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Spotify slipped into "Sweet Black Angel." Never my favorite track on "Exile on Main Street" but I love the sound...it's sparse, nearly naked, and today everybody is covering up.
I'm always interested in what Spotify will play after my chosen tracks/albums are done. To see what the algorithm presents. And hearing "Sweet Black Angel" I was inspired to go deeper down the rabbit hole, back to the return to form, "Beggars Banquet." People don't remember that for a long time that was considered the best Stones album, before time marched on and "Some Girls" got love and people looked back on "Sticky Fingers" fondly and I always favored "Let It Bleed," but "Beggars Banquet" was a complete surprise, a 180 from the overblown "Satanic Majesties," it was stripped down, no dross, and all the ink was always about "Sympathy For the Devil" and "Street Fighting Man," the former a deserved classic, the latter very good, but not quite as great, yet it was always the album cuts that resonated with me.
Of course there was "Stray Cat Blues," with that salacious intro, "ah...yeah..." before the lyrics even began. And I'm loath to admit that for a long time my favorite has been "Parachute Woman"..."land on me tonight," even though the meaning was slight compared to the rest.
The piece de resistance is the closer, "Salt of the Earth." But the rest of the tracks...
Waiting for a factory girl? Man, don't we live in a different society today.
"Waiting for a girl who's got curlers in her hair
Waiting for a girl she has no money anywhere"
At this point the Stones were stars. And it's not like Mick came from a lower class background. But this was just when England was emerging from black and white into color, when the grit was still baked into the buildings, and people are people...and usually those no one is paying attention to are the wildest and most interesting, because they see no need to color inside the lines.
And "Prodigal Son" sounds like anything but London. This is the England of 19th century literature.
But the song I was inspired to play after hearing "Sweet Black Angel" was "No Expectations."
"Take me to the station
And put me on the train
I've got no expectations
To pass through here again"
Regrets. Leaving with your tail between your legs. Hoping to recover your good feelings, by never returning to what once was.
This was when Brian Jones was still functional. His acoustic slide guitar is key. Just like so much of "Beggars Banquet," this is wooden music, as Crosby, Stills, Nash and sometimes Young put it. And the ignored Bill Wyman's bass is key.
Today everybody is a winner. The external is key. But that's not what the greats of yore were selling. It was a seamier side of life. Internal. After dark.
And Nicky Hopkins is a fifth member of the band.
But I wanted something more electric, so I skipped over to "Let It Bleed."
Now let's be clear, at this point I've forgone Spotify for Qboz, where I can hear these tracks in better than CD quality. The sound is so immediate. Right there. You're inside it. It's striking and pure.
Now let's be clear, "Monkey Man" is just an album track, far from "Let It Bleed"'s best, but this is back from when you couldn't easily pick and choose, you had to get up off the floor, the couch, your bed, to lift and drop the needle to hear a song again, rather you let the album side play right through.
The second side of "Let It Bleed" starts and ends with absolute killers, "Midnight Rambler" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want," but I didn't want to hear anything that overplayed.
"I am a flea-bit peanut monkey"
I didn't know Mick was singing "flea-bit peanut" until I looked up the lyrics online. Don't forget, most albums released back then didn't have lyric sheets. That was part of the magic, you had to figure the words out, and oftentimes you got them wrong.
But "Monkey Man" does not start off like a typical Stones song, in that it begins with Nicky Hopkins's piano. And Bill's bass. And a bit of ethereal guitar, more feedback than the notes.
And then...
Keith comes in. He plays all the guitars on this track.
And he's just hitting a few strings. And when he gets into it, there's just a bit of distortion, the sound is dirty. This was before the seventies, when everybody was experimenting with sounds beyond the strings themselves. Of course we had Hendrix and Clapton, but once Jimmy Page penetrated our consciousness an undistorted, a thin not fat guitar sound was rare.
But unlike the more modern productions, "Monkey Man" breathes. Because there's just not that much there. Nicky in the left ear, Keith in the right.
But then Keith falls into a groove. I wouldn't quite call it soul, but your head starts to nod. And Keith seems to be playing accents more than continuously. Seeing no need to dominate the track.
Although in the right ear there's a quieter guitar that gets louder as the song plays, but really it's Mick singing and then that fat guitar sound of Keith.
"And all my friends are junkies
That's not really true"
Only when you're at the peak can you undercut yourself. Today no one admits any faults. No one we knew was shooting heroin, but we knew what a junkie was, and the Stones had a bad rep, Mick is boasting of being a bad boy...and then he's admitting he's not quite that bad.
