Review: The Rolling Stones - The Rolling Stones, Now! (1965)
Tracks: 1) Everybody Needs Somebody To Love; 2) Down Home Girl; 3) You Can’t Catch Me; 4) Heart Of Stone; 5) What A Shame; 6) Mona (I Need You Baby); 7) Down The Road Apiece; 8) Off The Hook; 9) Pain In My Heart; 10) Oh Baby (We Got A Good Thing Going); 11) Little Red Rooster; 12) Surprise, Surprise.
REVIEW
Issued hot on the heels of the band’s second UK LP (rather unimaginatively titled The Rolling Stones No. 2 and even less imaginatively, and quite confusingly, sharing the same cover photo with 12 x 5), the US-only LP The Rolling Stones, Now! is quite similar to its UK counterpart, except that it omits those songs which had already been issued on 12 x 5 and replaces them either with older material (Bo Diddley’s ʽMonaʼ, formerly deleted from Newest Hitmakers in favor of ʽNot Fade Awayʼ), or newer material (ʽOh Babyʼ and ‘Heart Of Stone’, which in the UK would only make it to the next album, Out Of Our Heads), with at least one song fully exclusive to the American market (ʽSurprise, Surpriseʼ).
Once we got that all sorted out, the situation is tolerable, except for two gripes. First, in the process the American catalog somehow managed to lose hold of an excellent cover of Muddy Waters’ ʽI Can’t Be Satisfiedʼ (pity, since it features a fine sample of Brian’s slide playing in full-on Delta mode), and second, there are actually two versions of Solomon Burke’s ʽEverybody Needs Somebody To Loveʼ out there — the original three-minute demo, released by mistake on Now!, and the longer, officially sanctioned, five-minute finalized version on No. 2. Subsequent CD pressings of Now! corrected that mistake and swapped the short demo for the long master take, but here’s the funny thing: I actually like the demo far more than the master take — the latter rather loyally clings to the optimistic, party-spirit tone of the original, which I would rather accept from Solomon Burke in person; the former, however, is surprisingly darker, more echo-laden, stuffed with weird ghostly vocal harmonies and tense, aggressive micro-breaks from Keith’s electric guitar, basically feeling like a special Halloween version or something. They probably thought that such darkness clashes unfavorably with the cheer-up message of the song, but to me, the demo version has always seemed to fit in much better with the delicious nastiness of the ensuing tracks — so I would advise you to be tenacious and track down the «mistaken» three-minute version, which isn’t that hard to do in the digital age anyway.
Anyway, confusing details aside, Now! is a fairly accurate reflection of what the Stones were all about in early ’65 — still only just beginning to cut their own songwriters’ teeth, but continuing to polish and deepen their atmospheric qualities by reinventing other people’s classics in new, exciting ways. On a song-by-song basis, this is arguably the best release of the early Stones period; for the rest of 1965, there would be a slight dip in LP quality, as records would become more and more populated with early Jagger/Richards originals that still suffered from relative greenness, but Now! strikes a very good balance between proper covers, self-credited «rewrites» (new words for old tunes), and just a couple high quality true originals — and there’s hardly even one unwise choice among the lot.
Soulful, chest-thumpin’ R&B, one of the Stones’ biggest loves at the time but also unquestionably their most vulnerable spot, is kept here to an absolute minimum — Allen Toussaint’s / Otis Redding’s ʽPain In My Heartʼ is the only track on the album that could be brushed off as an inferior imitation of a masterwork, but while I won’t be defending Jagger’s vocals (they’re okay, but directly competing with Otis without trying to cheat is a no-no), the band still comes up with an inventive guitar-based rearrangement of the brass-based original, and Wyman’s grim-fuzzy bass tone gives it a bit of a new face.
