Welcome back! Half of Rocktober was occupied by the last couple of book awards, so I’m here with a Rocktober catch-up: another missive from Andrew Watt, the current avatar of commercially-oriented rock music by old men1, this time with everyone’s favorite commercially-oriented producers of rock music-flavored content, The Rolling Stones. (There’s also another one coming down the pike some day. You’ll see it.)
1 in all honesty, a non-zero part of why I have an eye on Watt at all is because this record he made with Morrissey that Morrissey has been kvetching about being shelved because he’s guilty of some light white supremacy, hardly any all don’t you know, is going to be a real hoot to think about, so I’ve got to remember that he’s out here. I did, for my own reasons, skip the Eddie Vedder album, also.
I’m not going to do the usual thing here and give you a people’s history. You know who they are, you know why they’re here. They’re the last men standing, in a lot of ways. Oh, there’s still a sort of shambling-husk version of The Who stumbling around under that name, and we’ve still got a couple of Beatles left2, but basically the British Invasion is down to one band, and here they are. I think that’s about as much speed as you need to be up to to get to what I’m doing here.
2 one is even on this record!
That said, being the last one left is something, and the fact that the band exists at all, in any form is, really, something impressive. The idea that this particular set of 80 year olds3 has gotten in there and made anything that’s recognizable as rock-music oriented content (and it, for all that it’s largely uncompelling, is recognizable as rock-music oriented content) is impressive, and they deserve it. That’s why this is a full-on Comeback Trail post: there’s no reason to even question why people would want to listen to it. I wanted to listen to it, and I’m hardly what you’d call a serious Rolling Stones fan.
3 which is to say, like, ten years younger than the oldest member of the Buena Vista Social Club
This seems like as good a place as any to get into what kind of Rolling Stones fan I am4. I like the same songs from their sixties period everyone else does, and get down to the serious business of liking them when Mick Taylor joins the band, at which point the band was genuinely lights-out great for three albums5, admirably effective for a couple more6, and then slipped to “pretty ok I guess” until 1981. Often one’s relationship to the Stones relies on one’s relationship to their second guitarist, and Mick Taylor was the one with more personality. Ronnie Wood’s Keith Jr. routine doesn’t do it for me.
4 spoiler alert: the answer is “very specifically” and “not very much”
5 Let it Bleed, Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! and Sticky Fingers, with Ya-Yas joining not only the pantheon of great live albums, but giving us versions of their earlier hits that Mick Taylor plays on, and thus these are the only three Rolling Stones album anyone could ever possibly need. Thank you for your time.
6 Exile on Main Street and Goat’s Head Soup. The former comes with the caveat that is a very large percentage of the fanbase’s favorite Rolling Stones record, which I am acknowledging here, and then also saying: it’s not only not that great, it’s barely a Rolling Stones record. I do like it, though.
Leaving aside Charlie Watts7, I’m one of those people for whom Keith Richards holds most of the keys to enjoying the band. In fact, despite my earlier praise of Mick Taylor, it is worth noting that my favorite Stones record (Let it Bleed) is the record with the fewest contributions from anyone on guitar that isn’t Keith8. The Jagger partnership, also, is crucial: Keith Richards’s solo records are pretty dire, so I’m not sure what I pick up on Mick-wise9, but it’s an important partnership. Similar to the Let it Bleed observation, I must report that my favorite Rolling Stones song is “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”10, on which the other guitarist is, in fact, Jagger. So you see this is a very narrow band of appreciation I’ve got here.
7 mainly because I feel the same way about Charlie Watts everyone else does: he ruled, and he was too good for the Rolling Stones
8 Mick Taylor only plays on some of it
9 to be clear: I think Mick Jagger is a fine and compelling singer, I just mean that very little of what I respond to in the band comes from him.
10 perhaps uniquely, this is the only song that has ever been my favorite Rolling Stones song and is also the first song I ever remember thinking of as my favorite. Remind me to tell you a story about a cassette tape some time.
