The Rolling Stones are approaching 60 years of recording, a career that spans the album-rock era and (with only a few others) helped set the direction for what we now view as classic rock.
The band long ago ceded that responsibility, following rather than driving trends, but it’s kept recording, kept touring — to decidedly mixed results since the Seventies. A new album is on its way — their 31st — and the single (and lead-off track) “Angry” is out.
The song is a mid-tempo rocker, that feels very un-Stones-like, despite the unmistakable Jagger voice and the guitar sound, though Keith Richards and Ronnie Woods’ playing feels tamped down, as do Steve Jordan’s drums, which are probably the most prevalent sound on the record.
Jordan is a fine drummer, the consummate studio professional, but he’s not Charlie Watts (who died at 80 earlier this year) and Watts’ presence will loom large as we attempt to gauge where this album fits within the Stones’ discography. Watts is featured on two songs, according to The New York Times, with Jordan coming in after having played with Richards and Woods’ separate side projects.
On “Angry,” the drum feels a little too crisp, a little too perfect, and it misses the Watts’ intuitive feel. The groove that gave the Stones its “foundation.”
“There would have been a Rolling Stones without Charlie Watts, but without Charlie Watts there wouldn’t have been the Rolling Stones,” Richards told The New York Times.
“Angry” is a solid song, but it does not answer the chief question: Is the band saying something that will cut through the noise, the canned pop music, and market-driven sounds that are hurtled at us by the big record companies. So much of what we hear now is driven by the popularity of shows like American Idol and The Voice, which reinforce a homogenized sound. Authenticity (I hate this word), once a central tenet of the artist gave way to sales and marketing a long time ago, which is why songs like “Rich Men North of Richmond” feel so real to so many.
That’s a lot to put on any band, even one that has such a long and glorious history — starting as a blues cover band that remade the blues in their own image, before developing a friendly rivalry with The Beatles, writing their own music, and defining the hedonistic attitude and excess that marked the darker parts of Sixties culture.
We remember the decade through a myopic lens, proclaiming it a time of peace and love. Of freedom without consequence. Of a positive rebellion that was destined to remake Western culture.
But the decade was one of excess and death, as well. Assassinations (the two Kennedys, King, Malcolm X), law enforcement run amok (the police riot at the Democratic convention, FBI overreach), an illegal war. The Stones’ multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones fell victim, as Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and others would later. I wrote about Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited through this lens, and we can hear the stresses and cultural fractures in The Beatles’ White Album, and the Velvet Underground’s entire oeuvre. Watch Easy Rider. Or the bizarre Wild in the Streets. Or any of the more underground dystopian fictions.
The Stones picked up on this, especially on the four albums surrounding Jones’ death in 1969 — Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed1, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street. These records were products of the Sixties’ de-evolution and the band’s hedonistic haze of drugs. Exile came out in ‘72, and it’s fair to say it was their artistic peak. The rest of the decade (into 1981) offered uneven, if underrated work with two minor, but flawed classics — Some Girls and Tattoo You.
The post-Exile period was when the band became a cliche and an institution, mirroring what was wrong with rock and roll as a broad genre. The Stones, a band that always approached its efforts with an underlying ironic wink (see Robert Christgau in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll2), were subsumed into the morass that was corporate rock as audiences fragmented and corporate marketing types swept in, created niches and silos, and pit fans against each other.
Dance music, central to the original rock project, was vilified, and racial lines were drawn. Rock and roll became rock, and rock became mostly White. Disco, which was born in Black and gay clubs, was alien, an enemy, and also turned into an umbrella term that encompasses all Black music. The apotheosis of this sentiment was a 1979 event in Chicago, at Commiskey Park, home of the White Sox. The event, Disco Demolition Night, invited fans to “turn up at Comiskey Park on 12 July with a disco record and you would get in for 98¢. (Organizer, DJ Steve Dahl) planned to fill a dumpster with the records and blow them up as a publicity stunt.”
Records from mostly Black artists were then blown up. A joke. But it had ugly connotations — Fahrenheit 451. Nazi book burnings. And a riot. Rock’s ugly side was on display, as it would be again in December, when fans attending a show by the Who stormed the entrance to Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati and 11 people were killed.
In the meantime, disco dominated the charts, and a growing underground punk movement was shaking things up within the narrowing rock oeuvre. The Stones had already released two albums that contained these influences — Black and Blue and Some Girls — but would dive wholesale into these sounds, with mixed results, on Emotional Rescue and Tattoo You.
What was clear, regardless of how individual fans judged these Stones records, was they no longer dictated taste. A band like the Faces would not have been possible without Let It Bleed, and without the Faces there is no Black Crows. It’s no accident that the Stones eventually settled on Ronnie Wood as Brian Jones’ replacement.
The Stones were now followers, and that would lead them into two decades of sparse recording and underwhelming results (even when compared with their Seventies’ output). Still, the Stones draw attention — is it because so many who write about music are my age or older? Their last album, a collection of rough blues covers called Blue & Lonesome was shockingly tough and powerful, a restatement of principles. Their last album of new material, A Bigger Bang, was easily the best thing they recorded since Tattoo You and maybe since Some Girls. I reviewed it in a column back then, announcing that it "lives up to the hype.” The band, I wrote, “have done something with this disc that no one, least of all me, expected them to be able to do they’ve captured a bit of their youth.” The record showed a “commitment to its roots as a blues and R ‘n’ B outfit,” and it eschewed the “fashion-chasing nonsense that plagued much of their work” during the Eighties and Nineties.
It doesn’t mean it was a classic or that in the 1980s (the muddled production and trebly goo that was used to sweeten far too many records at the time); nor is there the mannered approach to recording that resulted in flat outings like "Bridges to Babylon." This is an unpretentious return to rock ‘n’ roll, pure and simple.
I still think it was a relatively strong album, but much of what I wrote was probably hyperbole. And much of what we will get about Hackney Diamonds will be hyperbole — as long as it is better that those Eighties and Nineties records, which is not exactly a hard bar to meet.
Jones died during the recording of this album and was absent for much of it. Mick Taylor makes his debut with the band on Let It Bleed and lasts through It’s Only Rock and Roll in 1974, before quitting. Ronnie Woods joined the band at this point.
Christgau, Robert. “The Rolling Stones.” The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, ed. Jim Miller, 1980, pp.190-200.