A list (in no particular order) of my 500 favorite songs (singles, deep cuts, hits, and more) of all time. Includes a wide array of selections from rock, punk, funk, R&B, soul, classical, jazz, folk, and world music.
Showing posts with label the rolling stones. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the rolling stones. Show all posts
It's December 1981, a few days before my 4th birthday. I'm standing with my grandmother at the counter of the Record Bar music store in the Asheville Mall, trying to tell the teenage girl behind the cash register—who is nice enough, but obviously wishing she were someplace else—which singles I want. The first is "Trouble" by Lindsey Buckingham. (Out of stock. She gives us a listless shrug.) And the second is a song I'd heard on the radio about a week before that had stopped me in my tracks and now can't get out of my head. Problem is, I don't know the song title or who performed it—you know, exactly what every disinterested record store clerk wants to hear from a customer. The only thing I can articulate about the song: "It sounds like mean bees." As I've mentioned in other posts, my late grandmother worked stocking records and tapes for Sky City, a former regional department store. She was no stranger to kids shuffling up to her and mumbling lyrics to the latest Go-Go's single or wanting to know which Ozzy album had "Crazy Train" on it. So my grandma makes a suggestion. "Sing it to her, Mikey." By "sing," I know exactly what she's driving at: I re-created music with my mouth all the time as a kid. (Think: a toddler version of Michael Winslow from the Police Academy movies.) My family referred to it as "singing" because beatboxing wasn't really a thing back then. I'd usually make up my own songs and imitate the sounds of guitar, drums, bass, and synths—not to mention the pops and cracks of a vinyl record if I also was pretending that my song was playing on a turntable. But I'd often imitate stuff from the radio, too. So there, in the middle of Record Bar, I start "singing" the riff that had lured me away from playing with my building blocks the week before, imitating the buzzing "mean bees" guitar sound as best I can: uhn-uhn...uh-uh-uhhhhhh-uh-uhn-uhn... "Does that ring a bell?" my grandma asks the girl, who is standing there dumbfounded. Eventually, the manager (who is barely out of his teens himself) comes strolling over to take a listen. He listens with a half-smile and then asks me to perform it one more time. At this point, I'm starting to get a bit self-conscious. He starts tapping his pen on his clipboard in time with my riff, and a look of recognition suddenly beams across his face. "I'm pretty sure that's 'Satisfaction' by the Stones," he drawls. "That's an old song, little man. Where'd you hear that?" At this point, I go into shy mode and hide behind my grandma's legs, where I convince myself that I am invisible to everyone...
Obviously, the store didn't have "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones available as a single because the song had been released 16 years earlier in 1965. But, to my ears, it didn't sound all that different from the punk rock and New Wave that was starting to get airplay in those days. That Keith Richards guitar lick had the same attitude and primal crunch as the raw, unapologetic rock coming out of London and New York, circa 1981. Mick Jagger's sneering anti-consumerism/vagabond lyrics did, too, even though I didn't understand a single word he was saying until I was a teenager. Probably a good thing, because the words are raunchy. Especially the part where he's trying to bed a groupie, but she rejects him because she's "on a losing streak." Crass? Absolutely. But you can't argue with its honest snapshot of a performer's life on the road. The story behind the song is the stuff of rock legend, too, meaning you have to take it with a grain of salt and a shot of tequila. The Stones played Jack Russell Memorial Stadium in Clearwater, FL, on May 6, 1965. They were four songs into the show when a group of young concertgoers got into it with local law enforcement, and all hell broke loose. The show was shut down, and local politicians basically vowed never to let another rock band perform there again. Back at the band's hotel that night (some sources say "motel"—probably because it sounds seedier), an exhausted Richards fell fast asleep with his guitar beside him and a tape recorder on the nightstand. The next morning, he woke up to find the tape had spooled all the way to the end, even though he didn't recall turning the recorder on at any point. When he ran the tape back, well, you might guess where this is going. "So I put it back to the beginning and pushed play and there, in some sort of ghostly version, is [the opening lines to 'Satisfaction']," Richards told NPR's Terry Gross in 2010. "It was a whole verse of it. And after that, there's 40 minutes of me snoring. But there's the song in its embryo, and I actually dreamt the damned thing." As for the famous fuzz tone that makes the song the ugly, glorious thing that it is, Richards never intended to keep that guitar line on the final track. Instead, he envisioned a Stax-style horn section, not unlike Otis Redding's late 1965 rendition of the song. He only used his Gibson Maestro fuzzbox pedal in the studio to mimic the sound of saxophones, fully intending to overdub horns at a later date. But as he noted in a video to fans from 2004, "The record company and management slipped it out. They said 'this is a hit; why talk to them, they're on the road (promoting the album Out of Our Heads)?' And I can't argue with that."
