Review: The Rolling Stones' 'Live at the Wiltern'

2003 was a big year for The Rolling Stones. That was when the group turned forty, released their very first career-spanning greatest hits album, and went on an international tour that became the second most profitable one in history at the time (The most profitable? Their own Voodoo Lounge tour of eight years earlier). 

Review: 'The Rolling Stones Singles 1966 - 1971'

*It's been twenty months since the release of The Rolling Stones Singles 1963 - 1966, and though that set's press release promised the inevitable sequel would arrive in 2023, vinyl reissues of the Stones' U.S. LPs were apparently ABKCO's main concern that year. In 2024, the label has wasted little time in finally making good on that 2022 promise. 

So, now The Rolling Stones Singles 1966 - 1971 has finally arrived to compile eighteen singles representing the time period that I, for one, insist was the Stones' most creatively fertile. While they are usually lauded for sticking to their rudimentary rock and blues guns, I will forever insist that they were at their most exciting and vibrant when grooving with sitars, Mellotrons, dulcimers, synthesizers, John Paul Jones, and John and Paul. 

Review: Vinyl Reissues of 4 Rolling Stones LPs

When the Rolling Stones' sixties albums made their first appearance on digitally remastered CDs in the mid-eighties, ABKCO made the fairly controversial decision to issue them in their American iterations rather than the UK originals. At the same time, the label also issued these American versions on vinyl.

That was 37 years ago. Since then, the UK albums have become the standard in the US during the current vinyl resurgence, although most of the American albums were included on ABKCO's Rolling Stones in Mono box set from 2016. Long story short, ABKCO recently began reissuing each of the American albums in the U.S. as standalone vinyl releases for the first time since 1986. Some of these LPs, such as Aftermath, Between the Buttons, and Flowers, have not been issued in the states on stereo vinyl in any way since 1986. The campaign also includes a few UK records that have never been given standard (i.e.: non-RSD or non-box set) releases in the States before.

Review: 'Charlie's Good Tonight: The Authorized Biography of Charlie Watts'

The Rolling Stones' reputation for being "bad boys" or whatever is not unearned considering all the abuse of women, drugs, and each other for which Mick, Keith, Brian, and Bill were known to indulge in to varying degrees (as far as I know, Keith was always pretty gentlemanly when it came to women and Bill never messed with drugs or his bandmates. Underage girls, however...). 

Review: The Rolling Stones' 'Tattoo You' 40th Anniversary Box Set

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.

 

Review: 'The Rolling Stones Unzipped'

There's no question that the audio side of The Rolling Stones was always their most crucial facet, but they probably would not be quite so legendary if not for their visual one. Much imagery is inextricably twined up with the band: Charlie's natty suits, Keith's pirate costumes and arsenal of flash yet functional guitars, Mick's lips and the ubiquitous logo they seemingly inspired. The Rolling Stones Unzipped is a lavish tribute to that iconography. The big hardcover showcases not only the band's garb and gear but also their handwritten lyrics, pages from Keith's 1963 diary that reveal he was always really self-congratulatory, and perhaps most charmingly, Ronnie's needlessly artful but utterly delightful handwritten/hand-designed set lists of the band's rehearsals.

However, the garb and gear shots are what really carry Unzipped. Mick's wardrobe of the sixties is truly spectacular. The grenadier jacket (by M&N Horne) and gorgeous waistcoat/ruffled silk shirt combo (by Mr. Fish) he wore in 1965 were outrageously individual choices from a time when The Beatles still wore matching uniforms. His outfits start sucking in the seventies with an overabundance of gross unitards and sub-Elvis jump suits, but they tighten up again in the late eighties and nineties with sharp frock coats. Charlie, of course, always looked fab, but his wardrobe is unfortunately underrepresented, and there's nothing at all from the closet of the always well-attired Brian Jones. However, there are some nicely crumpled pieces from Keith Richards' bedroom floor. There are also some choice pieces of equipment, such as the tabla set Charlie banged on Their Satanic Majesties Request and the bizarre toy drum set that packs such a wallop on "Street Fighting Man".