In any event, my relationship with them notwithstanding, it’s clear to everyone that for a wide variety of reasons, large and small11, they have very little in common with the band they were in the sixties and seventies. The thing that makes the Rolling Stones interesting to me is that they’ve pretty well established what it is they’re doing, and they’ve set it up so that they don’t actually have to do it anymore.
11 as large as “they’re fabulously wealthy people who are about to live right up until the end of the world” and as small as “Keith has arthritis now and it changed the way he played guitar”
I’ve been somewhat dismissive to this point (all that business about “rock music oriented content” and whatnot), largely because while it’s inarguable that what they’ve made is music, I’m not sure it’s any sort of impulse beyond the need to have new content to use to stoke the fires of the economic engine that keeps them all fabulously wealthy. They’ve toured a few times since their last record, obviously, but in this case you have to drum up some more interest. What better way to do that than a batch of new songs, songs that show off their new replacement drummer, songs that get people saying things like “they are as good as rockers half their age” and “they’ve still got it.”
The great David Yow, in an interview with Andy Falkous (also great), was talking about his band, The Jesus Lizard, occasionally touring in “re-enactment” form, and describing his band as “the best Jesus Lizard cover band in the world”. It’s hard not to think about that sort of thing when confronted with the existence of the Rolling Stones12. But of course, that makes money only so long. The Rolling Stones are going on and on and on, so we need to find new ways. And so you wind up at the record as loss leader: you put some actual effort in on making a record13, and you are rewarded by getting a bunch of songs for the middle part of your set, in between the songs that you’re playing, because you don’t have to learn anything to do so, to crowds that have convinced themselves (rightly, wrongly or whateverly – I’m not interested in changing anyone’s mind here) that this is, somehow, contributing artistically and viably to the world.
12 who, even at their best, were not half as engaged or communicative with their material as the Jesus Lizard were
13 and the record, as unsatisfying as it is, clearly has some effort in it. Mostly on the part of the non-Jagger/Richards participants, but you know, it’s not a completely lazy endeavor. Not completely.
And thus we find ourselves at the fans. The machine is lubricated by giving the people what they want and, despite my inability to understand why, there is a large and dedicated set of people for whom this arrangement is, in fact, what they want14, which is nice for them. I mean it – it’s great that there’s a set of people who enjoy the work of a band who is doing something no one else has ever done15, and if I’m unable to see what they’re getting out of it, it’s also not my money they’re siphoning out of bank accounts with the force and speed of a cartoon anteater, so I’m content to let them have their thing. The Rolling Stones, improbably, genuinely seem to have an actively-engaged fanbase, despite every available fact of the Rolling Stones’s existence.
14 NB that I almost never understand why people like anything. That’s why I operate a website about why things are popular: because it never makes any damn sense to me, intuitively. This goes as far as the Rolling Stones, sure, but really, is the central question of this entire website.
15 I would imagine that I’ll be in a very similar boat in twenty or so years when U2 does basically the same thing – there’ll probably be a similarly-dodgy record with whoever the Andrew Watt of 2043 is (and there’s no way to rule out it actually just being Andrew Watt), but I’ll be on the other side of that one. Also, I will once more point out, in case you’re feeling persecuted or that I’m missing a point: I did not write about the Eddie Vedder album for, once more, personal reasons.
Anyway, after their blues covers album of several years ago, they teamed back up with their twenty-first century Guy in the Chair, Don Was, because who else would you call if you were a dinosaur that needed to be walked?16. Those sessions fell apart17, and Paul McCartney recommended Watt, whom he had been working with18, and who decided to do the thing that producers always say they’re doing, and reinvigorate the process so that it can be completed.
