You may well be unimpressed by the wizened Rolling Stones these days – they are surely rock music’s oldest and most artistically barren legacy band. But during the 1960s and 1970s they were unbeatable, particularly so during the latter decade when The Beatles were no longer their primary competition.
Factor in traces of sleaze, misogyny and disregard for the after-effects of hard drugs that hung around their collective neck like a silk scarf, and you have a rock group that just about continued to have a sliver of recklessness about them. That, however, would alter significantly from Goats Head Soup onwards.
Released in 1973, a year after their defining double album Exile on Main Street (which they disliked, apparently, yet which contained varietal strands of rock’s DNA that easily bettered The Beatles’ sprawling White Album), Goats Head Soup could hardly be expected to rise to the occasion. So it proved.
Not even the Stones could reconcile their non-compliant status – arrests, jail, Altamont and, as US writer Greil Marcus memorably noted, the way they “rattled drugs as if they were maracas” – with their gradual entry into celebrity-heavy enterprise.
As Mick Jagger’s 1971 marriage (to Bianca Macias) stumbled from shaky to volcanic, and as Keith Richard’s life as a drug addict slipped into quicksand, the band convened in Jamaica and set about recording songs mostly removed from Exile on Main Street’s dynamism and range.
Perhaps due to the influence of relationships and recent fatherhood, the album (with one throwback, Star Star/Starfucker, which alludes to groupies and other peripheral hangers-on) is reasonably melancholic, sometimes wistful, occasionally mundane.
Key ballads such as Angie, Winter and Comin' Down Again are high quality. You know Angie because it's one of their "greatest hits", but the latter pair are lamentably overlooked gems; Winter is similar enough to the country-rock sensibility of Moonlight Mile (from their 1971 album, Sticky Fingers), while Comin' Down Again blends Elton John-esque piano and Gram Parsons's Americana notes with one of Richard's best lead vocals.
Other tracks from the original album that make a dent include the funk/rock energy of Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker) and Silver Train, songs from which bands like The Black Crowes have made careers.
The remaining songs are filler, not killer. Treats for avid fans include three previously unheard tracks, as well as the standard reissue carrots of demo versions and outtakes.
No amount of polishing, however, can shine what is essentially a transitional record by a band that would soon be banished to the basement by punk. It would be some years before they were allowed to emerge.
