Not to miss a trick, The Rolling Stones decided to build a whole record around these auditions. Consequently, Black and Blue is the jammiest of Rolling Stones records, although it yielded a couple of their songiest songs: the lightly jazzy "Melody", featuring Billy Preston, and the wistful and cleverly structured "Memory Motel", which is long without ever getting indulgent. The record also boasts a couple of pleasingly concise rockers in the standard Stones mode: "Crazy Mama" and"Hand of Fate".
Much of the rest of Black and Blue is either indulgent or an awesome opportunity to just get to hear the Stones play, depending on your mileage for pseudo reggae jams ("Cherry of Baby"), pseudo disco jams (the vengefully dated "Hot Stuff"), and pseudo Latin jams ("Hey, Negrita", with which Ronnie Wood immediately broke the Jagger/Richards songwriting monopoly that Mick Taylor couldn't crack in his half-decade with the Stones, which contributed to his departure). The album's one hit, "Fool to Cry", falls somewhere between song and jam, with its MOR ballad choruses and its repetitiousness and unmelodic verses.
Black and Blue may not be the Stones' most timeless work, but you'd never know that from how much attention has been lavished on it for a new Super Deluxe box set. Five LPs, a hardback book, a blu-ray, a poster, and a nicely designed box make for a package worthy of Exile on Main St.
The leading ingredient is the core album newly remixed by Steven Wilson. This isn't a radically different take on Black and Blue. It adds some sparkle to the guitars, particularly on the album's best track, "Memory Motel". The remix also highlights Mick's voice a bit more, although things go off the rails on the album's worst track when that voice gets clipped off coming out of the mid-song instrumental break. At least, for just a moment, we can fool ourselves into believing the song is just called "Stuff" instead of a slogan decaled across the T-shirt of many a mid-seventies narcissist.
The second LP, which is slotted into a gatefold with the main album (ignore the image at the top of this page), presents some supplementary songs and jams. There's "I Love Ladies", which sounds like a dry run for "Heaven" without the cod-Asian filigree and more of a classic soul approach. The lyrics are silly and so is Mick's falsetto, but with better lyrics and a less keening vocal this would have been a welcome change of pace on the proper album. For "Shame Shame Shame" (not the Jimmy Reed song the early Stones appropriated for "Little By Little"), Mick keeps that falsetto running intermittently through the whole thing, but this would still have easily been one of the best cuts on Black and Blue.
The rest of Disc Two is devoted to the kinds of jams that drove the Black and Blue sessions. A "Chuck Berry-style jam" features Harvey Mandel, who properly auditioned for the band and partially got cut because he isn't English, and a few blues ones feature Jeff Beck, who was English but claimed he was really just sniffing around to see what was what and had no intention of joining the Stones. Both players brought their distinct styles but didn't assimilate as well as Ronnie would.
The next three LPs showcase a live set from Earl's Court. If you thought Mick's falsetto was goofy, wait 'til you hear him affect a pseudo-punk Cockney accent many months before The Damned even released "New Rose". The set is pretty similar to the ones recorded for Love You Live, but it's very nice that this album makes room for Billy Preston's spotlight performances of his two signature songs, "Nothing from Nothing" and "Outa-Space". Although the Stones were already a bit long in tooth by 1976, and Mick was really putting on an act, they still got themselves sufficiently roused, especially toward the end of the concert as they burned through "Jumpin' Jack Flash","Street Fighting Man", and "Sympathy for the Devil". Earlier Keith Richards had effortlessly stolen the show with a stormy rendition of "Happy", Wood aiding and abetting with some lacerating slide runs.
The remix, outtakes, and Earl's Court set reappear on a blu-ray included in the Super Deluxe set. As for exclusive content, the blu-ray includes Dolby Atmos mixes of Black and Blue and Earl's Court (as I recently declared, my rig is not Atmos compliant) and a TV concert video from a Paris gig that originally aired on French TV and is getting its first official home video release here. Since the concert was shot on mid-seventies quality video, you shouldn't expect it to look like the Criterion edition of Citizen Kane. It's pretty smeary, but you still get a good idea of how the Stones worked the stage, and it may be dark, but it has more atmosphere than certain over-lit bootlegs of the show.
A poster and a hardback book with a bit of text and a bunch of photos finish off this set. The real star of the Super Deluxe-Black and Blue is whoever pressed the vinyl. The records are beautifully noiseless and free of groove distortion, so if the jamming Stones are your favorite Stones, plunge in.
