The Beat Patrol

This article was written by the late Robert Palmer (not to be confused with the late singer of the same name) for the New York Times, Aug. 26, 1981. He discusses their upcoming tour and then-recent album Tattoo You…

Tattoo You, the new album by the Rolling Stones, is in local record stores today, a week ahead of schedule. Despite extensive security precautions taken by Rolling Stones Records, a copy of the album (probably a tape) made its way to WNMR, a radio station in Philadelphia, and was broadcast at the beginning of last week. Another Philadelphia station, WYST, taped the album off the air and began broadcasting its tape. Within a few days, tapes of the original tape were being broadcast in Buffalo and Chicago, and a copy had reached a disk jockey at WNEW in New York, who called Atlantic Records, the album’s distributor. At this point, Rolling Stones Records decided to rush-release the album.

The album’s premature release came as the Rolling Stones were beginning rehearsals for a coming tour, their first since 1978. Last Friday, members of the group and of the concert promoter Bill Graham’s organization were inspecting the Roseland ballroom, which has been mentioned as a possible site for one of the Rolling Stones’ Manhattan appearances. ”Look for the Stones to play a number of places in the New York area,” said a source close to the band. 

More Diversity Planned  

On their 1978 tour, the Rolling Stones played stadiums, arenas like Madison Square Garden and several smaller theaters, including Manhattan’s Palladium and the Capitol Theater in Passaic, N.J. The shows in smaller halls were the tour’s best, and this fall the group plans to diversify even more nightclub appearances are a possibility. No dates have been confirmed, but Bill Graham, who is organizing the tour, has been meeting with the group in New York City for the last week, and an announcement is expected shortly. A likely starting time is mid-October, and one of the band’s first performances could be a concert at Giants Stadium in New Jersey’s Meadowlands or several evenings at the Brendan T. Byrne Arena, the new indoor facility next door to the stadium.

Every Rolling Stones tour since the beginning of the 1970’s has prompted the same questions from fans and the press. Are the Stones still capable of playing first-rate rock-and-roll and of playing together as a band? Will this be their last tour? Will any Stones quit the band to pursue solo careers or to work outside music? Keith Richards, the group’s lead guitarist and co-writer, with Mick Jagger, of their songs, put these questions in perspective last summer.

”I’ll still be playing rock-and-roll when I’m in a wheelchair,” he said. ”As long as people want to hear it.” And the bassist Bill Wyman, who was rumored to be leaving the group, has announced that he is still a Stone and will be on the coming tour. On the subject of age, the 37-year-old Jagger may not be able to summon the athletic energy he commanded 10 or 15 years ago, but that doesn’t necessarily means the Rolling Stones shows will be less rewarding musically. In fact, if the new Tattoo You album is any indication, the Rolling Stones are playing with more commitment and fire than they have shown in some time. 

Last Great Album  

Most rock critics agree that Exile on Main Street, which was released in the early 70’s, was the last great Rolling Stones album. It was followed by Goat’s Head Soup, a dismally uneven disk, and by a succession of records that found the group experimenting with a variety of idioms, from disco to reggae, and recycling the Chuck Berry-derived rock-and-roll they had played so brilliantly in the 60’s. Each of the albums the Stones released in the 70’s had its high points, and one album, Some Girls, was a relatively consistent piece of work and both a critical and a commercial success.

But during the 60’s and the early 70’s, the Stones were something more than a rock-and-roll band. Albums like Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed and Exile on Main Street articulated some of the thoughts and aspirations of an entire generation, and even the Rolling Stones’ troubles – the murder at their free concert in Altamont, their drug arrests – seemed to mirror the troubles their generation of young fans was experiencing. Whatever the Rolling Stones did, they mattered. They weren’t just a musical group, they were news.

Rock no longer matters in the same way. Rock stars are still looked up to by their fans; often they serve as role models. But there is no longer a sense that young people make up a single, indivisible community. There are several youth communities, each with its own tastes in rock-and-roll. The rock bands that are most popular among today’s teen-agers are swaggering, macho heavy-metal bands like Van Halen, Foreigner and AC/DC. Other young rock fans prefer the bands that make up rock’s new wave. Still others revere the Rolling Stones, the Who and other survivors of the 60’s. During much of the 1970’s, the Rolling Stones dealt with this new situation by retreating into professionalism. If they could no longer be spokesmen for a generation, they could still put on the most exciting stage shows and play more solidly and kinetically than any other band.

