Review: The Rolling Stones - The Rolling Stones (1964)
Tracks: 1) Not Fade Away; 2) (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66; 3) I Just Want To Make Love To You; 4) Honest I Do; 5) Now I’ve Got A Witness; 6) Little By Little; 7) I’m A King Bee; 8) Carol; 9) Tell Me (You’re Coming Back To Me); 10) Can I Get A Witness; 11) You Can Make It If You Try; 12) Walking The Dog.
REVIEW
For personal convenience’ sake, in these reviews I follow the Rolling Stones’ 1964–67 original American catalog rather than the smaller UK one. This particular album in the US was subtitled England’s Newest Hit Makers (the UK sleeve was a plain photo with no wording at all) and started out with the Stones’ latest hit single, ‘Not Fade Away’, replacing a cover of Bo Diddley’s ‘Mona’ in the UK version. Subsequent differences between US and UK albums would be much larger.
"What’s the point of listening to us doing ʽI’m A King Beeʼ when you can hear Slim Harpo doing it?", Mick Jagger once famously remarked — long after the Rolling Stones had mastered the art of writing their own material, of course; had he humbly and honestly made this rhetorical statement, say, in early 1964, it could have gone a long way in ruining the band’s promotional campaign so meticulously constructed by Andrew Loog Oldham. But now that we are neck-deep in the 21st century, when both Slim Harpo’s original from 1957 and the Stones’ cover of it from 1964 have all but merged in the same time dimension... as much admiration as I have for James Isaac Moore of Lobdell, Louisiana, I think that today «the point» is quite self-evident.
Much too much silliness, a lot of it motivated by theoretical ideology rather than genuine heartfelt reactions, has permeated discourse on the «soulless whiteboy blues imitation» of the British Invasion. Occasionally, there is a grain of truth to it, depending on the level of talent, immersion, and technique of the artist in question: as with every fad and trend, there were plenty of second- and third-rate imitators in the early Sixties, just as there are hacks and phoneys in any sphere at any given time period. But when we talk about bands like the Rolling Stones, any such dismissive theoretization becomes utterly misguided. It only takes a bare minimum of comparison to understand that, while the early Stones did indeed mostly cover their overseas idols rather than write their own songs, already from the very beginning they exercised a personal and creative approach to these covers — in a way, even more creative than the Beatles, which might actually have been one of the reasons why it took them so much longer to overcome their shyness and begin writing original songs on a regular basis. In other words, it is possible that they did not feel such a pressing need to write their own songs simply because they were quite happy about how successfully they managed to reinvent and «expropriate» songs by other people.
As an example, take the aforementioned slow electric blues of ʽI’m A King Beeʼ, play it back to back with Harpo’s original and then make an honest decision about which of the two you would like to leave in your collection if, for some reason, you could not have both. The first thing you would probably notice is the production: naturally, the 1964 standards of Regent Studios in London make all the instruments sound sharper and clearer than the 1957 standards in Nashville (by the way, I innocently used to think it was a Chicago song, like most of Fifties’ electric blues, but turns out that Slim never even made it as far as Chicago). However, admittedly this is but an inevitable technical advantage. Much more importantly, the Stones were not content on simply playing the song note-for-note, but were determined to capitalize on its potential — potential that was immanently present there from the very beginning, yet never properly explored by the author.
Thus, for instance, not only does Bill Wyman nail the «buzzing» bass zoop of the song so that it sounds subtler more menacing than the original, but during the instrumental break, after Mick’s cocky and inciting "well, buzz awhile!..", he actually obeys and delivers a fun little buzzing solo (the original tune just went along with the zoops — same thing as the verse without the vocals). And then, the «Sting it babe!...» bit — where Harpo delivered a few limpy «stinging» notes, Brian Jones went on to make his guitar sound like an angry hive going wild on your ass, in one of the most imaginative mini-solos he had ever devised. This is not even mentioning the little extra guitar sting Brian makes every few bars in direct response to Bill’s bass zoops, maintaining that dangerous hive-like atmosphere for the entire duration of the song — where very, very little about Harpo’s original actually made you feel surrounded and overwhelmed by miriads of dangerous insects.
All right, shall you say, but what about the vocals? Surely an authentic bluesman from the Louisiana region will sound more authoritative and convincing than a snotty 21-year old Dartford kid who had never even seen the Delta, let alone directly experienced the experience? But yet again, this logic is only valid if we work from the assumption that Mick Jagger wanted to sound exactly like Slim Harpo, and that the idea was to give a credible impression of African-American sexual power as conveyed through blues music. If, however, we work from the assumption that African-American blues music was simply chosen as a starting medium for venting the suppressed sexuality of young British kids... well, in that case I will just have to state that Mick Jagger is far more successful here at accomplishing his own personal goal than Mr. Harpo was at accomplishing his — simply because nobody in the Great Britain of 1964 sounded quite like Mick Jagger. Not a single frickin’ soul, and that’s the God’s truth.
