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RedhotcarpetQuote
24FPS
It all reminds me of the Some Girls tour and the absolute blasting the group was getting in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine. The album had gotten an awful review and the headline for the tour was SHATTERED, and not in a good way. Reports came back that Jagger was pissed and refusing Rolling Stone reporters access. Suddenly there was a reassessment of the album in the magazine and things smoothed out. It's almost like there was a punk rebellion by the younger staff against the Stones and Jann had to step in and kiss a little ass to get back in the good graces of the group.
The Stones were still enduring the nightmare of Keith's heroin bust in Toronto and things were very fragile. It was probably the massive sales of the album and the worldwide smash of 'Miss You' and the surprising popularity of 'Beast of Burden' that got the band through the summer of '78. Then they almost blew it with Jagger's terrible, croaked out performance on Saturday Night Live, that left people cold with his creepy licking of Ron Wood's face. Wood looked obviously uncomfortable. Allegedly Jagger sounded so bad because he partied all week with the likes of Belushi. (Coke is notoriously bad on the throat). Anyone who has seen the rehearsals on bootleg know they band sounded great earlier in the week.
The whole stress of that time with Keith seems to have laid the foundation for the Jagger/Richards split. You can still see the closeness on the '75 and '76 tours, but after the group stood by Keith through the '77 bust until the '79 Concert For the Blind in Canada, it looks like a real distancing took place between Mick and Keith. And, with the subsequent good reviews the Stones always got in Rolling Stone afterward, it looks like Mick and Jann got a lot closer.
Interesting interview, used to find it boring but I was wrong. I think the split came in 1980 when Keith quit heroin. The bust in Toronto probably sealed the deal for Mick but the real split (probably) came later due to Keiths change - coke and heroin to coke and booze.
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Max'sKansasCityQuote
treaclefingers
Great article from 1995, the Jan Wenner interview:
[www.jannswenner.com]
Interesting reading this so many years later, particularly when hearing what he says then and how things don't seem that much different than now.
Nice online find, thanks for sharing treacle
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24FPS
It all reminds me of the Some Girls tour and the absolute blasting the group was getting in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine. The album had gotten an awful review and the headline for the tour was SHATTERED, and not in a good way. Reports came back that Jagger was pissed and refusing Rolling Stone reporters access. Suddenly there was a reassessment of the album in the magazine and things smoothed out. It's almost like there was a punk rebellion by the younger staff against the Stones and Jann had to step in and kiss a little ass to get back in the good graces of the group.
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treaclefingers
If there was one thing that did annoy me in the interview, it was the way Mick would feign to not actually 'know' what songs were on what albums, and had to ask Jan.
Seriously...he doesn't know the tracks on Let It Bleed?
Maybe the earlier albums...I get mixed up sometimes, on some of the tracks...but Let It Bleed?
I think he tries to hard to act 'detached' and uninterested, when I believe he is the opposite.
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tomkQuote
treaclefingers
If there was one thing that did annoy me in the interview, it was the way Mick would feign to not actually 'know' what songs were on what albums, and had to ask Jan.
Seriously...he doesn't know the tracks on Let It Bleed?
Maybe the earlier albums...I get mixed up sometimes, on some of the tracks...but Let It Bleed?
I think he tries to hard to act 'detached' and uninterested, when I believe he is the opposite.
Harrison did that in the Beatles Anthology, the bonus scene where they're listening to Abbey Road. All the others laughed. I though that he had to be joking. There may be something to them being "detached and uninterested." Makes it sound more romantic. However, my band put out an album about 10 years ago, and I was talking to my wife about about it and I'll be damned, I couldn't remember one of the songs on it.
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tomkQuote
treaclefingers
If there was one thing that did annoy me in the interview, it was the way Mick would feign to not actually 'know' what songs were on what albums, and had to ask Jan.
Seriously...he doesn't know the tracks on Let It Bleed?
Maybe the earlier albums...I get mixed up sometimes, on some of the tracks...but Let It Bleed?
I think he tries to hard to act 'detached' and uninterested, when I believe he is the opposite.
Harrison did that in the Beatles Anthology, the bonus scene where they're listening to Abbey Road. All the others laughed. I though that he had to be joking. There may be something to them being "detached and uninterested." Makes it sound more romantic. However, my band put out an album about 10 years ago, and I was talking to my wife about about it and I'll be damned, I couldn't remember one of the songs on it.