Unzipped is also notable for complimenting the pics with all-new commentaries from Jagger, Richards, Wood, and the recently departed Watts. The most substantial chunk of text is Anthony DeCurtis's nutshell history of the band, which does include a few head scratchers. He claims the Stones found psychedelia "silly" and "confusing," completely ignoring the head-long plunge they took into it with Satanic Majesties, their own prodigious LSD consumption, and the spaced out interviews Mick and Brian gave to the underground press during the acid era. He mostly ignores the band's pre-Beggars Banquet work, but calls the embarrassingly dated and antiseptic Dirty Work "possibly the most underrated album of the Stones' career" that "finds the band at its rawest and most rhythmically charged." Take another listen to "Back to Zero" and get back to me, Tony.

There are also essays from various guest stars, such as Martin Scorsese who assesses the Stones on film, Anna Sui and John Varvatos on their fashion sense, lips-logo designer John Pasche (who drops the A-bomb that he was only paid 50 quid to design that logo that has been pasted on a multi-million dollars worth of merch) on their graphic design, and Buddy Guy (who offers an ever-so-slightly and utterly justifiably begrudging nod to the Stones for introducing white America to blues artists mainstream DJs were too racist to play) on their relationship with the blues. All in all, Unzipped is a very plush, surprisingly eye-opening package, not unlike the Stones' musical body of work.

Farewell, Charlie Watts

The Rolling Stones became one of the top rock and roll acts on the strength of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards' songs, Jagger's way with a crowd, and Richards' way with a chord, but none of it would have meant a lick if Charlie Watts didn't hold it all together. Watts is best known for his simple, ever-so-slightly behind-the-beat beat that complimented so many Stones classics. However, he was also stealthily versatile, which will become rather obvious to anyone who ventures into the Stones' mid-sixties albums. More so than Richards' riffs, Charlie Watts's lyrical drum figures provide the main hooks in tracks such as "Get Off Of My Cloud", "My Obsession", and "Complicated" (he really shines throughout Between the Buttons).

In the decadent, often petty world that Jagger and Richards constructed, Watts was also a true gentleman.  There are plenty of gross stories involving The Rolling Stones (don't get me started on Wyman), but Charlie Watts always seemed like a decent guy. And on the odd occasion he lost his composure, he apparently tended to unleash his wrath on deserving parties. Many a Stones fan's fave Stones story (which will surely get repeated a lot in the coming days) is the one that finds Jagger in a rare state of drunken sloppiness, phoning Charlie in the middle of the night to shout, "Where's my drummer?" at an Amsterdam hotel. Watts slipped out of bed, donned one of his natty suits, headed over to Mick's room, and punched him in the face, responding, "Don't ever call me your drummer again. You're my singer."

Sadly, we have lost that beat and that wit. Charlie Watts recently bowed out of an upcoming Stones tour for health reasons. He died today at the age of 80. Specific details are not available as of this writing.

Review: 'The Rolling Stones'

For a band regularly derided as ugly and dirty throughout their nearly sixty-year career, The Rolling Stones' mugs have sure sold a lot of books. Originally published in 2014, editor Reuel Golden's The Rolling Stones was just the latest in a long history of Stones-centric photo books. Most of its images had been previously published, but since it's a Taschen book, it is atypically comprehensive. Its more than 450 pages are packed with pictures of them from their most photogenic days in the sixties to sessions for their most recent album at that time, 2005's A Bigger Bang. Half of those 450 pages focus on the sixties with a variety of publicity photos, album cover sessions, and recording studio documents. Surprisingly few catch them on stage in their most vital days, though concert pics become the dominant type when The Rolling Stones starts sucking in the seventies. Hilariously, and thankfully, the book sprints through the Stones' most execrable decade, the eighties, in just ten pages, while about twenty each are allotted for the inessential nineties and twenty-first century. 

Because so many of these images will be familiar to Stones fans, The Rolling Stones will be most valuable to fans purchasing their first Stones photo book or others looking to consolidate. I've seen my share, but some of these were new to me, such as a shot of Brian Jones holding a (presumably) psychedelic mushroom aloft in 1967 and a shot of Keith Richards's pre-Redlands living room, which is as Spartan as a hotel room. My favorite shots are the LP-cover outtakes, but that's just because I can never get enough of seeing Charlie Watts pal around with a donkey.

