0 Between the Buttons (1967)

(Requested by reader S.S.)

Between the Buttons falls in that trough of Rolling Stones albums between the original focus on rhythm and blues covers and the later turn as world's greatest rock 'n' roll band, from their most obvious period of aping Beatles moves, also known as "psychedelia." Generally I prefer Aftermath and on some days even Their Satanic Majesties Request. But it was good to revisit Buttons again and find something that sounds a lot to me now like Mick Jagger's first solo album—and a pretty good one too, full of inconsequential little songs about yesterday's papers, my obsession, my connections, who's been sleeping here, something happened to me yesterday, etc. Jagger's most foppish persona tends to be front and center, with the bluesy guitar impulses of Brian Jones and Keith Richards often retired well to the background. No covers either—all Jagger/Richards originals. Interestingly, Jagger claims now to still like only "Back Street Girl." But the album still sounds like a Jagger solo to me, with the student of economics way that it calculates and checks off, throwing high signs to the Beatles, Kinks, Who, drugs, preening fashion, and other usual suspects. Jones, perhaps at the beginning of his long slow fade, has traded in for vibraphone, recorder, saxophone, electric dulcimer, and oscillator, among other sounds he contributed. Busy busy. The main difference between the UK and US versions is the inclusion of a couple of big hits for the States album: "Ruby Tuesday" and "Let's Spend [the Night / Some Time, the latter at the famous special request of Ed Sullivan] Together." One of my favorites on Buttons, perhaps because it's relatively strange and fresh to me, was not on the US version: "Please Go Home," which revs up a real nice head. It's altogether tempting to dismiss Between the Buttons as a badly aging sellout, but that's a little silly. From 1965 to maybe 1968 (before going on to deathless editions of classic rock), Jagger and Richards turned out to be first-rate masters of pop songcraft, among the very best, and Between the Buttons is basically a collection of experiments, with varying results and no US hits on the Brit version. As I said I'm more for Aftermath, not least for the one-on-one between signature long album side closers: "Goin' Home" (a brief obsession I still adore when I think to play it) vs. "Something Happened to Me Yesterday," which sounds vain, coy, smug, with (uncredited) brass section—of a piece indeed with Bob Dylan's bawdy "Rainy Day Women," another song I don't like nearly as much as I think I should. It's not really psychedelic, for one thing. I might have benefited from knowing "Something Happened" when I first got into psychedelics. But I didn't, so it's "Tuesday Afternoon" and "Itchycoo Park" that still sound the better and more mysteriously meaningful to me that way. Between the Buttons is essential, of course, because it's the Stones of the period, but it's ultimately in the minor key in every way.

Detail: Between the Buttons (1967)

0 Rolling Stones, "Jumpin' Jack Flash" (1968)

June 15, 1968, #3
(listen)

There are times I'm pretty sure this is the greatest rock 'n' roll song ever made. There are other times when it only seems overplayed and trite—the penalty for loving a song too much and too well perhaps, though to date it remains resilient enough to stage occasional pulsating comebacks every few years. Part of the reason I like it so well I'm sure is that it came of the Beggars Banquet sessions, an album that takes regular turns for me as favorite Rolling Stones album (trading off generally with Sticky Fingers and Out of Our Heads, though others butt in as well now and then). Why "Jumpin' Jack Flash" was not released on the album is anybody's guess, as far as I know. I'm willing to take the mythologizing route at this point and make the extravagant claims: It's too big to be contained on an album. It is an album. It rewired our brains and forced us to redefine the very concept of what an album is, etc. Yes, I know. But there is a tremendous amount packed into this three and a half minutes. It's the kind of song with the power to inspire one to sweeping statements. That impossible trebly crashing guitar, that stomping back beat, the way it finds a space that logically belongs to somebody else a long time ago and puts its stamp all over it, Grade AAA prime rock 'n' roll. It glides, it soars, it struts and preens. Can't take your eyes off it. Older than rock 'n' roll. Older than the 20th century. But work the focus and there it is again: the Stones, Mick Jagger a-leaping about the place, cranking out the mocking, jeering, irresistible sounds of bitter envy and revelry. For better and for worse. And in sickness and health too, for that matter. In other words, and to get right to the point, "Jumpin' Jack Flash is a gas gas gas."