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georgelicksQuote
24FPS
It all reminds me of the Some Girls tour and the absolute blasting the group was getting in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine. The album had gotten an awful review and the headline for the tour was SHATTERED, and not in a good way. Reports came back that Jagger was pissed and refusing Rolling Stone reporters access. Suddenly there was a reassessment of the album in the magazine and things smoothed out. It's almost like there was a punk rebellion by the younger staff against the Stones and Jann had to step in and kiss a little ass to get back in the good graces of the group.
Some Girls had a GREAT review by Rolling Stone, the BAD ONE was for Emotional Rescue, it had a 2 star review, the worst ever for a Rolling Stones album in RS.
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treaclefingersQuote
tomkQuote
treaclefingers
If there was one thing that did annoy me in the interview, it was the way Mick would feign to not actually 'know' what songs were on what albums, and had to ask Jan.
Seriously...he doesn't know the tracks on Let It Bleed?
Maybe the earlier albums...I get mixed up sometimes, on some of the tracks...but Let It Bleed?
I think he tries to hard to act 'detached' and uninterested, when I believe he is the opposite.
Harrison did that in the Beatles Anthology, the bonus scene where they're listening to Abbey Road. All the others laughed. I though that he had to be joking. There may be something to them being "detached and uninterested." Makes it sound more romantic. However, my band put out an album about 10 years ago, and I was talking to my wife about about it and I'll be damned, I couldn't remember one of the songs on it.
Well, and not to be offensive, but how often do you play your album, and is it Let it Bleed?
People forget, but come on!
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RedhotcarpetQuote
tomkQuote
treaclefingers
If there was one thing that did annoy me in the interview, it was the way Mick would feign to not actually 'know' what songs were on what albums, and had to ask Jan.
Seriously...he doesn't know the tracks on Let It Bleed?
Maybe the earlier albums...I get mixed up sometimes, on some of the tracks...but Let It Bleed?
I think he tries to hard to act 'detached' and uninterested, when I believe he is the opposite.
Harrison did that in the Beatles Anthology, the bonus scene where they're listening to Abbey Road. All the others laughed. I though that he had to be joking. There may be something to them being "detached and uninterested." Makes it sound more romantic. However, my band put out an album about 10 years ago, and I was talking to my wife about about it and I'll be damned, I couldn't remember one of the songs on it.
Me neither >< (Joking). Can one listen to the album, and did it sell? Your album I mean.
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tomkQuote
RedhotcarpetQuote
tomkQuote
treaclefingers
If there was one thing that did annoy me in the interview, it was the way Mick would feign to not actually 'know' what songs were on what albums, and had to ask Jan.
Seriously...he doesn't know the tracks on Let It Bleed?
Maybe the earlier albums...I get mixed up sometimes, on some of the tracks...but Let It Bleed?
I think he tries to hard to act 'detached' and uninterested, when I believe he is the opposite.
Harrison did that in the Beatles Anthology, the bonus scene where they're listening to Abbey Road. All the others laughed. I though that he had to be joking. There may be something to them being "detached and uninterested." Makes it sound more romantic. However, my band put out an album about 10 years ago, and I was talking to my wife about about it and I'll be damned, I couldn't remember one of the songs on it.
Me neither >< (Joking). Can one listen to the album, and did it sell? Your album I mean.
That's ok, nobody did. It's actually older than 10 years now, holy smokes, closer to 20! I should put the songs up on YouTube or something.
The band split after a tour of Texas and some TV work. Bryan MacLean of Love is on it, singing a counter-melody on one song.
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24FPS
Well, here it is. Judge for yourself, and notice the little dig at the tour.
SOME GIRLS review
By Paul Nelson
August 10, 1978
Q: Do you think the music of the Rolling Stones has an overall theme?
A: Yeah. Women.
— Keith Richards
With Bob Dylan no longer bringing it all back home, Elvis Presley dead and the Beatles already harmlessly cloned in the wax-museum nostalgia of a Broadway musical, it's no wonder the Rolling Stones decided to make a serious record. Not particularly ambitious, mind you, but serious. These guys aren't dumb, and when the handwriting on the wall starts to smell like formaldehyde and that age-old claim, "the greatest rock & roll band in the world," suddenly sounds less laudatory than laughable — well, if you want to survive the Seventies and enter the Eighties with something more than your bankbook and dignity intact, you'd better dredge up your leftover pride, bite the bullet and try like hell to sweat out some good music. Which is exactly what the Stones have done. Though time may not exactly be on their side, with Some Girls they've at least managed to stop the clock for a while.
