Review: The Rolling Stones - Out Of Our Heads (1965)

Tracks: 1) Mercy Mercy; 2) Hitch Hike; 3) The Last Time; 4) That's How Strong My Love Is; 5) Good Times; 6) I'm All Right (live); 7) (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction; 8) Cry To Me; 9) The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man; 10) Play With Fire; 11) The Spider And The Fly; 12) One More Try.

Preliminary note to regular readers: This was supposed to be but a brief update of the older Blogspot review that I hoped to get over with in about half an hour. Instead, it ended up turning into a complete re-write that took several hours strewn across four days. My apologies for no longer being able to keep to any sort of strict schedule, but either I’m getting too old for this shit or just wise enough to understand that “schedules” and “quality” are two mutually incompatible notions. Some records take ten minutes to assess, others require a lifetime. From now on, I’m probably not even going to pretend having any set dates for releases of new reviews; life’s difficult enough as it is to spend effort on not simply going along with the flow. But don’t worry, new texts will still appear on a “quasi-”regular basis.

REVIEW

By mid-’65, with Dylan going electric and the Beatles going acoustic (sort of), it was becoming clear that a lot of change was in the air, and that the original British Invasion strategies of 1963–64 were no longer going to work. Glossy pop bands that wrote three-minute songs about girls (and, occasionally, cars) had to expand both their bag of musical tricks and their vocabularies in order to survive, while rough and tough rhythm’n’blues bands had to desist sticking to covers of their American idols and use their accumulated experience for properly creative purposes. Only a select few managed to make that crossing — many bands drowned along the way, like The Dave Clark Five or The Animals (at least, the original ones), while others, like The Hollies or The Yardbirds, thrashed and floundered for a while, occasionally thriving in the new environment but ultimately still dragged down by the times.

As good and time-honored (I do insist) as those early Stones records were, I am pretty sure there could have been some serious doubt, as 1965 loomed on the horizon, about the band’s capability of artistic survival in this new, far more demanding age. For sure, they had a great groove going, but so did The Animals; and whether they would be able to switch from their — admittedly highly polished and sharpened — take on the beats of Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Jimmy Reed was a question waiting to be answered. Meanwhile, their «original leader», Brian Jones, turned out to be completely inefficient when it came to any sorts of songwriting, and as for the soon-to-be «Glimmer Twins», they weren’t doing too hot for the first couple of years either: not only did they have to live forever with the humiliation of the Beatles writing their first hit song for them, but just about everything Mick and Keith got out of their own heads in 1963–64 had a clear aura of timidity around it. Covering Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters seemed to give them confidence; performing their own songs such as ‘Grown Up Wrong’ or ‘Surprise Surprise’ seemed to suck it back out of them.

The first indication that the Jagger-Richards theme might be starting to grow into something worth keeping tabs on was arguably ‘Heart Of Stone’ — a great soul ballad in its own right, yet not exactly a great candidate to set the brand new world on fire. That honor, so it seems, would belong to ‘The Last Time’, not one of my favorite Stones songs but an important milestone all the same. First and foremost, ‘The Last Time’ introduces Keith Richards The Riffmeister — that simple, jumpy, see-sawing, undeniably unforgettable chord sequence, which might have been developed by the guitarist while riffing around the ʽEverybody Needs Somebody To Loveʼ groove, opens up one of the greatest Epic Riff Runs in the history of popular music. Certainly Keith Richards did not invent the guitar riff, but he probably did more to establish it as the basis for hard rock in those early days than anybody else; my only problem with the riff of ‘The Last Time’ is that it feels catchy, but not particularly «meaningful» — very soon, Keith would start coming up with melodic phrases that almost read like genuine messages to the brain, but here, I’m still trying to figure out which exact message the slingshot of ‘The Last Time’ is hurling at my perception centers.