The best shows of the 1978 Rolling Stones tour proved that the group’s talent was intact, but the tour was not consistent. And albums like It’s Only Rock-and-Roll and the recent Emotional Rescue were similarly up-and-down affairs. Emotional Rescue was a commercial disappointment as well. Apparently, the group realized that Tattoo You and the tour that would follow it were going to either cement the group’s reputation or badly tarnish it. Tattoo You couldn’t be just another Rolling Stones album; it had to be more than that. 

It’s All Rock-and-Roll  

Remarkably, Tattoo You is something special. There are 11 fine songs. None of them are Chuck Berry retreads, none of them are disco, and none of them are reggae – they are all rock-and-roll, with more than a hint of the soul and blues influences that were so important in the band’s early work. The sound on the album is a basic Rolling Stones sound, with guitars in the foreground, a smattering of keyboards, and some of Mick Jagger’s most powerful and least affected vocals. There are three gritty and wonderfully mature saxophone solos by the jazz master Sonny Rollins.

Even the engineering represents a distinct improvement over earlier Stones albums. The mixing engineer, Bob Clearmountain, and the engineer and associate producer, Chris Kimsey, helped Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the producers, achieve a crisp, clean, appealingly bright recorded sound that puts the somewhat muddy clutter of previous Stones disks to shame.

The Stones seem to be making an effort to get more of their music onto the radio. Several of the songs on Tattoo You graft catchy, melodic choruses onto the band’s straight-ahead rock-and-roll, and there are some lovely rock ballads as well. The new album’s lyrics are also a surprise. The Stones seem to have dropped the studied decadence that was their most characteristic pose throughout the 70’s. The songs on Tattoo You seem to be by and about real people rather than larger-than-life caricatures. One song, ”Little T&A,” will probably anger feminists, as a number of Rolling Stones songs have done. But Tattoo You also includes ”Waiting on a Friend,” a song that suggests women should be treated as people, as friends, rather than as sex objects.

On earlier albums, the Stones played the role of aging adolescents; they boasted, they swaggered, they portrayed themselves as down-andout rebels even when they were living in luxury. On Tattoo You they are playing themselves; they have grown up. But will the young people who make up the rock concert audience pay to see a bunch of grownups play rock-and-roll? One suspects that they will if those grownups are the Rolling Stones.

Robert Palmer

Mick Farren’s May 1, 1971 review from Ink magazine…

If there’s such a position as world’s top rock & roll band, the Stones now occupy it, though it’s happened more by default of the Beatles than their own efforts.

While they were trailing, it seems perhaps they tried harder. We had the Beatles throwing out songs with almost offhand skill, managing to present an image of something for everyone, while the Stones confronted the public with a completely individual approach of insult and insolence that matured from juvenile art student fuck-you-all to a cult of militant decadence that drew on the libertine anarchy of a de Sade nobleman. Bad guys in the James Dean/Brando tradition, they surpassed both for teen rebel nastiness. They were the group that caused a national Press debate on whether or not they smelt. They were the group that got themselves photographed being brought from jail in handcuffs. People got shot at their concerts.

One of the major devices used by the Stones (and a lot of blues singers – Howling Wolf, Robert Johnson, Lightnin’ Hopkins) to accentuate the shock of their music is consistent use of first-person involvement in their lyrics. Jagger doesn’t sing about the Devil, he sings about being the Devil. Where Dylan reports a surreal series of events, Jagger actually takes part in them. This approach reaches the point of narcissism when coupled with the manic level at which the lyrics generally work. Most of the Stones’ later songs, whatever their subject, imply the viewpoint of emotional breakdown.

Sticky Fingers is much the same kind of music that the Stones have been playing ever since Beggars’ Banquet. But something seems to be missing on this one, though it’s hard to define just what. It would be easy to hear it as lack of enthusiasm, but the degree of care which has gone into the promotion and presentation (the sleeve is by Andy Warhol, oh yes) suggests otherwise.

Maybe it’s that the emotional crisis of ‘Gimme Shelter’ and Let it Bleed has given way to resignation, or the breakdown has worked out its cycle. Although the horrors are still there, the screaming that forced them home has subsided a little. On ‘Sister Morphine’ (a beautifully constructed song, with Ry Cooder on guitar), the junk horror lyrics have the rather numb drama of Love’s ‘Signed D.C.’, and never rise to the pitch of ‘You Got the Silver’ or ‘Live With Me’.

