Rolling Stones: Classic or Dud

A long time ago, galaxies away, I went through a brief period of trying to like them, but everything about them rubbed me the wrong way: voice, style, lyrics, attitude, general crankiness. I just couldn't stand them -- they always sounded like a glorified dumb bar- band. I gave up, and then I realized that it's okay to dislike bands that rock critics think are classic.

And I like the Smiths, so I guess that makes me a pussy.

Some further thoughts: for me The Stones are year zero, i don't care about Elvis or any other blues guys they ripped off. and with year zero's you just need a lot of mythology, I would say mythology + intensity + riffs = rock 'n roll. Now regardless of The Stones becoming old farts, I immediatly forget when I put on "Beggar's Banquet" or "Let it "Bleed", for that moment you live in that record and what you get is: psychotic cops cracking skulls, cities burning, lots of knife-pulling, mountains of drugs, under-age girls, armies of rapists flooding the streets, the danger of getting hit by a stray bullit at any moment. Now, in real life I'm a very sweet, liberal, no- violent guy, but this shit excites me. :) Anyone remember the way Guy Pellaert drew them in "Rock Dreams"? A bunch of English dandy's dressed up in SS uniforms drinking tea with naked little girls on their laps. So you see why I don't really find The Smiths very interesting ;)

With the Stones though, the cult of Mick n' Keef is far more important than the actual music. The court cases, publicity stunts, Brian Jones' death, Altamont etc all loom large over the music. The press seem to perpetuate this to such a ridiculous level - I mean who wants to hear about Altamont again and again? If you strip all this away and get back to the music it's pretty obvious that Jagger is a fairly average singer and that a lot of their material lacks the kind of excitement that you might expect it would have if you'd read about it first.

Also I was talking more about the mythology in the music itself, the images of the lyrics (although eventually the spilled out into the real world). All those tales of debauchery eventually become stale, though Nick Kent's 'Twilight Babylon'(in The Dark Stuff) is a great read about the Stones in the 70s, very sick and amusing. Also some brilliant characterizations esp. of Mick 'n Bianca Jagger (man, did he see through them :)

As for Rock Dreams, it's a great book but the whole Godstar decadence trip on the Stones didn't wash with me. It would have worked better for Led Zep I think. Generally though it makes the best case for classic rock and pop of any book out there - some of the images are just magnificent, capturing everything you need to know about a star in one image (the Brian Wilson one stands out).

aside from the odd single ("under my thumb" may be my favourite), a ho-hum dud i wouldn't bother thinking about if they weren't so acclaimed. stiff and wooden rhythm section, mechanical faux-blues vocals. give me the stooges any day. "hand in glove," "handsome devil," or "what she said" are infinitely heavier, more biting, harder rocking, and more dangerous (since when is macho more threatening than effeminate?). in fact, the idea of the stones, an institution as thoroughly mainstream as kellogg's corn flakes, being threatening at all is positively hilarious.

ah well. better get back to stephin merritt and iancu dumitrescu.

I'm prepared to throw my theory out, although since i was re-reading The Dark Stuff I noticed how Kent was fascinated by Mozzer's fear for thugs, crowds and rude violent behaviour (I put 2 and 2 together and built myself a hypothesis, nothing to serious, so I'll take those comments on the wooden rhythm section & the heavyosity of The Smiths with a pinch of salt).

"Oh, I bet they'd be billionaire marrionette ghouls by now..."

But Eminem has come along to CHANGE all that!

Pretty awful, by and large.

Jody Beth - comparing a Jagger vocal and a B&S vocal seems odd - the one is operatic (i.e. meaning lies in what he does with the voice), the other theatrical (i.e. meaning lies in the relation the words and phrases have to 'natural' speech),

good point...don't know how i would anwer this.

good point...don't know how i would answer this.

Good answer, if a bit glib.

Does your taste in rock music run to the hard stuff at all? (Thinking of all the "wimp rock" stuff mentioned above.)

I don't think I have a "taste in rock music" anymore. I like noise and aggression in music sometimes but for me the particular form of 'rock' as The Stones et al. practised it seems to diminish the noise and aggression, straitjacket it and make it an 'attitude'. (I love attitudes and striking poses but this particular one is 35-plus years old and doesn't connect with me any more.)

That's not a hard-and-fast rule, of course - but take the Stooges, who you mentioned. I like them, but the bits of them that draw a bloodline from the Stones (Iggy as onstage 'Rock God', the extroverted attitude of Raw Power as opposed to the introversion of "No Fun"/"1969"/"Dirt") are the bits that stop me loving them. And on the G'n'R thread I suspect I'd be one of those beside-the-point people who like the band for their 'genre synthesis' (the New York Dolls, too), i.e. for their pop qualities. The Stones tracks I do like, I like for those qualities too.

Doesn't seem too odd to me... both bands play variations on fairly straightahead rock music, so it's not really apples and oranges. The B&S vocal sound is pretty monotonous, though; the entire range of emotions is sung EXACTLY the same way. It's not a very creative expression of feeling.

"Now let's remember the most fundamental fact of life, folks: everything good is the Beatles, everything awful and bogus and pretentious and gross and condescending is the Rolling Stones.
Okay?
Mainstream pop has routinely offered two paths... One is all about happy times and getting lucky and being not miserable, while the other, at its most fruitful, might lasoo you something venereal in the East Village if you yap long, loud, and boringly enough. If you're past age 23 and the latter is still your idea of fun then you probably thought Will Self's "My Idea of Fun" was too, and, pal-o-mine, all your ideas are wrong. About Everything."

- Mike McPadden in "Bubblegum Music is The Naked Truth"

Most of Jagger's lyrics, save the occasional stutter, bear more than a passing resemblance to normal conversational speech. I can't even think of a case where this isn't so.