16 thanks folks tip your waitresses
17 although they did yield a couple of recordings of Charlie Watts playing that ended up on the record
18 for more on this, as well as a much more thorough takedown of Watt than I’m going for here, enjoy J.R. Moores at The Quietus
In order to complete it, and in order to signify the momentous occasion properly, Watt did what he always does: he called everyone he could think of and invited them to the studio. Here’s where the signifying starts to wildly pick up. We have Charlie Watts’s last known performances! We have four original Stones on one song, because Bill Wyman left his sarcophagus to play on one of the songs Charlie plays on! We’ve have Paul McCartney playing a bass solo on the album’s ostensibly-rockin-est song (the ghost of the Beatles teaming up with the revenant Rolling Stones. Just in time for Halloween!). We have Elton John revisiting his session player days on a couple of songs, isn’t it cute? We have Stevie Wonder coming in as a special guest-star piano player, which is fun! We have Benmont Tench playing yet more piano, because why on Earth shouldn’t we? We have the new guy, who has been in Keith Richards’s band for seventeen billion years! We have Lady Gaga, because I guess that’s what she’s doing now! Each guest appearance comes built in with a marketing hook and a gimmick, thus displaying the capitalistic efficiency with which the Rolling Stones conduct their business. Can you believe that Jagger even hollers at Paul McCartney in a mean impression of his own accent? Can you believe that Lady Gaga might have not even come by to sing but that she did it anyway? Can you believe that Elton John just played piano like a professional piano player? Can you believe that Stevie Wonder played and also sang? With Lady Gaga? Can you believe Benmont Tench wasn’t busy ?
Of course you can, but the idea is that these are the questions you’re supposed to ask, and that’s the stuff you’re supposed to be thinking about. If nothing else, it’s impressive how consistently they’re able to guide the conversation: seemingly every single review19 needs to mention these things, because the Rolling Stones have had several decades of pointing to the things that people need to see in order for them to still represent the same rock band, in defiance of all reality20.
19 including this one!
20 indeed, the whole thing would be less annoying if the idea that they are somehow defying age and probability by doing it, rather than them simply being rich enough to treat themselves like a full-on corporation, complete with extensive marketing and advertising, wasn’t repeated quite so many times.
And that’s not all! There’s also the spectacle of a website that doesn’t work, as well as an overly-winking fake ad with the album’s godawful21 title. They released the Wonder/Gaga song as a single, and then there it was, along with playing a brief handful of songs at a relatively-small venue which also climaxed in a Lady Gaga appearance. They released a music video where Sydney Sweeney does the video vixen thing22. They did an album announcement with Jimmy Fallon, kicking off a surprisingly wide-ranging battalion of interviews23. In short, all the stuff you’d need to do to remind people that you’re alive and charming and that those are the things they should be thinking about, and not the music. Then there’s the decisions you have to make afterward: the record is released in a dizzying variety of formats, including alternate covers for every single MLB team and FC Barcelona24, and really, it’s a good thing they gave you all that stuff to hang your opinion on so you don’t even have to listen to it to make insane declarations.
21 but since explained to human fucking death. We get it already.
22 a decision that meant that every fucking review links to the video
23 which battalion, for my money, climaxes when Ronnie Wood revealed that Mick Jagger told him Don’t worry if you don’t think it’s the best thing since sliced eggs, Ronnie, just play it.” Indeed, the best thing since sliced eggs, an acknowledged great thing that everyone agrees is great and thinks about all the time. Fuck me.
24 who also did this for Drake, which I think we can all agree makes for a weird duo. I wonder if anyone has both of them?
This also lets the aforementioned fans get it on it: telling the stories, talking about the things that the stories mean, talking about the significance of the whole thing. Charlie Watts handpicked his successor25, snickering at the bit about going off to Brazil, all of the stuff from a couple of paragraphs ago, and, of course, that this is their best record since the wildly-overrated Some Girls26, if not the best record made within my lifetime. Of course, perhaps funniest of all, it could also just be the best Rolling Stones record of the last two decades, which might just about be accurate.
25 it’s said he said to Keith that if anything happens to him, Jordan should have the job, but it’s also hard to wonder how much of that is hand-picking and how much of that is trying to pave the road for when Charlie finally quit for good. He never actually did, but he quit the band a lot, albeit always in ways that meant he played on every record and every tour.
