Great Albums: Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed

So for my 250th post I am going to talk a little bit about one of my favorite albums ever.  The Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed.

I have mentioned this before, but I grew up in a small town with limited radio, almost none of it rock and roll.  So my rock and roll education came almost entirely from my parents’ collection.  Let It Bleed was one of the five or six Stones albums my parents had, and was the most recent chronologically.

The other albums my parents had were their early blues records.  Those are fun records to listen to still, but there’s a huge divide between those and Let It Bleed.  In fact, it’s fashionable to divide the Stones’ career between Pre and Post Beggar’s Banquet, and I agree mostly that this is how they should be seen.  That was when they really matured as a band.  Or when they became irrevocably debauched.  In their case it might just be the same thing.

Anyway, also in fashion is to state that the four albums they put out in this era- Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St.– are mostly the same level of quality and that picking the best of the four is mostly a matter of taste.  I agree with this in theory, but since my parents only owned one of these, Let It Bleed is the best, and it’s grown better as I get older.

When I was a kid it was a collection of crazy songs with a funny cover of a cake made out of junk that’s destroyed on the back cover.  I had to get older to know what some of the songs were about.  I had to get older than that to understand some of the feelings conveyed in the music.

Let’s review some songs-

I don’t know if there’s much to say about Gimme Shelter that hasn’t already been said.  It overplayed and used too often in movies.  It’s also one of the best songs of the 60s.

I wasn’t there so who knows, maybe I’m full of it, but I’ve always assumed that the great struggles of the 60s must have taken a toll on a lot of people, and this song captures that.  It’s a haunting song.  Keith Richards claimed to never like writing topical songs or songs about politics because one day they’d stop being relevant.  There is that risk.  But sometimes having a song that acts like a time capsule is a great thing too.

And purely in technical terms it’s masterful in how it keeps building in intensity.  The Rolling Stones were great at arranging songs to sound like they weren’t actually arranged.

Love in Vain is a nice choice for second- the first so is so intense it’s good to unwind a bit

By this time the Stones could actually do some decent blues.  The guitar is really pretty as well.

Country Honk was ruined for me by that scourge of record listeners everywhere- the record skipping.

That ever happen to you?  You have a song you like, but somewhere along the way the record gets scratched and that sound of a record skipping every single time at the same point in the song becomes etched into your mind, so that every time you hear the song you cringe, expecting the record to skip?  It happens to me, even when I hear it in a format that can’t possibly skip- like the internet

the sweetest ballroom queen I met in Memphis,

in Memphis,

in Memphis,

in Memphis,

in Memphis

Arrrrrrrgh!

Live with Me is the funkiest song on the album

I loved this song and its wild, anarchic sound.  I had no idea what it was about.  This was my favorite song on the album when I was a kid.  So nasty, and such an epic ending when the piano players starts going for it.

Just after that Let It Bleed takes nasty to another level.

Like Love in Vain, this is the song that tones it down a bit after a fast rocker.  As a child I knew what breasts were, so I had an inkling of what was going on in the song, even if I couldn’t have said exactly what.  I had no idea why Mick was singing so slow.  I have a better idea of what he was trying to convey by doing that now.

Midnight Rambler is a song I liked better when I was a kid.  It’s just a little too long.  I’ve never really cared for You Got the Silver.  Oh well, every album has a dud or two.

Monkey Man strikes me as sort of a throwback to when the Rolling Stones were trying to write pop songs, but with an edge to it.

The piano is really pretty.  Wikipedia tells me that the other instrument in the beginning of the song is vibraphone.  Didn’t know that.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want always struck me as an attempt to provide something uplifting at the end of an album full of danger, fear, cooks who are whores, visiting parking lots for “coke and sympathy” and sticking knives down people’s throats.  Like the Stones are trying to make listeners feel better about themselves after their journey to the depths of depravity and I’ve always been grateful for them doing that.

One of the great things about the Rolling Stones is how they can work in so many different genres but always sound exactly like themselves.  Like the Stones don’t bend their music to play in other genres, genres bend to make room for the Stones.

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Anyway, 250 posts feels like a real milestone.  I honestly can’t believe I’ve kept at it for as long as I have.  It’s been very interesting though, and thanks to everyone who reads this.  I’ll try to keep ’em coming!