I remember the first time I saw the music video for The Rolling Stones "Miss You" from the 1978 album Some Girls (the last album where they actually tried to make good music, in my humble opinion). I believe Casey Kasem was discussing some factoid about the Stones on his syndicated America's Top 10 T.V. show, and "Miss You" was the clip they chose to show before going to commercial. I was probably about 3 or 4 years old at the time, and the clip was only about 30 seconds long. But it made quite an impression on me. There was something about that groove and Jagger singing his ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh vocals to the camera that clicked with my little brain. But it wasn't just, "Oh, that's a great song"; it was more like, "Well, I could do that." I spent the rest of the afternoon, strutting around the house and ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ing until my parents asked me to stop. Anyway, I'd always known that "Miss You" was a by-product of Jagger spending many semi-lucid hours at New York's Studio 54, absorbing the sound and attitude of disco. But I only recently learned that, although Keith Richards is credited with co-writing the song, he really had nothing to do with it. In a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone magazine's Jann Wenner, Jagger notes that he and multi-instrumentalist Billy Preston came up with the song during rehearsals in Toronto while Richards was awaiting trial on drug charges. Says Jagger, "Yeah, Billy had shown me the four-on-the-floor bass-drum part, and I would just play the guitar. I remember playing that in the El Mocambo club when Keith was on trial in Toronto for whatever he was doing. We were supposed to be there making this live record." Preston also came up with the song's strutting bassline, which Bill Wyman then reshaped in his own Stonesian image. And while the bass really is what grabs me, Sugar Blue's harmonica is what puts the track right over the top. It's a gorgeous, soulful chunk of bluesy grit that keeps the whole affair from getting too glossy and slick. Kind of a little reminder that, while Studio 54 might have been the height of toot and glam, the real New York of 1978 was a funky, brutalist shit show.
"Gimme Shelter" opens The Rolling Stones' 1969 album Let It Bleed and essentially slams the book closed on the hippie utopian dream. Mick Jagger and the boys take a look at the world around them, and what they see is pretty bleak: war, rape, and murder—all just a shot away. As Jagger told NPR's Melissa Block back in 2012, "It was a very moody piece about the world closing in on you a bit. When it was recorded, early '69 or something, it was a time of war and tension, so that's reflected in this tune." What's also reflected in the tune is their "back to basics" approach to crafting raunchy R&B, a reboot that began with their 1968 album, Beggar's Banquet. From the moment Jagger coos his eerie falsetto oooh's atop that undulating Latin-flavored intro to the final seconds of his smoldering blues harmonica in the fadeout, it's clear that they were no longer interested in aping The Beatles. The most memorable moment of the song, though, doesn't even come from any of the Stones; it comes from backup singer Merry Clayton. The band was putting the finishing touches on the song in Los Angeles in the middle of the night, when Jagger and partner in crime Keith Richards decided it needed a female vocal. Story goes, they'd tried to contact a number of vocalists and finally ended up reaching (a very pregnant) Clayton as she was on her way to bed. They convinced her to come to the studio—still in her silk pajamas with a scarf covering the rollers in her hair—to cut some vocals. Thing is, she had no clue who they were! All she knew was that they were some little rock outfit from England. So, understandably, she was taken aback when she got there and found out they wanted her to belt out the unsavory lyrics: Rape, murder / It's just a shot away. Nevertheless, she did a solid take, vamping and singing along with Jagger's lead. Impressed with her confidence and swagger, Jagger asked if she was up for another take. As Clayton reminisces in the fantastic 2013 documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, "I said to myself, 'I'm gonna do another one, and I'm gonna blow them out of this room'." That's when she unleashed the now-famous gospel-tinged shout that sounds like someone crying out in the wilderness. It's not just sung; it's wailed, complete with cracks and breaks—particularly when she hits the word murder. It's one of the most frightening, exhilarating things ever captured on tape. Clayton's singular performance takes a good track that would have been a decent snapshot of its time and crystallizes it into the definitive chronicle of its era.