On the other hand, their intrusion onto slow Southern territory totally hits the jackpot. ʽDown Home Girlʼ was a small local hit for Alvin Robinson, a grizzly-voiced New Orleanian singer-songwriter closely associated with Leiber and Stoller, the former of which co-wrote this sultry ode to a Louisiana mud queen with his friend Artie Butler. It is quite obligatory for any true music lover to seek out the original version (Robinson’s vocal timbre truly sows the impression that he emerged from out of the depths of the bayou), but this is really a tune that Mick Jagger was simply born to sing, regardless of the fact that he’d never even seen a proper "cotton field" before, let alone tried walking in one. The funniest thing about the song is that originally it was just humorous, not sarcastic — the girl in question is being admired for her down-to-earth nature, not put down or anything; the Stones, however, remake it as if the protagonist had this complicated attraction-and-condescension relationship for his passion. Honestly, this is one of those moments where even an outspoken defender of women’s rights might want to put the feminist stance on pause and revel in the gleeful sneer of Jagger’s voice, cleverly mimed by Brian’s bottleneck triple-note «ha, ha, ha!» When it gets to the chorus, Robinson’s drawn-out "oh, you’re so, down home girl" is a prolonged howl of primal lust, but Jagger throws in the armor-piercing Wrench of Nastiness and scores a critical hit. You might want to take a shower, though, after exposing yourself to its full radiation potential.
As good as the band’s covers of ʽCarolʼ and ʽAround And Aroundʼ used to be, Now! is also where they reach the top with their modernization of the Chuck Berry sound — for some reason, both ʽYou Can’t Catch Meʼ and ʽDown The Road Apieceʼ fell out of their live repertoire fairly early, but maybe they just couldn’t live up on stage to the requested levels of speed and tightness shown here. As befits the title, ʽYou Can’t Catch Meʼ zips along at the fastest speed they could get at the moment, with Bill and Charlie setting the frame for a performance that really imitates the spirit of a breathless car race — again, with much of Chuck’s lightweight humor replaced by grim and gritty efficiency. There’s that odd whiff of something dark and mysterious all over again, exemplified by... well, for instance, what’s up with that weird «dripping» sound they add — that one lonely "ping!" coming in at regular intervals, like a water splash from a leaking faucet? I have no idea whose idea that was, or even what instrument is producing the effect, but it’s goddamn weird — together with all the reverb, it makes the song sound as if it were recorded inside a jail cell. A song about fast-and-furious car racing inside a jail cell? See, bet you never knew just how weird these early Stones covers, so easily dismissed by the non-curious, can really get.
ʽDown The Road Apieceʼ is clearly less mysterious — an old roadhouse boogie that goes all the way back to the days of the great piano player Amos Milburn, but the Stones, naturally, are once again exploiting the Chuck Berry version, and, once again, are elevating it to a whole new level of excitement: not only is the production thicker and tenser, but Keith is given free reign in the studio, and he profits from that by extending the song by almost an entire minute, just so that he can demonstrate his complete mastery of every single Berry lick, which he glues together in a seamless sequence (the song only begins to fade away once he has exhausted the pool and begins repeating himself) and polishes to perfection; additionally, every once in a while he engages in call-and-response dialog with Ian Stewart, banging away like there was no tomorrow in the background — there is a clear feeling here that they are intentionally sweating to beat Master Berry and Master Johnson at their own game, and you know what? They might just be succeeding at that (allegedly, Chuck himself was noted to have been genuinely amazed when he saw them recording the thing at Chess Studios in mid-’64, and one does not simply walk into Chuck Berry’s presence and receive a compliment from the guy for doing one of his tunes).
In the 12-bar blues department, they hit some high points, too. ʽLittle Red Roosterʼ is an early showcase for Brian, who seems to have a lot of fun doing various animal impressions with his electric slide; I would praise Mick’s vocal effort, too, but this time he has to compete against Howlin’ Wolf, and that’s even more of a no-no than competing with Otis Redding — so let’s go along with the flow and agree with the critics who always point out Brian’s electric slide parts as the finest ingredient of the song. Such was the power wielded by the Stones at the time that the song, released as a tentative single, shot to #1 on the UK charts — the first time ever in the history of 12-bar blues, and probably the first time ever in the history of songs written about a dysfunctional penis.
