The Rolling Stones: Through The Past, Darkly (Big Hits Vol. 2)
This is the UK version of the group's second compilation album, and again, as with High Tide And Green Grass, it is the best one. It was also the first Stones compilation I had access to - my friend owned it and we all shared around our records back then due to our lack of money. He had this, Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies and Lou Reed's Transformer. I had Mott the Hoople's All The Young Dudes and Ziggy Stardust. So it was like I owned it, seemingly living in my bedroom for weeks on end.
It was the look of The Rolling Stones that first did it for me - the cockiness, the laddish (but pretty harmless) sexism, the sneers, the long hair. A general wilful grubbiness that appealed to many young boys such as myself. I let my hair grow Stones-ish. No mop-top for me, thank you very much. When The Stones really started to resonate with me, sonically, was in 1968 when Jumpin' Jack Flash hit the number one spot. Wow! What a devilish brew of a song. What an accompanying video they showed on Top Of The Pops as well - the group looking positively Mephistophelean. I was ten by then and I loved it. The huge, dirty riff, the menacing lyrics - "I was bawwwn in a crossfire hurricaaaaane...." - and Mick Jagger's drawled, affected but immensely captivating singing. I'll take half a pound of those please...this was the absolute dog's bollocks.
Mother's Little Helper, sung in Jagger’s extremely affected “mockney” voice - that's "mock cockney", in case you didn't know - was patronising, lyrically, to say the least. "What a drag it is getting old" - Jagger sings, taking an unnecessary swipe at stressed-out housewives. No matter, really, though, I guess. They were still comparatively young. That said, the song is unnecessarily sneering and, at times cruel and insensitive. Listening to this, I just don't feel Jagger had the right to tear these poor women apart. Leave 'em alone eh, Mick? They ain't hardly botherin' you none.
Along with communality, drugs and peace, the other leitmotif of the late sixties/early seventies era was space travel. It was here, on 2000 Light Years From Home, that The Stones produced something that was ahead of the game. This got on the space rocket a few years before others, expressing the perceived loneliness of space travel before David Bowie (Space Oddity) and Elton John (Rocket Man), and the mystery of space travel in general long before Hawkwind's 1972 Silver Machine single. Instrumentally, it is also a most impressive track, great drum sound and psychedelic guitars and an ethereal vocal. It is by far the high point on the album. Along with She's A Rainbow they were the Satanic Majesties album's only two really properly memorable tracks.
Let's Spend The Night Together was a very controversial song at the time, prudish US radio and TV shows asking the lyric be changed to "let's spend some time together". How things soon changed. That very summer everyone was sharing the same bed, man. The song is a frantic, attitude-bearing rock number that was covered superbly, in my opinion, by David Bowie on his 1973 Aladdin Sane album. He gives it a wired-up, electric sexuality that outdoes even Jagger, amazingly.
You Better Move On - an odd inclusion here - dating from what was already "way back" in 1964, this Arthur Alexander cover first appeared on the 1964 EP entitled, inventively (not), The Rolling Stones. Jagger delivers the song soulfully, showing that he wasn't just an upbeat blues rocker. It showed a softer more sensitive sound to The Stones, both musically and image-wise. The Stones' version has a rather sweet, innocent appeal to it but, actually, my favourite cover of it was by Mink De Ville on their 1982 Coup De Grâce album.
We Love You was The Stones' "thank you" to their fans number. It is lightweight in a freaky, psychedelic fashion typical of the summer of 1967. Featured on backing vocals are no other than John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The song is full of overdubs and indulges Brian Jones' desire for oddball experimentation. It marks the height of The Stones' thankfully short-lived Beatles-imitation period. It carries with it a strange appeal, however.