"I'm a cold Italian pizza"
Was this a reference to the album's cover, that 'za squeezed into the cake concoction?
"I could use a lemon squeezer
Would you do?"
Funny how the previously released "Led Zeppelin II" spoke of lemon squeezing... A term unused in the U.S. that we instantly became familiar with. When rock stars were at the bleeding edge of sexuality, before anyone could Google porn.
"I was bitten by a boar
I was gouged and I was gored"
"Gouged and gored" I always heard, but not "boar," at least not as in an animal...
"Yes I'm a sack of broken eggs
I always have an unmade bed
Don't you?"
I heard "eggs" and "unmade bed," but in the pre hi-res audio days, when we listened on less than perfect stereos, we only caught certain words, and Mick was famous for slurring and the Stones buried the lyrics in the track to the point on "Exile" they were nearly indecipherable.
"Well I hope we're not too messianic
Or a trifle too satanic
We love to play the blues"
I caught all that. And it was hard to hear "satanic" without thinking of "Sympathy for the Devil," but the attitude evidenced...they were the other, they weren't offering salvation, they just wanted to play the blues, but they were DANGEROUS!
That's what permeated the track, the danger.
That's what struck me, the difference between then and now. For a long while hip-hop sold this danger, to some degree it still does. And in active rock you hear anger, I'm not quite sure danger, but for a long time there was no danger in rock and maybe that's why it expired.
The bluesmen were not brought home to mother. How did Robert Johnson die?
Musicians were a cult. They actually knew how to play. And they lived an alternative life. With sex, drugs and...rock and roll. They invented this!
And then everybody glommed on, grew their hair long and lost their ethos.
Taylor Swift has built a career on complaints. No one was complaining back then, they were living the life of Riley.
And those on the Top Forty were not even in mind.
That's why the '72 tour was such a thing. This was not about the money, this was about bad boys raping and pillaging across the country... Maybe we can use that term once again. It was a state of mind, not actual rape. But now you can't even test limits with speech, never mind action.
And what exactly was "Monkey Man" about?
Now the Urban Dictionary will tell you it's "A person who does drugs (specifically cocaine)."
That sounds right. The Stones were famous for using drugs. It was part of Keith Richards's identity.
But Wikipedia says "Monkey Man" is " a tribute to Mario Schifano, whom they met on the set of his movie 'Umano Non Umano ((Human, Not Human!'"
Now as into foreign film as were back then, I've never heard of Mario nor his film, which doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page, which means it might as well not exist, but "Human, Not Human!" could mean monkey.
Or...
It's not really about the lyrics at all. Except for the words that stick out here and there.
"But I've been bit and I've been tossed around
By every she-rat in this town
Have you, babe?"
"She-rat"? That's sexist, abusive... We don't even want to hear your explanation, be lucky you're not #MeTooed.
Then again, the Stones and the other bands drew women to them like lemmings.
Let's be clear, sex was part of the package.
"Well I am just a monkey man
I'm glad you are a monkey woman too"
We are in this together. Ultimately, rock was not exclusionary. You just had to throw off your preconceptions, society, and join in. The Fortune 500 were anathema.
Of course, things changed. The Stones were the first to do a major sponsorship deal, with Jovan, talk about a forgotten brand.
And somewhere along the line it became about the money.
And then all the people who stayed away needed to get close, go to the show, even though it was too down and dirty for them in '69.
And there's that darkness, but baked into "Monkey Man" is also FUN!
You wanted to be Keith Richards throwing off those riffs.
Charlie and Bill holding down the bottom.
And then there was that sound, encapsulated in the notes emanating from Keith's guitar. They penetrated you in a way the words did not. Mick was just the icing on the cake.
And the way the track seemed to accelerate at the end. It didn't fade out so much as disappear into the distance, a train of debauchery pulling away from you.
What was that?
These are just human beings, but how did they come up with this sound? This attitude? This life?
We were drawn closer to the flame. We were even willing to get burned a bit in our journey. You could not get this anywhere else but in the grooves of a record or live at the show. It wasn't on TV. Not even in the movies. The rock stars were kings. You don't nod your head when you use Facebook, never mind other social media. Music might throw off money, but money never ever has had the power of music.
And you need to remember that.
I don't know if we can get back to the garden.
But I know if we do the people who lead us there won't be like you and me. They won't care about societal convention. They'll just be concentrated on getting the lightning of sound in a bottle.
We've come so far from that magic...
It's just not the same.
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