26 this last opinion being so widespread, and so frequently restated, that at least one reviewer tried to beg people to stop saying it, and also included this gem, too good to pass up: “It’s a dereliction of critical duty to overpraise art…Given that ‘Some Girls’ from 1978 wasn’t a patch on those imperial-era late Sixties and early Seventies Stones albums, laying on the hyperbole for ‘Hackney Diamonds’ is a bit like saying that the Chicken Cottage burger and chips you had last night was the best dinner you’d had since your Big Mac Meal”
So what about that music, then? Oh, it’s fine, I guess. I mean, it’s actually quite bad. Some of it is genuinely bad. But I’m not a fan, and therefore not a customer, so my opinion amounts to being basically the same as my opinion of, say, Polaris GEM. I don’t buy golf carts, either, so who cares if I don’t like theirs? The best I can say for it is that stretches of it were better than I thought they’d be, some of it doesn’t sound as phoned in as they sometimes do, and some of the spectacle (Charlie Watts! Paul McCartney! Bill Wyman) is touching enough to make the journey through the album easier.
But that’s about it. “Angry” is everything you would expect out of a Rolling Stones single. “Get Close” has an ok riff, and some pretty good sax, and Elton John enjoying himself. I might even listen to that song again someday. “Bite My Head Off” (the one with Paul McCartney) is dreadful, Keith’s “Tell Me Straight” almost works, and the rest of it is just kind of a wash, until the clamoring, scream-singing, false-ending clamor of “Sweet Sounds of Heaven”, a song that manages to bring out the worst in everyone playing on it. Unaccountably, people seem to love it.
Of course, at the end of it all, it sounds like the people involved wanted it to sound. For all their talk of how Watt was pushing them forward, and Ronnie Wood’s especially-effusive praise for how genreless and unbound the music was27, and despite Mick’s insistence that they didn’t want to make too many references and wanted instead to make new music, this is pretty much made up, entirely and exclusively, with sounds and moves that the Rolling Stones have already committed to tape several times over, and for decades.
27 a thing that if you could, if you were less excited about the thing, chalk up to a sort of relentless need to have a variety of songs ready for commercials, which is a major thrust of the Pitchfork review of the album, and which I’m basically inclined to agree with.
It’s hard not to get caught up in is, for me, the central image of the whole thing: Watt’s claim that he wore a different vintage Rolling Stones t-shirt every single day of the recording. He spent a lot of money, you see, and he was in the fold. So he made sure they sounded exactly like the Rolling Stones, without upsetting the Rolling Stones’s idea that they were doing something they hadn’t done, or at least without damaging the credibility of them saying so, whether they believed it themselves or not.
But of course, all of it is there to provide the Rolling Stones family of products their means to make more money, and, as such, there’s not a whole lot of point to trying to carve out a unique or interesting opinion in the first place: the Rolling Stones are, in fact, able to run over and flatten just about any opinion, because, well, they are who they are.
And so I leave you as they did, and how most of the reviewers did. It’s hard not to think of this as at minimum a transitional period, but of course, these are eighty year old men. There’s something hanging over the proceedings, and that something is “four fifths of a century”. It is, in fact, just under the amount of time it’s been since Muddy Waters first recorded “Rollin’ Stone Blues”, which the two constant members of the Rolling Stones tackle here. It’s often mentioned in reveiws as being a coda after the wail-and-stomp of “Sweet Sounds of Heaven”, but honestly, it might be the only thing in this century they’ve done that I liked, if only because in their rush to get it done and appease the people who think they should’ve recorded it by now, they didn’t fuck around with it, and there’s always going to be something nice about people who have done something for so many decades just…doing it.
Every record can be made interesting by trying to imagine how it sounds to someone who doesn’t hear the same way you do – thinking about the process of making it, and the things it would mean to someone for whom this is part of their biography, or at least their journey through their own biography. In this case, though, that’s just about all it’s got, and, indeed, it’s all the Rolling Stones are still trading in. They used to be somebody so hard that they can convince a whole bunch of people that it never ended.
It’s a talent, in its way, but it sure doesn’t make the music sound any better to me.
Ohio Needs a Train 