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”.
