![]() “I was in awe sometimes listening to Mick Taylor, especially on that slide,” writes Richards in his memoir, paying respect where it’s due. Recast with a honky-tonk feel, Jagger wrings pain from the lyrics, and Taylor sets his slide guitar on stun. The 1937 Robert Johnson recording is a pillar of blues history, and the aching version on Let It Bleed (reprised heavily on the live album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out) is no doubt its most famous cover. Somehow the Stones have never played it live – but Phish have. His whisper-to-a-scream vocals build over piano, horns and those dramatic drum fills in the final choruses. Jagger sings about watching friends fall apart and lovers fade away, as he staggers through a long night of sex, booze and the bedroom blues. The big soul ballad on Exile is also the album’s longest song. MTV couldn’t take the heat and made them recut it. This hopped-up ode to a steamy babe came with a video in which redheaded actress Anita Morris gets the boys so revved-up the buttons of their trousers pop off. It’s an acoustic Beggars Banquet oddity that feels like a country song yet incorporates tablas, mandolins and a fiddle solo.ĭid Jagger ever get the woman from “She’s So Cold” together with the woman from “She Was Hot”? The possibilities are staggering. The working girl in this song must be one of the Stones‘ toughest and most formidable female characters: She takes the bus to the factory by day, she parties hard and starts fights by night, she makes Jagger wait in the rain for her to get off work. This fever dream set to music inspired multiple EDM remixes 30 years later. Wyman’s spine-crawling vibraphone and mordant bass line have an air of creepy mystery, and Richards plays a piercing riff as Jagger offers the sulfuric disclaimer: “I hope we’re not too messianic or a trifle too satanic.” Not at all, Your Majesties.įew Stones tracks are as atmospheric as this gauzy, left-field gem Jagger strums an electric guitar while woozily crooning lines like “Nothing will harm you/Nothing will stand in your way,” over a restrained, bare-bones accompaniment. Written on the same early-1969 Italian vacation that “Midnight Rambler” was written, “Monkey Man” is nearly as menacing. Image Credit: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns The Stones delved into Watergate-era paranoia on this post- Sly Stone funk workout, in which Jagger sings about “some little jerk in the FBI” with a stack of papers on him “six feet high.” It was cut during their last sessions with Taylor, who played bass while Wyman switched over to synthesizer Taylor laid down what may be the only bass solo on a Stones song. Of course, he’s still married to the woman he was with when it came out – and their two daughters happen to have the initials T and A. Who else could smuggle the word “tits” onto the radio in 1981? Right next to the word “ass”? Only one band, and only one man: Keith Richards, who snarls, chants and wheezes his way through a celebration of his callipygian muse. “Very strange number,” Jagger observed “Like a music-hall number.” Richards had no problem with his partner’s lyrics: “A lot of the stuff Chuck Berry and early rock writers did was putting down that other generation. Image Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesĪ huge hit about a pill-popping mom, propelled by an electric guitar imitating a sitar. ![]() It’s also a superb showcase for the range of Jagger‘s voice, which leaps from soul-man falsetto to bluesy moans. It’s a five-minute, cowbell-thwacking jam, with funky organ from Billy Preston and the great Sonny Rollins on sax. Like almost everything on Tattoo You, this grunting, growling stomp was recorded years earlier – in Rotterdam, during the Black and Blue sessions. ![]() Richards slashes away and Wood provides Creedence-y licks, while Jagger contemplates hanging out at gay bars and tells his soon-to-be ex-lover, “Can’t you get it through your thick head this affair is dead as a doornail?” But what “Let Me Go” lacks in depth, it makes up for in punk-rock attitude. Image Credit: Michael Putland/Getty ImagesĪ simple power-chord rocker telling a clueless lover to get lost. Keith really wrote a sophisticated piece of music.” Don Was agreed: “It’s the most radical thing on the album. “I wouldn’t have been able to write songs like that 10, 15 years ago,” he said. during the last Bridges to Babylon session. It features a sax solo by Wayne Shorter, recorded at 5:30 a.m. Richards showed rarely seen romantic maturity and musical subtlety on this haunting gospel hymn. Considering that the Stones began as blues purists, they were making a kind of homecoming too. Robert Wilkins’ country blues about a boy who returns home after venturing out into the world on his own. The Stones cut plenty of blues covers but rarely sounded this authentic: an unplugged, acoustic-slide-guitar-driven cover of the Rev.
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