Detail: Rolling Stones, "Jumpin' Jack Flash" (1968)

0 Out of Our Heads (1965)

(Misbegotten first attempt here. Main song here.)

The Rolling Stones re-discovered Chicago Blues at a time when Muddy Waters was painting ceilings for a living. (Patrick King, Amazon review, 2006)

For my purposes, Out of Our Heads stands in for all five of the first Rolling Stones albums, staunch and enduring classics each one: with England's Newest Hitmakers, 12 X 5 (photo session for which used again here), The Rolling Stones, Now! and December's Children (and Everybody's). Stick all five in a CD changer, set up the playlist shuffle in digital, and see for yourself. The quality across the 60 songs (and various outtakes, demos, and whatnot) rarely flags, rarely falls below anything less than first-rate. I'm talking here about the US version of Out of Our Heads, but I'm not particularly splitting hairs over US and UK versions—it matters, I know, but that's what Wikipedia is for. This is approximately where the scope opens up regardless.

The playing is all in place, notably evident on the live track, "I'm All Right," which briefly reveals the dimensions of what all they were up to in performance too, and it's remarkable. Rhythm section sewn up tight and perfectly unconscious, the dancing prancing singer Mick Jagger working out his repertoire of stylistic conceits, and the guitar players Brian Jones and Keith Richards, defining fundamentals of the practicing rock band. On some levels it almost sounds ordinary now, perhaps from the overexposure, but even under withering scrutiny over the years it bears an indefinable magic spark. The music speaks for itself.

Recorded in Hollywood, Chicago, London.... We hope that this album gets you OUT OF your HEADS listening to it, as we got making it. (Andrew Loog Oldham, liner notes, 1965)

Talk about attack: Out of Our Heads was the third of four albums released by the Rolling Stones in the US in 1965. It included two of their biggest hits, later worn to nubs on oldies stations and elsewhere: "The Last Time" (#9 in the spring) and "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" (#1 for four weeks in the summer). They are great songs, of course—"Satisfaction" is arguably their greatest—and likely the reason the album became the band's first US #1.

Out of Our Heads is my go-to of the early handful from the expedient of living with it. It didn't hurt that it featured "Satisfaction"—that was one for playing over and over, which led to favoring the second side of the album where it was the first song. My brother got the album as a birthday gift the same year it was released. It scared me a little—their faces were put right in ours on the cover, and the music tended to be as dark as that cover, sultry, preening, brisk and economical, and infinitely grown-up somehow. And what did they mean "out of our heads"?

In the early R & B phase, they were wildly exciting but also crude, derivative, very limited, and they shaped up only as a short-term craze. But then, just as things were wearing thin, Jagger and Keith Richards suddenly upped and exploded as writers. Out of nowhere, they started churning out monsters.... All that mattered was the new sound—an adapted Spectorsound but less symphonic, less inflated—and the murderous mood it made. (Nik Cohn, Rock From the Beginning, 1969)

Out of Our Heads is actually majority originals. On the second side they are a supermajority, 5-1. The three best songs on the album are on that side—"Satisfaction," "Play With Fire," and "The Spider and the Fly"—and they are all originals. But the covers are not to be neglected either. The choice of artists alone is another kind of audacious by our present standards: Sam Cooke ("Good Times," a #15 hit for Cooke just the year before), Marvin Gaye ("Hitch Hike," Gaye's first hit, a #30 in 1960), and Otis Redding ("That's How Strong My Love Is"), plus Solomon Burke ("Cry to Me") and Don Covay ("Mercy, Mercy," a #35 hit the year before). As producer and PR man Andrew Loog Oldham mentions, the locations for recording sessions included the Chess Records studio in Chicago. These cats were getting around.

Out of Our Heads has a foot in the past and a foot in a past future. It's that old now. The majority of pop albums of the time were still mostly collections built around one hit single original with 11 covers of other hits of the day. But the Stones, following the Beatles lead (and Bob Dylan, of course), appeared to know what was coming, or they rewrote the rules book expressly to change that. Some of their covers are hits, some are not, and none are exactly by preapproved artists for a band of white British wannabes, except that rule got changed too approximately here. Essential.