Another innovative quality of the song is its unusually grand, booming, echoey production — apparently, the Stones had crossed paths with Phil Spector himself on that early January day at the RCA Studios in Hollywood, and, though uncredited on the official record, he assisted them with the mix so that, for the first time ever, the Stones ended up sounding larger than themselves. The song itself was hardly all that grand to merit the bombastic Phil Spector touch, but it actually helped cover the deficiency of the solo break — neither Keith nor Brian had any good ideas in store here, so the solo becomes just an arpeggiated variation on the riff itself. Meanwhile, Jagger cleverly borrows an old gospel trope — in its original and most lyrically and melodically similar form, it can be heard on The Staple Singers’ ‘This May Be The Last Time’ — readapting it from religious to completely secular purposes and turning what used to be a mildly threatening apocalyptic invocation into a ballsy pop hook. (Occasional irate howls about the Stones «stealing» the song make no sense whatsoever because what they are doing here is quoting, not stealing — which is a great incentive for comparative culturological analysis, but a pretty poor basis for a lawsuit, let alone holier-than-thou moralizing).

Yet for all the importance of ‘The Last Time’ to the maturation of rock music in the mid-Sixties, I would dare suggest that it was the B-side that first suggested the Stones were to be something more than «just the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world». ‘Play With Fire’ announced an entirely new type of Stones music, one that would reach its apogee in 1966-1967 and then retire into a relatively latent state: the «Anglo-Stones», finally consenting to turn their heads away from across the Atlantic and back to their native shores. A dark acoustic ballad, further colored with Jack Nitzsche’s baroque harpsichord lines, and with lyrics that namedrop plenty of English realities, replacing the barely known (and barely pronounceable) Winona, Kingman, Barstow, and San Bernardino with the more familiar Saint John’s Wood, Stepney, and Knights­bridge, it sounds like a barely veiled threat to the upper classes — and it was recorded and released several months prior to ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ, with which it shared at least the basic theme, if not the details.

If Mick Jagger sounded like a mere lascivious midnight rambler in 1964, then on ʽPlay With Fireʼ he actually sounds like a real menace — and all he has to do is keep that voice down to a stern, but calm, half-spoken tone. "Well you’ve got your diamonds... and you got your pretty clothes..." — the very first line already gives it away that this situation is probably not going to stay the same for very long. The lyrics aren’t completely transparent, though, as the song’s greatest enigma remains in the personality of its first-person protagonist: "So don’t play with me / ’cause you play with fire". Who exactly is me? The young socialite’s rebellious underdog lover? How would she be «playing with him», then, and how would that relate to the main bulk of the verses? Could the me actually be something more abstract — the Dark Force, perhaps? There’s definitely a bit of a sulfur-and-brimstone whiff around those somber chords.

In any case, based on whatever the Stones were doing in 1964, a song like ‘The Last Time’ could be predicted; after all, it embraces pretty much the same spirit as ‘It’s All Over Now’, which, by the way, was also riff-driven, even if its riff was not nearly as distinctive and melodic. But nothing from their first two years of activity suggests the emergence of ‘Play With Fire’. What on earth drove them to record a song that begins like some Joan Baez folk ballad and then continues in a «John Lee Hooker meets Johann Sebastian Bach» sort of vein? There wasn’t even any Marianne Faithfull on the horizon yet to push her thick-lipped lover boy into the proverbial artsy-fartsy direction! All we know is that Mick and Keith supposedly wrote this while staying in their hotel room in Washington, with Keith strumming his Gibson Hummingbird and Mick improvising to the chords. But what exactly pushed them in that direction remains unclear.

Still, in the context of 1965 ‘Play With Fire’ remained an anomaly for the group — this particular vibe was so very much ahead of its time, it had to wait around until 1966, when the band’s «pop phase» would really kick in. But it was awful nice to offload it on both the British and American public, as a B-side addition to the irresistible temptation of ‘The Last Time’, which went all the way to #1 on the UK charts, though it stalled at #9 on the US market (lower, actually, than ‘Time Is On My Side’ from the previous year). For the first time ever, both sides of the single would be credited to Jagger-Richards; and for the first time ever, a hard-rocking original composition on Side A would be subtly mollified by an «artsier» creation on Side B, a strategy that the Glimmer Twins would quite often put into action in the future (remember, for instance, the much underrated psychedelic mini-masterpiece ‘Child Of The Moon’ as the B-side to ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’).