Man I ain’t tryin’ to be nobody, just want a chance to be myself

Apologies to John Cougar Mellencamp, but this has always been the perfect small town song for me

Man I ain’t tryin to be nobody

I grew up in a town of around 5,000 people, in the poorest corner of the state.  Tryin’ to be nobody is the definition of ridiculous.  You are born the child of a rich farmer and you’re somebody.  Or you aren’t, and you’re not anybody.  And nothing you do will change that.

I’m not saying anyone is going to actively prevent you from “being nobody”- opportunities are just limited.

Reconciling my limited ambition with having possibilities open to me since I’ve moved to the city is something I’ve always struggled with.  When I arrived at college I met people from big cities- they had all kinds of ideas of things they might do.  Growing up everyone I knew was in farming or public service.  There was one dentist in my town, no doctors, no lawyers, no accountant’s office (though I did have a friend whose dad was an occasionally employed accountant), no insurance salespeople, none of the regular careers people from the city take for granted.   I mean, some of the people in the neighboring town must have done this things, but in my town, not that I knew of.

Going back to where I grew up recently, I met not one, but two dudes at the club who told me about how they really wanted to make a career in music.  They’re currently doing menial jobs, but they’re working on music in their spare time.  They’ve got dreams.

I didn’t want to poop on their dreams, and be like “give up now, it’s waaaay harder than you think,” because that’s just mean.  But this is the thing about growing up in a small town- any career outside of cop, teacher or tractor driver seems kind of outlandish, so you might as well aim high.

For me, I just didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I knew I was too smart to be a tractor driver.  So I was lost.  I still kind of am.  I’ve never been driven to do anything like some of the people I know.  Maybe it would have been the same if I’d grown up in the city, maybe it wouldn’t.  Who knows.

just want a chance to be myself

I love Dwight’s version of this song.  It’s a pretty sweet mix of southern California culture.  Where I grew up the town was, at the time, pretty split down the middle of white and Mexican people.

I may have told this story before, so skip this paragraph if you’ve heard it, but there was a family in my town that would sometimes hold parties at their house.  They were, by our standards, poor but they had bought a house on some very marginal property along on of the handful of very un-scenic rivers that ran through the valley.  In the backyard they had salvaged some steel and concrete and built a large dancefloor, complete with stage and barbeque area.  They’d have local Mexican bands play music and party into the night.

This is the kind of thing you just can’t do in the city.  There’d be noise complaints, complaints about unpermitted building, complaints about their front yard, which they used as a parking lot.  Country life, in that regard, was pretty awesome.

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I hear about rural life being “live and let live” and I suspect that’s true for lots of people, and it’s definitely true that there are no HOAs to make you miserable and when you’re on your own property you can get drunk and blast away with your shotgun just cause you feel like it.

But there’s also life in the fishbowl.  Everyone knows what you’re up to.  At the same time I was never really a part of life there.  My parents were both solidly middle-class workers in an area that had a very tiny middle class.  We had no roots there- having arrived when I was two years old from Orange County.  We didn’t own a farm, I never played football.  I was the oddball whose family lived in Europe for a year and who went off to private school for a couple years in high school.  I did have a chance to be myself there because no one had any expectations for my behavior.  If I’d been from a rich farm family, I don’t think that would have been true.

Who knows?  In the end, you can be yourself wherever you want to.  You just might end up lonely, depending on how “yourself” is.  So I’ve always taken the line

just want a chance to be myself

as a sort of resignation.  I don’t know anything about the songwriter, Mr Homer Joy, beyond what he tells us in the song.  What the song says to me isn’t that he’s an oddball looking for acceptance, but that he’s weary of the pressures of big city life, weary from “a thousand of miles of thumbing.”

I don’t miss my hometown.  My family moved out a long time ago and I’d never move back there.  I don’t even really think of it as my hometown anymore.  It was just somewhere I lived until I was 18.   But sometimes I’m weary from living in the city.  Sometimes I feel like I should have made something more of myself and that growing up in a small town held me back.   Most of the time I don’t want to be nobody.

