Review ("The Greats"): The Rolling Stones - December's Children (1965)

Tracks: 1) She Said Yeah; 2) Talkin’ About You; 3) You Better Move On; 4) Look What You’ve Done; 5) The Singer Not The Song; 6) Route 66 [live]; 7) Get Off Of My Cloud; 8) I’m Free; 9) As Tears Go By; 10) Gotta Get Away; 11) Blue Turns To Grey; 12) I’m Moving On [live].

REVIEW

If Out Of Our Heads was the Stones’ transitional album, their third and last American LP for 1965 was a downright schizophrenic one — unquestionably the most incoherent collection of songs to ever come out of the band as a more or less «original» product (though Flowers would probably come somewhat close two years later). The United States thought it needed a new Rolling Stones record for the Christ­mas market — President Johnson even signed a special executive order, as any respectable brand of AI is sure to inform you these days if you press it hard enough for classified information — and I guess Andrew Loog Oldham had another unused piece of his trashy beat poetry still lying around, so, without thinking twice, he took the album cover of the UK edition of Out Of Our Heads, stuck his words on the back side, temporarily rechristened the Rolling Stones to December’s Children because it made them sound like characters out of an Edith Nesbit or Gertrude Warner novel, and filled the record with everything he could lay his hands on (although, in all honesty, I do not know who was directly responsible for the content and sequencing).

To be fair, December’s Children is not that jumbled compared to certain other chronologically challenged monstrosities sacrificed by American record industry to the voracious devils of consumerism. The only song that sticks out quite sorely is the cover of Arthur Alexander’s ‘You Better Move On’, originally released as part of the self-titled Rolling Stones EP for the UK market in early 1964 (its other three covers — Chuck Berry’s ‘Bye Bye Johnny’, Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’, and the Coasters’ ‘Poison Ivy’ — somehow managed to avoid ending up on any of the original US LP releases and up to this day can only be found on various compilations, though they are not outstanding enough for us to regret the fact). Everything else is at least strictly from 1965: four songs re-plundering the British edition of Out Of Our Heads (which itself came out after the US edition), two songs representing the band’s latest single, three songs exclusively recorded for the new album, and two more live performances taken from the same Got Live If You Want It! EP that had already yielded ‘I’m Alright’ for the US version of Out Of Our Heads. There’s no sense of unity or purpose whatsoever, but it is a fairly representative slice of the Stones — all their good and bad sides — the way they were wobblin’ all over rock music’s transformational year.

The key track on the LP, brashly kicking off its Side B, is undoubtedly the single: ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ has not quite managed to linger on in the public conscious with as much fundamentality as ‘Satisfaction’, but way back in its time it was as much of an anthem for the fall of ’65 as ‘Satisfaction’ had been an anthem for its summer. Some might even quip that it repeats the same formula a bit too blatantly for comfort: same key of E major, same type of looping, nagging riff, same prevalence of wordy message over any extra musical embellishments (e.g. the lack of a guitar solo), same kind of fuck-off for the parasites, squares, and establishment types ruining Mick Jagger’s road to peace and happiness. That’s all true, but the end vibe is actually very different from ‘Satisfaction’ — in a way, the song really ushers in that very special period of the band’s history, lasting all through 1966 and early 1967, which some people occasionally lightly deride as «the Stones chameleoning into Brit-poppy intellectuals» but true fans recognize as simply a very special period in the history of the Rolling Stones’ multi-stage greatness.

