| April 21st, 2005 09:13 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
[I suspect that this had already been posted once since it's several months old. I just ran across it tonight and don't recall having read it though. Anyway is it worth reading/posting twice??? Sure...why not???]
On ’60s rock ‘n’ roll masterpiece, Stones prove both messianic and satanic
By Andrew Miragliotta
October 31, 2004 in Voices
Between the death of Brian Jones and the arrival of Mick Taylor, it was fairly possible that the Rolling Stones’ 1969 album Let It Bleed could have been one of their worst. Instead, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards stepped up to the plate, and the result was a crude and bluesy classic that ranks among their top albums.
As far as album openers go, “Gimme Shelter” remains a standard in rock. Richards’ ghostly riff provides the backbone of the song, and Merry Clayton lays on her booming vocals to add to Jagger’s apocalyptic vision. It’s almost as if the song were calling for Altamont, the Bay Area concert that would end in tragedy later that year. And with lyrics like “War, children/It’s just a shot away,” the song still delivers chills today.
The energy dies in the following song, the Stones’ take on prolific bluesman Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain.” While it’s slow, the song features a very dirty and reflective Jagger with a voice that echoes much of their previous album, Beggar’s Banquet. Riding the wave of the British Invasion, it seems as if the Stones wanted to prove to America that they could not only rock harder, but rock harder in traditionally American styles of music.
This sentiment continues on “Country Honk,” a country-western version of their single “Honky Tonk Women.” A British law prohibited singles from being released on albums unless they were of the “greatest hits” variety, and it’s unfortunate, because the original would have been a much better fit with the album. The band improvised, both figuratively and literally, and most of the song sounds like a jam session. Either way, it works.
If there is any album in the Stones catalog that should be considered Keith’s, Let It Bleed is it. He proves this throughout the work; his riffs are all solid as he plays almost every type of guitar, but his dexterity is most notable on the fourth track, “Live With Me.” Here he takes the idea of the bass to a new level. He also provides the lead vocals on “You Got the Silver,” where he tries to come across as Dylan, but doesn’t quite pull it off. The song slips up a little, especially lyrically, but no album is without its flaws, right?
In between is the title track, “Let It Bleed,” and the harmonica-propelled “Midnight Rambler.” The former is one of the band’s raunchiest, and features great piano work by Ian “Stu” Stewart. Whether or not the song should have been the namesake of the album is up for debate, but it definitely adds the element of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll that the Stones are known for. “Midnight Rambler” is pure rock in its simplest form. The song is lyrically and musically minimal and shows just how easy rock can be.
The end of the album stands out as much as the beginning, with the eerie and incoherent “Monkey Man,” followed by “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The introduction of “Monkey Man” starts to echo some of the sounds of Motown, but that’s eventually shattered with garbled lyrics like, “I’m a cold Italian pizza/I could use a lemon squeezer/Would you do?” There are bits of profundity that break through, like “Well I hope we’re not too messianic/Or a trifle too satanic/We love to play the blues.” What the song lacks lyrically, it makes up for musically, with Bill Wyman’s vibes and Nicky Hopkins’ piano forming a melodic yet sinister air.
Finally, only the London Bach Choir could handle the heroic final track, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Featuring a full choir, a beautiful French horn line, and a pipe organ, the song’s message is a great contrast with that of the album’s opener. While the piece is based on only two chords (I-IV), it builds from a soft ballad into a full-blown orchestral triumph, and is the perfect climax to a larger-than-life album.
Overall, Let It Bleed falters in very few places and serves as the bridge between Woodstock and Altamont, the two events that defined the music business at the end of the 60s. It was at the beginning of the 70s that the Stones proclaimed themselves the “World’s Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band”, and with albums like Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. following Let It Bleed, it would be hard to tell them they were wrong.
If you like Jet, Velvet Revolver, the White Stripes, Blur, or the Black Crowes, then you should check out Let It Bleed.
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
| April 21st, 2005 09:52 PM |
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| Soldatti |
Classic from start to finish. |
| April 21st, 2005 10:42 PM |
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| Egbert |
Thanks 10K - I don't recall seeing this one before. |
| April 21st, 2005 11:02 PM |
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| corgi37 |
Brilliant album, no doubt about it. |
| April 21st, 2005 11:25 PM |
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| time is on my side |
Let It Bleed is a masterpiece- not only one of the best by the Stones but one of the greatest albums ever. |
| April 22nd, 2005 05:39 AM |
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| sj |
Let It Bleed is one of the masterpieces of the last century. What other album runs such a emotional range as this does, both heavy and dark: Midnight Rambler, GS, Live With Me, to light and loving: Love In Vain, YCAGWYW, You Got the Silver and the grey spot in between:LIB?