Detail: Out of Our Heads (1965)

0 Gimme Shelter (1970)

USA, 91 minutes, documentary
Directors: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin
Photography: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Gary Weis
Music: Rolling Stones
Editors: Joanne Burke, Robert Farren, Ellen Giffard, Kent McKinney
With: Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Tina Turner, Hell's Angels, Melvin Belli, Meredith Hunter

In late 1969, the Maysles brothers (Albert and David), with Charlotte Zwerin, had already made their reputation as iconoclastic documentary filmmakers on the strength of their extraordinary Salesman from 1968 and other projects. The Rolling Stones, just then about to assume the mantle of greatest rock 'n' roll band in all history, had returned to touring after an interruption of a few years that was due to drug busts, turmoil inside the band, and other breakdowns. Also, Woodstock had just happened. Thus, the elements were in place for a first-rate and very interesting concert film. Then events stepped in to help make sure it couldn't be anything else. The more you look at Gimme Shelter now, the more eerie and weird and unfortunate it all seems, which the movie exploits almost perfectly with its dense atmosphere of dread.

The two sides were remarkably in synch from the start. The Maysles team only knew they wanted to make something "more than" a concert film. Mick Jagger, speaking for the band, kept laying down terms the Maysles were already abiding by or happy to comply with: no acting, no recreations of scenes, no voiceover narration, and none of "that Pennebaker shit." So far so good,  except the Maysles knew the last one might be a problem, depending on what Jagger meant by it. They kept nodding their heads and saying no problem, and they kept shooting.



Gimme Shelter more or less starts as a typical enough concert film, with arrivals at airports, press conferences, recording sessions on the road, hotels and buses, and concert footage shot at the Stones' '69 Madison Square Garden show. In performance, Jagger carries on in iconic fashion, wearing a long scarf, cape, and star-spangled top hat. The sound is not very good but the images compensate. Mostly what makes the scenes work as well as they do are the audience reaction shots, which really bring the adulation and the fervor, a sense of what an event it was.

But the movie has already started to subtly enlarge its scope. Zwerin, who was largely responsible for shaping and structuring all the hours that the Maysles and their crews gathered on their travels with the Stones, already knew of course that this story ended in Altamont. It couldn't be ignored, so she worked with the Maysles to establish a thread early in which the Stones are brought in to look at portions of the film. Their reactions to it are in turn filmed. By this time they had already worked with Jean-Luc Godard on the 1968 documentary Sympathy for the Devil so they were evidently comfortable both with cameras and with strange experiments.

Going "meta" like this—"see the Stones, seeing themselves!"—is somewhat arch but it's also a nice way of foreshadowing what the filmmakers have got. As an event, Altamont was well known by the time the project went into postproduction, or at least the general shape of its disaster was. Altamont remains an epic cluster-fuck, the poster child for how to do an outdoor festival wrong on practically every level, capped off by the murder of a concertgoer at the hands of the Hell's Angels, who had informally been put in charge of security, which they provided—no surprise—the Hell's Angels way.

What the filmmakers got, of course, is the kind of thing now called "documentary gold"—a scene so raw, unfiltered, and real that it practically makes the picture essential viewing all by itself. In this case, it was the murder of Meredith Hunter. The army of camera operators the Maysles sent into that strange sea of 300,000 on that December day (trivia fans may enjoy knowing that one of them was George Lucas) somehow happened to catch the murder itself on film, which was subsequently discovered during the editing.

It's a pretty neat way to solve the problem of using an event without exploiting it, though it operates in a gray area. The murder happens swiftly, inside of a thick crush of people just 20 or 30 feet away from the stage. To clarify it for the viewer, it is dwelt on and looked at more than once, including in slow motion and with freeze frames. It has to be shown, arguably, because the context is everything—and because it is the single event that defines Altamont. But it's no simple case of peace-loving hippies assaulted by demented biker gang. Hunter had a gun and was holding it in his hand. He was not merely an innocent bystander but an active player in the violence erupting all around.

That context is crucial, and establishing it may be the single most important part of the film, documenting the turn—as many have pointed out before—from '60s fairy pop dreams of Monterey Pop and Woodstock to something far more grim and depressingly human. The scenes at Altamont are repulsive, taking the images of quaint hippie eccentrics we knew from before and making them impossibly grotesque. Naked people, stoned people, hairy people, with dead eyes and buckskin fringe—it looks like anomie made palpable.