Taschen is now publishing an updated edition of The Rolling Stones, though the only post-2014 photos can be found in the memorabilia and discography sections. Perhaps more pics were added to the sixties and seventies. I doubt anyone would complain about that. 

Review: 'The Rolling Stones in the Beginning: With Unseen Images'

Between mid-1965 and mid-1966, Danish photographer Bent Rej was one of The Rolling Stones’ most trusted chroniclers. He began working with the band just as Mick and Keith penned their first smash, “The Last Time”, entering them into the upper echelon of pop artists. Rej exited the fold when Brian, his closest friend in the group, spiked him, and the group’s descent into druggy darkness began. Consequently, his shots tend to show an atypically innocent Rolling Stones.

Review: Rolling Stones-'Bridges to Bremen'

Only the most deluded fan would argue that The Rolling Stones’ were at their most vital in 1998, or that their most recent album—Bridges to Babylon—was one for the ages. Still, there’s always something to be said for catching a band of the Stone’s magnitude live, and they certainly put on a polished show. Granted, polished rock isn’t too electrifying, but the band still had their moments even at the end of the fifth leg of their Bridges to Babylon tour. Just when I was ready to nod off while watching the new Bridges to Bremen DVD, the Stones slammed into a vital version of “Paint It Black” that woke me right up.  

Review: 'The Rolling Stones in Comics'

With Mick’s exaggerated lips, Bill and Charlie’s square heads, and Keef’s bird’s nest scruff, The Rolling Stones always did look a bit like cartoon characters. And between their easily caricatured mugs and equally outrageous behavior, the Stones have always been ripe targets for cartoonists. Bill Wyman even anthologized newspaper comic parodies of his band in The Stones: A History in Cartoons back in 2006.

Now a writer named Ceka is using the comic medium to tell a somewhat more complete version of Stones history in a book called The Rolling Stones in Comics. Between large chunks of text-only exposition, 21 different artists bring portions of the story to life employing a variety of styles from Domas’s Sunday comic section doodles (illustrating Lennon and McCartney composing “I Wanna Be Your Man”) to Kyung-Eun Parks’s more detailed, slightly grotesque style (illustrating the Stones’ fall out with the Marquee club) to Dominique Hennebaut’s Underground Comix-indebted approach (Mick and Keith’s first songwriting attempt) to the stylized yet more realistic approach of Amandine Puntous (the Redlands bust) to Anthony Audibert’s sketchy abstractions (Mick’s alleged dalliance with Anita Pallenberg while making Performance). It’s an invigorating mixture that makes the 1000^th retelling of The Rolling Stones’ story seem fresh again. So do Ceka’s realistically coarse dialogue and decision to include such valuable trivia as the real… and horrifying… explanation for the term “Rolling Stone”.

The one downside is Ceka’s tendency to sometimes veer to close to hagiography, as when he refers to all five of the Stones as “geniuses” (I doubt any one of them deserves that much-overused designation) or deifies the horribly abusive Brian Jones as an angel. Fortunately, the author balances moments such as these with sly criticisms of the Stones myth, such as a sardonic depiction of Mick’s half-hearted and hypocritical participation in socio-political activism in 1968. I also really dig the sections that fly away from the main story, such as the clever explanation of Keith’s open tuning from guest cartoon character and real musician Vincent Blanchard and Ceka’s personal story of finding the love of his life as “Angie” spins at a party. The Rolling Stones in Comics works nicely as a pocket history of Rock & Roll’s key band, but its narrative quirks and far-out art are what make it special.

Review: 'The Rolling Stones in Concert, 1962-1982: A Show-by-Show History'

The Rolling Stones made some of the greatest records of the Rock & Roll era, but for a lot of fans, the band was at their greatest on stage. Sitting in your living room listening to Aftermath you couldn’t see Jagger shimmying his skinny hips and flapping his pillow lips. You couldn’t watch Keef swaying over his guitar like a marionette operated by a drunken puppeteer. You couldn’t see Wyman…errr…standing.

