Review: RSD Edition of The Rolling Stones' 'More Hot Rocks (Big Hits and Fazed Cookies)'

Sure Hot Rocks: 1964 - 1971 had "Satisfaction", "Jumpin' Jack Flash", "Honky Tonk Women", and plenty of other examples of what made The Rolling Stones such a superior blues and R&B-based rock band, but it was missing a really key component of the Stones' story: they could be pretty fucking weird. Aside from a bit of sitar on "Paint It Black", some dissonant guitar effects on "Mother's Little Helper", Brian Jones's pastoral recorder on "Ruby Tuesday", and that choir on "You Can't Always Get What You Want", Hot Rocks generally presented the Stones as a more conventional band than they'd been from 1964 to 1971 (more consistently conventional days were ahead of them after '71, but that's another, less interesting story). Where was the psychedelia? Where were the fey Elizabethan ballads? Where was whatever the hell "I'm Free" is? 

Well, the answer arrived just in time for X-mas '72 when ABKCO/London released More Hot Rocks (Big Hits and Fazed Cookies). Although the only really, really big hits were "The Last Time" and "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?"--the set's only top-ten hits--there were fazed cookies galore. The ominous, looming psych of "We Love You" and "2000 Light Years from Home". The florid music-box romance of "She's a Rainbow". The skeletal anti-romance of "Lady Jane". The pseudo-Appalachian folk of "Sittin' on a Fence". The delightful Stones-pretend-they're-The-Beatles experiments "Dandelion" and "Child of the Moon". The Jagger-experiments-with-weird-voices experiments "Let It Bleed" and "I'm Free". It even included an entire side of oddities previously unreleased in the U.S. Hot Rocks moved more units, but More Hot Rocks surely moved more minds.

For the comp's fiftieth anniversary, and for Record Store Day 2022, ABKCO has released a new edition of More Hot Rocks on glow-in-the-dark vinyl. While the track line-up matches that of the original release, as opposed to the expanded SACD version from 2002, the track versions conform to those on the 2002 disc. That means "Dandelion" and "We Love You" are in stereo instead of mono (the latter complete with John Lennon's strange exclamation unique to the SACD), "Have You Seen Your Mother" is in mono instead of fake-stereo, and so on. 

The mastering is quite good, with the music sounding sufficiently detailed and powerful, but the audio is too quiet by several decibels, which means that if you get a pressing with some groove noise, as I did, that noise will be especially pronounced. A deep, wet cleaning might cure what ails ya. 

The set also comes with a holographic obi and two lithographs: one a tinted version of the B&W photo on the cover of Out of Our Heads/December's Children and the other a contact sheet from the session that yielded the pic on the cover of The Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra's The Rolling Stones Songbook album. Oldham's groovy doggerel still adorns the cover, adding another layer of weirdness to the Stones' most charmingly weird compilation.