Rolling Stones Album-by-Album Thread (Part 12)

Not as many as some bands, but still lots of good ones: Play With Fire, Sway, Ruby Tuesday, Heartbreaker (sort of), Fingerprint File, Hot Stuff...

 

Exactly. The original (which I much prefer over all live versions) is basically major (although if you wanna get music-geekish, it's mixolydian because it has a minor or flat 7th, but so does probably 85% of rock music). JJ Flash has a "tough" or "minor-esque" feel because the chord changes move in a way that would suggest the home chord "should" be minor (like, for example, "I Can See For Miles," or the Ramones' "Pinhead," or "Back in the USSR," or thousands of others). In Beethoven or Schumann, a chord progression like that of JJ Flash would have come home to a minor chord, no question. The heavily blues-influenced major-minor ambiguity, in a different area than the bending of the third of the scale by the voice or lead guitar. Woulda sounded weird and jarring to anyone in the West a hundred twenty years ago…. sounded unusual and dangerous, say, seventy years ago… just sounds good now, and any music that doesn't nod to it risks sounding wimpy… or perhaps neo-subversive by being major and nice and happy?

 

Mick Jagger 1985 Live Aid

 

Post away, I'd like to see them. I only have a few.

 

http://eil.com/shop/moreinfo.asp?catalogid=19039
http://eil.com/Gallery/19039b.jpg
http://eil.com/Gallery/19039b.jpg

ROLLING STONES She Was Hot (Scarce 1984 UK limited edition 2-track 'tongue' shaped vinyl PICTURE DISC single, also including the track 'I Think I'm Going Mad' - great girl-hugging-candle image with tracklisting credits on the reverse ofthe iconic tongue logo shaped disc! RSRP114).

 

I like that interview. Thanks for posting.

 

Friday and Saturday night. Pictures just wouldn't look right without a drink.

 

That's the one - its a pretty cool piece!

 

World War III Declared: a crossfire hurricane brewing

CBS Records forked over a very tidy sum in 1983 to get distribution rights on the next four Rolling Stones Records albums, as well as reissues of anything bearing that imprint in the meantime. They didn't just buy "four new albums by The Rolling Stones", mind you, but four new Rolling Stones Records albums (a crucial and yet often over-looked distinction). CBS bought the lot -- everything the band had done in the previous thirteen years, and whatever came out in the next five -- hook, line and sinker. With a much buzzed-about new album in the can (Undercover, the last Stones album that the titanic Atlantic Records would launch), and lucrative new CD and home video markets opening up, signing with the global giant CBS meant that the Rolling Stones could gracefully transition into a new era, flush with record company support and a bright-looking future. Keith Richards married Patti Hansen on an extended wintertime working holiday in Mexico, with Mick Jagger serving as best man. Very soon, alas, the year of '84 that had started out promisingly sunny for the Good Ship Stones darkened ominously. What had seemed like a slam-dunk deal would soon prompt a fatal dispute threatening the band's future altogether.

The Undercover LP began to slip down the charts, and without an accompanying tour, the percolating appeal of its singles to underground dance clubs and MTV (seemingly) could not save its commercial prospects. All patiently waited throughout '83 and '84 for Charlie Watts to return to work with the band, so that another recording and touring cycle could fall into place. Thanks to a punishing bout of insecurity on the Watts family front, however, the drummer was in midlife crisis mode and he was therefore unwilling to devote significant time to any group activity. With the other band members also otherwise occupied, there was little momentum to continue onward once the promotion of Undercover finally ended in '84.* Coasting on goodwill from the success of Tattoo You only got them so far, especially as Undercover had under-performed in comparison.

*Charlie did play casual one-off gigs with Stu's boogie-woogie band Rocket 88 several times in this period, as well as benefit gigs organized by Ronnie Lane of the Faces for Action into Research for Multiple Sclerosis (ARMS) also involving Ron Wood & Bill Wyman. Keith did not perform much in public; establishing his married life with Patti instead entailed putting many of their familial affairs into order. Ron Wood began to paint his artwork in earnest, starting in April of '84 and, before the year's end, he would hold his first exhibition in Dallas. Dear ol' Bill Wyman was putting the moves on a 13-year-old girl, whom he would soon marry in a storm of horrendous publicity and bizarre personal fallout.