Then came June 5, 1965, and with it, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. It’s a little funny that the song it eventually displaced from the top of the US charts was another «I Can’t» song — the Four Tops’ ‘I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)’... and now that I’ve reminded myself how it goes, I can actually find a few similarities between its own opening piano riff and the one on ‘Satisfaction’. This is sheer accident, of course, but it’s still ironic how one of the most ecstatically happy songs of the year suddenly gave way to one of its angriest and grumpiest declarations. Later, in concert, Mick would actually downplay the importance of his own creation: the extended jammy codas which you can, for instance, hear on material from the 1969 American tour (such as captured in the Gimme Shelter movie) pretty much turn all the social frustration of the first verses into a short prelude, after which Mick uses the rest of the song to go on an imaginary woman hunt ("I’m looking for a good woman to give me satisfaction", etc.). But that’s not how it goes in the original version — which is one of the rare cases where I seriously prefer a Stones studio original over the way it evolved in their live show.

The original version keeps a nice, reasonable balance between Jagger’s sexual and social dissatisfaction — strongly suggesting that both are very much tied together but never really letting us know if it is sexual dissatisfaction that derives from social one or the other way around. (Which, again, reminds me of that funny bit from the Gimme Shelter movie where a post-Altamont Mick watches the footage of a pre-Altamont Mick at the press conference during the tour launch — the pre-Altamont Mick answering a reporter’s question with "well, we’re financially dissatisfied, sexually satisfied, philosophically trying". "Rubbish", grimly reacts the post-Altamont Mick). It also has this sly-seductive contrast between the opening soft, slippery, high-pitched vocal and its gradual descent into hysterical hell, whereas in a live setting Mick usually enters his «barking mode» from the get-go — parallel to Keith’s lead guitar which just keeps on picking steam until it re-explodes back in all of its fuzzy glory on the chorus.

And speaking of fuzzy glory... it’s curious that, although the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone device is said to have been introduced by Gibson as early as 1962 (under the influence of Grady Martin’s classic «fuzzy» recordings such as ‘Don’t Worry’ and ‘The Fuzz’), I cannot for the life of me find any evidence of any commercial recordings made with it prior to ‘Satisfaction’. Keith himself allegedly used the pedal as a temporary substitute for horns — but the horns never came until the Otis Redding version, so the fuzz pedal had to do, and every one of those fuzzy garage-rock recordings we know from Nuggets came after ‘Satisfaction’. The funny thing is, those old Grady Martin recordings sound pretty nasty and gimmicky; Keith’s fuzz tone, however, feels perfectly natural for the song. It’s nasty, too, but it’s alive and nasty, not «synthetic-nasty», if you get my meaning. (This is how it used to go, on that Marty Robbins recording of ‘Don’t Worry’: not only is the sound way too reminiscent of the «faulty equipment» issue, but it doesn’t really belong in the song). I even like how the fuzz effect shows signs of instability — instead of running smoothly along with each note, it sometimes intensifies and sometimes weakens as if it had a life of its own, really talking to us and all. No AI could learn how to replicate that.

Of the two epochal youth anthems about «-ations» that came out in 1965 — ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘My Generation’ — there is no doubt in my mind which one is the greatest. As much as I like ‘My Generation’, its flaw is that (like so many Townshend compositions) it overthinks itself; it’s really a piece of oversimplified social philosophy masquerading as a rock’n’roll number, from somebody who feels like he might have read a bit too much Jean-Paul Sartre or watched one too many of Jean-Luc Godard’s movies. It’s certainly not a crime, but it redirects some of the song’s magic from your guts toward your brain, thus dampening the «primal» effect of the song. ‘Satisfaction’ does no such thing; it’s all about the protagonist’s immediate reaction to the surrounding bullshit, with no overthinking, excessive self-reflection, or, importantly, narcissistic self-aggrandizing whatsoever. "I can’t get no satisfaction" just seems so much better to go along with the general flow than "This is my generation, baby". Who really cares about whose generation it is when the real problem is that you’re trying to make some girl and she tells you "baby, better come back maybe next week because you see I’m on a losing streak?".. Hey, this is why The Rolling Stones really are a «people’s band» and The Who appeal so much more to illusion-riddled arthouse audiences. (Not that those target groups don’t overlap, mind you).