For starters, unlike ‘Satisfaction’, ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ is not as explicitly «dirty» or «sexy», neither in its words nor in its music. Each of the three little «stories» that the verses tell puts down its own category of people — the mods, the philistines, the shufflebutts — but somehow completely forgets to lock in on Mick Jagger’s sexual frustrations, as if they’d suddenly become irrelevant next to all these far more pressing problems. This is mirrored in the music by the near-complete removal of fuzz or distortion from the melody: actually, Keith still plays those choppy, crackling rhythm chords but this time around they are completely pushed into the background by the much louder, cleaner, ringing lead riff from Brian — in a way, despite Brian, as usual, not being credited for the songwriting at all, this makes the song a sort of «Brian Jones response» to the «Keith Richards challenge» of ‘Satisfaction’. (No wonder, then, that in his subsequent remarks Keith does not seem to think too highly of the song, and that the band only dusted it off very sporadically on their post-’66 tours, notwithstanding its commercial success and critical acclaim). Ian Stewart’s supporting piano part also helps light up the overall mood, supporting the song’s more easy-going, almost comedic vibe.

For another thing, if the lyrical hero of ‘Satisfaction’ was basically a guy chasing around the world in hopes of fulfillment, it took just three more months for the lyrical hero to get tired of the limelight and retreat into seclusion. The second verse of the song does imply something like partying way past midnight, but it’s still a home party ("it’s three a.m., don’t you people ever wanna go to bed?") — and the first and third verse are all Mick’s take on the I want to be alone vibe. Incidentally, ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ is listed as having been recorded at the RCA studios in Hollywood on September 6–7, which is exactly two days after the rowdy Irish shows documented in the Charlie Is My Darling road movie, and exactly four days before the start of an even rowdier tour of Germany — and you can already see numerous signs of exhaustion in the movie. Life on the road was not an easy thing back in 1965, not even for the suddenly-rich-and-famous — especially not for the rich and famous, might I add, and ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ has a solid bit of that attitude in it.

The song itself does not sound tired, of course. Structure-wise, it is a bit less original than ‘Satisfaction’ because, if you listen to it long enough, you realize that its backbone is essentially lifted from the McCoys’ hit version of ‘Hang On Sloopy’ — released in July ’65 and very likely a regular guest on the Stones’ own turntables (as well as the Yardbirds’ For Your Love LP from the same month — both bands independently got the song from the original 1964 Vibrations version). Not that they even tried to conceal this legacy, as Mick would occasionally chant hang on sloopy during live performances of the song. But they sped up and intensified the groove, eliminating all the silence between notes in favor of Brian’s busy lead riff, and then made Charlie Watts the second biggest star of the song (some might even say the first) by letting him metronomically play this complex rhythmic figure through all of its three minutes.

Each of Mick’s lengthy «rapped» lines ends up both introduced and closed off by a five-or-six-shot snare fill that adds intensity and gravity to the declaration — but with plenty of restraint and self-control, no Keith Moon wildness here. While this is hardly the most technically challenging pattern in the world, keeping it so cool and steady for three minutes must be one hell of an achievement — if you listen to the live versions from 1966 or later, they all offer an approximation of this perfection at best (and I think that on those rare occasions when they played the song post-1966, Charlie mostly just kept the beat without bothering at all to harshly regulate those snare fills — not that we’d have any right to hold that against him). So, along with ‘Ruby Tuesday’, ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ is arguably the single best example of Mr. Watts as King of The Cool Snare Fill.

My only problem with the song is that, just like ‘Satisfaction’, it exhausts its bag of tricks for us over the first verse and chorus, leaving only the continuing flow of Jagger’s narrative as an element of further surprise. It’s quite a fun flow, even giving Mick the opportunity to throw in an early veiled drug reference (that bit about a ‘detergent pack’ referred to by the ‘guy who’s all dressed up just like a Union Jack’ — and no, I don’t really think Mick is talking about Pete Townshend here, as some have suggested), although drugs are really a very peripheral motive of the song. But at this point, the Stones have not yet learned to adopt the contemporary Beatlesque approach to songwriting — make each next verse a tiny bit different from the first — perhaps intentionally, as they put far more trust in the mesmerizing power of the groove than the Beatles ever did. ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’, though, is still a catchy pop-rock song first and a psycho-stimulating groove only in the second place, so it always leaves me wanting for a bit more to it.