Since Altamont, Woodstock Nation’s first trauma, and the Beatle split, the Stones seem to have turned in on themselves. In the same way that Tommy saw the Who relaxing into an image of being musical craftsmen, the Stones seem to be withdrawing into the image of World’s Number One rock & roll stars. Sure, they may be weird, libertine, deathcult drughead perverts, but this goes with their whole super-superstar bit. The close contact with their environment and the reality of confronting the cops, Mrs. Whitehouse, Hell’s Angels and the death of a founder-member of the band has begun to fade. Their move to France, and what looks like fulltime membership of insulated Riviera jetset surroundings seems a symptom of the resignation and withdrawal that characterizes the new album.

Maybe the Stones have reached that paradoxical point where in attacking a corrupt system they find it responding with material privileges which immunize the attacker to the evils of the system. They’ve stepped a long way back from the statements they were making before their American tour. At that time, they were talking about their own record company, of a cooperative, of supplying funds to groups like the Black Panthers. Today’s reality is the Kinney group, French chateaux and tax evasion. The street fighting antichrist figures have been contained to the point of becoming millionaires with nasty habits.

Sticky Fingers is a flawless production. It is musically stimulating. Some tracks, like ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knocking’, are energetic and exciting. We get our dose of decadence and titillation. The fact that previous albums have fucked with our heads and that this one is only very good is the great disappointment.

Mick Farren

(Spanish edition – cover)

This appreciation of The Stones’ most understood and maligned album comes from Tony Sclafani, Feb. 2008, on the Perfect Sound Forever website. I have always loved this album, flaws and all. It might not be your typical Stones album, but they certainly experimented to a higher degree than any other time in their career. Definitely worth a listen… 

Satanic Majesties Revisioned: A Positive Take on a Colorful Stones Album 

It was 40 years ago today… Um, well. OK, let’s hold the fanfare. Unlike the 40th anniversary of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, there were no memorials or tributes pouring out when the Rolling Stones’ psychedelic opus Their Satanic Majesties Request turned 40 on Dec. 8, 2007 (Dec. 9 in the U.S.). 

The reason for this, as all students of rock know, is that Satanic Majesties is a “bad” album, a one-off aberration into “weird” music in which the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band “lost focus.” After their mortal sin of trying on a different style, the band got “back on track” with riff-heavy songs like “Jumping Jack Flash,” because, like, that’s what The Stones are all about, man… 

We know all of the above, of course, because rock critics have handed down these pronouncements for eons. And when you listen to Satanic Majesties within the context of the Stones’ albums, the critics do have a point. This isn’t your classic Stones album. It sorely lacks classic guitar riffs, snarling vocals and hard-hitting rhythms. Instead, it resounds with trumpets, strings and enough percussion to make Santana jealous. And even if you altered the arrangements, the ten songs that make up this album wouldn’t sound anything like classic Stones songs anyway. 

And that’s why Satanic Majesties is arguably the boldest piece of work the Stones ever conceived. Despite its flaws, it’s a radical departure from the norm that few artists have ever attempted. For one time only, it seems, The Stones ditched their monochromatic sound and worldview for a multihued, anything-goes mindset that really was “like a rainbow,” to paraphrase the disc’s only major hit song. 

I didn’t know anything about the album’s history or bad reputation when I was 13 in 1978 and found it wedged away in the back of a closet in my grandmother’s Brooklyn, New York apartment. The album, I learned, had belonged to my uncle Joey, a musician, who used to play it for me when he babysat (I recall enjoying “She’s a Rainbow”). When I reunited with the (exact same!) album in eighth grade, the first thing that struck me was how it seemed to deliver more than just music. Satanic Majesties seemed like a gateway into the unknown – a strange mysterious world of the past with endless possibilities, ideas and mysteries. 

The lyrics to “Sing This All Together” about “opening our heads” and closing our eyes to “see where we all come from” seemed a bit naive – but not much more than some of the ideas I’d heard expressed on Beatles records (“Say the word and you’ll be free,” “All you need is love,” etc.). The life-after-death conceit of “The Lantern” kept me listening over and over to the lyrics, wondering what they meant. Then there were the sounds. 

