Intermediate work:
While John Lennon and Paul McCartney formed a songwriting partnership long before The Beatles made them multimillionaires, Jagger and Richards were encouraged to become songwriters just as The Stones became famous. The early Stones albums lean heavily on covers of blues and rock standards and current R&B hits, reflecting the purist leanings of then-leader Brian Jones, who founded the band. But as Jagger and Richards, at Oldham's urging, because the main creative forces in The Stones, Jones became the group's ace multi-instrumentalist, introducing exotic new sounds on the band's records.
After refining their songwriting on two near-classics from 1965, Out Of Our Heads and December's Children (And Everybody's), Jagger and Richards produced their first album of all-original material with 1966's Aftermath, also their first full-fledged masterpiece and a template for every classic Stones album that came afterward. It was here that Jagger—always an underrated lyricist—established the themes he would ruminate on throughout his career: sex as pleasure, sex as power, love disguised as hate, and hate disguised as love. The songs were sarcastic, dark, and casually shocking. They were also misogynistic, though "Stupid Girl" and especially "Under My Thumb" could also be heard as disturbing portraits of their hatefully macho protagonists. Still, Jagger made sure to blur the line between critique and celebration. It was part of a complex, slippery persona that let Jagger have it both ways. He could be good and evil, man and woman, tough and tender, victim and victimizer. It was a confounding, complicated image, and willfully constructed to be misunderstood and even alienating, but it made Jagger one of rock's most compelling frontmen.
"Stupid Girl" by The Rolling Stones
Three years after Aftermath, The Stones were making the best albums of their career. Starting with Beggars Banquet in 1968 and ending with Exile On Main St. in 1972, The Stones enjoyed arguably the greatest creative period for any rock band, also releasing the masterpieces Let It Bleed in 1969 and Sticky Fingers in 1971. (There's also a wonderful live album recorded during the triumphant '69 tour, Get Yer Ya-Yas Out!) This is unquestionably the band's hardest-rocking period, and its most scandalous. The '69 American tour, the Stones' first in three years, ended in tragedy at a free concert held that December (the day after Let It Bleed was released) at California's Altamont Speedway, where four people died, including Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old fan who was stabbed to death by Hells Angels bikers hired to work security. (They were paid $500 and given all the free beer they could drink.) The murder was filmed by documenatarians Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, and featured in their movie Gimme Shelter.
Altamont is often referred to as "the end of the '60s," a description that could also apply to Let It Bleed. While the band paid lip service to Woodstock Nation before Altamont (disastrously, as it turned out), Let It Bleed was far more cynical about the so-called youth "revolution." The record's first and last songs tell the story: "Gimme Shelter" is an emotionally violent rocker featuring a memorable backing vocal by Merry Clayton, who screamed lines in the chorus that predicted Altamont: "Rape, murder, it's just a shot away, it's just a shot away." The album-closing "You Can't Always Get What You Want" was more accepting of an uncertain future, and it became a fitting epitaph for Jones, who was fired from the band during the Let It Bleed sessions after chronic drug abuse (and drug-related convictions) made it impossible for him to play adequately or tour with the band once the record was released. Jones died less than a month later, in July 1969. He was 27.
"You Can't Always Get What You Want" by The Rolling Stones
A 21-year-old blonde-haired wunderkind named Mick Taylor, a former member of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, replaced Jones. A dazzling guitar player with a smooth style reminiscent of another former Bluesbreaker, Eric Clapton, Taylor spent just five years in The Stones, but he's one of the great unsung contributors to the band's rich legacy. The Stones, arguably, never sounded as good as they did with Taylor. Sticky Fingers, for one, is aided tremendously by Taylor's technical proficiency, which helped raise the musicianship of the rest of the band. "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" begins as a typical Stones rocker, riding a chunky Richards riff and Charlie Watts' reliably funky backbeat. But after two and a half minutes, it turns into a Santana-style scorcher, with Taylor turning out solos that Richards (or Jones) could never touch. Taylor could keep it simple and rockin', too—on "Sway," he rubs up against Richards' churning rhythm guitar in the verse, then tears out a soaring solo in the outro, quietly showing off without ruining the gut-level sleaze that makes the song so terrific. Taylor's last album with The Stones was 1974's It's Only Rock 'N' Roll, for which he co-wrote two of the better songs, the ballads "Till The Next Goodbye" and "Time Waits For No One." But Taylor wasn't given a songwriting credit, and while he said the slight didn't play a part in his decision, he left the band later that year, just a few months before The Stones were set to make another record.
Advanced Studies:
With 1973's Goats Head Soup, image and lifestyle moved ahead of music for The Rolling Stones, and while the band continued to make good records, music took a backseat to the Stones "myth" from here on out. Recorded in Jamaica because, according to Richards, it was one of the few countries that would take them (Keef's drug-arrest sheet was already pretty long, and it only got longer in the '70s), Goats Head Soup garnered a mixed reaction upon release, mostly because it doesn't hold up to the incredibly high standard of what came before. Like the rest of the band's post-Exile On Main St. work (save Some Girls), Goats Head Soup is best appreciated when not compared to The Stones' classic output. It's an album that once again finds The Stones changing capably with the times, embracing a glam look and a funk groove, along with some terrific ballads for the pop charts. "Angie" was the hit, but the moving "Winter" is one of the great lost Stones slow songs. Ballads frequently are the strongest tracks on late-period Stones albums, from "Waiting On A Friend" (Tattoo You) to "Almost Hear You Sigh" (Steel Wheels) to "Out Of Tears" (Voodoo Lounge).
"Winter" by The Rolling Stones
Jagger claimed he "really put all I had into" Goats Head Soup, but neither he nor the other Stones could honestly claim to care much about 1976's Black And Blue, which was recorded while the band was auditioning replacements for Mick Taylor. In fact, Black And Blue is virtually an audition tape, with new Stone Ron Wood sharing time with unsuccessful applicants like Wayne Perkins and Harvey Mandel on the album's jam-oriented tracks. 1981's Tattoo You was similarly slapped together, collecting outtakes from the previous 10 years and overdubbing new vocals. But at least the material on Tattoo You was stronger, with one side featuring decent-to-splendid fast numbers (including the band's last classic rocker, "Start Me Up") and the other side centered on ballads.
Tattoo You was one of the bestselling records of the band's career, and it proved to be the last time an album of original Stones material was received so warmly commercially and critically. Once The Stones became a stadium act, spectacle became their main focus. Records increasingly seemed like an excuse to launch another highly lucrative, globetrotting tour. Still, while the post-Tattoo You output displays little of the fire or inspiration of the group's classic period, The Stones still made good records that can be appreciated on their own terms. Perhaps the most underappreciated (and strangest) entry in the Stones catalog is 1983's Undercover, which chucked the standard-issue hard rock of Tattoo You for a wildly experimental mélange of new wave, dub, pop, and reggae. Lyrically, Undercover is almost comically violent, with songs like the serial-killer portrait "Too Much Blood" (with its references to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) delivered with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Undercover isn't an entirely successful record—the slick, danceable textures don't quite make up for the lack of songs—but it's certainly more interesting than the solid but too-safe "comeback" record Steel Wheels, released in 1989 after Jagger and Richards spent a few years sniping at each other and pursuing solo careers.
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