The B-sides to the single were different depending on which side of the Atlantic you heard them at the time. For the slightly earlier US release they took ‘I’m Free’, the last song on the recent UK edition of Out Of Our Heads that American audiences had not yet had the opportunity to hear. This, somewhat amusingly, reminds me that three out of four greatest British bands of all time all had a song of their own called ‘I’m (I Am) Free’ — only the Beatles decided not to join in on the trend — and all three have something to say about their respective band’s nature, be it the idealistic-poetic flow of Dave Davies (on The Kink Kontroversy), the bitter-cynical take of Pete Townshend (on Tommy), or the rough and cocky declarativeness of the Stones. Ironically, though, the song itself is nowhere near as «free» as the lyrics suggest: it is tightly locked into a steady blues pattern, so that Jagger’s "I’m free to sing my song though it gets out of time" is disappointing (you kind of expect the song to get out of time at that moment, but it doesn’t. FAKE NEWS!).

It also blatantly borrows the "love me, hold me" bit from the Beatles’ ‘Eight Days A Week’ — and I have no idea why, though the quotation is so obvious it must have been very, very deliberate. Come to think of it, though, ‘Eight Days A Week’ was one of the Fab Four’s generically chivalrous declarations of eternal love for that one special person ("one thing I can say girl, love you all the time"), while the Stones openly declare that "I’m free to choose who I please any ol’ time, I’m free to please who I choose any ol’ time" — thus, you could view the quotation as a subtle mockery / challenge of that ol’-timey romantic shit, as illustrated by grandpa-value-lovin’ conservative Liverpudlians and directly opposed to the progressive ideals of free love, casual sex, and so much tambourine-fueled debauchery. If only it would make the song itself compositionally superior to ‘Eight Days A Week’, that might have nailed the coffin lid... but alas, no such luck. It’s a fairly second-rate creation even by the Stones’ overall standards circa 1965, when they were still, on the whole, better interpreters of other people’s takes on rock’n’roll and R&B than masters of their own songwriting trade.

It is still much less embarrassing than the B-side they came up with for the UK version of the single: ‘The Singer Not The Song’, albeit recorded at the same session as ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’, feels like a possible outtake from their earliest meek exercises in songwriting — its vibe has something in common with that of ‘Tell Me’, which I believe was quite superior — and while I do not mind the weird sound of the arrogantly out-of-tune acoustic guitars, I do mind the clumsy lyrics and Mick’s cringey attempt at simulating tragic romance without the saving grace of his nasty ironic nature. If you dig deep enough to discover that the title might be a reference to an obscure Roy Ward Baker movie from 1961, notable, among other things, for its subtle toying with homosexuality, then maybe lyrics like "there’s something wrong and it gives me that feeling inside that I know I must be right" can take on a whole new life and maybe we can even advise Mr. Lou Reed to eat his heart out or something like that. But it takes a whole lot of digging to even begin surmising this stuff; as it is, though, the chorus resolution of "it’s the si-i-i-i-nger, not the song!" has always struck me as one of the corniest bits the Stones ever put to tape. (Not even Big Star’s Alex Chilton could save the tune when he recorded a much more rocking version of it for his Bach’s Bottom album in 1981 — it ended up sounding like third-rate Jam).

But perhaps the strangest — not the worst, just the strangest — creative decision that the Stones took that year, just four days after the release of the UK single version of ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’, was to go into the studio and make their own official version of ‘As Tears Go By’. We know that this was one of the very first Jagger-Richards compositions, originally called ‘As Time Goes By’ before they installed an anti-cliché firewall in their brains that automatically changed ‘time’ to ‘tears’. We also believe that it was likely the very song they wrote when Andrew Oldham locked them up in that kitchen, telling them to put out (self-written songs) or get out, although the veracity of this account depends on the highly fickle factor of personal memories. But we do know that back in 1964, the Stones made the artistically sensible decision not to release the song themselves but rather donate it to Marianne Faithfull, whose brand new cultural image seemingly agreed far more with the spirit of the song than that of the «bad boys of rock’n’roll» — and, subsequently, the song became one of the highlights of her own debut record. Nobody in the UK could play the role of a saintly medieval maiden, locked away in an ivory tower to drown in her own tears, better than Marianne did in 1964.