Cheers fellas for an incredible contribution. Oh.. and if you happen to be reading this, I wanna see you guys rock Hyde Park for free again!! |
| April 22nd, 2005 08:35 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
quote:
sj wrote:
Let It Bleed is one of the masterpieces of the last century.
For sure. It was the BIG nail in the Beatles coffin, destroyng the myth forever that the Beatles were better than the Stones. |
| April 22nd, 2005 08:35 AM |
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| Bruno Stone |
It`s their best record to me.
And somehting that i never understand: What`s ``vibes``?
I know that is that thing in the beginning of Monkey Man and right before Mick sing ``... monkey woman too``
Somebody to give me info, please. |
| April 22nd, 2005 10:49 AM |
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| HomerJRichards |
Definitely my favourite album of all time. GS gives me goose pimples every time i hear it - especially the intro. It's so foreboding & dangerous, as if some heavy shit is about to go down. The Doors riders on the storm does the same thing to me as well. |
| April 22nd, 2005 10:59 AM |
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| rocky |
the let it bleed outtake" i don't know the reason why "
11 min long,,,my quest is ,is it from spring 69 ? or ,exile outtake,,?the same thing "i ain't lying" ? rocky |
| April 22nd, 2005 11:02 AM |
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| egon |
love the album, but exile is still no 1, followed by sticky
and then bleed.
well maybe bleed and sticky a shared no 2.... |
| April 22nd, 2005 02:31 PM |
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| Factory Girl |
Let It Bleed was my first...Stones album, so it'll always be near & dear to my heart.
For the record, I've always loved "country Honk".
And, I've never liked YCAGWYW-it just drags and drags!
So, there ya'll go!! |
| April 22nd, 2005 02:58 PM |
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| glencar |
How scandalous! |
| April 22nd, 2005 03:00 PM |
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| glencar |
I DO like YCAGWYW and I'll never forget the first time I heard it in concert(Philly opener, 1981). After an hour or more of clashing& smashing guitars, the gentle beguiling sounds of YCAGWYW wafted over the huge crowd & we all joined in with Mick on the chorus. It's one of the best moments from my many Stones concerts. |
| April 22nd, 2005 03:04 PM |
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| Factory Girl |
Oh, glenny, you're so gentle and beguiling!! 
I love ya, but this (Factory) Girl likes to rock-out (with a touch of country!)!
[Edited by Factory Girl] |
| April 22nd, 2005 03:05 PM |
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| glencar |
Well, to be frank, I could do with them skipping it these days. I'd rather hear Sister Morphine or Almost Hear You Sigh in the ballad spot.
[Edited by glencar] |
| April 22nd, 2005 03:07 PM |
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| Factory Girl |
WOW, we post in sync!
I'm watching my KOL dvd next (Thanks, MRD8)!!! |
| April 22nd, 2005 03:10 PM |
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| glencar |
Will KOL open for the Big Boys this fall? I'd like to see that. |
| April 22nd, 2005 06:52 PM |
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| Factory Girl |
KOL is the next big thing...maybe! PM me (or MRD8) for more info. |
| April 22nd, 2005 07:54 PM |
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| Soldatti |
Let It Bleed
UK Chart: #1, 29 wks on chart - Sales: 300.000
US Chart: #3, 44 wks on chart - Sales: 3.000.000
Greil Marcus (Rolling Stone, Issue 49, 1969)
Let It Bleed is the last album by the Stones we'll see before the Sixties, already gone really, become the Seventies; it has the crummiest cover art since Flowers, with a credit sheet that looks like it was designed by the United States Government Printing Office (all courtesy of the inflated Robert Brownjohn), and the best production since, well, "Honky Tonk Women." The music has tones that are at once dark and perfectly clear, while the words are slurred and often buried for a stronger musical effect. The Stones as a band and Jagger and Mary Clayton and Keith Richards and Nanette Newman and Doris Troy and Madelaine Bell and the London Bach Choir as singers carry the songs past "lyrics" into pure emotion. There's a glimpse of a story—not much more. And like Beggars' Banquet, Let It Bleed has the feel of Highway 61 Revisited.