The amount of "emotion" wasn't my point (and I fucking KNEW you lot would get on my case about that, which is why I hesitated to use the word) -- it was the range of things Jagger DOES with his voice within the course of a single song, vs. Murdoch, who doesn't offer the listener that much variety.

I don't KNOW whether Jagger would cover B&S well, but to be fair, the stately Britpop of Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesties Request isn't really very different from B&S, is it?

(Mind you I think the stately Britpop era of the Stones is staggeringly awful, loads loads worse than their 'rock' stuff (or even their disco stuff!) precisely because Mick sounds like he's having to squeeze his tongue into a corset for every song. How anyone can listen to "Lady Jane" and enjoy it is a great mystery to me.)

...just because he's sounding like he has to squeeze his tongue into a corset... it's quirky in a good way. also, it matches the harpsichord.

A good alternative to "Lady Jane" is "Play With Fire." Similar mood, similar era, similar theme, much less mannered, much more biting.

bubblegum is good too

it's a continuum

SO THERE.

And yeah yeah the beatles weren't all sunshine and lollipops any more than the stones were all needles and spoons. That's a total red herring. But I think the strength in McPadden's attack isn't that he hates that The Stones are dark, it's that he hates that they are bogus and ... pretentious and condescending and, love em as I do, THEY ARE!

xxpost explain the “most” part to me lol

The most part is detailed in his memoir Stone Alone. That, and things like him finding ancient Roman coins in his back yard and making a song called "Je Suis un Rockstar" which is the best of all solo Stones singles.

Wyman reminds me of Lurch or something

you rang

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-c0BShYBobAE/VCNAgCDJ-5I/AAAAAAAAroY/7EQXkHDP100/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/Bill%2BWyman%2BSB%2B25666.JPG

Have you seen the Some Girls '78 live show? He keeps dropping cigs every time he sings back up. He must have gone through a few packs that night.

LOL, I forgot about that! (I have a copy of it) It's a bit late for this but I hope he's stopped smoking - it's pretty crazy that he got lung cancer, refused chemo because of his hair, and yet by the looks of everything is now in remission.

je suis un little teapot

https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/rs-231303-bill.jpg

methinks he is the least essential member of the major brit rock acts of the 1960s: like, maybe he's at the level of Pete Quaife or Chris Dreja or Jim McCarty, or Keith Relf (I don't think Relf was very good)… it doesn't matter that he's on or not on any particular Stones record, or probly Keith Richards contributes better bass parts… but y'know who disagrees? Dylan said that they lost a step too many when he left after Steel Wheels… like, really, Bob? you think they sounded like sleepy John estes in 1990, and then Wyman left and they might as well have sounded like Dangerous Toys?

they sounded great last night! really -- tempos were good, support musicians including drums, bass, keys were more locked in than in recent years, mick sounded great, and that guitar "weave" is inimitable. when the big screen focused on keith's poor gnarled arthritic fingers it seemed a wonder he could do anything up there, but they make it work. and during the stage bows, when the support folks peel away to leave the three of them standing there, anyone not moved by that has no heart.

I can always tell when Wyman plays on those '70s records as opposed to Wood, Taylor, or Keef.

I think this whole show is in broad daylight - when's the last time the Stones have done a show completely in the day?

three weeks ago!

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-rolling-stones/2024/fair-grounds-race-course-new-orleans-la-babb9fe.html

“I was dreamin last nigbt / I was crying’ like a child”

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

It looks like Keith's playing the opening riff real hard - and after that it's a loop of what he just played because he's just miming after that as he softens up his strokes, even missing the beat occasionally. Am I seeing that right? He doesn't have any pedals by his feet so I guess someone's doing it offstage? (I'm not a guitarist so I have a very shaky familiarity with this.) Not complaining though, Keith's arthritis will only get worse and it probably makes sense to save his joints for a solo rather than wear them down from repeating the same figure over and over again. You see the same thing play out when the riff changes.

i think that's all live, bird.

It looks like Ron is playing the same riff? ie. covering where Keith looks like he's missing it.

Yeah, I was about to post what visiting saw, but when I went back to those spots, I think I was hearing really Ronnie off-camera playing those notes when Keith was sort of relaxing or softening up his strokes.

Like at 0:30, look how vigorous Keith plays on the downstroke - that's pretty much how I picture Keith all the time, but I'm not sure anyone with arthritis can really sustain that without getting a sore wrist. And just seconds later, like at 0:35 or 0:36, he's relaxes a lot more, to the point where he isn't dead on the beat like before. But then the camera eventually moves left and you see Ronnie's playing the same notes.

Great performance though, I'm glad they brought this song back. It was the highlight when I saw them in 2019 and it was one of the few numbers where the massive echo heard in the nosebleed section worked in its favor - it sounded like a ghost train out of hell with with Charlie's drums rumbling forward and Mick's harmonica wailing the whole way.

oh yeah no doubt he plays this song differently than the 60s/70s when he was chomping down on the rhythm all the time. back then there was a simpler division of labor. now they call it the "weave" where they're constantly and intuitively trading voices. keith's arthritis has taken away a lot of dexterity, and the larger ensemble does a lot of gap-filling, but at the same time there is something even more primal going on where they use rhythm and volume and timing. because of their age it sometimes doesn't *look* like they're doing it. gosh i just love this band.

i went both nights at metlife -- one of them (ironically the one with the much better seats) i made use of their "lucky dip" web option for fast-fingered fans who want to save some bucks and don't care where they wind up sitting. they pulled out a whole bunch of songs they hadn't played the previous night. some were tour "firsts." i never thought i'd hear "rambler" though. i thought it had gone the way of "brown sugar."

you can kind of tell from ron wood's expression at the end they're just as surprised they pulled it off as anyone else.