I mean, I keep running these rowdy young boys of that time period through my mind, one by one — Eric Burdon, Roger Daltrey, Paul Jones, Keith Relf, Phil May, never mind any of the Beatles at all in this category — and there is literally nobody who could even begin to approach Jagger in terms of that certain «aggressive mystique» in his singing (and not just singing — his harp playing was fully attuned to the same mystique as well). Mick wasn’t much of a burly belter — more of a midnight rambler, sounding razor-sharp and sneeringly cocky at the same time, like pop music’s equivalent of some deadly, yet impossibly charismatic villain from some contemporary TV show or comic series. And while half a century later it is all very well for us to smile at the «dangerous» image that was so carefully constructed by him (and for him) in 1964, the fact is that this here ʽKing Beeʼ did sound as dangerous as possible in the context of early Sixties’ popular entertainment. Never mind the calculated promotion, the darkened photos, the staged «offensive behaviour»: above everything else, the Rolling Stones were felt as «dangerous» in 1964 because their music sounded dangerous, far more so than the Beatles.
And speaking of the Beatles, here comes another comparison. Unlike its doctored American counterpart, the self-titled UK version of this album opened with the (also heavily reinvented) cover of Chuck Berry’s cover of Bobby Troup’s ʽ(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66ʼ — a basic three-chord rocker which sounds not entirely unlike the Beatles’ ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ if you reduce both to bare-bone structures. Both songs serve as kick-ass energetic openers to capture your attention and devotion from the get-go. But the Beatles use the energy of rock’n’roll to stimulate over-the-top joy and exuberance of a burgeoning teenager — the Stones, on the other hand, use it as a fashionable, yet barely understood voodoo mechanism. The song, which used to be a fairly innocent ode to the wonders of U.S. highway travel in the days of Nat King Cole, and was still quite happy sounding even in its Chuck Berry incarnation, is here transformed into a mystical ritual: Jagger lists all these unknown, enigmatic words like "Amarillo", "Gallup, New Mexico", and "Flagstaff, Arizona" as if they were part of some black magic incantation (surely they couldn’t sound any different from the proverbial abracadabra for him at the time?), and even though their drug-drenched days were still years away from the boys at the time, the line "would you get hip to this kindly tip, and take that California trip" sounds positively stoned in this context.
It does not hurt, either, that in early ’64 the Stones emerged on the scene as easily the tightest of all nascent British bands, period. Again, listen to the way they play ʽRoute 66ʼ and ʽCarolʼ in the context of the time — nobody in 1964 played with quite the same combination of speed, tightness, and mean, lean, focused energy. One of the biggest mysteries that I have never managed to figure out is how exactly they got their rhythm section to sound that way: with Charlie Watts’ predominantly jazz-based interests and with Bill Wyman being older than most of the rest by a good nine years (and having previously played with comparatively «tepid» outfits such as the London-based Cliftons), it would seem at first like a fairly suspicious match with their wild pair of guitarists — but from the very first seconds of ʽRoute 66ʼ, it is clear that everybody gels in perfectly, and that Bill and Charlie are only too happy to provide Keith and Brian with the tightest, fastest, grittiest «bottom» that was at all possible in 1964. Additionally, Mick proves himself to be a master of the harmonica, avoiding technical stunts or wild power-puffs (for which he lacked extensive training anyway) and making it, instead, into a melodic extension of his own voice (ʽI’m A King Beeʼ and Jimmy Reed’s ʽHonest I Doʼ are the best examples).
Much like the Beatles, the Stones from the very start showed clear disdain for the idea of LP-only filler — almost every single track here smells of creativity and excitement. So, for ʽI Just Want To Make Love To Youʼ it was clear that they could hardly replicate the Olympian swagger of physical love god Muddy Waters — instead, they sped the thing up to an insane tempo that even put Bo Diddley to shame and subjected their soon-to-be teenage girl fans to the lose-your-head breakneck fury of a young and strong team of British rock studs. For ʽHonest I Doʼ, Jagger knew it was useless to replicate the famous «toothless» voice of Jimmy Reed, so he went for a more Europeanized, Don Juan-style delivery: you know he absolutely does not mean it when he sings "I’ll never place no one above you", certainly not after following it up with the wolf-whistle harmonica solo, but is that reason enough to shy away from a lying-and-cheating one-night stand? For the album-closing Rufus Thomas’ ʽWalking The Dogʼ, the band pulls out all the stops, with the sneeriest, nastiest vocal performance possible and Keith blasting away on that solo as if his life, freedom, and an upcoming 20-year heroin supply all depended on it.
