While Mick Jagger and Keith Richards enjoyed a break from each other, they brought in producer Chris Kimsey to see what he could dig out of the vaults so the Stones could welcome the year of MTV with a new release. The result of his vault raid was the last unequivocally fine work by the Rolling Stones. This is especially strange considering that Tattoo You is a compilation of rejects from some of the weakest albums the Stones’ had yet to release. Three tracks from Some Girls notwithstanding, the rest of the cuts were culled from Goats Head Soup, Black and Blue, and Emotional Rescue. Two of the numbers, “Neighbors” and “Heaven”, were brand new and not as good as the oldies. Fortunately, the only other so-so selections are the bluesy Some Girls-leftover “Black Limousine”, and oddly enough, the riff-without-a-song “Start Me Up”, a remnant of the Some Girls sessions that went on to become the group’s flimsiest classic.
However, it is baffling why such terrific material as “Worried About You” and “Slave” were left off of Black and Blue. Both of these tracks outclass anything on that record. “Worried About You” is a cynical love ballad that Mick sings in a sincere falsetto (as opposed to his cartoonish Mickey Mouse performance on “Emotional Rescue”), which contrasts his impassioned shouts that climax the track beautifully. “Slave” sounds like the Black and Blue relic it is because it’s a lengthy, vamping jam. However, it kicks harder than the other jams from those sessions and Sonny Rollins’s sax solo is superb. So is his work on “Waiting On A Friend”, a minor hit single much more deserving of classic status than “Start Me Up”. “No Use in Crying” is a similarly tender slow-soul number, while Keith’s showpiece, “Little T & A”, is tough and catchy enough to rise above its misguided use of sexist slurs to express romantic infatuation.
Tattoo You was followed by a big stadium tour, represented in its day with the single-LP live album Still Life, and more completely in Hal Ashby’s concert film Let’s Spend the Night Together. While watching Mick sprint across a football field-sized stage in stretch pants and knee pads in 1981 is not as exciting as seeing him strip down to a painted-on Satan tattoo in 1968, the Stones’ work on this tour is a solid representation of where they were in the eighties: a massive stadium act and truly the biggest rock and roll band in the world when Led Zeppelin ceased to be in it and The Who were on their way out.
A remastered edition of the 1981 studio album and the debut of a full concert from its accompanying tour are the cornerstones of an all-new box set devoted to the Tattoo You era. The original album appears on both CD and picture disc LP, while the concert is spread over two CDs, but the most interesting ingredient of this set is a disc of nine outtakes. A spirited cover of Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away”, an early reggae version of “Start Me Up”, and a rocker better than the rock version of “Start Me Up” called “Living in the Heart of Love”, have long been considered some of the band’s best unreleased tracks. However, the addition of seventy-eight-year-old Mick Jagger’s vocal to forty-plus-year-old recordings such as “Troubles A’ Comin’”, “Fiji Jim”, and “Fast Talking Slow Walking” muddies the authenticity (and, frankly, doesn’t sound very good) and the whole thing is brickwalled on CD. The vinyl sounds better, but picture discs are for hanging on walls, not placing on turntables. The lenticular box and hardback book are quite nice.