Unbeknownst to the others, and probably out of legitimate concern that this was actually a waning period for the band, Mick signed a sly separate deal for a solo career on the back of their new CBS contract. The deal meant that, should four prospective Rolling Stones albums fail to arrive, the company would throw their support entirely behind Jagger's solo discs instead. If they had fully disintegrated, if Charlie and the others could not commit to finishing another new project, this ensured Jagger could nonetheless keep his job as a popular musician without having to overtly break up the band. After four albums, either by Mick solo, or by the Stones (defined as Mick plus one other band member), the CBS contract would nonetheless be satisfied. Although this was a shrewd move on paper, it turned out to be a bet against the winning horse -- and keeping it a secret was an astonishingly poor way to treat the other band members, who at least deserved the respect of being invited into the room for a deal that brokered their potential legacy.

When Keith figured out the full implications of this epochal decision (perhaps not until months later in '84), he was absolutely livid. In cozying up to slimy record company moguls and losing faith in his bandmates, so figured Keith, the bastard had traded in their combined sweat equity for the purchase of his own ego inflation. Worse still, Jagger held all the chips in major decisions about what the band could release until the CBS contract expired, and therefore stood a chance of stealing all media focus away to his solo act. While Keith had politely told Mick in '83 he'd theoretically support the singer's attempt at a solo side project, this unconsidered little contractual wrinkle was actually indulging an entirely different scenario: one where the band could have faded permanently out of the picture, gambled away in the crapshoot of pop stardom. Richards reacted by walking away from Jagger's camp entirely, refusing to play ball while biliously taunting Mick in public for his superstar pretensions.

As a stop-gap measure, CBS began assembling a greatest hits package called Rewind that would anthologize the entire Atlantic-helmed period. Unlike all previous compilations of the post-ABKCO era, this was a comprehensive hits collection (with varying tracklists tailored for different markets). It kept the band in a holding pattern, continuing to trade off their past successes while the provenance of new material remained doubtful. Julien Temple, who had directed the Undercover clips, shot twenty minutes of newly scripted material featuring Mick and Bill to help sequence together a long-form home video release packaged to accompany the Rewind album. He intercut these segments with existing interviews (sometimes quite clumsily, when the rights to use interviewers' voices could not be obtained), live footage, and vintage promo clips to create a flimsy-premised through-line about Bill Wyman the nightwatchman breaking into a museum store-room containing rock relics, hanging out with a frozen '72-vintage-jumpsuited Jagger encased in glass, and reminiscing about the band's faded glory days. They scroll around on the museum computer (Bill was a hobbyist in the early craze for home PCs) to play back the footage, and pointedly lament that Charlie isn't around to play anymore.

Thrown into the sequence also were Temple's three epic promotional films for Undercover. It was a good second-life airing for these clips, and showcased their high production value outside of MTV airplay, where they had enjoyed less heavy rotation than would perhaps justify their exorbitant budgets. That said, they didn't really fit with the "trawl through the archives" framing device, and consequently feel a bit out of place. That's not to say they are bad, by any means. Julien Temple was an astute craftsman, and the videos are highly accomplished works of art in their own right, providing intelligent visual commentary on the lyrical and musical imagery they convey. But they could and should be restored from their 35mm film elements soon — the video prints used the Rewind video are faded and run at the wrong speed, yet troublingly, they appear to be the sources for the Stones' official YouTube channel versions.

Although it was crippled from potential daytime airplay by the violence of the plot, the full "Undercover of the Night" clip is exquisitely constructed, with Mick portraying a mustachioed white-knight figure who saves a Mexican girl from a maurauding gang (including one death's-head-wearing Keith) only to be mowed down in their church hideout in a climactic gunfight. It's a battle between the ego and the id, and the meta-story of the teenagers watching at home adds another layer of commentary: you can acknowledge and pay attention to the violent reality of your world, as the girl wants to, or lose yourself in sex and drugs and rock 'n roll, as the boy wants to do by switching the channel back to the Stones playing. In the end, authority figures (here personified by the girl's parents, representing the superego) thwart the indulgence of either. It's a perfectly-tuned psychodrama.

"Too Much Blood" is in much the same vein, with its horror movie pastiche (though it was, again, slightly too suggestive for white-bread MTV). The TV-watching protagonist is beset by the nightmarish spectre of a blood-soaked raft of entertainment options, from glossy Life magazine, to alcohol, to the Stones themselves. "She Was Hot", by absolute contrast, excelled in the campy British Carry On tradition, while paying tribute to the colour-saturated 50s rock film The Girl Can't Help It with Anita Morris standing in for Jayne Mansfield and Charlie Watts in a show-stopping star turn as her manager. This clip was, perversely, also banned from some TV broadcast playlists -- not because of any violent or suggestive content, but because one of the shots shows a record executive (presumably a pastiche of those A&R suits they'd just left behind at Atlantic) holding a foaming can of Tab soft drink, which had not cleared its trademark for use in the video. Even if these corny visual gags don't do it for you, the video is definitely worth viewing for the added lyrics in the extended first verse. I think the song still makes sense without them, but having those extra lines explains things a bit better.