This is no small accomplishment. It's not a big one either. Thus far, the critical line claims that Some Girls is the band's finest LP since its certified masterpiece, Exile on Main Street, and I'll buy that gladly. What I won't buy is that the two albums deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. (Listen to "Tumbling Dice" or, better yet, "Let It Loose" from the earlier record, and then to the exemplary "Beast of Burden" or "When the Whip Comes Down" from this year's model, and tell me that the passion, power and near-awesome completeness of the 1972 performances are in any way matched by the new ones.) Instead, Some Girls is like a marriage of convenience: when it works — which is often — it can be meaningful, memorable and quite moving, but it rarely sends the arrow straight through the heart. "It took me a long time to discover that the key to acting is honesty," an actor told the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter. "Once you know how to fake that, you've got it made."
For the most part, the Stones "act" superbly on the new LP. They've stripped down to the archetypal sound of two or three guitars, bass and drums (and, more importantly, ditched the vacuousness of Billy Preston), and it's wonderful to hear the group blazing away again with little more than the basics to protect them. Everything's apparently been recorded as close to live as we'd want it, and the overdubbing and extra musicians have been kept to a minimum. But at their best, the Rolling Stones used to play and sing a brand of rock & rollnoir as moody, smoke-filled and ambiguous as the steamy and harmful atmosphere of such film noir classics as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. Where Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were once a pair of Humphrey Bogarts (or, in keeping with Some Girls' imagery, Lauren Bacalls), they're now more like — who? — Warren Beatty and Robert Blake. Gone is the black and white murk, and the vocals are way up in a nicely messy but pastel mix. While the Stones may have gone back a dozen or more years for the sound and style of the current album, what they've really done is to reshoot Rebel without a Cause as a scaled-down, made-for-TV movie. The rebellion — with the exception of Richards' powerful "Before They Make Me Run" — lacks a certain credibility, and the cause is simply survival. (If you don't think that credibility is a major issue here, you haven't seen any of the band's recent concerts, most of which have been poor.)
With their eerie dual commitment to irony and ecstasy, the Stones, as rock critic Robert Christgau has pointed out, have always been obsessed with distance. On Some Girls, however, the distances are too great, and it would take a far better singer than Mick Jagger to bridge the gap between the notoriety of his jet-set lifestyle and the straightforward, one-man/one-woman sentiments of true love he expresses in "Miss You" and the Temptations' "Imagination." Or to make convincing his despair in "Shattered," a fine, scathing song about New York City — a locale that figures prominently on this record. (Rod Stewart has a similar problem now, and punk rockers like Johnny Rotten and the Clash are correct to bring it to our attention.) Because Jagger is such an excellent singer, he almost makes you believe everything he says, but it's that "almost" — which wouldn't matter at all if he weren't a Rolling Stone, i.e., the best — that keeps Some Girls from going right over the top. Too often, we're faced with a question that goes well beyond the usual some-tension-within-the-material-is-necessary argument and into the area of, why is this man lying when he's obviously pleased as punch with himself and is getting roomfuls of satisfaction? After all, if you don't believe that Jay Gatsby really loves Daisy in his divinely crazy way, what good is it?
That said, Some Girls has more than its share of highs and only one real low (the condescending and silly "Far Away Eyes," which makes even the country-rock of Firefall seem swell). "Respectable" takes a close look at the peculiar position of the Stones, circa 1978, and boasts lines like these:
We're talking heroin with the President
Yes it's a problem sir, but it can be bent...
You're a rag trade girl, you're the queen of porn
You're the easiest lay on the White House lawn...
before it inexplicably begins to lose interest in itself. "When the Whip Comes Down" and "Lies" are a neat combination of white heat and old hat, while "Miss You," "Imagination" and "Shattered" are a good deal better than that. And the title track is every bit as outrageous ("Black girls just want to get @#$%& all night/I just don't have that much jam") as everyone says. This song may be a sexist and racist horror, but it's also terrifically funny and strangely desperate in a manner that gets under your skin and makes you care. On "Some Girls," Mick Jagger sounds like he's not only singing like Bob Dylan, but about Bob Dylan: "I'll give ya a house back in Zuma Beach/And give you half of what I owe."