The Stones' performance at Altamont caps it all off perfectly. This is not the riding high of Madison Square Garden. The band is hemmed in on all sides by the mob, which is no more than five or six feet away from them. The stage itself is barely elevated. The band is obviously scared—as they should have been, because the Angels had already assaulted Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane as well as many, many attendees. But they are attempting bravado to get through. It's not the usual scene of concert intimacy, when performers allow the audience close as they perform. This is more like a picture of kidnapping and extortion.

The best description of the Stones and Altamont is in a book by Stanley Booth called The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (released originally as Dance With the Devil). Gimme Shelter is best taken as an adjunct to that book, which is much better able to penetrate and explain the details. They are as complicated as they are unfortunate, and Gimme Shelter does very little to illuminate them if you don't already know them. Still, it remains one of the single most crucial documents of its era. It's not fun to watch but it will never leave you.

Top 10 of 1970
1. Gimme Shelter
2. Performance
3. Catch-22
4. MASH
5. Days and Nights in the Forest
6. Where's Poppa?
7. Goin' Down the Road
8. Woodstock
9. The Conformist
10. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

Detail: Gimme Shelter (1970)

0 Rolling Stones, "Gimme Shelter" (1969)

(listen)

At this point, it's probably fair to say it's the title that's most famous about this song. It soon after became the title of a documentary which stands still as a generational monolith. And its primary sentiment—the urgency of the "gimme," the nature of the request—was widely and acutely perceived as shared in that historical moment. You will notice the author of the mashup video I'm pointing to, posted October 5, 2009, would seem to agree, focusing on all the history being made within its general vicinity. So with everybody in agreement this way, it can be a little surprising to sit and listen to it, to figure out what it is and what it does. What matters most is how it feels. More than anything it sounds exhausted, or that's the wrong implication—it sounds like exhaustion. It sounds like how exhaustion feels. The words are not quite there, a rumbling, wailing blur, though "it's just a shot away" is clear enough, ringing out by Merry Clayton. I can't tell you how it makes me feel when I reflect this was recorded only weeks before Altamont (only weeks after Woodstock), particularly when I think of the scenes from the documentary. But I suspect it provokes feelings in others as well. Those tender, tentative notes Keith Richards picks out to open it, the soaring background vocals as the elements start to kick in, the way it assembles itself by pieces, until finally it is a rock song, if still somewhat shambolic. It's never loud, no matter how much you turn it up. It is a great and powerful whimpering, and can leave one a little sick and usually quite uncomforted. A remarkable document.

Detail: Rolling Stones, "Gimme Shelter" (1969)

0 Rolling Stones, "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" (1971)

(listen)

I'm not about to attempt sorting out better from best among the Rolling Stones albums from the late '60s and early '70s. It's arguably their best period, when they seemed to effortlessly achieve status as world's greatest rock 'n' roll band. For sentimental reasons, I still tend to prefer the 1964 to 1967 period personally. But if forced to make a choice, 1971's Sticky Fingers is usually the one I want to name from the great run. It's no knock on Let it Bleed or Exile on Main St.—it's just that the album with the zipper cover designed by Andy Warhol was the one I owned and thus tends to remain the most familiar. But there's also the matter of this amazing song, which truly closes the deal. It starts as classic crunching Stones electric guitar blues riff, up there with "Brown Sugar" and "Tumbling Dice" and all those. Then, at about the halfway point of a 7:16 length, it wanders off into "Layla" territory with another song entirely, one obviously built out of an impromptu jam led by Mick Taylor's lyrical guitar play, Bobby Keys's barrelhouse saxophone, and a band capable of locking into solid grooves at will, as second nature. There's little else like it across the Stones' entire catalog, and even as it strays a bit into the prog-inflected territory of the times (a feature I like about it as much as any other, as the Stones have always been slaves to fashion, which often plays out comically) it remains unmistakably a product of a greatest rock 'n' roll band: raunchy, swinging, funny, hairy, evocative, and beautiful. Look for it at the movies in Blow, Casino (in its entirety), and The Fighter, among others.

Detail: Rolling Stones, "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" (1971)