If you're familiar with the Stones' 1969 album Let It Bleed, you probably know that the song "Honky Tonk Women" (released separately as a non-album single in 1969) started out as a jangly two-step called "Country Honk." Both songs pretty much share the same lyrics about booze and floozies. Biggest difference is that "Country Honk" is set in Jackson, MS, whereas "Honky Tonk Women" is set in Memphis, TN. Musically, though, they're worlds apart. The former is completely countrified. Primitive-sounding, in fact. Don't get me wrong; it's is not without its ragged, front porch n' white lightnin' charms, including audio verité moments of tires on gravel and a horn honking. It also provides the perfect bridge from Robert Johnson's haunting "Love in Vain" to the raunchy, Motown-esque "Live With Me" on the album's first side (if we're talking vinyl). But I prefer the Memphis-meets-East Texas funk-fire of the reimagined track. For some reason, more than any other track by the band, "Honky Tonk Women" conjures for me the instant mental picture of Mick Jagger strutting around like a banty, pointing at the audience, shaking his hips, etc. (Moves he largely cribbed from Tina Turner after she and Ike opened for The Stones on their 1966 tour of the United Kingdom.) I think the answer lies somewhere between the snarling guitar licks and producer Jimmy Miller's clanking cowbell.
Sitting at the very end of the album Let It Bleed (1969) is the epic-length "You Can't Always Get What You Want." It basically was Keith Richards and Mick Jagger's response to The Beatles' "Hey Jude"—purely from the standpoint that the Fabs had successfully crafted a 7-minute hit song with strings and a singalong chorus, and the Glimmer Twins felt compelled to shoot for a similar goal. "You Can't..." opens with a tongue-in-cheek a cappella choral intro, performed by the 60-voice London Bach Choir (who ultimately requested that their name be removed from the performer credits when they discovered the album contained songs with themes ranging from serial killers to shacking up). The track then shifts gears, making you think it's going to be an acoustic tune in the vein of Blonde on Blonde-era Bob Dylan—that is, until the drums, organ, and backing vocalists spring to life and reveal the song to be a gospel-inflected R&B number that digs down as low as it soars high. Throughout the song (and album, for that matter), the common thread is Jagger's weariness with the 60s—the drug scene, the political scene, the free-love scene, etc. Even when Jagger is singing about a fairly lighthearted exchange with a friend over a cherry cola, the friend's response to Jagger is the word "dead." While that might sound like a celebration of bleakness, the feeling is actually one of resolve: you don't always get what you thought you wanted; but, in the end, you get what you need. Pretty sage wisdom.
Lyrically, "Can't You Hear Me Knocking?" from 1971's Sticky Fingers is one of Mick Jagger's meh moments. It's a string of drug references and a semi-coherent story about a guy trying to convince his girlfriend to let him into her apartment after returning from a night on the town. (Although, knowing Mick and the boys, I'm guessing the lyrics are a druggy, euphemistic plea for extra-marital nookie in the same vein as blues songs like Howlin' Wolf's "Back Door Man.") Musically, however, this is one of the best Stones tracks ever, capturing the blistering napalm of Keith Richards's riffs as well as the subtler melodic style of co-lead guitarist Mick Taylor. It's the perfect balance of Stonesian yin and yang. It's Richards's guitar that you hear as the track opens—a raunchy, staccato burst of flame that ignites the song's slinky groove. In his autobiography Life (2010), Richards reveals that the song's riff was the simple result of jamming around in the studio and stumbling upon a rhythm that everyone just sort of fell into. The second half of the song also was the result of jamming, but in this case, Taylor took the lead. He was enjoying the groove they had going, so he decided to keep on playing after the song was over, not realizing that the tape was still running. After a couple of bars, everyone else picked up their instruments again and dropped back in, locking into the Latin-tinged rhythm that Taylor and session percussionist Rocky Dijon were working. Incidentally, what you hear at the end of the song is the product of a single, improvised take without any edits or overdubbing. The contrast to Richards's style is pretty stark: Taylor finesses each chord instead of bludgeoning it. Notes ripple and flow with jazzy nuance as they weave their way around the soulful sax of Bobby Keys. The burn is slower, but it's still hot.