While the Stones’ recordings have been well documented in books such as Martin Elliott’s Complete Recording Sessions, their live performances have not been as thoroughly covered. In his introduction to The Rolling Stones in Concert, 1962-1982: A Show-by-Show History, author Ian M. Rusten is up front about attempting to create a stage equivalent to Elliott’s studio-centric one. Like Elliott, Rusten has created a very well organized chronicle of The Rolling Stones at work with separate entries for each item. Of course, recordings are more available to review than ephemeral performances are, so Rusten relies less on his personal opinion in evaluating his topic than Elliott did. This means a hell of a lot more research was involved as Rusten had to seek out period reviews for nearly every concert he discusses in The Rolling Stones in Concert. No wonder he only had it in him to cover the Stones’ first two decades.

Even without considering the workload, 1982 is still a smart year to cease the discussion because it both marks an end to the Stones’ road work before they took an extended (and very acrimonious) break and also marks the end of the Stones as a fairly uncalculating live act. To see them from 1989’s Steel Wheels tour and beyond is not to see the real Rolling Stones. They became more like a Vegas act. Rusten covers the Stones before they started putting on slick shows. In their earliest days, it was more like they were putting on hurricanes. It’s stunning to see how many of their mid-sixties shows ended in riots. In the context of the Stones’ whole sixties stage career, Altamont looks more like a business-as-usual show than a grotesque aberration.

It’s hard to convey the excitement of live music in prose, especially when you weren’t present for the performance in question, so Rusten mostly serves as relayer rather than reviewer. Along with period reviews and less reliable fan relocations culled from contemporary message boards, Rusten provides set lists when possible, and most interesting of all, chunks of quotes from the Stones themselves. Mick and Keith’s hilariously nasty responses to some daft reporters from Phoenix are worth the admission price alone.

Review: 'The Rolling Stones in Mono'

Keith Richards is a pretty vocal mono purist, so it must have galled him that The Rolling Stones had been inconsistently represented in his preferred format since the end of its dominance in the late sixties. During the CD age, their pre-Aftermath albums tended to be hodgepodges of stereo and mono tracks and everything afterward was exclusively stereo. This was a dire situation, because their cro-mag gang rock relied so much on its sonic solidarity. The Stones bled an alluringly swampy murk in which Keith’s guitar was rarely discernible from Brian’s, and Bill’s bass throbbed through their wall of sound as if his band mates had hid his amp under the floorboards. Stereo dilutes that murk, violates its magic. 

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 246

The Date: June 2

The Movie: Charlie Is My Darling (1966)

What Is It?: The Stones were too uncontainable to put in a Hard Day’s Night style scripted romp, so Andrew Oldham made them the somewhat unwilling subjects of a documentary instead. Mick and Keith are the hammy ones, Bill the noncommittal one, Brian the fey and articulate one, and Charlie the inarticulate, possibly self-loathing one. He’s also my darling.

Why Today?: On this day in 1941, Charlie Watts is born.

Review: 'The Rolling Stones from the Vault: L.A. Forum (Live in 1975)'

Ronnie Wood got thrown right in the deep end when he joined The Rolling Stones in 1975. He had a lot to prove as the successor of Mick Taylor, the most classically accomplished musician ever to earn official-Stone status. That Keith Richards was in deep with addiction meant Ronnie had extra weight to pull on his first outing with the band, the Stones’ first tour of the U.S. in three years. With Jagger at center stage it wouldn’t be accurate to say all eyes were on him, but let’s face it, Ronnie had something to prove. Based on his work in the new “From the Vault” DVD, L.A. Forum (Live in 1975), he did a damn good job. Don’t get me wrong, Keith can still play, but he keeps an unusually low profile at this gig. When it’s his turn to step to the mic for “Happy”, he often doesn’t even bother to sing. The majority of the solos fall to Ronnie. When the band leans into “Fingerprint File”, it’s down to the new boy to play the funky bassline Mick Taylor handled on record. Bill Wyman sure couldn’t be expected to play it.