The good news is, I think, that ‘Satisfaction’ still stands up tall and proud more than a half-century later. Nobody has really been able to improve on that dirty, stinkin’ fuzz tone, or on Charlie’s unnerving pounding, or on the line about some useless information supposed to fire my imagination — more relevant in the age of social media than anytime before. ("He can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me" has aged a little more poorly, but if you replace cigarettes with Iphone you’ll be getting there). A more complicated question would be concerning the LP that contains it — how well does that one stand more than half a century later? Were the Rolling Stones able, by mid-’65, to have their LP-only material stand up to the quality of their singles, like the Beatles (usually) did?

The answer is ambiguous and blurry, and here, once again, we are witnessing the «clever» strategy of the American market: by integrating the band’s outstanding singles of 1965, it made the American version of Out Of Our Heads, released at the end of July, into a flash of summery splendor next to its UK counterpart, which only came out at the end of September and looked somewhat gray and autumnal in comparison; actually, track-wise it would be more like the equivalent of the equally disappointing US release of December's Children (with which it would also share the front sleeve). On the other hand, there is also no denying that the US version of Out Of Our Heads seems uncomfortably bumpy in compa­rison — with A+ level songs sharing the bus with decidedly inferior originals and covers that clearly belong in the pre-‘Satisfaction’ era.

Take the three above-mentioned biggies off the record, and what you are left with is rather a letdown in comparison with the tightness and excitement of the material on Now!. First, there is a clearly defined tilt towards soul-tinged R&B: Don Covay, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, and Solomon Burke all get represented by one song each, as if skinny white boy Mick Jagger were challenging them all to five rounds of a ring fight in half an hour’s time. That’s quite a cocky challenge if you ask me, and it’s even a wonder that he does not continuously fall flat on his face all the time — but he does take a bit of a beating; the problem is that, unlike American blues and American rock’n’roll, American soul is that one particular genre which the Rolling Stones, as a band, find the most difficult to subvert to their own musical purposes, and in the end, this is where almost everything depends on Mick Jagger, and for all his shrewdness and versatility, Mick Jagger is not going to be always able to get what he wants. Well, if he tries sometimes...

Unsurprisingly, things work out best when Mick’s musical buddies make a strong effort to support his personal theater. ‘Mercy Mercy’ was a solid hit for Don Covay on the Atlantic label in the fall of 1964, and, amusingly, Covay’s exceptionally passionate vocal performance was allegedly backed by the electric guitar playing of none other than Jimi Hendrix — though only the most seasoned Hendrix expert might have suspected that, what with the rhythm flow indeed being quite Jimi-like in terms of chords and phrasing, but with none of the classic Hendrix flash-and-flair showing up anywhere. It’s a nice and colorful guitar part, but also quite modest, never threatening to upstage the singer. You might not even notice it at all. Quite probably nobody ever did back in 1964.

This is something that the Stones set out to remedy — and it helps quite a bit that their cover happened to be recorded on the very same day as ‘Satisfaction’, with the Maestro FZ-1 still hot from the action. Keith’s riff is not as complex or crackling here as it is on ‘Satisfaction’, but it still makes the song roll along with a vengeance, and together with Mick’s attempt to out-Covay the original singer by pushing his emotional overdrive even deeper into his pharynx, they make the song even less of a genuine plea for mercy and even more of an actual threat. In this version, "if you leave me baby / Girl if you put me down / I’m gonna make it to the nearest river child / And jump overboard and drown" becomes a menacing ultimatum. As in, do you really want to live out the rest of your years with a lover’s suicide weighing heavy on your conscience, girl? You’d better think twice before committing the biggest mistake of your life... This makes the recorded version into a meaningful, garage-y update on the more country-style original — and a hell of an energetic opener for the LP (note that ‘Satisfaction’ opens the second side, so talk about a strong «fuzzy welcome» each time you interact with your turntable).