"Loving Cup" off the decadent, sprawling masterpiece Exile on Main St. (1972) is the sound of The Rolling Stones at its creative peak. Pretty much every album since then has been a long, agonizing slide into mediocrity and a case study in the power of brand equity. (In other words, even though 90% of what they've released in the past 40 years has been dreck, people keep shelling out money for their merchandise and concert tickets because that tongue-n'-lips still somehow embodies their former badass-ness.) Anyway, the sessions for Exile are the stuff of rock legend. Story goes, the band went to southern France to record in April 1971 to escape the British taxman. For the better part of a year, members of the band--along with producer Jimmy Miller, various wives/girlfriends, random acquaintances, and assorted heroin dealers--lived in Villa Nellcôte, a sprawling mansion that Keith Richards rented for £1000 a week. When the group was sober-ish, they'd record in the mansion's basement, using a mobile recording studio to capture the feverish riffs that Richards and fellow axe slinger Mick Taylor were tossing out effortlessly. By March 1972, however, the French police had tired of the narcotics-fueled rowdiness at Nellcôte. Likewise, Mick Jagger had grown annoyed with his writing partner's heroin use and the scene in southern France, and he decided to move the recording sessions to Los Angeles to finish the album, which was quickly developing into a double set. "Loving Cup" was one of the tracks created during the LA sessions. Keyboardist Billy Preston had convinced Jagger to go with him to a Pentecostal church in LA near the recording studio, and Jagger had a sort of religious experience hearing the church's gospel choir. So much so that he began writing and arranging the remaining songs for the album with a more soulful, gospel feel. Although Preston plays on other tracks, session keyboardist Nicky Hopkins is featured playing the Southern Gospel-tinged piano intro to "Loving Cup." At times, the song feels vaguely like Memphis soul, what with the blazing horn and rhythm sections. But then it just as easily slips into the realm of honky tonk--like a Hank Williams song written with a nose full of coke instead of a liver full of Jack. Whatever genre it falls into, Jagger sounds like he's having fun, which is something that couldn't be said again until 1978's Some Girls.
It's funny. I've been a fan of the song "Monkey Man" from Let It Bleed (1969) for years. But every time I hear that intro with Bill Wyman's bass and vibraphone, I think that my iPod has shuffled to a song by The Temptations or Marvin Gaye. It happily fakes me out every damn time. But from that pseudo-Motown intro, Keith Richards's guitar suddenly snarls with distortion and rips into that unmistakable riff as Charlie Watts's drums smack in you the head from stage right. It's a raunchy, funky groove from moment one. "Monkey Man" also is one of my favorite Stones songs lyrically. The late 60s / early 70s saw Mick Jagger crafting lyrics that were witty, literate, honest, and complex. On "Monkey Man," he's using blues and drug slang to wryly comment on the public's/media's perception of him and the band, which was that he obviously was a junkie and an STD-ridden womanizer who was constantly bed hopping from one skank to another. He also addresses the odd dichotomy of fans practically worshipping them and the establishment deriding them as agents of evil, while they themselves were just interested in rocking a little. (Well, I hope we're not too messianic / Or a trifle too satanic / We love a bit of blues). In and of itself, all of this would add up to a great song. But then there's that instrumental bridge that comes out of nowhere and shifts everything into a sunny major key, with Keef's nice slide guitar work and Nicky Hopkins's glorious piano, which somehow borrows as much from honky tonk bordellos as it does from Viennese concert halls. That bridge just puts the whole tawdry, sack-of-broken-eggs affair into the category of "instant classic."
Sitting at the end of the second side of The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers (1971) is "Moonlight Mile." It basically began as a throwaway riff, tentatively titled "Japanese Thing," that Keith Richards had recorded to tape and promptly forgot about. That is, until Mick Taylor resurrected it with Mick Jagger's help, the two of them reworking it into a full-fledged song during an all-night recording session. (Yet somehow the song was only credited to "Jagger/Richards." Crappy move on their part.) Compared to the other songs on Sticky Fingers, which mostly romp and rave through topics ranging from interracial nookie to rock and roll excess, "Moonlight Mile" is decidedly sweeter and more poetic. That's not to say it doesn't have its thinly veiled drug references. (Who is Jagger kidding with the line "a head full of snow"?) But in the context, they're less celebratory or cautionary (see "Sister Morphine") and more road-weary. It's one of those rare Stones songs where Jagger isn't strutting like a rooster in a henhouse. Instead, it's as if he's reciting a private letter to a loved one, revealing that the on-stage persona and bravado are all part of the show. Deep down, he's grown weary of the constant touring and its accoutrements. In fact, it's almost a confession that he wanted out, which actually is consistent with what he was telling the media in 1971-2: he'd grown bored with rock and roll. Consider the lyric: Made a rag pile of my shiny clothes Gonna warm my bones Gonna warm my bones I got silence on my radio Let the air waves flow Let the air waves flow It's one of the band's few ballads that looks forward to a place of solitude and comfort rather than reflecting upon loss.