I could go on and on about the sounds. There are trumpets, flutes, recorders, processed vocals, tape loop effects and even an eerie tolling bell (the first sound heard on “The Lantern”). The great, ominous orchestral sounds in “2000 Light Years from Home,” I later learned, were made by a device called the Mellotron and played by the late Brian Jones. The sound of the album was so markedly different than anything I had heard up to that point, it left me in a permanent state of intrigue. Why didn’t other music sound like this? Why were bands content to use just guitar, bass and drums?

And how cool was it to have an eight-minute song that sounded like they made it up as they went along? I thought it was all pretty damned great and remember thinking Sgt. Pepper, which I also owned, sounded stiff and quaint by comparison. Eventually, I’d discover there were a lot of artists who pushed boundaries and would embrace artists like Captain Beefheart and The Velvet Underground. But I have Satanic Majesties to thank for opening my mind in the first place. 

So I set out on a quest to learn about Satanic Majesties. I didn’t get far. There was no Internet then, there were precious few rock books even written in 1978 and no one in the arid suburban town where I lived knew what the hell I was talking about when I mentioned Satanic Majesties. My uncle, who had owned the album I now possessed, was now playing bass in a post-glam band called The Brats ( an offshoot of The New York Dolls) and wondered what on Earth I was doing listening to anything but new wave. 

Searching my other Stones albums for clues confused me even more. Not one single song from Satanic Majesties had made it onto the Hot Rocks greatest hits collection, and the band’s then-current release, Some Girls, sounded like it was a progression from the Hot Rocks songs and had nothing to do with Satanic Majesties. All these years later, I think the album’s sense of total dislocation in terms of the Stones’ oeuvre is its best quality. 

A bit of history is in order. Their Satanic Majesties Request was released just as the psychedelic music era was coming to a close in late 1967. The past two years had seen lots of bands doll up their sound, crafting albums that were incrementally more ornate and lyrical. For most major bands, you can see their work progress in some sort of logical manner. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, of course, built on their previous Revolver and led to the music of their later period. The Who’s Sell Out album was also an elaboration on their A Quick One album and featured musical ideas that later wound up on Tommy. Love’s Forever Changes built on the acoustic flourishes of Da Capo and even The Beach Boys’ oddball Smiley Smile had the band’s classic harmonies and references to everyday Americana. For most of these albums, the songs weren’t all that different from the bands’ previous efforts; it was the arrangements that had changed and became grander. 

The Stones were having none of that for Satanic Majesties. Here, they morphed into a different band, much the way XTC did when they developed their psychedelic “alter ego,” The Dukes of Stratosphere. There is no song on Satanic Majesties that could ever have easily fit on another Stones album. The rocking “Citadel” comes close, but its angular, stop-start rhythms and metaphorical, storybook lyrics (ostensibly about Andy Warhol’s New York City scene) are far from typical Stones fare. Also, the R&B drive that fuels almost every other Stones LP is completely missing. Songs don’t plow over you; they slowly seduce you with art rock arrangements. Brian Jones purportedly plays no guitar at all on this album. 

The mold-breaking qualities of Satanic Majesties spawned a cult audience, but not amongst most Stones fans. This album tends to turn up in the collections of psychedelic music or art rock fans. One high-profile enthusiast is Peter Gabriel. The former Genesis front man said in the Jan. 1983 issue of Trouser Press magazine that “For me, Satanic Majesties is far more interesting than (The Stones’) other albums because they were trying to do something a little different. But they got so slagged off by the press and avoided by the public that they decided, I think, never to take such a risk again. That’s a pity.” 

The album’s lyrics are also different than anything in the Stones’ catalog. Mick Jagger shook off all the macho blues posturing of the band’s previous work to delve completely into the world of fantasy. This was a major change. Unlike most bands, the Stones didn’t just tart up their love songs with flamboyant imagery or peace and love platitudes. 

As such, there can be no comparison of Satanic Majesties with the band’s previous album Between the Buttons. While Buttons has its share of acoustic arrangements, its lyrics are probably the most vitriolic in the entire Stones’ catalog (the deceptively melancholy-sounding “Backstreet Girl” offers what might be the cruelest lyrical conceit Jagger ever devised). On Satanic Majesties though, the singer’s aggression is dissipated. Instead, he seems to channel poetry and short stories from (presumably) the English books he read in his youth. He pulled this off with more imagination than most people gave him credit for. 