Why the Stones themselves suddenly decided to return to this early exercise in songwriting more than a year later and reclaim it as their own property is anybody’s guess. Yet if you look closely at the context, the tentative guess becomes a surefire one: on September 13, 1965 the Beatles put out ‘Yesterday’ as a single (only in America, though), and on October 9 it rose to the #1 slot where it stayed for four weeks. Right in the middle of that stay, the Rolling Stones march into London’s IBC Studios and record their own sentimental, acoustic guitar-plus-strings heartbreaking ballad. They did not even have the time to write a new one — perhaps Andrew Oldham had put them to the whip once more — but the important thing here was not to lose the momentum, as the market seemed to be hot for more of that «rock’n’rollin’ boys embracing the sweet temptation of the Art Ballad» type of product.

I have to confess that I myself have never really loved the Stones’ version of ‘As Tears Go By’, though I do admit that, with the professional help of Mike Leander’s orchestration, they did make it into a «lovely» piece of work. Amusingly, they ended up steering it into even more classical territory than Marianne by completely stripping the song of its rhythmic base (the original recording had a steady pop rhythm section), again, in a clear nod to ‘Yesterday’, but also to simply emphasize the intimacy of the scene — and, in a subtle way, the exclusive spiritual connection between The Glimmer Twins, as it’s literally just Mick’s voice and Keith’s guitar, with the angelic strings completing their «marriage». This may have made it into even more of a shock for typical Stones fans (at least, male ones — the girls must have gladly embraced it as swoon material) than ‘Yesterday’ was for Beatles devotees. At least «pretty boy Paul» had already established the reputation of a sentimental balladeer, with the seeds of ‘Yesterday’ sown in songs like ‘Till There Was You’ or ‘And I Love Her’. «Bad boy Mick», on the other hand, was mostly known for breaking other girls’ hearts, not sitting out there sulking in the darkness and nurturing his own bleeding one.

Shock or no shock, though, the very fact of an artist working outside their comfort zone is by no means a bad thing, and on paper — as well as in certain versions, like Marianne’s — ‘As Tears Go By’ is a pretty good song, with a strong buildup to the chorus and everything. But it is simply not the kind of a song where the classic suspension-of-disbelief trick is possible if the singer behind it is Mick Jagger. It’s not that Mick is terminally incapable of conveying deep sentiment and vulnerability (though some might insist he is); it’s that his psychologism is always at its best when it is tempered with a bit of intellectual cynicism. Mick Jagger is only Mick Jagger when he stays in control; Mick Jagger trying to emulate broken-down despair, hopelessness, and defeat comes across as a bad actor. Regardless of who actually wrote the song, I believe Marianne when she sings it, but I have a hard time trying to believe the big fat lips of Michael Philip "I Can’t Get No" Jagger. Also, I don’t really like Mike Leander’s string quartet arrangement. It’s too loud and overblown, almost to the point of "I’ll see your string quartet and raise all the way up to eleven, Mr. George Martin, bitch!" He did a much more tasteful job on Marianne’s original version, in my opinion — here, it seriously smells of elementary penis envy.

Ultimately, I think the Stones’ version of ‘As Tears Go By’ has some historical importance, in that it was an early attempt to stick their hand into the tricky genre of baroque-pop, which would be so much en vogue for the next year and at which they would get so much better, especially once Brian Jones would be fully included into the creative process. Its release as a single did show the world that the Stones could be very different, though it probably also became the first in a chain series of arguments about how the Stones were really nothing but Beatle copycats. The truth about that rivalry is probably that the Stones did see the Beatles as a guiding light, especially when it came to groping around for new creative directions with a strong promise of commercial and critical appeal. But unlike so many other bands, the Stones never stooped to directly copying or mimicking the Beatles in these directions. Indeed, on a formal level ‘As Tears Go By’ is a direct reaction to the success of ‘Yesterday’ — yet it is still a completely different song, whose spirit is perhaps closer to 16th century England than to... uhm... well, to whatever the spirit of ‘Yesterday’ is closest to. (And if you want something that is really cringeworthy — San Remo-style cringeworthy, that is — you should probably try and listen to Mick singing the song in Italian, retitled ‘Con Le Mie Lacrime’ for the nobly aristocratic continental European market).