Continuing thoughts on cultural appropriation- the 1960s

Here’s where the discussion of rock and roll gets interesting.  Most of the early rock and rollers had been from the South and could plausibly claim to have been personally exposed to the type of music they were borrowing from.  But by the early 60s they had all mostly disappeared, died or were no longer very popular. Then along came the British Invasion.

There’s not much earnestness left in American culture so I listen to things like this and I hear a kind of desire to prove that they’re real bluesmen

But obviously they’re just some kids from the UK.  So were these guys:

I pick out these two bands because they were trying a lot harder to ground their music in authentic American sounds.  I’ve said before I find the whole concept of authenticity in music fairly foolish, but you can understand the position they’re in.  They want to sound as real as possible.  The Animals pulled it off fairly well.  The Stones… well, they’d get much better at American music in few years.

And this is where I don’t know how to feel about the whole idea of cultural appropriation.

I’ve recorded a few of my songs and I’ve put them on the internet, which means possibly somewhere, someone is copying some idea from one of my songs.  Not likely, but stay with me.  I actually don’t care.  I can make more.  If someone gets rich and they direct some interest my way, that would be even better.  But I don’t have an actual career to think about.

Let’s imagine you’re Howlin’ Wolf.  You release this song:

It wasn’t a huge hit, but it’s a great song.  Then some art school kids from England come along and release their clunky* version and it shoots to #1 on the British charts.  Even the audience in this video looks bemused.

Now if you’re Howlin’ Wolf you might be kicking yourself.  Some little punk kids have come along and outdone you.  From what I read Howlin’ Wolf was a smart man and was wise with his money, having a long career free of the hard times that would strike some of his blues contemporaries.  But he would never be in the same tax bracket as the Stones.

Is that fair?  Howlin’ Wolf was gifted with a powerful voice and an imposing figure, but not a face that would ever make him a pop star, even if we totally ignore racism he would have faced in that time period.  So he was probably always at a disadvantage when it came to young, cute guys from England.

I don’t really know the answer.  We all start out young punks and I can imagine being the Rolling Stones and hearing all this amazing, exotic music and thinking I want to do that.  I kind of want to now.

On the other hand, the world didn’t really need the Rolling Stones version of Little Red Rooster.  I like the Animals version of The House of the Rising Sun, so I’ll give that one a pass.

Did the world need the Yardbirds or any of the other British Invasion bands to deliver inferior versions of this?

Or a Yardbirds version of this?

Or the Beatles’ cute, but corny version of this?

Or the Beatles’ fairly uninspired cover of this**?

No, not really.  These songs are much better than those early British Invasion versions.  The best thing the British bands did was start writing their own songs.  .

But I’m not saying the original is always better or that no one should ever do cover versions.  Just that I can understand if some American musicians were upset about having fairly weak versions of their songs becoming better known than the originals.

 

*It’s not that bad, but Mick Jagger really wasn’t ready to be a blues singer at that point.

**Actually, I read Smokey Robinson’s autobiography and he said that at the time Motown was just starting out and that having the Beatles record the song brought them a lot of attention, so insofar as it helped introduce Motown to the world, the answer is yes.

The People’s Music!

So I was talking about this the other day, but I refer to certain kinds of music as The People’s Music.

I don’t mean it’s music of a certain class background, like this:

Or that it’s even about a certain theme.  It’s just music that people without formal training or lots of money can play.  America has a ton of examples of The People’s Music:

Folk

Blues

Country

Punk Rock

Rap

Dubstep

There’s a lot of overlap between them.  And there are a lot more styles than this!  These are just the ones that popped into my head.

I don’t have any formal training myself, so this tends  to interest me.  This isn’t to take away from musical styles likes Classical, Jazz, R & B or Disco that require a high level of skill or training.  But not being able to contribute to technically difficult musical styles also means that on a certain level I can’t understand them.  It’s my loss, I know.

People complain about how rock and roll is dead or kids today listen to crap music, or whatever, but I would bet that we could come back in 100 years and what people would be listening to would have a lot in common with what we listen to today.  People will always play musical instruments like the guitar or drums because there is a physicality to them that appeals to some people.  I couldn’t care less about playing fast licks on my guitar, but I love to bang on it and throw it around.  I can’t be the only one.