That said, my personal favorite out of the generic blues tunes on this album has always been ʽWhat A Shameʼ, another re-write of something Jimmy Reed-style on which the band just sounds so admirably tight — every single musician, including the rhythm section and the pianist, contributing on an equal level, all melodies sharpened razor-style (gotta love Keith’s ascending bass line at the end of each verse) and with perhaps the single best case of «guitar weaving» between Keith and Brian on the entire record, when Brian enters his slide guitar run. Of special interest are the lyrics — seems like a first, timid attempt at writing something socially relevant, proto-ʽGimme Shelterʼ style: "What a shame / They always wanna start a fight / Well it scares me so / I could sleep in the shelter all night"... "shelter", get it? Nobody paid proper attention at the time, but this just might have been the first recorded case where they’d use the spooky potential of their blues-rock sound to accompany a bona fide alarmist message.
In the middle of it all comes the band’s first original masterpiece; I wish I could be original myself and award that award to ʽOff The Hookʼ, but as groovy as Keith’s crunchy riff is, the repetitiveness of the song ultimately works against it (maybe a decent bridge could have been a better choice than the endless vamp of "it’s off the hook, it’s off the hook, it’s off the hook..."), so I still have to go along with ʽHeart Of Stoneʼ. Curiously, from a melodic standpoint it seems like it may have begun life as a variation on the aforementioned ʽPain In My Heartʼ (they share plenty of similarities in all aspects of melody, structure, lyrics, etc.), but the Stones have turned the tables and made life more complex — now it’s not about a girl who is breaking the protagonist’s heart, it’s about a girl who is not breaking the protagonist’s heart, yet at the same time you can feel that the protagonist’s heart is on the breaking point anyway, adding an extra level of psychologism: "...this heart of stone" is delivered by Jagger in such a way that you can’t help noticing a serious internal contradiction.
Overall, ‘Heart Of Stone’ has to qualify as Mick’s first truly gripping dramatic performance. It would still take him a few years to become a consistently first-rate voice actor in the studio (an ability that, unfortunately, he was rarely able to take with him on stage), but the modulation range on ʽHeart Of Stoneʼ is already quite impressive — from the opening cockiness of "there’ve been so many girls that I’ve known..." to the childishly puzzled intonations on "what’s different about her?" to the bitter pleading of "don’t keep on looking..." to the desperate self-denial of "you’ll never break this heart of stone, oh no...", this shows the Stones already adhering to that one maxim which made their classic period so, well, classic — you may not believe in the stuff you write, but it is your sacred duty to make it believable for everybody else. And do not forget Keith, either, who accordingly plays the wailing guitar solo like a man gone crazy with grief: a beautiful 15-second ascension from grumbly gloominess to desperate hysterics that packs as much emotional punch into it as any Eric Clapton performance, even without doing anything particularly inventive with the standard blues scale. Play this one next to ‘Tell Me’ and see how much deeper these guys learned to crawl under your skin in just half a year’s time.
In conclusion, one would be forced to admit that maybe the record was not nearly as fabulous as to allow you the infamous moral right to follow the advice printed inside the sleeve notes and "see that blind man knock him on the head, steal his wallet and have the loot" (hey Mr. Andrew Loog Oldham, we really need you in the 2020s to help us shape our social strategies once again!). But in the context of early ’65, it was still totally cutting edge. Perhaps the formal «shape» of the Rolling Stones was not yet completely formed, since they still had to largely rely upon borrowing other people’s skeletal structures instead of supplying their own, but the «spirit» was every bit as vibrant and flamboyant as it would be at any later point of their finest decade. For the rest of 1965, they would officially qualify as an A-level singles band and more of a B-level album band — but The Rolling Stones,Now! is just amazingly consistent from top to bottom, and remains, as it has always been, my first and foremost recommendation for a thorough, multi-sided acquaintance with the first (and most commonly neglected) phase of the band’s career.