On songs like "Live With Me," "Midnight Rambler," and "Let It Bleed," the Stones prance through all their familiar roles, with their Rolling Stones masks on, full of lurking evil, garish sexuality, and the hilarious and exciting posturing of rock and roll Don Juans. On "Monkey Man" they grandly submit to the image they've carried for almost the whole decade, and then crack up digging it: "All my friends are junkies! (That's not really true...)" And there are other songs, hidden between the flashier cuts, waiting for the listener to catch up with them: the brilliant revival of Robert Johnson's exquisite "Love In Vain," and Keith Richards' haunting ride through the diamond mines. "You Got the Silver."
And yet it's the first and last of Let It Bleed that seem to matter most. The frightening desperation of "Gimmie Shelter" and the confused frustration of "You Can't Always Get What You Want" give the lie to the bravado of "Midnight Rambler" or "Live With Me." Not that those songs don't work — they do, of course, as crunching, soaring dreams of conquest and pop supremacy. They're great numbers. But "Gimmie Shelter" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want" both reach for reality and end up confronting it, almost mastering what's real, or what reality will feel like as the years fade in. It's a long way from "Get Off My Cloud" to "Gimmie Shelter," a long way from "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" to "You Can't Always Get What You Want."
That's not to say the Stones can't move fast and play all their roles at once—they can, right on stage—but the force of the new vulnerability blurs the old stance of arrogance and contempt. The music of these two songs is just that much stronger than anything else on the album—they can't be ignored, and the images and moods they raise blur the old stance of arrogance and contempt. Once the Stones were known, someone's said, as the group that would always take a good old-fashioned piss against a good old-fashioned gas station attendant. And now Mick sings it this way too: "I went down to the demonstration/ To get my fair share of abuse ..."
"Gimmie Shelter" is a song about fear; it probably serves better than anything written this year as a passageway straight into the next few years. The band builds on the dark beauty of the finest melody Mick and Keith have ever written, slowly adding instruments and sounds until an explosively full presence of bass and drums rides on over the first crest of the song into the howls of Mick and a woman, Mary Clayton. It's a full-faced meeting with all the terror the mind can summon, moving fast and never breaking so that men and women have to beat that terror at the game's own pace. When Mary Clayton sings alone, so loudly and with so much force you think her lungs are bursting, Richard's frames her with jolting riffs that blaze past her and take it back to Mick. Their answer and their way out matches the power of the threat: "It's just a shot away, it's just a shot away ... it's just a kiss away, it's just a kiss away." The truly fearful omen of the music is that you know just a kiss won't be enough. This song, caught up in its own momentum, says you need the other too.
You remember the Stones' girls, the common, flirty (or was it "dirty"?) machine operator of "The Spider and the Fly," or for that matter the poor girl back home who said "when you've done your show go to bed"? They're all still here on Let It Bleed, with their masks on so you can use them—all the cooks and maids, upstairs and downstairs, in "Live With Me," or the presumably well-mangled victims of The Midnight Rambler. But the real women of this album seem to be women who can shout like Mary Clayton—gutty, strong, and tougher than any of the delightful leering figures that are jumping out of the old Stones' orgy. She can stand up to Mick and match him, and in fact, she steals the song. That's what makes "Gimmie Shelter" such an overwhelming recording—it hits from both sides, with no laughs, no innuendoes, and nothing held back. The Stones have never done anything better.
That's not a pace to maintain, obviously.
Meanwhile, as the Rolling Stones close out the Sixties and move into the Seventies with Let It Bleed, a new book's been published, photographs by David Bailey (once the Stones' photographer) of the celebrities who meant something in London these last ten years. It's called Good-bye Baby & Amen—to translate the subtitle, "A Wild Dance for the Sixties." It attempts to capture, in pictures and print, the liberation London found when the Empire was jettisoned, when Christine Keeler cut the boards out from under the platform of the British Establishment, when John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Peter Townshend drove out the old with the noise of the new music, when movie stars and directors and models took art out of the museums and took their clothes off at the same time. The book reaches for that sense of freedom already past, urging images of one long party lasting through the years, some still looking for it.
There's a strange quote from Bryan Forbes, pictured with Nanette Newman, who sings on two tracks of Let It Bleed: "The curious thing is that ideas float in the air and a lot of us explored the same territory; there was no collusion. We weren't committing adultery with each other's permission. We never knew, in fact, that we were sleeping with the same girl." Forbes grasps a sense of excitement and creativity that was unconsciously shared, and the sexuality that pervades his talk only heightens its impact. In London, in the Sixties, when styles on Carnaby Street changed by the day, when each new group was exciting, when America looked to London with envy, joy, and, really, wonder, one could see a mad pursuit of every next day. They really seemed to be building some kind of flimsy freedom, those English.