Ronnie stands out on Live in 1975, but he’s still upstaged by spotlight-snatching Jagger and even Billy Preston, who almost seems to be vying for bandleader at times. Kudos to control freak Mick for allowing the keyboardist so much leeway. Perhaps he realized he could use all the help he could get considering Keith’s condition. When the energy starts flagging during the center of this two-hour-and-forty-minute show (there’s an interminable version of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” that utterly fails to capture the recording’s propulsion), it’s Preston who gets it back on groove with performances of his “That’s Life” and “Outa-Space”. From there the Stones ride out the show with a Greatest Hits onslaught that never loses steam again, right up to the transcendent, show-closing version of “Sympathy for the Devil” that finds Mick leading a conga line of dancers and percussionists across the stage.

Not all of Preston’s contributions are stellar. He could have laid off his annoyingly squealing synth on several occasions. Yet he mostly shines in this show, and it’s cool to see a concert movie that isn’t solely owned by Mick for a change. We don’t see much of him, but Charlie Watts really makes his presence felt during this mostly powerful set too.

Eagle Vision’s new DVD release of the L.A. Forum gig sounds damn powerful too. The video is less spectacular, looking a lot like an old VHS bootleg complete with washed out bars running through the screen. The poor video quality actually didn’t do much to affect my enjoyment of this disc though. I guess a good concert is a good concert.

50 Years/50 Reasons The Rolling Stones are the Most!

According to Karnbach and Bernson’s It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards first went to see Brian Jones and Ian Stewart rehearse with their new blues band on May 25, 1962. Kismet. For the next fifty years, The Rolling Stones would remain the definitive Rock & Roll band, leaving a trail of milestones in their wake. Here are 50 that prove The Stones are and have always been the most.

1. Start Me Up
“Hot Stuff” notwithstanding, Stones albums could always be counted on to get off to a rousing start. Track one always packed a little extra kick: “Route 66” on their debut, “She Said Yeah” on Out of Our Heads, “Sympathy for the Devil” on Beggars Banquet, “Gimme Shelter” on Let It Bleed, “Rocks Off” on Exile on Main Street, “Start Me Up” on Tattoo You. Sometimes The Stones lured you in with beguiling mood music, as they did with “Mother’s Little Helper” on Aftermath, “Yesterday’s Papers” on Between the Buttons, and “Sing This All Together” on Their Satanic Majesties Request. No matter what, as soon as the needle drops on side one, there’s no mistake you're listening to the world’s greatest Rock & Roll band.

2. Imagination
Sometimes The Stones’ exploits overshadow their music. Mick and Keith are rarely spoken of in the same breath as fellow lyricists Dylan or Lennon and McCartney, but could they be Rock’s greatest wordsmiths? They were not as poetic as Dylan. They were not as empathetic as The Beatles. Yet Mick and Keith were far more personal, varied, and imaginative than many listeners realize. Songs such as “Before They Make Me Run” and “Wild Horses” are vulnerable contemplations of real situations. “Citadel”, “Torn and Frayed”, and “When the Whip Comes Down” establish incredibly detailed scenarios of fantasy and reality. “Sympathy for the Devil” may be Rock & Roll’s finest—and most frightening— character study, while “Monkey Man” might be its most hilarious self-parody.

3. Copy Me
One of the things that made Mick Jagger such a stellar frontman was his ability to mimic the greatest frontmen before and of his time. He spent the first few Stones records working hard to capture Chuck Berry’s audible smirk, Jimmy Reed’s slur, Marvin Gaye’s sweet roll, and Otis Redding’s transcendent shout. By the mid-‘60s he was an expert impersonator who had Ray Davies’s wryness (“Cool, Calm, & Collected”), The Beatles’ Liverpudlian harmonies (“Yesterday’s Papers”), and Dylan’s whine (“She Smiled Sweetly”) down pat.

4. The Bass Player He Looks Nervous…and the Drummer, He’s So Shattered…
Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman were never a flash rhythm section like Moon and Entwistle, or rhythmic melodists like Starr and McCartney. They just locked into grooves like no other white rhythm section, smearing slicks of drums and bass Keith could slide all over with his greasy licks. So what if Charlie played a little behind the beat? So what if Bill didn’t have the interest in distinguishing his lines from the mix, making it necessary for Keith to tear the bass from Bill’s hands and do the job himself from time to time? There’s still an undeniable magic to their boogie: Charlie wacking away like a slightly slack metronome; Bill tossing off walking runs with ease, occasionally dive-bombing down neck like Bo Diddley. On stage, the guys looked like they could not have been less interested in what they were doing. The exquisite rumble they made proved otherwise.