"Before They Make Me Run" and "Beast of Burden," Some Girls' hardest-hitting songs, are sandwiched between "Respectable" and "Shattered" on side two. It's probably presumptuous to suggest that these four tracks are about the present predicament of this stormy band, but I think they are. When Keith Richards sings, "Well after all is said and done/Gotta move while it's still fun/But let me walk before they make me run," there's no doubt he's talking about the music, his drug bust and the possible end of the road, about which he writes brilliantly ("Watch my taillights fading/There ain't a dry eye in the house..."). And when Mick Jagger implores,
Ain't I rough enough
Ain't I tough enough
Ain't I rich enough
In love enough
Oooo, ooh please.
he's got to be thinking about himself and the Rolling Stones, among other things. It's too bad the answer to all his questions isn't an unqualified yes. In a better world, it should be.
(I didn't add the little smiley faces, they came with wherever I downloaded this from).
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tomkQuote
RedhotcarpetQuote
tomkQuote
treaclefingers
If there was one thing that did annoy me in the interview, it was the way Mick would feign to not actually 'know' what songs were on what albums, and had to ask Jan.
Seriously...he doesn't know the tracks on Let It Bleed?
Maybe the earlier albums...I get mixed up sometimes, on some of the tracks...but Let It Bleed?
I think he tries to hard to act 'detached' and uninterested, when I believe he is the opposite.
Harrison did that in the Beatles Anthology, the bonus scene where they're listening to Abbey Road. All the others laughed. I though that he had to be joking. There may be something to them being "detached and uninterested." Makes it sound more romantic. However, my band put out an album about 10 years ago, and I was talking to my wife about about it and I'll be damned, I couldn't remember one of the songs on it.
Me neither >< (Joking). Can one listen to the album, and did it sell? Your album I mean.
That's ok, nobody did. It's actually older than 10 years now, holy smokes, closer to 20! I should put the songs up on YouTube or something.
The band split after a tour of Texas and some TV work. Bryan MacLean of Love is on it, singing a counter-melody on one song.
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Rip This
The Stones didn't get a rave review from Rolling Stone for that matter in 1972 for Exile either....
By Lenny Kaye
July 6, 1972
There are songs that are better, there are songs that are worse, there are songs that'll become your favorites and others you'll probably lift the needle for when their time is due. But in the end, Exile On Main Street spends its four sides shading the same song in as many variations as there are Rolling Stone readymades to fill them, and if on the one hand they prove the group's eternal constancy and appeal, it's on the other that you can leave the album and still feel vaguely unsatisfied, not quite brought to the peaks that this band of bands has always held out as a special prize in the past.
.............that's just the first paragraph.
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24FPS
(I didn't add the little smiley faces, they came with wherever I downloaded this from).
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24FPS
Here's where things got strange. A 4 and a half (out of 5) star review for Undercover. MTV's Kurt Loder lost his credibility on this date.
By Kurt Loder
December 8, 1983
By now, the Rolling Stones have assumed something of the status of the blues in popular music — a vital force beyond time and fashion. Undercover, their twenty-third album (not counting anthologies and outtakes), reassembles, in the manner of mature masters of every art, familiar elements into exciting new forms. It is a perfect candidate for inclusion in a cultural time capsule: should future generations wonder why the Stones endured so long at the very top of their field, this record offers just about every explanation. Here we have the world's greatest rock & roll rhythm section putting out at maximum power; the reeling, roller-derby guitars at full roar; riffs that stick in the viscera, songs that seize the hips and even the heart; a singer who sounds serious again. Undercover is rock & roll without apologies.
There is a moment early on in "Too Tough," a terrific song on the second side, that sums up all of the Stones' extraordinary powers. With the guitars locked into a headlong riff and Mick Jagger hoarsely berating the woman who "screwed me down with kindness" and "suffocating love," the track is already off to a hot start; but then Charlie Watts comes barreling in on tom-toms and boots the tune onto a whole new level of gut-punching brilliance. That the Stones are still capable of such exhilarating energy is cause enough for wondrous comment; that they are able to sustain such musical force over the course of an entire LP is rather astonishing. Undercover is the most impressive of the albums the group has released since its mid-Seventies career slump (the others being Some Girls, Emotional Rescue and 1981's remarkable Tattoo You) because, within the band's R&B-based limits, it is the most consistently and energetically inventive.