Anyway, it is time to finally turn our attention to LP-exclusive territory here, considering that American audiences actually heard the Stones’ version of ‘As Tears Go By’ on their copy of December’s Children (December 4) before getting a chance to buy it as a single (December 18). One song that they got to hear later than their luckier UK brethren, though, was ‘She Said Yeah’ — an old jokey Little Richard-style rock’n’roll number, apparently one of the first Sonny Bono songwriting credits, first recorded by New Orleanian jokester Larry Williams. It was popular enough in Britain, with both the Animals and Cliff Bennett releasing cover versions in 1964; but it took the Stones to turn it into something else, so much so that it became the opening track on both the UK edition of Out Of Our Heads and, later, on December’s Children.

Chucking out the piano and replacing it with harsh, fuzzy, metallic riffs, Keith Richards essentially creates here the perfect blueprint for punk rock; I don’t intend to say that nobody else rocked with such intensity back in 1965, but the overall combination of nasty tone, fuzz, feedback, simplicity, and speed — once the entire band kicks into gear, ‘She Said Yeah’ becomes the fastest anybody ever played back in 1965 — would be pretty tough to challenge for its time. They manage to bring the original running length from 1:50 all the way down to 1:35, and when you put it together with the primal crude­ness of the lyrics — dom deedle dee dom dom, little girl where did you come from? — that’s the Ramones for you, pure and simple, except that the riffs are bluesier, the lead vocalist is less friendly than Joey, and the guitar solo is screechier and fussier than a typical (and rare) Johnny lead. Had this recording come from a little-known one-hit band, to be included on a garage-rock collection like Nuggets, it would have been one of the major highlights; coming from the Rolling Stones, it amply demonstrates that the Stones, on the whole, were not a bona fide «garage-rock band» not through lack of spirit or «(anti-)musicianship», but through voluntary choice. They would very, very rarely rock as hard as they do on ‘She Said Yeah’ in the next two years — with the Beatles and the Kinks pointing the way to go, melody and subtlety would keep on winning over pure energy — but they sure as hell would not forget this valuable lesson.

Unfortunately, of the remaining studio recordings included on the LP, nothing comes close to that power. The only other patented «rocker» is Chuck Berry’s ‘Talkin’ About You’, a second-rate song from 1961 which sounds good, but «1964-good»: it is the exact kind of sound that the Stones had going for themselves on their earliest records, and you’d think that by the fall of 1965 they would already get past that. Likewise, their latest stab at straightforward 12-bar blues — Muddy Waters’ ‘Look What You’ve Done’ — sounds generic and predictable, just like any harmonica-soaked 12-bar blues they ever did before (think ‘Confessin’ The Blues’, for instance, but with less of that delicious vocal nastiness). It’s not bad in general, but it’s bad in the context of 1965, reminding me of all those relative Beatles lowlights like ‘Wait’ or ‘Another Girl’ which are good songs but tend to leave you with that «oh, I kinda expected more...» aftertaste once you’ve been spoiled by all the extra creativity. Same thing here — caught in the transition from inspired cover artists to trend-setting original songwriters, multiplied by the first wave of exhaustion from spinning inside the pop machine gears, the Stones unpredictably churn out golden nuggets mixed with (what has by now become) generic workmanship.