Other people love putting songs together piece by piece on their computer and creating something like they’re putting together a puzzle.  That’s not my thing, but I know plenty of people who love to do this.  There will always be a place in music for both of these.

What Happened to Rock and Roll Part II

So Steven Hyden came out with the last installment of his Winner’s History of Rock and Roll, focusing this time of the Black Keys.

I like the Black Keys.  I first hear Thickfreakness and wasn’t impressed- sounded exactly like it was recorded in a basement, and it apparently was.  But Rubber Factory I liked a lot.  I moved on to other things for a while, and didn’t really hear much of them again until the last couple years when they really started to be played on the radio a lot.

But what’s interesting to me about The Black Keys, and you might as well add The White Stripes in to this list as well, is how they came out of the garage rock movement of the early 2000s and how the movement largely disowned them when they became famous.  By any stretch of the imagination The Black Keys and The White Stripes are just as rock-nerdy as any indie garage fan.  I can’t even listen to interviews with Jack White.  I’m a rock fan, but I’m not a rock nerd, and I just don’t care that much about rock history or vintage gear.

But both bands had hits.  Real radio hits, not some song you’d hear once a month on alternative stations.

How did they do it?    Steven fills in the details on The Black Keys.  They came out of the midwest, largely bypassing the indie scene, or so they say (this may be more of the band’s own mythology than actual truth).  They got tired of being critical favorites (and being broke) and brought in a producer Dangermouse and started adding instruments.  I like their radio hits.  I’m glad they’re doing well.  The White Stripes, I suspect, are famous because Jack White is a vampire or made a deal with the devil.  I’m glad he’s doing well too.

So why don’t other bands try to produce radio hits?  I don’t know. Steven says this, and I kind of agree:

When I said earlier that indie has failed rock and roll, this is what I meant: Indie bands haven’t done enough to compete. The status quo in indie rock these days is to make records aimed directly at upper-middle-class college graduates living in big cities. Only a small handful of indie bands attempt to reach listeners who aren’t already on the team; even the really good records reside firmly in a familiar wheelhouse of tastefully arty and historically proven “college rock” aesthetics and attitudes that mean nothing to the outside world.

What I hear mostly on our local alternative station is either the hits of the past (roughly the 90s + some old punk tunes) or music that I just don’t care for.  My friend and I joke that every indie hit sounds like it belongs in an Apple commercial.  For lack of a better word, it’s cutesy, and it’s just not my thing.  I like my music big, dumb and obvious.

But here’s the thing, I can barely stand classic rock radio either.  I like The Cars, I like the occasional 70s Aerosmith, I like some Led Zeppelin, I love The Stones.  But Bad Company, Foreigner?  I don’t even know who they are.  KISS is a bad joke.  Bob Seger, The Nuge?  Barf.

I love punk rock.  I love garage rock.  I love music made by amateurs.  But I don’t want to feel like a snob either.  I have no need for cultural capital and I have no hipster fiefdom I need to protect.  Steven argues that if we want a thriving underground, we need to have a thriving overground.  I agree.

Right now I listen to Top 40, because it doesn’t cause me any cognitive dissonance.

I thought he might bring this up, and I was glad that he did:

If you happen to be part of the audience that rock music used to cater to — if you work an unsexy job in an unsexy town in an unsexy part of the country — you’re not really invited to the party anymore. Which is OK, because there’s still a form of rock music that’s made for you, it’s just not called rock music — it’s called country.

I have tried to listen to current country.  I can’t.  I fucking hate it.  How couldn’t I?  Brad Paisley is calling me a pussy and every other damn song is about Jesus or getting cancer.  The movie of my life can be a big enough bummer without adding a country soundtrack.  We live in a divided nation and country services one half of it quite well.  You can’t knock it for doing that.

I’m fucked, pretty much.  I have always loved pop and I’ve always tried to write songs that would appeal to anyone.  I like big dumb rock, I like clever, subversive rock.  I want everyone at the show to have a good time.  I’m not hopeful for the future of Rock and Roll, and Steven doesn’t seem so hopeful either.

I want it to matter outside of my own head. Either way, I’ll be listening. Will you?

Maybe.