In fact, minus the Undercover segments, the Rewind video is quite sharply self-aware -- the dialogue spoken by Mick and Bill (as well as the placement of the band's historical detritus), when viewed with acknowledgement of the band's crippled and on-standby status, is very telling. It ends with Jagger being confined to his case again, only to literally break out on his own while the other band members languish in obscurity; then Bill wakes up, to realize he dreamed it all and they'll remain rock stars as long as they can stay together and maybe even someday get some of those MBE medals they gave the Beatles. It must have been done in response to the real-life stalemate facing the band. I tend to read the intertextual fantasy of "Bill Wyman's dream" that occupies much of the Rewind video as an alternate scenario: a message from Mick to the others, of sorts, as if to say "let's let bygones be bygones, so that we can keep our band identity together and attempt to maintain a relevant collective entity, or else it will fade into museum-piece status." This must have lit some kind of fire under Keith, because he accepted the challenge of doggedly trying to get the band to record together again. After a fraught band meeting in Amsterdam, however, Jagger overstepped his boundaries and pissed Charlie off by calling him up long after he'd retired to bed, insultingly calling him "my drummer"; the way Keith tells it, Charlie reacted by getting out of bed, dressing to the nines, and physically assaulting Jagger to retort that he was "MY singer".

With Mick now totally cast adrift from the band, things were only going to get bleaker in 1985.

 

Whew, glad I got that one in under the wire before lucky Part 13 starts.

Here's the latest TABLE OF CONTENTS so we can wrap this one up soon:

1.) "Come On" | "Poison Ivy (single version)" | "I Wanna Be Your Man" | The Rolling Stones EP
2.) "Not Fade Away" | The Rolling Stones
3.) "It's All Over Now" | Five By Five EP | "Time Is On My Side (single version)"
4.) The split in the Stones' US and UK discographies | 12 x 5
5.) "Little Red Rooster" | The Rolling Stones No. 2
6.) SIDEBAR #1: The Rolling Stones at the BBC
7.) The Rolling Stones, Now!
8.) "The Last Time" | got LIVE if you want it! EP | "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"
9.) Thoughts on Brian Jones' changing role within the group: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
10.) Out Of Our Heads US | Out Of Our Heads UK
11.) "Get Off Of My Cloud" | December's Children (and everybody's)
12.) "19th Nervous Breakdown"/"As Tears Go By" | Big Hits (High Tide And Green Grass)
13.) Aftermath
14.) "Paint It, Black"
15.) SIDEBAR #2: The Covers Codex -- The Rolling Stones Play Other People's Songs
16.) "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow?" | got LIVE if you want it! LP
17.) Thoughts on the impending, inevitable collision between the Stones and the Establishment: Part 1 | Part 2
18.) "Let's Spend The Night Together"/"Ruby Tuesday"
19.) Between The Buttons
20.) Flowers
21.) "We Love You" | outtake#1 - Oscar Wilde, Mick Jagger, and irony writ large | outtake #2 - The Beatles, The Who and The Stones
22.) Their Satanic Majesties Request
23.) "Jumpin' Jack Flash"/"Child Of The Moon"
24.) "Street Fighting Man"
25.) Beggars Banquet
26.) "Honky Tonk Women"
27.) Through The Past, Darkly (Big Hits Vol. 2)
28.) Let It Bleed
29.) 'Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!' - The Rolling Stones In Concert
30.) Sticky Fingers
31.) SIDEBAR #3: 38 Special - The 38 Essential Decca-Era Outtakes
32.) Hot Rocks/1964-1971 | More Hot Rocks (big hits & fazed cookies)
33.) SIDEBAR #4: Exile On Main Street -- collective preliminary discussion
34.) Exile On Main Street
35.) Goat's Head Soup
36.) The Brussels Affair '73
37.) It's Only Rock 'N Roll
38.) Metamorphosis
39.) Black And Blue
40.) Love You Live
41.) L.A. Friday - Live '75
42.) Some Girls
43.) Some Girls Live in Texas '78
44.) SIDEBAR #5: 1979–81 -- more collective preliminary discussion
45.) Emotional Rescue
46.) Tattoo You
47.) Sucking in the Seventies
48.) Still Life (American Concert 1981)
49.) Live at the Checkerboard Lounge, Chicago 1981
50.) Hampton Coliseum (Live 1981) / Live At Leeds Roundhay Park 1982
51.) Undercover
52.) SIDEBAR #6: World War III Declared: a brewing crossfire hurricane

 

Is there a strictly "CD Comparison" thread somewhere?
I could not find it through here or a google site search.
Cheers.

