Once they realized they couldn’t get by with covering great
old Chuck Berry and blues numbers forever, The Rolling Stones got busy with
trying to hack out a distinctive sound of their very own. This led to their
most eclectic period as they continually tossed fashionable sounds against the
wall to suss which one was the stickiest. While it’s tantalizing to imagine how the rest
of the Stones’ career might have played out if they’d settled on the cool
marimbas and Elizabethan harpsicords of Aftermath
or the spooky Mellotrons and Moroccan jams of Their Satanic Majesties Request, they probably made the wisest
choice to stick with what they knew best. Thus, the rugged blues and sinister
Rock & Roll of 1968’s Beggars Banquet
became the template for much of the rest of their career.
Their 1969 follow up, Let
It Bleed, never strays too far from the previous year’s outing, though
there is too much good stuff in the grooves to dismiss it as an also ran. If
“Country Honk” is a more disposable C&W parody than “Dear Doctor” and “Midnight
Ramber” is a less elegant first-person portrait of evil than “Sympathy for the
Devil”, the Stones kept things fresh with the incomparable apocalyptic
atmospherics of “Gimmie Shelter”, the wicked grooves and guffaws of “Monkey
Man”, Keith Richards’s deliciously gnarly solo-vocal debut “You Got the
Silver”, and the hard-learned insights and choir—choir!—of the pop symphony “You Can’t Always Get What You
Want”.
With its fiftieth anniversary approaching, Let It Bleed is the latest subject of
ABKCO’s deluxe Stones reissue campaign. These annual releases got off to a
somewhat tentative start. 2017’s deluxe edition of Satanic Majesties tested one’s patience for how many copies of the
same album one needs in different formats (stereo and mono mixes on both vinyl
and hybrid SACDs), though its liner notes and packaging were both superb. 2018’s
deluxe Beggars Banquet was more
appropriately scaled back, featuring the stereo mix on one LP, the only track
afforded a dedicated mono mix (“Sympathy for the Devil”) on another 12”, and a
flexi-disc featuring a rare promotional interview with Mick Jagger. The CD
version was available separately from the vinyl one.
While fans surely would have gone cuckoo over the inclusion of
outtakes, that does not seem to be in the cards for these anniversary sets, and
this year’s Let It Bleed once again
skips the rarity party. That’s a drag since its sessions yielded such
fascinating items as “Gimmie Shelter” with lead vocals by Keith and “You Got
the Silver” with lead vocals by Mick. Instead we once again get the format
overload of the Satanic set with both
the stereo and fold-down mono mixes on both vinyl and hybrid SACDs. Stereo remasters
offer a slight but noticeable improvement over the ones on ABKCO’s excellent
2002 hybrid SACDs with clearer, punchier bass. I can discern no difference
between the mono LP and the one included in 2016’s Rolling Stones in Mono vinyl box.
My favorite move with this new set is one I was championing
since 2017’s Satanic set: the album’s
accompanying single (in this case, “Honky Tonk Women” b/w the single edit of
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”) is included complete with picture sleeve.
That’s a genuinely nice bonus that will hopefully continue in the years to
come. Imagine a deluxe Between the
Buttons with “Let’s Spend the Night Together” b/w “Ruby Tuesday” or deluxe
Out of Our Heads with “Satisfaction”
b/w “The Spider and the Fly”! The packaging is also fancier with the campaign’s
first big box containing a set of lithographs, a repro of the large poster included with Let It Bleed’s original release, and a
hardbound book full of terrific and rare photos, though David Fricke’s essay
won’t tell you anything you don’t already know if you’re enough of a fan to invest in the 50th anniversary edition of Let It Bleed.