Although the hard-rock numbers that make up the bulk of the record have the Rolling Stones' stamp all over them, they are also distinguished by a heightened creative freshness that recalls their song-rich 1967 LP. Between the Buttons (from which such numbers as "Too Tough" and the sentimentally salacious "She Was Hot" could almost pass as outtakes). The raw vitality of the performances is matched by the thorniness of the lyrics, which glimmer with all the usual veiled allusions and inscrutable ambiguities.
When Jagger sings in "Tie You Up (the Pain of Love)" that "You get a rise from it Feel the hot come dripping on your thighs from it," and that "Women will die for it," you might conclude that he's just being provocative (or, alternatively, that he's still the pathetic sexist @#$%& you always figured him for). But the song isn't simply about male domination of women; it's about the omnisexual oppressiveness of romantic obsession. Similarly, the black woman at the center of "She Was Hot" turns out to have been more than just a great lay — the simple sincerity of the singer's "I hope we meet again" adds a sudden emotional resonance to what at first appears an empty-headed sex anthem — while the title of the sinuously slippery "Pretty Beat Up" refers not to the song's female subject but to the singer's condition since she left him. And in between the shout-along choruses of "All the Way Down," where Jagger looks back on his beginnings and says, "I was king. Mr. Cool, just a snotty little fool" — and then slyly adds, "Like kids are now" — he sounds more self-aware than his detractors have ever given him credit for being.
This admission of emotional vulnerability, so far removed from the usual phallic strutting of most hard rock, is a familiar theme from at least the last two Stones albums. And while it coexists here with the indomitable self-assertion of "Too Tough" ("But in the end, you spat me out You could not chew me up"), it also achieves its most childlike expression in Keith Richards' unadorned declaration of love and hope, "Wanna Hold You."
One suspects the Stones wouldn't approve of all this rummaging around in their lyrics — they've never bothered to pose as poets, and their words have always melded with the music quite well. On Undercover, the music offers continuing proof of the band's commitment to black music. There are numerous young performers in Britain today who are lauded for adopting the trappings of Tamla-Motown or the dance-tested beat of black disco and pop reggae, but the Stones have been covering this turf (and more originally, at that) for years. It is a happy irony that at least two of the central songs on this album are prime examples of their commitment to the now-resurgent notion of black pop primacy.
On the flamboyantly grisly "Too Much Blood," they bring in Sugar Hill Records' former horn section (a four-man unit called Chops) for a rough and rambling rap tune that shows they've been listening to more than the occasional Grand Master Flash twelve-inch. The horns, coupled with the rampant clatter of Moroccan percussionists Moustapha Cisse and Brahms Condoul, plus reggae stalwart Sly Dunbar on electronic drums, churn up a marvelous, murky funk. And when David Sanborn comes screaming up on solo sax and Jagger rides in on a descending riff, singing. "I wanna dance, I wanna sing, I wanna bust up everything," the track transcends MTV-style racial considerations and emerges as a colorblind dance-floor hit.
And while there is a dark Jamaican dub groove running through "Feel on Baby," a somewhat poignant lament, the dub sensibility crops up most strikingly on the title track and single, "Undercover of the Night," a dance mix of which appears on the album instead of the less expansive 45 version. Like the careening "It Must Be Hell," "Undercover" exhibits a sense of political scorn that seems fueled by more genuine disgust than the Stones have spewed up in years. Rich in repugnant detail, the latter cut chronicles current Latin American political agonies, and its music, resounding with coproducer Chris Kimsey's sirenlike dub echoes, slams the message home with inarguable power.
If there are disappointments on Undercover, they can only be claimed in comparison to past Stones triumphs. If the album lacks the epochal impact of, say, Sticky Fingers, then perhaps it's because the mythic years of pop are past — by now, even the Stones have long since bade them goodbye. But Undercover seems to be more felicitously concentrated than Exile on Main Street, and while it may lack that album's dark power and desperate atmosphere, it does deliver nonstop, unabashed rock & roll crafted to the highest standards in the business. And that, rest assured, will do just fine.
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Glam Descendant
>Disagree...love this album, just a tad behind Tattoo You is accurate IMHO.
>Last great Stones album and highly underrated. Stellar title track as well.
I totally agee with this assessment.
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24FPS
Stellar title track, worthless album. Still can't listen to it. One of very few Stones albums pre-90s that I do not keep in my collection.