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The Stones late founder, Brian Jones,
who wanted the Rolling Stones to be a Blues band, for sure
would have been very pleased with his former band mates if
he could have just heard this one. Yes indeed, a 100% blues
album from the Stones - and a 100% cover album from the band
to boot!
As a lover of the Blues myself, there
wasn't any way I wasn't going to enjoying this LP, and sure
indeed, I loved this one the very first time that I heard
it. Still, there were a few things missing here. First, this
is a fast blues album, when in the past the Stones always
played slow blues whenever they tackled the genre (think
“Love in Vain”, or “No Expectations”, etc., sadly, there's
nothing like that anywhere on here); unless they
were taking an old blues number like “I Just Want to Make
Love to You" and turned it around into a rock song. But that
isn’t what they were doing on this album. Perhaps because
they didn’t plan on making this blues album in the first
place, is why it turned out to be so damn fast paced?
About the only thing missing on this
excellent Blues LP is a lot of slide guitar, yet something
else that the Stones always used a lot of whenever in the
past they wrote or covered a blues song. Ronnie Wood is one
fine slide player, so why didn’t he play any real slide on here?
There’s only a bit of that on this album, thanks to the
guest appearance of Eric Clapton. But gosh, how many old
Stones fans thought to themselves, boy, this great album
would have sounded even better if former Stone Mick Taylor
had repaid them a visit on here with some of his great slide
playing?
With that all noted, one thing that we
are used to hearing on most Stones blues songs, is Mick
Jagger’s clean and wonderful harp playing, and yes, be blows
harp on all but one song on this LP, and his harp helps to
make you forget about the lack of any true slide guitar
being heard.
As far as the songs on here go, the
album opens up with one of its best songs, “Just Your Fool”.
Talk about a very clean song, with pure, wonderful blues,
from start to finish on this one! The best song on the LP is
its sixth cut, “Everybody Knows about My Good Thing”,
featuring Jagger’s best vocal output on the album.
But really, there isn’t a weak track
on here; every song has its strong point for an album that
wasn’t even planned. The band went into the studio with
newly written Jagger/Richards rock songs to record, and
during a break on the first day, Mick started to sing what
would be the LPs title cut, and they just kept going in that
one direction after that. The new rock songs that they
actually wrote for what became this album’s sessions, will
now have to just wait for another day to come around.
I don’t rate any song on here a ten,
but the sum of all of these songs still lands the LP in my
Stones Top 10 album list anyway, Overall, if you love blues
music, or just love the Stones, you will enjoy this album!
- Keno, April, 2017
*Old Ratings vs. New Ratings
The oldest
ratings that you see above are from back when the album was first released.
Since time does change one's point of view, I decided to listen to and rate the
album again, doing so in January of 2019. Note: I did not look at the old
original ratings until after I placed my new ratings here in 2019. Second
note: New review can be found
here.
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