5. …and the Guitar Players Look Damaged
While Bill and Charlie were perfecting their rhythms at the back of the stage, Keith Richards and Brian Jones were out front revolutionizing guitar dynamics. The lead and rhythm player had always been distinct entities in Rock & Roll. Keith and Brian started changing that through a technique Keith christened “weaving,” instinctively trading rhythm and lead roles within a song. While Mick Taylor’s virtuosity meant that the roles became less integrated during his tenure, The Stones’ acquisition of Ronnie Wood in 1976 resulted in the most perfect weaving Keith would ever achieve with a guitar partner.

6. Slipped My Tongue
It’s been slapped on T-shirts, jackets, and air fresheners (though it’s hard to believe anything associated with The Stones would actually make the air smell better). Over-commercialized for sure, The Rolling Stones’ tongue is still a perfectly lascivious, unbelievably iconic logo for the world’s dirtiest band of pirates. It has certainly gotten more mileage than if it had “slowly (turned) into a cock,” as Keith Richards once suggested it might.

7. I Got the Blues

Through the Past Darkly with ‘Between the Buttons’

Tap your foot and rhyme, trip back 45 years time… Swinging London in full swing… floppy hats and foppish brooches… skinny drain pipes and big round sunglasses under sunless skies… paisley, pinstripes, pop art… acid and nightly clubbing with Rock royalty… The Beatles, The Who, The Kinks… the artists’ art: Rubber Soul and Revolver, My Generation and A Quick One, “Sunny Afternoon” and “Over, Under, Sideways Down”… visitors from across the Atlantic: Bob and Brian bringing Blonde on Blonde and Pet Sounds back home… Chuck and Muddy stacked in the attic… out with Chrissie Shrimpton like yesterday’s papers; in with Marianne and Anita… all these ingredients in the soup of late ’66… when The Rolling Stones consumed their peers and times, the styles, the sex, the drugs, the lifestyle, the retro vaudeville and prog psychedelia, spat them out on a vinyl time capsule called Between the Buttons… see it more clearer…

…Between the Buttons starts as a laugh… a spate of writing in late 1966… Mick goes solo for the first time, discarding Chrissie with utmost cruelty on “Yesterday’s Papers”… Keith composes “Connection” without connecting with his mate, unknowingly foretelling

Review: 'Treasures of The Rolling Stones'

Treasures of The Rolling Stones is a book for fans with a penchant for style and money to burn. Glenn Crouch compacts 50 years of the band’s history into a 60-page digest boxed in a spiffy slipcase. Their tale has been told more thoroughly and reliably elsewhere. There’s no excuse for the number of errors that appear in a book of this size, ranging from the mildly sloppy (a photo from 1967 is tagged 1965; “Under My Thumb” is mistakenly named as Chris Farlowe’s #1 hit of 1966 rather than “Out of Time”, etc.) to the egregious: “1975…The Faces had splintered after the death of bass player and songwriter Ronnie Lane…” Umm, Glenn, Ronnie Lane died in 1997. Maybe a fact checker wouldn’t have been a bad investment.

Yet Crouch’s credentials seem fairly solid. According to the back cover copy, he “worked with the Rolling Stones (at Virgin Records) for more than a decade.” He has certainly accumulated a fair share of Stones-related goodies over the years, which are the “treasures” of his tome’s title. Treasures of The Rolling Stones houses five pockets filled with reprints of Stones memorabilia: reprints of concert posters, tickets, backstage passes, programs, letters to fans, etc. The best is a note delineating the band’s lodging requirements. An ominous directive warns to “keep Bill Wyman away from Keith because of noise.” The guys’ silly road pseudonyms are run down too: Keith is “Percy Thrower”; Charlie (apparently) is “Bender.” There are also some nice black & white and color photos and fairly insightful overviews of every major L.P. and single. Big points to Crouch for being that ultra-rare Stone chronicler to praise Their Satanic Majesties Request, which he declares “the most musically inventive and innovative album in the Stones canon.” Hear, hear!

