded it in London on 4-track machines. We bounced it back to do overdubs so many times, we lost the sound of a lot of it... Connection is really nice... My Obsession, that's a good one. They sounded so great, but then, later on, I was really disappointed with it. Isn't Ruby Tuesday on there or something? I don't think the rest of the songs are that brilliant... I don't think I thought they were very good at the time, either.

btw this is a good way to spend a slow hurricane day: http://www.timeisonourside.com/track67-72.html

Isn't Ruby Tuesday on there or something?

top quality critical analysis here :D

classic Jagger

It's not on the UK version!

Must have been a bit of a headache for touring acts in the '60s to remember what was released in each territory.

"Ruby Tuesday" is on the new Colvin and Earle record which some of us have been listening to.

i don't care how white the stones are, they're wizened enough to play the blues

Agreed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pYBQg4qifU

This Slate piece has pretty much totally drained away my interest in a book I'd been looking forward to reading. (Also, I know his focus in this segment is on the late '60s and early '70s, but that's unfortunate, because it keeps him from mentioning that the Stones had both Prince and Living Colour open for them in the '80s and '90s.)

I assume it's Keith playing the riff, but there's some pretty fast picking on the turnaround...

No less a Stones vinyl collector extraordinaire than John Rutherford has always insisted the mono Let It Bleed is dedicated, and he calls it sublime.

I don't know if it's a fold-down or a dedicated mix but holy shit sublime is a very accurate description of it.

This Slate piece has pretty much totally drained away my interest in a book I'd been looking forward to reading. (Also, I know his focus in this segment is on the late '60s and early '70s, but that's unfortunate, because it keeps him from mentioning that the Stones had both Prince and Living Colour open for them in the '80s and '90s.)

― Don Van Gorp, midwest regional VP, marketing (誤訳侮辱), Friday, 7 October 2016 01:45 (five days ago)

I keep meaning to read Hamilton's book; what I've taken a look at so far seems somewhat problematic to me, since he goes into the rockism vs. poptimism debate and declares that no one thinking about popular music seriously could be a rockist these days, which I think is wrong. Don't know if he does talk about the business, and that would certainly be appropriate to discuss the careers of Janis Joplin on the one hand and Howard Tate, say, on the other, since Joplin and Tate both hit with songs by the same white songwriter but Joplin is famous and Tate known only to soul fanatics. Seems obvious that rock fans in the '60s tended to valorize "blues" but had trouble with "soul" and maybe even "funk," and I wonder if he talks about James Brown anywhere. So I guess I'll have to read it.

I think curmudgeon posted something about it on another thread.

I read the Hamilton book and no, James Brown is virtually not talked about. The author tries to explain that omission up front in his introduction, saying that Brown's "been written about extensively elsewhere" and that "he never really inhabited the 'crossover' ethos that this book probes."

Among other subjects the book doesn't discuss are Curtis Mayfield, Stax Records, and Sly & the Family Stone (believe it or not) although Hamilton hints that he might write books about Curtis & Sly in the future.

I'm not totally slagging the book - there's a lot of good subtle analysis within it - but as you can guess it's a pretty selectively scattershot treatment of a large and complicated topic. Really it reads like a collection of six individual essays, one per chapter.

The lack of attention paid to the business side of the story was the biggest disappointment to me. It's just not the author's angle - as he warns in the introduction, he's mainly discussing recordings and what print media was saying at the time.

Honestly, dealing with what print media was saying at the time basically guarantees that all you're analyzing is rockcrit myopia. What might have been much more interesting (albeit a lot more challenging and labor-intensive) would have been contrasting contemporaneous press narratives with a) analysis of what was actually charting vs. what was canonical, and b) Studs Terkel-style interviews with people about what they were actually listening to at the time. I mean, I know my mom (who's 65) owned 45s by the Beatles and the Stones and Dylan, but also tons of Motown and other soul/R&B stuff, chintzy pop hits, etc., etc.

yes i'm p interested in this book but my topic currently is *literally* rockcrit myopia

Ah, well then, have at it.

Getting back to the Stones, I'm glad to see they're giving props to Little Johnny Taylor. For some reason I thought he was still alive, but he's been gone since 2002. Not a Chicago guy, either, from Arkansas and made his career in L.A. The song the Stones cover was done for Ronn in Shreveport and was a big hit in 1971.
Interested to find out just how much substantive reporting was being done in the '60s on black popular music--did Jet write about it at length? I think Jim Delehant at Hit Parader often covered black acts. But I suppose what rock crit there was at the time was focused on the San Francisco bands, the British Invasion groups and whatever white bands hit the top 40. Was anyone writing about soul in depth? (I guess blues was recognized as a sacrosanct topic, but again, how much substantive writing was being done on contemporary blues, apart from people like David Evans, who were writing about "country" blues?).

'Just Your Fool' most reminds me of their really straight but really effective cover of 'Stop Breaking Down'

Interesting, Edd. I only know Johnnie Taylor, don't think I've heard of Little Johnny Taylor before.

Little Johnny and Johnnie are often confused with one another. Little Johnny's claim to fame is his recording of "Part Time Love," from 1963. Howard Tate also did it. Fantasy has a one-disc comp, Greatest Hits, that's pretty much all you need, though I'm partial to his 1972 Ronn LP Everybody Knows About My Good Thing.

desert set:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2qTOh-Ok60

Don Was: "The record sounds very crude, very authentic," he said. "It captures the essence of what they are."
Ron Wood: "They are extremely great cover versions of Howlin' Wolf and Little Walter, among other blues people. But they really sound authentic. ... When we heard them back after not hearing them for a couple of months, we were, 'Who's that? It's you,' It sounded so authentic."

the rhythm section certainly sounds cruddy

Old blues not a very high sonic bar to hurdle

This is, I suppose, good, and Jagger's in good form as vocalist and harmonica player, but I don't care much for Chicago blues.

Yeah it's pretty raw
Would be cool if this was a jumping off point to a cool album of originals like Dylan's folk cover albums did but doubt it

Hoodoo Man Blues

everyone should listen to this album

they should do the album of funny beatles covers next.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs6Qzfm1bJM

nothing beats the guitar solo in the original though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJCkbbMnEPg

That record is still insane!

I don't care much for Chicago blues.

There's some shit you just don't say in public.

― Don Van Gorp, midwest regional VP, marketing (誤訳侮辱)

ts: expressing disapproval for chicago blues vs. expressing disapproval for chicago pizza

I haven't heard this record yet but at this stage I'm more bothered by how enthusiastic they sound on record rather than how "authentic" these covers are meant to be.

? You don't like it that they are enthusiastic?

There were some tracks I wanted them to cover that weren't on Spotify, but...

https://open.spotify.com/user/bendybendy/playlist/4ruR5qnI2ewAPw4HxxLGiv

xpost:

No, I mean that I prefer it when the Stones sound enthusiastic, which I appreciate must be hard to do if you're on your 1,534th album... if they sound excited, the track sounds exciting. If they sound like they're going through the motions, you can pick up on it right away. I guess that's why it used to take 'em so long to make records at one point... trying to get that great take where the band is firing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNRKTFCA7c0

I'm going to that Exhibitionism thing after Christmas. Anyone seen it?

Nah, but I did listen to Tattoo You last night and 'Slave' has developed into one of my favourite Stones grooves.

https://greilmarcus.net/2016/12/20/real-life-rock-top-10-122016/

never thought I'd type this but Greil Marcus 100% OTM

i gave up on this album after listening one minute to the first song. there is about as much blues feeling in this as in a techno track.

xxxpost - turrican that makes sense misinterpreted your post

but yeah this is the first they sound like an actual band in forever