Street Fighting Man was an ideal anthem for the turbulent summer of 1968, which saw students rioting in the streets and fighting running battles with police, particularly in Paris. The song takes Martha Reeves & The Vandellas' Dancing In The Street and paraphrases its title and meaning into something darker. Musically, it gives us the first truly great guitar "riff intro" since (possibly) Get Off Of My Cloud or Under My Thumb and Jagger's affected vocal - "my name is called distur-BOWANCE ....what can a poh-wah boh-way do, sep' play in a roggh-roll bai-yand?". Great stuff. As a ten year old boy who had always preferred The Stones to those milksop Beatles, this was music to my young ears. This was how I wanted my Stones to sound, even then. Rod Stewart also did a cracking cover of it on his debut solo album, An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down, in 1969.
The best of The Stones' psychedelic material, She's A Rainbow is a brilliant, addictive piece of pure 1967 in the same vein as Love's She Comes In Colours. It has an unforgettable keyboard hook and an affecting Jagger vocal. It just sums up the zeitgeist, man. I love it and always have done.
A wonderfully tuneful, hooky and totally infectious Stones ballad is up next in Ruby Tuesday, one of my favourites of the "slow Stones" songs. It has lovely, evocative verses and imagery along with an irresistible chorus. As with quite a few Stones songs, it has been covered by others, perhaps in an arguably superior style. Two of these are Rod Stewart on his 1993 Lead Vocalist album and Melanie Safka, whose early seventies throaty "goodbye Roo-bay Toos-day" rendition has always done it for me, big time. I love it. The Stones' version still retains a simple innocence though.
The 'b' side to the We Love You single, the light, inoffensive Dandelion catches on to the hippy movement's often blissful, child-like themes. Once again, McCartney and Lennon join in on backing vocals. No doubt they were all drugged up. Apparently they were all dressed in Paisley and velvet. Gotta love it, man.
A jolly little acoustic, folky song is found now in Sittin' On A Fence, whose selection for this compilation is questionable. It dated from the sessions for 1965's Aftermath. Lyrically, it was a somewhat cynical song, criticising couples who get married. It was hardly a subject for a big us and them rebellion, though, was it? There were better things to rail about, surely?
Honky Tonk Women - no, it wasn't good old Charlie Watts on cowbell, was it? Lots of us spent years thinking it was - including John Otway - if you're an Otway fan you'll recognise the reference, if not, ignore it. Anyway, it was producer Jimmy Miller tapping out that iconic, clunking, metallic rhythm before Keith comes in and blows the lid off the whole damn thing. The lyrics are just so deliciously bawdy too, aren't they? "I met a gin-soaked bar-room Queen in Memphis...." and "I laid a divorcee in New York City", Jagger enunciates these lines wonderfully, in his best leery fashion. Pretty much everything about this single was perfect. It was a candidate for number one in my list. Quite what possessed The Stones to not include it on the Let It Bleed album in preference to the muddy blues of its cousin Country Honk is beyond me.
The US version left out You Better Move On, We Love You and Sittin' On A Fence, including Paint it Black and Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing In the Shadow?, which, were, of course included on the UK version of High Tide And Green Grass.
Much more impressive than much of the UK Aftermath album's material was the song that preceded Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing In The Shadow? as a single - a Stones classic in Paint It, Black. Why the comma in the title though? A processing typo apparently, I'm told. Utilising Brian Jones's Eastern instrumentation obsession to the max, featuring him playing the sitar on the song's now iconic coda and getting right in on the hippy thing, the song is at the same time a hippy freakout and a solid upbeat rocker. It is packed full of energy, hooks, instrumental bits you can sing along with as well as a killer vocal.
Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing In The Shadow? - Motown was huge in 1996 and big brass breaks were everywhere - The Beatles used one notably on Revolver's Got To Get You Into My Life and Keith Richards freely admits that he wanted to get a sort of Otis Redding Stax-ish sound to this odd choice for a single. While that was most laudable in that his influences were impeccable, the song wasn't actually that good. Beginning with some jangly guitar, the brass then arrives in punchy style but the overall sound is really muffled and indistinct. Jagger's vocal is hurried and the whole thing seems just too damn frantic to me. There is a bit of punky energy to it but it is the impression of sonic murk that has always remained with me. No amounts of remastering seem to have improved things. The best bit is the very sixties-ish bit where it slows down for a short while.