Review: "The Rolling Stones' Ed Sullivan Shows" DVDs

After The Rolling Stones made their first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on October 25, 1964, the host famously grumbled, “I promise you they'll never be back on our show. It took me 17 years to build this show and I'm not going to have it destroyed in a matter of weeks… I was shocked when I saw them.” The Stones, of course, would go on to shock funky, old Ed five more times throughout the ‘60s. SOFA Entertainment is now following up on last year’s terrific collection of The Beatles’ appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and doing the same for The Stones. While the complete collection of six episodes on two discs is not due for release until November 1st, an abridged single disc edition missing the band’s first and final “Sullivan” appearances comes out next Tuesday.

Whether or not fans should drop their dollars on one of these DVDs is no moot point. You love The Stones, you need to check them out on “Sullivan” not just to scream and shout to their performances but to dig the context. These days “The Ed Sullivan Show” may be most famous for its Rock acts, but that was never the show’s central purpose. It was an extremely old-fashioned variety program catering to corny circus acts, awful comedians, and bland crooners. Seeing the filthy, furious Rolling Stones storm the stage at 1697 Broadway is like watching a hurricane wipe out Little Town USA. Not that everything on these discs but The Rolling Stones is unwatchable. Some of the shows deliver serious nostalgia value. A lot of the vintage advertisements are more entertaining than the actual acts. Some of those acts are genuinely impressive. However, a lot of this material requires a quick thumb on your remote’s “next” button.

Charlie Watts's Ten Greatest Beats

Keith Richards may have recently spent nearly 550 pages grumbling about the prancing vocalist to his right, but only one Stone was terse enough to tell Mick Jagger “Don’t ever call me ‘your drummer’ again. You’re my fucking singer!” before giving him a face full of knuckles. That’s the kind of forthright might one should expect from Charlie Watts. He is equally brusque on drums, never overplaying or needlessly upstaging his cohorts, but like that famous punch, he isn’t above letting you know who’s really pulling Jagger’s strings every once in a while. The Charlie Watts Beat is as instantly recognizable as Ringo’s wash of hi-hat or Keith Moon’s thunderous chaos: never a hi-hat and snare played in unison, always a little behind the beat. Funky, loose but driving, the perfect compliment to Mick’s mercurial yowling and Keith’s sparse shades of strumming. Charlie Watts is The Rolling Stones’ “Man Behind the Curtain,” but in honor of his 70th birthday, we’re gonna yank that curtain down, shine a light on him, and groove to his ten greatest beats.


1. “Get Off Of My Cloud” (1965)

With “Get Off Of My Cloud”, Charlie Watts essentially does for the drums what Keith Richards did for the guitar on The Stones’ previous single, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”: he creates his instrument’s most instantly recognizable lick. The big difference is that iconic guitar riffs had been a Rock & Roll staple since Ike Turner choked out the boogie-woogie on “Rocket 88”. How many iconic drum beats had there been? “Peggy Sue” perhaps? “Bo Diddley” maybe? But even on those songs the drums served as backdrop for Holly and Diddley’s manic strumming. Right from the start of “Get Off Of My Cloud” we know who’s ruling the record. That purposeful thunder of semi-open hi-hat invaded by a lightning-bolt snare fill is to Rock & Roll drumming what “Once upon a time” is to storytelling.

2. “Paint It Black” (1966)

“Paint It Black” is a glorious testament to The Stones’ ensemble power. Everyone is delivering stellar work: Keith’s snaky guitar riff later echoed by Brian’s zingy sitar, Mick’s crimped inflections, Bill’s bass swoops that propel the track through its concluding dervish dance. But it is Charlie’s tom-tom pounding that inspired Melody Maker to swoon that he “creates a galloping beat suggesting high-speed elephants.” The powerful thumping Charlie muscles through the majority of the song is only topped by the simple yet shattering fill he discharges after the quiet mid-song break. A curt volley between toms and snare and the track is immediately thrust back into frenzied violence. Transcendent.


3. “My Obsession” (1967)

The potency of simplicity. As he did on “Get Off Of My Cloud”—and as he would do often throughout Between the Buttons—Charlie provides a track’s chief instrumental hook on “My Obsession”. Bass-snare-bass-snare-snare. When the sound evaporates at the end of each verse, the drummer ushers the band back in with a return to his ponderous solo like a nightmare that refuses to end. Only by killing it mid-beat is Charlie able to halt his obsession.