Another clever reinvention is ʽCry To Meʼ. Solomon Burke already was one of the band’s most frequently covered artists (perhaps Mick found it easier to adapt to his style than to any other soul singer’s), but this is the first time they directly tampered with the original song’s mood, groove, and melody, reflecting an increased level of confidence. Burke’s big hit for Atlantic was an energetic dance number in the vein of ‘Stand By Me’, and great as it was, it did create somewhat of a discrepancy between the lively melody and the depressed lyrics. The Stones set out to remedy that flaw; slowing down the tempo and redirecting the song toward a more natural I-vi-IV-V progression, they turn it into a lyrical ballad, and it’s a good thing — compare Solomon’s jumping into the song with the lively "WHEN your baby...!" and Mick’s slow easing into it with the tender and breathy "when your baaaaby...", creating an atmosphere of empathy and consolation from the very first notes. (Which, by the way, reminds me of the often overlooked role of Mick Jagger as one of the best vocal empathizers in the history of rock music — from ‘Cry To Me’ to ‘Shine A Light’ and ‘Winter’, the man could be a true soulmate like no other, even if this facet of his tends to get forgotten behind all the swagger and posturing).

Meanwhile, on the musical front Brian Jones switches to rhythm guitar, while Keith once again helps out with a lead part that is every bit the rightful soulful counterpart of the vocal. The best is saved for last, when the singer and the guitar player fight each other over the coda with machine-gunned vocal barks and bluesy licks, making the whole thing wilder and crazier than any soul ballad they’d tried out before. There was no such coda in the Burke original, meaning that the Stones also add a whole new dynamic development — the tune starts out as a subtle ballad and ends as a thunderstorm. You must, therefore, excuse me for openly declaring that the reinvented version is downright superior to the original, even if Mick Jagger could never hope to be able to belt out "DON’T YOU FEEL LIKE CRYYYYYING" with all the un-earthly power of the «Muhammad Ali of Soul». Sometimes, though, inventiveness and subtlety carry the day over brashness and brawn.

But not everything works as smoothly as it does on ‘Mercy Mercy’ and ‘Cry To Me’. On the other three covers, the band does not manage to come up with similarly creative rearrangements, and the entire burden of living up to the originals is placed on Mick’s shoulders — with somewhat competent, but ultimately useless results. Marvin Gaye’s ‘Hitch Hike’ is a bit stiff, Mick has a hard time matching Marvin’s vivaciousness, and the guitar accompaniment is actually less creative than the cool brass and woodwind interplay on the Motown original. Otis Redding’s ‘That’s How Strong My Love Is’ is copied faithfully to the original, which means that the guitars are just out there strumming, and it’s all about Mick Jagger trying to imitate Otis’ "now I’m soft and tremble and weepy / now I’m incensed and energized and screechy" approach... and it’s not a half-bad imitation, but it would all be much better once he’d start using all that experience for his own compositions rather than directly copying the vibe of one of the greatest soul singers of all time. Precisely the same judgement applies to Sam Cooke’s ‘Good Times’ — a beautiful pop song in its own right to which the Stones add absolutely nothing. (Other than, perhaps, Charlie Watts’ magnificently rolled drum intro).

With all that soul stuff scattered around, one might almost forget about the Rolling Stones being a rock’n’roll band. To hastily remedy that at the last moment, Decca pads the record with a live version of Bo Diddley’s ritualistic vamp ‘I’m All Right’, «borrowed» from the earlier EP Got Live If You Want It! (released in June ’65 and recorded three months earlier). It’s a good, classic example of an early «Stones rave» (though it’s much too short to properly convey the trance-inducing powers of the Stones in that era), but there are some problems — first, it’s live, so there are obvious problems with sound fidelity; second, it feels ripped out of its dutiful context; and third, it would be reinstated back into its dutiful context on next year’s full-fledged live LP (I think that the actual recorded instrumental track might be exactly the same, but the vocals would be re-recorded in the studio). As enjoyable as some of those «dive-bomb» guitar patterns from Brian can be, the track does not really feel at ease sitting here in the middle of the LP.