 

Not sure what you mean - if you mean what CD versions do people prefer, There have been at least 2 general threads for post 71, and probably as many for the ABKCO era. Specific titles, probablynot so much, although I think EsotericCD gave opinions on his reviews.

 

Check this thread and its predecessor: http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/rolling-stones-on-cd.353036/

 

Yes, I meant the best sounding CD's. I don't want to trawl all the posts on this though. How are the SHM 2013 discs favoured? I'll go with them if they are good.

 

So far, I have been happy with all of the ones I have bought. For Some Girls, I prefer the Virgin though.

 

Cheers. Just read some of the thread on them and that's convinced me. That was surprisingly painless lol.

 

Nicely done - that is full of TONS of info I had not heard before!

I never thought of Rewind as a self-aware, maybe-this-is-the-end project, but you're right... knowing what we know now, it certainly reads that way.

Also agree that it would be great to see those videos in good quality. I'm of split opinion as to their merits - the band's totally inability to "act" is more of an issue in these narratively-driven videos, but they're full of great visual ideas. Also, the girl in the Undercover video (the one watching TV) is really cute. Just sayin'.

And although the Frank Tashlin sight-gags get tired in She Was Hot, the shot of Keith strumming his guitar, then grabbing the whiskey bottle is super-iconic. It ALMOST makes up for Ron's wobbly guitar...

 

yeah, great stuff by botley in turning Video Rewind into the key text of an otherwise blank period -- and in light of the anecdotes included, it's poignant that it's only bill that mick can get to turn up to participate in the shoot for the framing material. (Still a pretty shoddy package overall, Video Rewind... but probably not much worse than how other '60s legends were packaging their pasts in that awful era for them, the '80s).

what exactly were the family problems charlie was dealing with? I thought his heroin jag was ascribed to a sudden wish to emulate his jazz idols, admittedly a slim rationale. Or, if it's better not to get into it here (probably), what's your main source for the info, botley? It does seem incredible that he and shirley(?) have maintained their marriage since the early '60s...

nice film reference, charliez -- and without wanting to sound like a lech, I think I know what you're saying about the young lass in the "Undercover" vid. As I recall, she's surprisingly un-'80s-ized in appearance -- ie, no permed hair or workout clothes... Probably intentional styling by Temple to give her a more "pure" character, to be ravaged the Stones.

I also like how, as I recall, the Stones performing on TV in the video are somewhat classed up, in almost Jones-era clothes (but not uber-retro, as in "She Was Hot"), to give them more distance from the "characters" in the political film.

 

Huh? Only "Undercover of the Night" is narrative-driven and, at worst, mustachio Mick pulls off a kind of smarmy James Bond-esque action hero. Keith is a perfect villain. Charlie's "acting" turns in "She Was Hot" are an absolute riot (next time you watch it, freeze-frame on the card with his model's measurements and "special talents"). I'm just surprised they let Ron & Keith use what appear to be REAL chainsaws in "Too Much Blood"!

I love how at that moment they chose to use a CRANE SHOT for the damn thing. Also, in the iconic Keith shot you mention, he somehow sells the line "Detroit was smoky grey" even though there are clearly visible apartment buildings just outside the window that look exactly like the place where they were filmed: Mexico City.

 

All three are narrative; they all have stories that require performances other than musical performances (even if the story is as simple as "dudes chase Mick with chainsaws" or "woman seduces the band"). As opposed to the old-fashioned performance videos - like Start Me Up, to name one of many - where the band is just miming the song.

I guess we just have to disagree on their acting ability; the image of Keith with a chainsaw is inherently amusing, especially when chasing Mick, but he and Ronnie look like they're goofing around in home movies. Which is fun and all, but the self-consciousness of it makes the "story" part of each video not work at all. And not a huge criticism either; this discussion is making me want to screen Rewind again, even though I remember wincing through the Bill and Mick bits last time I saw it (probably 20 years ago!)

However, I actually PAID to see "Freejack", so what the hell do I know?

 

Rewind bought on Crete Greece in 1984 when I was stationed there in the Air Force.

 

Let's continue here:

Rolling Stones Album-by-Album Thread (Part 13)