4. “Please Go Home” (1967)

Another Between the Buttons track gets its oomph from the man behind the kit. While Keith’s absurdly overdriven guitar doesn’t slack, it is Charlie’s “shave-and-a-haircut” jive that launches “Please Go Home” into the stratosphere. Punctuated only by the occasional gong-like cymbal crash, the beat never relents or alters, and the listener’s heart never stops racing until that final wave of guitar shudders into the shadows.


5. “Complicated” (1967)

Charlie gets even funkier on “Complicated”. Once again, he provides the hook, a hypnotic cha-cha-cha that expands into an unbreakable roll by the end of the track. There’s something very cheeky about his shifts into a Ringo Starr-like wash on the verses.


6. “2000 Man” (1967)

Here’s where words fail me. I’m not a drummer, so I can’t really explain what Charlie is doing in this song. I’m guessing most drummers couldn’t either. As Keith picks out a fairly conventionally rhythmic folk melody on his acoustic, Charlie trips the beat into disorienting psychedelia (or is it prog rock?) with his syncopations, keeping the beat moving with his hippity-hoppity bass drum but landing the snare where you’d least expect it. On first listen, his beat sounds completely out of place and distracting. After the third or fourth listen, you couldn’t imagine “2000 Man” without it. And just in case you’re concerned that Charlie has succumbed to some sort of massive psychedelic head trauma, he lays down his familiar funk on the mid-section to remind us he is still well capable of kicking out a basic beat.


7. “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968)

Mick and Keith did not provide Charlie with a lot of material requiring Latin rhythms, so hearing him samba as naturally as Tito Puente on “Sympathy for the Devil” is kind of shocking. He gets the intricate rhythm jingling from the opening seconds. When Rocky Dijon on congas and Bill Wyman on cabasa join in, the voodoo ritual is in full effect. Add in Mick’s screams and Keith’s tortured guitar shrieks and jittery bass, and you have one of the most rhythmically exhilarating Rock & Roll tracks ever cut.


8. “Honky Tonk Women” (1969)

No Latin flourishes here. No tricky syncopations or signature hooks. “Honky Tonk Women” is where Charlie lays down the archetypal Charlie beat, and this list would be incomplete without such an example. A few insouciant clicks from Jimmy Miller’s cowbell then Charlie thuds in slightly behind the beat, as is his way. He then propels the tempo without pushing it, barely altering the beat throughout the track’s three minutes. Notice how consistent the drums remain even as the brass, guitars, and bass approach euphoria on the instrumental break. Then when all instruments and voices cut loose on the grand finale, swooping and diving around each other like asteroids, Charlie trips up his beat a bit for emphasis, but doesn’t hit harder, doesn’t really go out of his way to up the intensity because he doesn’t need to. “Honky Tonk Women” is a sublime example of the drummer’s taste and his ability to lead the show from the back row. And you can dance to it.


9. “Moonlight Mile” (1971)

Perhaps the most gorgeous song in The Stones’ catalogue is also one of the band’s most deceptively powerful ones. Gentle acoustic guitars and piano provide a velvet backdrop to Mick’s sensitive vocal. Charlie rolls in with what sounds like soft mallets, creating cinematic flourishes redolent of crashing waves. He never breaks into standard bass-snare interplay. Rather he washes and booms and tumbles his way through the track, providing its exhilarating might, driving Mick to wails that ring with greater sincerity than the mass of his vocals. “Moonlight Mile” suggests that Charlie may have missed his calling as a great movie director.

10. “Time Waits for No One” (1974)

Charlie’s rhythm on “Time Waits for No One” is just as visual as his work on “Moonlight Mile”, cracking a rim shot that instantly conjures images of a grand, looming clock even before Jagger begins decrying the stoic cruelty of time. When the guitars flood in, he releases all of his signatures: the lax beat, the cinematic rolls, the Latin off beats, the simple yet mighty tom fills. By the end of the track, he’s back to tick-tocking, leading this epic out toward infinity.