Sure enough, I like and/or respect all the original performances of these songs; but they were never as openly defiant as what the Stones manage to turn them into — and if you do not feel that quantum difference in your bones, you will most likely be unable to grasp the essence of this band, not even after formally swearing your allegiance to the likes of Sticky Fingers or Exile On Main St. because these records are «supposed» to be so great and all. And while this kind of arrogant youthful defiance would be recreated over several subsequent generations of artists, the Stones in 1964 had the advantage of playing it cool: unlike, say, Aerosmith a decade later, they did not possess the means to generate excessive dramatization (frenzied guitar pyrotechnics, wild screechy vocalist, crude sex-dripping lyrics, etc.) and still had to exude that aura of nastiness from a somewhat «gentlemanly» platform, dabbling in musical eroticism rather than having permission to dive headfirst into the ocean of musical pornography. (Not that I have anything against well-done musical pornography, mind you, but well-done musical eroticism usually requires more talent).
Where the band does slightly fail is with material which they do not manage to fully drag over to the dark side — the most notable of these failures probably being Marvin Gaye’s ʽCan I Get A Witnessʼ: an okay cover, I guess, but Jagger is trying too hard to simply get us up on our feet and dance, without finding himself some extra function which was not already there in Marvin’s original; and as an «R&B singer without a back thought», it is clear that the man does not hold his own against seasoned pros. (In fact, I am far more sympathetic towards the instrumental extension of this song — ʽNow I’ve Got A Witnessʼ features top-notch harmonica solos and another masterful guitar break from Keith). ʽYou Can Make It If You Tryʼ, originally done by Gene Allison but probably heard by the Stones in the more recent Solomon Burke version, is another duffer candidate, although Mick’s vocal here commands more respect than it does on ʽWitnessʼ — replacing soul with swagger, it still somehow manages to give you an uplifting kick.
The album contained but one original, the romantic ballad ʽTell Meʼ, and it always amused me that the «proverbially evil» Stones would have a tender, sentimental pop ballad (albeit a tragic one) as their introduction to the world of songwriters’ royalty (and royalties) — but I’ll be damned if it ain’t quite a fine-written song for the ʽFrom Me To Youʼ era, with the boys already mastering the art of build-up (tender verse to alarmed bridge to desperate chorus) and, curiously, going well over the typical three-minute barrier, as if they got carried away with their own success. It also set a common standard for them: in the future, the typical Stones ballad would be a bitter lament rather than a serenade, helping to lessen the gap between their rocky swagger and their sentimental side. In any case, ʽTell Meʼ is a respectable keeper, rather than forgettable fluff, and it’s kind of a pity that they buried it once and for all in their live set after 1965 (honestly, they wrote quite a few worse clunkers in the balladry department after that).
In short, remember this, kids of the future: there were only two artists in 1964 (as opposed to, for instance, more than forty in 2020) to top the UK LP charts — the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and if you fail to understand how the artistic creativity of A Hard Day’s Night could be regarded on a comparable level with the «slavish blues and rock’n’roll covers» of The Rolling Stones, then just chalk this up to the sorrowful consequences of how the Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham and his team were able to dupe the British public with their titillation-based promotional campaign. (Then again, there are also those who think that Brian Epstein not only made the Beatles, but basically was the Beatles, as far as their popularity and influence are concerned). But I myself have never subscribed to that conspirologist opinion, and as time goes by, the awesomeness of the fresh, young, nasty, swaggery Stones only becomes more and more clear to me even against the ever-expanding musical horizons.
Discography note: There are quite a few early Stones classics around this period which managed to avoid early LP release. The band’s first single, a cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On’ from June ’63, already has the Stones as a super-tight unit, but misses the magical transformation of Chuck’s vibe from fun-and-cute to fun-and-nasty. The second single, featuring the Lennon-McCartney composition ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ specially written for the Stones, was released in November ’63 and is a minor classic — the band’s first rip-roaring performance whose vocals and guitars simply ooze nastiness (especially when compared to the much more mild Ringo-sung version on With The Beatles), and the B-side ‘Stoned’ is a pretty evil take on Booker T & The MG’s ‘Green Onions’. The third single was an also nastified cover of Buddy Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’ (it is included on the US version of the album). Additionally, there was an early EP from January ’64, also called The Rolling Stones but somewhat expendable (four covers, none of them particularly great).
If you do want to truly dig deep, though, seek out bootlegged versions of some of the outtakes from the recording sessions for the LP — in particular, the instrumental jam ‘And Mr. Spector And Mr. Pitney Came Too’ (because they did), basically an extension of ‘Little By Little’ from the album with frantic soloing from Mick on harmonica and Keith on lead guitar; and the infamous ‘Andrew’s Blues’, a drunken improvisation to the melody of ‘Can I Get A Witness’ which happens to celebrate the spirit of Andrew Loog Oldham in the most appropriate manner ("Andrew Oldham sittin’ on a hill with Jack and Jill, fucked all night and sucked all night and taste that pussy till it taste just right" — I keep thinking of a parallel universe in which they accidentally mixed up the tapes and sprang this on the public market instead of the actual ‘Witness’ and I still cannot properly model the consequences). Bet you don’t get that kind of language from digging through the Beatles’ Abbey Road Studios outtakes, do you?
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