The other two studio tracks are original compositions, but neither feels inspired or efficient to my ears. ‘Gotta Get Away’ is a slow, monotonous shuffle written, perhaps, under the influence of Sonny & Cher or any other such folk-pop act, with a barely developed chorus and a perfunctory repetitive hook; Jagger’s "gotta get away, gotta get away..." is delivered with so little passion, you’d think this was a jingle he specially wrote for his court session on the advice of a corny divorce lawyer. Clocking in at just over two minutes without even featuring a bridge or an instrumental break, it’s typical filler stuff. As for the ballad ‘Blue Turns To Grey’, it is somewhat polarizing — some fans believe it is actually one of the band’s deepest breakup anthems, and I have to concur that lyrics-wise, it is rather a highlight from those early days: "so now that she is gone / you won’t be sad for long... / then blue turns to grey" is a cool twist, as not a lot of pop songwriters wrote about the dull grayness of loveless existence as opposed to regular sadness and despair. But melody-wise, well, Jagger and Richards are no Paul McCartney or Rod Argent, and ‘Blue Turns To Grey’ is no ‘For No One’ or ‘I Remember When I Loved Her’, just to knock off a few awesome melancholic tunes for comparison. Definitely a step up from ‘The Singer Not The Song’, but still the Stones’ best days as bitter balladeers were yet ahead of them.

Leaving behind the weird decision to beef up the track listing with that early-as-heck cover of Arthur Alexander’s ‘You Better Move On’, we’re saving some of the best for last. Continuing to rip apart the short EP Got Live If You Want It! that was already mentioned in the review of Out Of Our Heads, the Stones finish off each side of December’s Children with one live track from that performance — and although the two of them together barely cover five minutes of the live experience, take this from me: this is five of the finest minutes of a live Rolling Stones experience you ever get. If you think that the Rolling Stones only really earned their title of greatest rock’n’roll band in the world around 1969, with Mick Taylor and all those new awesome songs and Madison Square Garden and Altamont and Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! — or, for that matter, if you think the Rolling Stones weren’t all that great even back then as a live band at all — these short, to-the-point blast-offs of ‘Route ’66’ and Hank Snow’s ‘I’m Moving On’ should at least demonstrate that the Stones’ reputation as live performers was far from entirely built on Mick Jagger’s big lips and physical prowess. At most, it should demonstrate that the Stones were the greatest live rock’n’roll band in the world already back in 1965.

The only actual hint at that physical prowess provided by the recordings is the scream-a-thronic background, which, unfortunately shall prevent many a potential admirer from truly digging them. To quote James Hector’s little guide to the Stones’ music on this version of ‘Route ’66’, "when Keith Richards began his solo, the audience erupted, but probably not in appreciation of his virtuosity; my money’s on Jagger’s leg-twitching James Brown impression". Ah, but you don’t really see the James Brown impression here, so that shrill, siren-like, absolutely hysterical guitar eruption still remains as the natural psychological association with the audience response, and it’s one of the coolest moments in official recorded Rolling Stones live history. And it’s not just the solo — Keith is well-oiled perfection throughout, shadowing Mick with never-erring, always-moving, rough-’n’tough lead lines all the way, while Charlie and Bill provide simply the fastest and tightest rhythmic foundation you could hope to find anywhere at the time.

Not that the Beatles couldn’t be pretty tight, too, particularly when they brushed off stuff like ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ or ‘Matchbox’, but theirs was a joyful tightness, replete with Ringo wreaking childish havoc on the cymbals, John «sometimes I play the fool» Lennon emphasizing the irony of it all, and Paul trying to endear himself and the lads to the audience to the best of his ability. These guys, though, they’re not as much about connecting with the fans as they are about subjecting these fans to a brutal blitzkrieg. Even Mick’s voice has somehow toughened up by 1965, with an extra metallic ring and brash confidence squeezing out the last drops of insecure childishness that you can still hear, for instance, in some live BBC recordings from early-to-mid 1964. This here is the sound of a fully mature rockin’ warhorse, capable of operating with metronomic precision — the result of a most fortunate arrangement between cool-calm-and-collected professionalism (Bill and Charlie) and perfectly controlled musical violence (everybody else). «Lawful evil» at its finest, as opposed to the «chaotic evil» of your average garage band.