On “2000 Man” and “2000 Light Years from Home,” Jagger develops elaborate sci-fi themes that make insightful moral statements about humanity. The former song was covered by Kiss and the latter may well have served as the inspiration for David Bowie’s landmark “Space Oddity.” “She’s a Rainbow” is one of the very few unapologetic love songs in the band’s catalog and even if Jagger did steal the idea from Love’s “She Comes in Colors,” he does more with the analogy. The lascivious “On With the Show” is the album’s one nod to woman-baiting, but its astute look at working class customs rivals Frank Zappa’s similar “America Drinks and Goes Home” for sociological insight. 

The album also contains a track by Bill Wyman — the only song by the bassist to get an airing on an original Stones album. “In Another Land” compliments the space-age themes of the other songs well and even got released as a single. A hyped-up backing vocal by the late Steve Marriott and some spacey sound effects make for a clever juxtaposition against Wyman’s sleepy vocal, which describes a hallucinatory dream. The tremolo effect that was applied to Wyman’s voice still grabs my attention after all these years. 

That’s the relatively normal stuff. There are also two so-called “problem tracks” on this album that are absolutely hated by Stones fans, at least according to the opinions voiced on various Internet fan forums. The songs “Gomper” and “Sing This All Together (See What Happens)” are largely improvised and largely dissonant and/or atonal. Roll over, John Cage and tell the Art Ensemble the news. If you’re expecting Exile on Main Street, these tunes won’t do it for you. But anyone who enjoys the improvisational jams on albums by The Godz, The Mothers of Invention or The Grateful Dead will find these tracks suitably atmospheric (and atmosphere is largely what psychedelic music was all about). 

“Gomper” begins as an exotic Eastern-sounding ballad but evolves (or devolves) into free-for-all chaos, with lots of frantic recorder playing by Jones. “Sing This All Together (See What Happens)” lives up to its title, being almost totally improvisational. It begins with a bit of studio chatter (Jagger hilariously asking “Where’s that joint?”) and tromps through eight minutes of horns, chanting, shouting and exotic percussive beats. Both songs are so removed from anything The Stones ever did, no casual listener would ever think they were done by the group behind “Satisfaction.” 

There’s even an unlisted track tucked away at the end of side one – possibly the first hidden track on any major rock album. “Cosmic Christmas,” is a spooky version of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” performed on mellotron by Bill Wyman and rendered almost unrecognizable (Cosmic Christmas was also purportedly the original title for the LP). 

What all this adds up to is the fact that The Rolling Stones had a lot of audacity to unleash an album like this on fans that had been with them for barely three years. Satanic Majesties presented more of a challenge to Stones fans than any album by any major act (save maybe Lou Reed’s dissonant Metal Machine Music), because its contents are so utterly unexpected. It’s as if you went to meet your womanizing tough-guy friend in a bar and unexpectedly found him sitting beside a lake, sobbing because the exquisite beauty of a swimming nymphet was too much for him to bear (a scenario that comprises the storyline of “Gomper”). 

Whether the Stones meant to create a totally aberrant piece of work is another matter. At the time, their longtime manager and producer Andrew Loog Oldham had jumped ship (or was thrown overboard), leaving them to produce this album themselves (though they would soon hook up with the talented Jimmy Miller). Jagger, guitarist Keith Richards and Jones were all having problems with the law (documented extensively elsewhere), so the album was done in bits and pieces between court dates and jail time. 

Nevertheless, they still saw fit to throw Satanic Majesties out there. Had the Stones included the songs from their recently-released single, “Dandelion” and “We Love You,” on the album, it would have made more palatable listening (especially if these two songs had replaced the troublesome ones). These tunes were likely not included because they were produced by the departed Oldham, and because many UK acts didn’t put singles on LP’s back then (and maybe because the later song was too sarcastic to match Majesties themes). 

Maybe in retrospect, the Stones’ worst move was utilizing the services of Sgt. Pepper cover designer Michael Cooper to craft their own cover (originally done in 3-D). This led to charges that they were “ripping off The Beatles.” Not quite. The Fabs’ effort was a carefully-conceived, deftly-focused project, a culmination of everything they had done. The Stones’ album, by contrast, was anything but. That’s its beauty. 

Tony Sclafani