The Rolling Stones on Apple Music (2024)

Most of 1981’s Tattoo You was conjured from a hodgepodge of unfinished tracks stretching back as far as 1973’s Goats Head Soup—as inauspicious a backstory as the band had in their catalogue. Keith Richards said they just needed to jam something out before going on tour, an enterprise that by the end of the decade had swallowed their life as a studio band anyway. Others said Jagger and Richard weren’t getting along. Whatever the case, the end product was an album that didn’t just feel deceptively unified, but served as both a summary and a celebration of basically everything they’d done during a period where nobody seemed to know exactly what they were doing.“Start Me Up” started life as a reggae song for 1978’s Some Girls, “Waiting On a Friend”—an island-ish country ballad iced out with a solo by the jazz legend Sonny Rollins—for Goats Head Soup, and “Slave” was an R&B vamp for 1976’s Black and Blue. Jagger’s lyrics—mostly written and recorded in 1980—lent thematic consistency: He buckled for young girls (“Start Me Up”), complained about the weirdos next door (“Neighbours”) and discovered one could have a rich interpersonal relationship without music or sex (“Waiting On a Friend”).He was cresting 40, and as intoxicatingly arrogant in middle age as he’d been in youth. The band, once confined to verses and choruses, were increasingly stewards of a groove more important than any song. And with a few more trips around the sun under their belt, they sounded as entitled to their funk as they once were to their sprawl. A lot had changed, but with Tattoo You—lean, confident, world-weary but fired up—the band once again became The Rolling Stones.

Some Girls wasn’t so much a return to form as to content. Exhausted by the sprawl of the early ’70s, the band sounded lean again, a bar act scaled for arena audiences. (The band’s surprise show at the tiny El Mocambo club in Toronto under the name The co*ckroaches a year prior, in 1977, was a neat metaphor: Not only were they stripping down, they were making clear their intention to survive drugs, legal hassle, cultural change, nuclear holocaust and possibly time itself.)Even the album’s title—Some Girls—called back to a younger, more restless Rolling Stones: riding around the world, doing this and signing that, just trying to make some girl. (Keith Richards, never as nasty as Mick Jagger but still tempted by the bon mot, joked that it was only called “Some Girls” because the band had forgotten the girls’ names.) Well, the girls got made, but the band was still around. The sound was tougher, more immediate. Fewer session musicians and synthesisers, more handclaps. Engineer Chris Kimsey arranged amps in a tight semicircle to mimic a club stage. Jagger’s fascination with disco (“Miss You”) and punk (“Respectable”, “Shattered”) appealed to the moment, but they also refreshed the project the band had been working on for 15 years: marrying working-class music from both sides of the racial divide.And where Jagger could treat you like a dog and make you like it (“Miss You”, “Respectable”), Richards—responsible for “Before They Make Me Run” and the worn love of “Beast of Burden”—was tender and loyal, the guy who’d been through the wringer and was happy just to be alive. A few years earlier it seemed like the band were settling down. With Some Girls, they were winding up.

More than songs or performances, 1972’s Exile on Main St. was about mood. Listen close: Can you hear the young gods sweating it out in the basem*nt of a French mansion overlooking the Mediterranean? Surrounded by junkies and hangers-on? Eating lobster and stuffed tomatoes in the afternoon and working all night? Never had the band managed to translate their myth—the sloppy, redemptive glory of rock ’n’ roll—so faithfully into sound. A great party album, yes, and a party unto itself. But Exile was also the closest The Rolling Stones ever got to something truly avant-garde, an album whose perceived mistakes—the muddy mix; the sloppy, dislocated performances—conjured a feeling something more correct would have wiped away.Even in its looser moments, 1971’s Sticky Fingers had sounded professional—raw music gussied up for the main stage. Exile, by contrast, wasn’t just born in the basem*nt, it evoked one: a place of clutter and darkness, strange things forgotten and unfinished. For every “Tumbling Dice” or “Torn and Frayed“—two of the album’s more coherent moments—there was an “I Just Want to See His Face” or “Let It Loose”, tracks that functioned less as finished thoughts than open-ended suggestions, seeds for new growth. And the blues that had once served as the band’s shorthand for earthly hardships and desires now sounded mysterious and arcane—less the entertainment of juke joints than the vernacular of some underground society.The story of Exile is probably oversold—after all, they only spent part of the time in the basem*nt. But the frame remains useful. “I hear you talking when I’m on the street,” Mick slurs on the opening line of “Rocks Off”. “Your mouth don't move, but I can hear you speak.” For the next hour, the paradoxes keep coming: light in darkness, clarity in chaos. For years, the band had described confusion—with Exile, they embodied it.

