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Rockman

Gotta agree with Mick, recording it the old fashioned way might have improved the album, instead of "we've already got it down" and leaving it as it was. "We ain't going nowhere, pal" - yep, not with that.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-04-18 16:16 by treaclefingers.

ABB not one of my faves. I like VL a lot, Steel Wheels. Love Is Strong, Streets of Love, Don’t Stop are great tunes.

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skytrench
Gotta agree with Mick, recording it the old fashioned way might have improved the album, instead of "we've already got it down" and leaving it as it was. "We ain't going nowhere, pal" - yep, not with that.

The sad thing is, no matter the studio, the mastering is what killed A BIGGER BANG. I can't recall where I saw it but there was about a 30 second video at some point of them doing On No Not You Again that sounded like a SOME GIRLS leftover but it was Mick walking up to Charlie while they were recording it, maybe, in Mick's house.

Mick recorded GODDESS in studios and hotel rooms.

I also like ABB a lot, but can’t stand the two Keith songs. Extremely weak and almost an offence to spoil minutes to them during a show.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-04-19 18:03 by bobo.

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bobo
I also like ABB a lot, but can’t stand the two Keith songs. Extremely weak an almost an offence to spoil minutes to them during a show.

Have to agree with you, I once saw a live clip of Infamy and for some reason expected Mick to be out there with the harp but of course he wasn't

To me, This Place Is Empty is one of the best songs on the album! And I've never understood the hate for Infamy.

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GasLightStreet
And, of course, anything is better than MAJESTIES and DIRTY WORK, both of which would've worked much better as... EPs.

I am not sure why Dirty Work has to be slammed all the time. Why do we, people, feel the need to say this is bad or that is bad? Dirty Work was the first Stones album I ever bought (vinyl). First cut is the deepest. I still play it quite frequently. It's a hard rockin' album. It does have its Jaggerish moments that Keef had very little to do with. But even Winning Ugly or Back To Zero are more memorable than most songs on the first two solo albums from Brenda.

It is an energetic LP, perhaps not as inspired as previous albums by the Stones. I don't hate any of the Stones' LPs. There are LPs I rarely listen to. A Bigger Bang is one of those. It is overproduced, loud as hell, in-your-face production. Dylan worked with Don Was and he wasn't happy about his approach. And yes, nothing stood the test of time on A Bigger Bang. I think many of us were fooled by the guitar-centric sound of it at the time. Now somehow it feels like that it was the volume that made up for the lack of ideas. And that cover... It is a bombastic, pretentious album.

Wouldn't we all be extremely happy if Dirt Work was released in 2022? Wouldn't we hail it as the most amazing farewell from the greatest rock & roll band in the world?

I do not hate or dislike any of the Stones' albums. Jack White's favourite is the Satanic album. Some think Black and Blue is the greatest Stones album.

I like Dirty Work. It is overproduced and loud. Most hate the cover. But hey, you see it once and those colours pop off of it and stay with you forever. It is a memorable cover. Apart from Stripped and A Bigger Bang, Stones albums rarely featured a band shot from the 80s onwards. (You can hardly see the Stones in the cover photo of A Bigger Bang.) The sessions leading up to Dirty Work also produced a great lost gem: Deep Love (the version with Keef on vocals). Huge riff right there! What Am I Gonna Do With Your Love could have changed the overall feel of the album if it were included.

Dirty Work sounds more like a real Stones album. It was the last album before Jagger started overdoing, over-decorating his vocals.

Voodoo Lounge is great apart from a few silly, overblown tunes (I Go Wild comes to mind). Steel Wheels was so important at the time! Mixed Emotions and Rock & A Hard Place were all over the radio and MTV. It was a time when the Stones truly mattered. Everyone paid attention. They were on the cover of Time. Sad, Sad, Sad, Hold On To Your Hat, Break The Spell, Slipping Away are my favourite wheelers.

My favourite Stones album? I have to agree with Bill Wyman on that: Beggars Banquet (10/10).
A Bigger Bang (4/10)
Dirty Work (8/10)
Steel Wheels (8/10)
Voodoo Lounge (7/10)

Here's a longish and somewhat academic review of Dirty Work from discogs by subliminalkid:

Between 1980 and 1989, the Stones produced 5 records that leave the critics and the fans of their 60’s and 70’s material quite cold. The Stones are accused of being in shambles, undermined by internal disagreements, increasingly heavy addictions, egocentrism, creative weariness, fashionable drifts ... a narrative that the Stones themselves, on the one hand, feed with nihilistic cynicism and on the other hand, deny, relaunching each record with the ridiculous rhetoric fanfares of the "comeback” and “the best album since… "
Yet the Stones in the 80’s shine with a dark light, like a terminal black hole of Rock. A luminous and cathartic explosion / implosion that is halfway between the barker trick and divine illumination (and here is the devil), and which reveals the ultimate meaning and deepest structure of Rock.
The records of the 80s, and especially the post modern tryptic of Undercover, Dirty Work and Steel Wheels, reveal themselves as the ultimate reflection of Rock on Rock, and what are the Stones if not the archetype of rock itself?
From this point of view, Dirty Work is, above all, probably their most derailing work. An album unfairly mistreated, when instead it is a central semantic work, both for the Stones and, consequently, for the meaning of Rock itself.
Dirty Work highlights, in a martyrdom of ridicule and failure, the primary weirdness that underlies rock culture, and in this way plays the role of a true destabilizing force.
Dirty work, and in general all the 80’s Stones material, mockingly show the gears of the Stones machine, revealing its artifice. In Dirty Work they destroy themselves. A supreme rock move.
Capturing the semantic flows that underpin Reality, coagulating them and then derailing them, this is the ultimate meaning of rock as a product of post-modern civilization, where creation and destruction find themselves intimately enclosed in a kaleidoscopic groove.
And it is here, in the ambivalent shimmer of the products of advanced consumerism, products that on the one hand celebrate themselves and on the other propagate their own end, the vital meaning of rock, not in a sort of mythological romanticized authenticity. And it is still here that Rock reveals itself closer to the plagiarism of hip hop and dub techniques, than to the blues (but of the the blues it captures its signs and symbols)!
Looking at this semantic drifts, with the Stones lost between disco, dub, wave, fusion, funk we see how these drifts do nothing but shine a weird light on the previous work of the band, erasing in a chilling way any form of authenticity'.
And let's not forget that the early 60's Stones are by no means a blues band, but a bunch of suburban white kids obsessed with the signs of the blues! Punks who grew up in the labyrinth of mass communication, children of the pneumatic vacuum of advanced capitalism, aesthetes of the death principle, sellers of dissolution.
And Dirty Work, from this point of view, turns out to be a terminal masterpiece in which the layers of reality, both private (the band in an human, emotional, and chemical disintegration) and public (the post-human individualism of advanced capitalism, the Cold War …) are reflected in a stylistic confusion that threatens and breaks down the borders of their image. It is the Rock that threatens itself, rediscovering its ambiguous identity of death.
And here Jagger seems to constantly invoke and play with the end, in a climate of threat, ugliness and terminal dissolution.
The Stones are divided between submission to the Totem, the celebration of themselves (later elaborated in the beautiful plastic obsessions of Steel Wheels and in their live shows) and the centrifugal forces of studio work and private life. The critics accuse them of watering down their energy in a tired run-up to follow the last music tendencies, and in this way they fail to understand that this work on signs / inside the signs is the peculiarity of the Stones. There is no real or artifice, but only a disruptive machine of assimilation/ dispersion, which here appears mocking, cynical and above all ridiculous. Here they make fun of the human puppet in a work of ugliness and drift.
The beauty of Dirty work lies precisely in the fight of dialectical forces between centrifugal dispersion and that cursed and radioactive circularity, which has always been present in the Stones.
Prolonged listening to Dirty Work exposes you to a perverse pleasure, where the death principle offers its seductive dance, even more than in the rest of the Stones' 80’s discography.
It is a concept about Rock and modernity. It is an exploration of the limits, on the limits, of Rock. It is no coincidence that the record is constantly haunted by the structural and productive references to dub ... with which the Stones have been flirting since the 70s. (Too Rude as King Tubby’s ghost). And let's not forget the choice of Lillywhite as producer, who covers the Stones machine with fluorescent neon colors.
A concept album on dissolution (of signs and relationships), a meditation on the meaning of rock in the pneumatic vacuum of post capitalism, accelerated by the economic dynamics of the 80's. Destruction and dissolution sought and feared at the same time (as in Back to zero, the atomic menace in a seductive funk-wave groove, between Talking Heads’ ghosts and polished disco).
And then that ending, that few seconds of a distant boogie piano, like an hallucination from elsewhere, as in a Dickian fiction. As if Ian Stewart had been playing from the 'hereafter' (is he dead or are we dead? They seem to ask themselves) That terminal fragment puts the whole work back into a chilling perspective. And here Dirty Work reveals itself as a work of death, a labyrinth without a center. Their most post-human creation.
When this game of mirrors manifests, you are screwed and lost inside forever, the mind infected and free.

The same review was posted on the Steve Hoffman site in a Dirty Work discussion:
Dirty Work on SH

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frenki09

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GasLightStreet
And, of course, anything is better than MAJESTIES and DIRTY WORK, both of which would've worked much better as... EPs.

I am not sure why Dirty Work has to be slammed all the time. Why do we, people, feel the need to say this is bad or that is bad?

Because it's their worst LP ever. As Mick said, "It's not special." And especially in a thread about ranking Stones albums, well, there ya go.

ABB is still spinning on my machine. Not a masterpiece, that is for sure, but a very good work, and it gets better with time. Kind of re discovered it when I bought the vinyl version: it works better when I listen to it in "sides".

Agree with Mick that the album could have been better with a little more work. Things like a proper guitar intro to Streets of Love, a good bridge on She saw me coming, more dynamics in general, a little more variety in tone, less schematism in the song structures and so on.

But what the hell, I am happy to have had ABB instead of nothing.

As far as assessing a star valuation, I would give it a good 3 stars (where 5 stars is Exile good and 1 star is Voodoo lounge so so).

C

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liddas
ABB is still spinning on my machine. Not a masterpiece, that is for sure, but a very good work, and it gets better with time. Kind of re discovered it when I bought the vinyl version: it works better when I listen to it in "sides".

Agree with Mick that the album could have been better with a little more work. Things like a proper guitar intro to Streets of Love, a good bridge on She saw me coming, more dynamics in general, a little more variety in tone, less schematism in the song structures and so on.

But what the hell, I am happy to have had ABB instead of nothing.

As far as assessing a star valuation, I would give it a good 3 stars (where 5 stars is Exile good and 1 star is Voodoo lounge so so).

C

I think the biggest 'problem' with the album is that Charlie wasn't present in creating the backing tracks/shaping the songs. There is some sort of lack in swing or dynamics especially in rockers section, and Charlie sounds surprisingly monotonic. I take that been due to him just replacing Mick's 'original' drums, and more or less just copying Mick's parts, not really organically affecting to the result. I would also go with Mick that probably re-cutting the whole material again (with the condition of the whole band organically being present in the sessions, Ronnie too) would have made the album better. Sometimes 'Brenda' can be right, and holy Keef wrong.

- Doxa



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2022-04-20 18:03 by Doxa.