Yet as you stare at the sometimes striking pictures of Goodbye—Marianne Faithful pure against the sunset, Susannah York projecting and restraining sex, the Beatles and the Stones looking like kings of it all, and the weird, scary double-page of Christine Keeler vamping it to a close—you see that the book cannot really bring the era into focus. It's as if these people and the years they lived through were never there at all, like an American friend's vision of rock-and-roll-London at its finest peak of frenzy:
Tonight, to the consternation of the duly delegated authorities, an unkempt mob of anarchists clad in body paint and fright wigs stormed the Houses of Parliament following their frenzied participation in the Intergalactic Sonic Sit-In at the Royal Albert Hall. After laying siege to the speaker's podium, they used their cigarette lighters to fuse the works of Big Ben into a bronze statue of Smokey Robinson . . .
Gerard Van Der Leun
America's own Sixties—assassination, riot, war and the cold gloom of Richard Nixon—caught up with London's party: The mad, heroic student revolution of Paris gave the very idea of Carnaby Street a ludicrous tinge, while those same street-fights pushed the Stones into a new disenchantment with "sleepy London town." You mean swinging London? Then the blinding eye of Godard suddenly revealed the directors of English films as second-rate.
It became hard for Americans to think of London as a city—for most of us, it became the place where the Beatles, the Stones, and the Who all lived. A few years before when Antonioni came to town, he made his movie about a photographer. That seemed to say it all. As the era faded Godard made his first English film—with the Rolling Stones. They and a few others have lasted, and if the rest have lost their meaning, at least to America, that is why Bailey's book, and really his own dated, stylized way of taking pictures, carries a truly pathetic message: "We were there! We really were! It was a grand time ..."
This era and the collapse of its bright and flimsy liberation are what the Stones leave behind with the last song of Let It Bleed. The dreams of having it all are gone, and the album ends with a song about compromises with what you want—learning to take what you can get, because the rules have changed with the death of the Sixties. Back a few years, all of London's new lower-class middle-class aristocracy were out for just what they wanted and they damned well got it. But no one can live off a memory that vanished sense of mastery felt in, when was it, '65, '66? If "Gimmie Shelter" is the Stones' song of terror, "You Can't Always Get What You Want" looks for satisfaction in resignation. And that sort of goal isn't what made "Satisfaction" the unanimous nation-wide poll-winning choice for the greatest rock and roll song of all time. But then the radio stations don't hold those polls anymore. You have to reach for this song yourself.
This is one of the most outrageous productions ever staged by a rock and roll band, and every note of it works to perfection: the slow, virginal choral introduction; the intensely moving, really despairing sounds of Kooper's horn and Keith's slow strum; and then the first verse and first chorus by Mick, singing almost unaccompanied. From there it dissolves and builds again with surges of organ, lovely piano ripples, long lead electric runs by Richards, drumming that carries the song over every crescendo—music that begins in a mood of complete tragedy and fatigue and ends with optimism and complete exuberance. The song, in a way, is as much a movie as Blow-Up—beginning and ending with a party in a Chelsea mansion, the singer meeting a strung-out, vicious girl he apparently knew from some years before, when things were different all around. It moves from there into street-fighting and frustration, and then to the strangest scene of all, a young man trying to strike up some sort of friendship with an old man who's past it. The results are much grimmer than anything out of "Midnight Rambler."
I went down to the Chelsea drugstore
To get your prescription filled
I was standing in line with Mr. Jimmy
And man, did he look pretty ill
We decided that we would have a soda
My favorite flavor's cherry red
I sang my song to Mr. Jimmy
And he said one word to me
And that was death
From there, of course, it's back to the party.
So in Let It Bleed we can find every role the Stones have ever played for us—swaggering studs, evil demons, harem keepers and fast life riders—what the Stones meant in the Sixties, what they know very well they've meant to us. But at the beginning and the end you'll find an opening into the Seventies—harder to take, and stronger wine. They have women with them this time, and these two magnificent songs no longer reach for mastery over other people, but for an uncertain mastery over the more desperate situations the coming years are about to enforce.
[Edited by Soldatti] |
| April 22nd, 2005 11:02 PM |
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| Brainbell Jangler |
"vibes"=vibraphone: a musical instrument similar to a marimba but having metal bars and rotating disks in the resonators to produce a vibrato; also called "vibra-harp." |
| April 23rd, 2005 02:35 PM |
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| Bruno Stone |
quote:
Brainbell Jangler wrote:
"vibes"=vibraphone: a musical instrument similar to a marimba but having metal bars and rotating disks in the resonators to produce a vibrato; also called "vibra-harp."
Thank you. |
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