There is still enough space left for three more originals, at least two of which qualify as throwaways, albeit of a very different nature. ʽThe Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Manʼ is basically a repetitive one-riff vamp (could have been a serious influence on The Velvet Underground, though) whose primary purpose, as I had thought for a pretty long time, was to vent some frustration at the alarmingly expanding ego of Andrew Loog Oldham, but, apparently, the true culprit here was a certain George Sherlock Raymond Jr. (obviously no relation to the protagonist of the Buster Keaton movie), one of Decca’s promotion department people who irritated the band so much that they pilfered the groove from Buster Brown’s ‘Fannie Mae’ and the song titling principle from Bob Dylan to write one of their first bits of specifically targeted social satire. The only thing I really admire about it are Mick’s highly expressive ejective fricatives on the "sss’eer-ssss’ucker ssss’uit" adlibbing bit at the end. Other than that — well, it’s always fun to hear the Rolling Stones get angry and sarcastic about something or somebody, but it doesn’t always automatically imply classic status.

Another bit of unsatisfactory filler is the two-minute long ‘One More Try’, a fast, cheery pop-rocker that shares a similar vibe with their very first single — the cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On’ — and, honestly, sounds as if it could have been written around the same time (early 1963, that is). I really like Brian Jones’ harmonica part — during the instrumental break, at one point he seems to really «lift off» and briefly take the band in some different and exciting direction — but everything else about it feels trivial and disappointing, particularly the wannabe-uplifting chorus of "don’t you panick, don’t you panick, give it one more try!". Four years later, the Stones would grow up big enough to add an epic feel to this kind of encouraging vibe and end up with ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’; this, however, is child play, especially sitting next to the likes of ‘Satisfaction’ or ‘Cry To Me’.

On the other hand, the album’s one genuinely «sleeping gem» is the original B-side to ‘Satisfaction’: ‘The Spider And The Fly’, riding on a cool, calm and collected mid-tempo Jimmy Reed groove, is a delightfully devilish and cynical exploration of the subject of sexual temptation, a song that would surely have ended up on Oscar Wilde’s playlist had he lived to be a hundred and fifty. The yarn spun by Mick over three and a half minutes offers no moralistic conclusions whatsoever, and the story does not even have an ending — we never get to learn what happened to the protagonist’s relation with his "girl at home" after his sordid tryst with the random lady who "was common, flirty, looked about thirty" and "said she liked the way I held the microphone", but something tells me he could hardly be expected to be repentant about what had perspired. In any case, what matters are not the words as is the intonation with which most of them are sung: slow, drawly, grinning from ear to ear, this is the first occasion on a Stones record where Mick Jagger goes for a positively «Luciferian» delivery that would, naturally, reach its apogee on ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ three years later.

The atmospheric / emotional contrast between the likes of ‘The Spider And The Fly’ and ‘Cry To Me’ is, in fact, quite astonishing — it’s a much, much wider range than anything any of the Beatles were capable of, and while the Beatles could get nasty and cynical every once in a while, even bad boy John preferred to openly get in your face rather than play the part of a man possessed by a devilish trickster spirit on the inside. The mere sound of Mick Jagger pronouncing the word "hi" in the second verse would send mothers and fathers lock up their daughters — or, in the 2020s, send social media mobs up in flames of moralistic indignation. Meanwhile, Keith Richards completely and utterly conforms to the spirit of his working partner by playing a simple, 100% efficient guitar solo that oozes the same essence of naughty seduction. If ‘Satisfaction’ was an almost «righteous» protest song in its core, then its B-side was downright criminal — the anthem of somebody who does not shout out loud on every corner about getting no satisfaction, but instead prefers to achieve it surreptitiously and salaciously while breaking every rule of good old-fashioned moral conduct. Utterly disgusting! And utterly irresistible. "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it" — remember that one?

As you can see, Out Of Our Heads is quite a mixed bunch in the end, a decidedly transitional album if there ever was one for the Stones — which is perfectly normal for 1965, a year of transition for just about everybody, starting with the Beatles themselves. That said, all of my criticisms of the individual songs are thoroughly relative: I do actually enjoy the record from start to finish, because, hey, even ‘Hitch Hike’ and ‘Good Times’ are great songs and the Stones do them justice — it’s just that I would have no need for them on my desert island if the original versions were available. Any mid-Sixties crossing from «musical adolescence» into «musical maturity» would be a bit of a bumpy ride by definition, and after all these years, it’s a lot of fun to look back at all the bumps and discuss the relative degrees, shades, and perks of their bumpiness.

• Only Solitaire reviews: The Rolling Stones