This is perhaps even better heard on ‘I’m Moving On’, which is sometimes quoted as one of early British Invasion’s most successful transformations of country into rock’n’roll — although, in all honesty, the Stones are following Ray Charles’ R&B version from Genius Sings The Blues here rather than Hank Snow’s actual country original, so the achievement is not nearly as tremendous as might have been thought. (It’s still hilarious, though, to hear the ultimate source and the latest reinvention back-to-back and marvel how a song with such an original sunny, optimistic, and innocent disposition could end up sounding like a rabid stampeding buffalo’s mating call).

Even so, when Bill and Charlie establish their proto-metallic groove in the very first seconds, they pretty much invent the blueprint for half of Hawkwind’s classic material — if only this weren’t just for two minutes, but could go on for about 10 or 15, it’d be the perfect trance-inducing «stoner rock» groove ages before the term was even invented. And where Keith is the big musical hero on ‘Route ’66’, here the stage is occupied by Brian Jones and his delicious Elmore James-ian Hawaiian slide runs — which seem to come from a completely different terrain but fit in perfectly with the groove. The thundering bass, the unerring drums, the golden waves of Brian’s guitar, the nasty undertones of Mick’s vocals, the chaotic harmonica blasts, the out-of-tune-but-passionate backing vocals from Keith, and even the wild flow of the audience screams — it’s two minutes of the most intense controlled chaos there could ever be. (As an amusing piece of trivia, those concluding twin choo-waah choo-waah blasts from Mick’s harmonica would, eight years later, become the main musical hook of ‘Silver Train’, a song that has a bit of a similar vibe with ‘I’m Moving On’ if you think hard about it.)

Yes, it’s just the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world, the Rolling Stones. They would soon lose the honor for a few turbulent years — which is why, perhaps, the «1969 comeback» is sometimes intuitively perceived as a beginning to the band’s live greatness, but by all means it was a comeback, because the Stones had hit their original live peak somewhere right about this time. Brian Jones never sounded better as a slide-infatuated bluesman, Keith would never come back to outchucking Chuck Berry while playing his rock’n’roll grooves with such speed and precision, and Mick’s ego was at that perfect intersection of adult confidence with restrictive discipline; by 1969, «adult confidence» would already be tainted with stage narcissism, and discipline would begin to falter (reaching an absolute nadir in the mid-1970s). Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! would, of course, have the benefits of great songwriting, cleaner sound, and monumental epic vibes, but still, these few tracks make me extremely sad that the boys and Andrew Oldham did not manage to come up with a truly great LP-size sample of the classic Stones’ live sound from mid-’65 à la Five Live Yardbirds. (The Got Live LP from next year, alas, would already be not quite it for multiple reasons that shall be discussed once we get around to it).

Thus, as you can see, December’s Children ends up being an extremely mixed bag, confusing everything — covers and originals, live and studio tracks, old bearded outtakes and cutting-edge singles, fabulous songwriting and generic filler. Perhaps this was, in a way, reflective of the band’s actual state of mind at the end of 1965, (a) torn between their original love of straightforward blues, R&B, and rock’n’roll and the need to adapt to rapidly changing trends, (b) desperately trying to solidify their status as original songwriters to retain a legitimate place on the A-tier list, (c) exhausted from incessant touring while still under constant pressure to uphold the «bad boy» image, (d) already suffering from internal rivalry between the Mick / Keith duo, on one hand, and Brian Jones, on the other, whose ambitions to make a really big something of himself were only offset by the fact that he did not quite understand himself what kind of «something» he had in mind. As Alex Chilton, in a sort of retro-prophetic way, would sing eight years later, «december boys got it bad», and although the line had nothing to do with the Rolling Stones, I think it quite appropriately summarizes the situation here. Much more so than Andrew Oldham’s stupid beat poetry on the back cover, anyway.

• Only Solitaire reviews: The Rolling Stones