Youth In Reverse

Best of the rest

At the time of the above photo, Mick Jagger was 33 and already old; "The World's Greatest Rock & Roll Band" was well past the artistic zenith that stretched from 1965 to 1972 and coasting on a gentle downslope towards the escarpment that would be the 1980s. After their last unqualified masterpiece, Exile on Main St. (1972), there would be a handful of peaks ('78's excellent Some Girls album, "Emotional Rescue", "Start Me Up"), a smattering of return-to-form mirages (Voodoo Lounge, A Bigger Bang), and a ton of pointless money-grubbing tour souvenir live albums (the avoid-like-the-plague quartet of Flashpoint, Stripped, No Security, and Live Licks). Today The Stones are famous for being old, and for having obscenely expensive ticket prices for their live shows. In fact, one could make the argument that The Rolling Stones' most significant recorded release of the past quarter century was 2002's Forty Licks, their first greatest hits comp to feature selections from both the Decca/London years (now licensed by ABKCO) and the Rolling Stones Records/Virgin years.

Forty Licks' track list is a lot like one of those Arctic ice core samples from An Inconvenient Truth where you can determine the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during different eras from the air bubbles trapped at the corresponding points in the ice. Forty Licks is evenly split between two discs, the first 20 songs going to the ABKCO era and the second 20 reserved for Virgin. The difference in quality is mind blowing, rendered even more stark when you consider that no fewer than four throwaway tracks from 2002 ("Don't Stop", "Keys to Your Love", "Stealing My Heart", "Losing My Touch") pad out the Virgin platter. With the ABKCO disc, you can't help but think "how could they leave off ________?" With the Virgin disc, you have certified top shelf hits with "Start Me Up", "Brown Sugar", "Miss You", "Beast of Burden", "Angie", "Happy", "Tumbling Dice", and "It's Only Rock 'n' Roll". That's eight tracks - nine if you throw in the divisive disco-stab "Emotional Rescue" - out of a possible 20. With a discography as deep and rich as The Stones', even a .450 batting average is completely inexcusable.

Pondering this tragedy over the weekend, I set out to create my own shadow Stones' comp, mixing a few stone cold classics with a couple of hits of the second rank and a smattering of deep album cuts for a result that would flow more like an album, rather than another mindless greatest hits autodial. Clearly, I didn't aim for complete obscurity, although surely obscurity is a relative matter when discussing the Rolling Stones' discography. There are certified hits present, as one could not tell the story of the band, even impressionistically, without them. The results are as follows:

(Note that for purposes of balancing ease of temporal contextualization with ease of assemblage, I opted to identify all singles present with the albums they appear on, where applicable. Fact is, many of these songs are available in their original incarnations on myriad compilations.)

1. "Tumbling Dice" from Exile on Main St. (1972)
   
2. "It's All Over Now" from 12 x 5 (1964)
   
3. "Before They Make Me Run" from Some Girls (1978)
   
4. "Dead Flowers" from Sticky Fingers (1971)
5. "Angie" from Goats Head Soup (1973)
6. "Fool to Cry" from Black and Blue (1976)
7. "All Sold Out" from Between the Buttons (1967)
8. "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" from Out of Our Heads (1965)
9. "Beast of Burden" from Some Girls (1978)
10. "Tell Me" from non-LP single (1964); available on Singles Collection: The London Years
    
11. "Stray Cat Blues" from Beggars Banquet (1968)
12. "Emotional Rescue" from Emotional Rescue (1980)
    
13. "Monkey Man" from Let It Bleed (1969)
14. "Torn and Frayed" from Exile on Main St. (1972)
15. "Salt of the Earth" from Beggars Banquet (1968)
16. "Paint It, Black" from U.S version of Aftermath(1966)

If you want a pre-fab Stones' comp that is more representative of the band's chart topping ubiquitousness (the group was scoring Top Ten singles well into the '80s; their run of commercial success with contemporaneous material is probably only matched at this point by U2 and Madonna), I do have a few recommendations:


Hot Rocks 1964-1971 - Probably pound for pound the finest assemblage of Stones' cuts relative to selections made. At 21 shit-hot tracks spread across two CDs, Hot Rocks is a phenomenal survey of the ABKCO years, including "Wild Horses" and "Brown Sugar", which were singles on London Records prior to their inclusion on the Stones' first Rolling Stones Records release, Sticky Fingers. For the adventurous, there is also More Hot Rocks (Big Hits and Fazed Cookies), focusing more on the pre-"Satisfaction" years and the group's dabblings in psychedelica circa-'67. Both comps were reissued in SACD-hybrid editions as part of the 2002 ABKCO catalogue upgrade.


Singles Collection: The London Years - For the completist, this is exactly what it purports to be: a compendium of every A and B-side issued by The Rolling Stones while they were on London Records, winding circuitously from "Come On" to "Sympathy for the Devil". At a glance, all of the songs on Hot Rocks Vol. 1 are available on Singles Collection, save the inessential live version of "Midnight Rambler" from Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! and the full album version of "You Can't Always Get What You Want", presented here in truncated single form. The added bonus is that, at 58 tracks, Singles Collection presents a gapless portrait of the Stones' ascension from straight R&B practitioners to originators of what is understood today to be mainstream rock and roll. Also available as a 3 disc SACD-hybrid reissue.


Jump Back: 1971-1993 - Bizarrely, for a band brazenly committed to the art of making a buck, there are only two Rolling Stones compilations that approximate a complete overview of the Rolling Stones Records/Virgin years (save Forty Licks). The first of these, Rewind (1971-1984), is out of print, thus narrowing our choices to Jump Back. There's a wee bit of unavoidable overlap between Hot Rocks, Singles Collection, and Jump Back as I guess one would have to be a complete imbecile to leave "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses" off of a greatest hits comp if one had the rights. Aside from that forgivable duplication, Jump Back is the cream of the Stones' second act, including staples "Tumbling Dice", "Miss You", "Start Me Up", "Beast of Burden", and "It's Only Rock 'n' Roll (But I Like It)". Hilariously, this set was originally issued in the U.K. back in 1993, and only made it to American shores in 2004, two years after the supposedly definitive Forty Licks. Still, people are always gonna want "Start Me Up", and outside of Tatoo You, this is the best place to get it.

But wait, there's more:

For odds 'n' sods:

Metamorphosis - A fascinating look at the Mick Jagger/Keith Richards songwriting partnership, mainly through demos and alternate takes. Many of the tracks were cut as instrumentals for other artists to sing over, and yet others would be taken back and reconstituted as proper Stones' songs. Indeed, the chief complaint about this set is that oftentimes there are more session men present than actual Rolling Stones; of course, among these session men are Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, so do you really care? Another ABKCO SACD-hybrid.

Live:

Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! - The Stones were/are a legendary live act, and there is no shortage of attempts to document this. However, aside from some alleged bootlegs that you or I will never lay ears on, this 1970 set remains the definitive Rolling Stones live album. Culled from the legendary 1969 tour that culminated in Altamont, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! is a gut punch from start to finish, very nearly transmitting the presence and velocity of the group at their apex through your speakers. It's rock qua rock, distilled to a naked set of gears and ball bearings. For evidence of this check out the cover of Chuck Berry's "Carol".

Film:

Gimme Shelter - This is the greatest rock and roll film ever made. Intended by the Maysles brothers (Salesman, Grey Gardens) to document the group's 1969 American tour and their planned "Woodstock West" at San Francisco's Altamont Speedway, Gimme Shelter instead ended up an epitaph for the Sixties writ large. The film boils down to one incredibly powerful sequence: Mick Jagger watching footage on a Movieola editing set-up of 18 year-old Meredith Hunter being stabbed to death by a Hell's Angel a few feet from the Altamont stage. For the record, the Stones were wrapping up "Under My Thumb" at the time of the murder, not "Sympathy for the Devil", as is commonly asserted. Nevertheless, a print-the-legend mentality took hold and the band excluded "Sympathy" from their set lists for years following the event.