Fans will argue about it forever, but there’s a possibility that 1971’s Sticky Fingers is the most distilled album in The Rolling Stones’ catalogue. Touring in 1969 and 1970 sharpened their playing and broadened their range, expanding it to cover country, Latin fusion, Southern soul and whatever “Moonlight Mile” is. (Richards’ working title for the riff had been “Japanese Thing”.) Emotionally, the gradient had gotten finer, too: Like 1968’s Beggars Banquet and 1969’s Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers wasn’t as concerned with getting or losing the girl so much as exploring the psychic tolls of romance (“Wild Horses”, “Dead Flowers”) and its many taboos (the sadomasoch*stic overtones of “Bitch”, the colonial-historical pipe bomb of “Brown Sugar”). The drugs still felt good coming in, but were a little rougher getting out (“Sister Morphine”, “Moonlight Mile”). Most of the movement still came from the hips, but you could feel the heart pumping pretty hard, too.With hindsight you can hear the constellation the band had been mapping out suddenly light up: British wit, American muscle, soul-revue horns, orchestral grandeur and untamed lust. Reportedly, the band didn’t know the tape was even running when they improvised the simmering outro for “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”. But it proved the band weren't limited by the structural confines of song, foreshadowing the groove-dominant music they made as the 1970s went on. They were bigger and more decadent now, but also more reflective and exploratory.Still, you have to wonder, a little, how it must’ve felt. Not that The Rolling Stones needed sympathy per se—they’d already made a bigger cultural impact than any other musicians of their generation save, possibly, The Beatles, who, by the time Sticky Fingers came out, no longer existed. Led Zeppelin was the new thing now, as were David Bowie and Black Sabbath. Whatever air of competition that had surrounded the band dissipated. Sticky Fingers wasn’t just age—it was change.

The day after Let It Bleed came out, The Rolling Stones played a show at the Altamont Speedway in Northern California that ended with the Hells Angels' ad hoc security force stabbing an 18-year-old concertgoer named Meredith Hunter. Hunter’s death was cast as a kind of punctuative moment in the cultural narrative, a violent climax to an increasingly violent decade. But more than a marker of the era’s end (a loss of the hippie movement's supposed innocence, the passage from optimism to cynicism), Altamont reflected tensions—racial (Hunter was black), geopolitical and generational—that had been mounting in America for years. In other words, Altamont didn’t end the '60s, the calendar did—but you’d be hard-pressed to find a richer allegory for what that end meant.What role, if any, the Stones played in all that—well, no matter how eruditely the New York Times compared their shows of the era to Nazi rallies, they were, after all, just a band. But they were also a weathervane of cultural sensitivity, detecting gathering winds of sexual violence (“Midnight Rambler”), spiritual fatigue (“Let It Bleed”) and a sense of fear too deep for any drug to sufficiently numb (“Gimme Shelter”).Musically, they’d taken the Americanisms of 1968’s Beggars Banquet a step further, shedding the primness of albums like Between the Buttons for something slurred, messy, more liable to be dragged out than walk on its own accord. Half the time, you can’t even understand what Mick Jagger is saying, which makes the fact that you can basically hear him alternately high-kicking and shambling through it that much funnier and more seductive. Like the drunken bender that lurches toward revelation, Let It Bleed is the bad idea that starts to look pretty good: the sound of confusion rendered with perfect clarity. In a year when Led Zeppelin started to repurpose blues as the soundtrack for ancient fantasies, Let It Bleed cast it as accompaniment to modern apocalypse—one all the more gnarly because you end up living through it.As for what the album meant in the band’s maturation, consider the ground covered between “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”—a song about angry young men complaining about what they don’t have—and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, in which the same, less angry (and slightly older) young men make peace with what they do. Asked a couple of weeks before Altamont if he was, in fact, now satisfied, Jagger told a press conference in New York, “Financially dissatisfied, sexually satisfied, philosophically trying.” Sometimes all you can do with a world at war is hunker down and have a drink.

After the spacey excess of Their Satanic Majesties Request, 1968’s Beggars Banquet was like cold water in the face. The band sounded lean and angry, their silk caftans traded for workwear that wouldn’t snag in the street. Mick Jagger had shown up to anti-Vietnam protests at Grosvenor Square in London that March, but was even more inspired by the unrest in Paris that May—“because in sleepy London town there’s just no place for a street fighting man,” as he put it on record. That it was “sleepy” London and not “swinging” London was signal enough—one moment was over, and another was already exploding.The band had never been political per se. Instead, politics had been sublimated in the music, whose punch and swagger suggested violence even if the lyrics didn’t call for it. That Jimmy Miller—their new producer—had been a drummer helped: Even Jagger’s voice sounded like a percussion instrument now, hitting words and syllables (“…but what’s PUZZ-ling you is the NA-ture OF my GA-me,” he says on “Sympathy for the Devil”) like they were detonators. At a time when the culture was acclimating to the reality that the personal would always be political and vice versa, the Stones always remained a little detached, careful not to lay too heavy a hand on any part of the scale. The band weren’t freedom fighters and Beggars Banquet wasn’t a manifesto—they were keen onlookers, and here was the picture from the window.The marching, charging feet of the “Street Fighting Man”, the stained dress of the “Factory Girl” and the “Salt of the Earth” so vast they appear numberless: Beggars Banquet belonged to The People. Even the album’s goofs—“Stray Cat Blues” and the country farce of “Dear Doctor”, the spit and the sour bourbon—were real enough to smell. And as though to write themselves into a deeper, longer history to which they were only humble inheritors, the band even dipped back into blues covers—Robert Wilkins’ “Prodigal Son”—for the first time since 1965.