The Rolling Stones It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (1974)

From rollingstone.com By Jon Landau October 16, 1974

It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll is a decadent album because it invites us to dance in the face of its own despair. It’s a desperate album that warns at the end of one side that “… dreams of the nighttime will vanish by dawn,” and on the other that a Kafkaesque “someone is listening, good night, sleep tight.” It’s a rock ‘n’ roll album because it’s so goddamn violent.

At its simplest level the album deals with the psychosis of being in a rock ‘n’ roll band and having made it as a star — and it does that better than the Who’s opus devoted exclusively to that subject, Quadrophenia. At another level it uses the relationship between a band and its audience as a metaphor for the parasitic relations between a man and a woman. At still another, in the best tradition of rock ‘n’ roll, it convincingly flaunts its own raunchiness.

The first cut sets the tone of the album by reminding us of pop’s ancient double-entendre: that the word rock refers both to music and to sex. “If You Can’t Rock Me” sounds like it ought to be about sex. But it starts with, “The band’s onstage and it’s one of those nights.” Only the chorus turns it back into the anticipated and angry fuck song.

Their “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” is still a lover’s plea but there’s an undercurrent of resentment directed at the listener. By now, you can’t tell whether the Stones are singing about people who watch them or people they live with. That confusion is enhanced by the tightness with which the album’s producers, the Glimmer Twins, have welded it to the title track.

The verses to “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll” sound like an assault on the audience. “If I could stick a pen in my heart/I’d spill it all over the stage …” It’s only when they get to the bridge that their real target comes into focus: “Do you think that you’re the only girl around/I’ll bet you think that you’re the only woman in town.” They’ve fused their many resentments into a single vitriolic statement.

But the song is more than an attack. Jagger sounds like he hates, but he also sounds convincing, not ironic, when he belts out, “I know it’s only rock ‘n roll but I like it.” How can he? Because, in addition to desperation, the song reflects both the strength and vulnerability of someone who has earned the right to ask Bob Dylan’s question, “What else can you show me?”

On the album’s first three songs the band renews its claim to greatness. Instead of coming off like cynics they sound like they’re still vulnerable, afraid, capable of being hurt and able to respond with aggressive energy. They’ve returned with a vengeance to the wildness of their early records and the fact that they are more self-conscious than ever about it doesn’t detract from the album’s impact.

The main focus of their aggressive instincts are, as has most often been the case, women. On the basis of “Stupid Girl,” the Rolling Stones have been called sexists. On the basis of this album, they are plainly misogynists. Their antipathy to women comes across most bluntly in their blast at the woman waiting for Jagger to “. . . suicide right on the stage.” But it’s also there in an incidental line (“Time can tear down a building or destroy a woman’s face”) or an entire song (“Short and Curlies”).

Jagger’s tendency to see women and work as extensions of the same burden shows up in the weirdest places and in the funniest ways. On “Luxury” he plays the part of a Jamaican factory worker with two monkeys on his back: “I’m working so hard, I’m working for the company/I’m working so hard to keep you in the luxury.”

His embittered view of the possibilities for men and women show up most powerfully on the extraordinary “If You Really Want to Be My Friend.” In the first verse he takes the part of the man in a lover’s quarrel, in the second verse, the part of the woman. And while he’s doing it, he continues to use art as a metaphor:

I know you think life is a thriller
You play the vamp, I’ll play the killer
Now, baby, what’s the use of fighting
By the last reel we’ll be crying

He leaves the lovers in a horrible, hopeless quagmire of their own making.

“If You Really Want to Be My Friend” is a tough ballad; “Till the Next Goodbye” is almost poignant. Jagger conveys his desperation by simply saying, “I can’t go on like this,” while the band smolders beneath him.

Jagger used his most violent images to deal with men and women. At one point he laughingly cries “… she’s got you by the balls.” During another, he talks about “… a vulture, a sore and a cancer culture,” and asks someone to “get your nails outta my back, stop bleeding me.”

When he’s singing about more abstract subjects, he’s more distant. “Fingerprint File” is a bit contrived, in the manner of “Dancing with Mr. D.” on Goats Head Soup. He never quite convinces us that some nameless agent of a nameless power is really running him down.

But he sings “Time Waits for No One” with a controlled desperation that borders on acceptance but never quite becomes resignation. Given the rock star’s inherent fear of aging, the song becomes an affirmation of Jagger’s willingness to keep on trying in the face of inevitable doom.

For me, It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll is Mick Jagger’s show. It seems like any time anyone writes about him it is either to analyze his appeal as a showman or to gossip about his private life. His role as the man who has done the most to define rock-band singing often (and amazingly) goes undiscussed.

Jagger started out with a mediocre voice, no training, an enthusiasm for black music and a passion to communicate. From the start he must have known instinctively what he only made explicit on December’s Children: “I’m free to sing my song though it gets out of time.”

He had a right to feel that way because he was singing in the only band that made a virtue of its drummer’s tendency to lose the beat and its background voices’ inability to sing on key. While the Beatles always had George Martin around to clean up their act, the Rolling Stones had Andrew Loog Oldham to coarsen theirs. (And it’s the early Rolling Stones records that still get played while so much of the early Beatles music is now only of passing interest.) Jagger possessed style, control and originality from the beginning. His interpretations of Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get a Witness” and Bo Diddley’s “Mona” were remarkably precocious and startlingly well focused.

By the time he cut “Satisfaction” Jagger had so well captured the spirit of black music that when singers of twice his ability covered the song, they never called into question his original. But beyond black music, Jagger gave an English voice to the adolescent rage that Bob Dylan was articulating in the United States.

And yet, while the Rolling Stones have always qualified as angry young men, they were never merely angry young men. Jagger swaggered through Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” (“My song’s … gonna save the whole world”^*), hammed his way through “Empty Heart,” and sang a perfect version of Sam Cooke’s difficult “Good Times,” making it sound surprisingly easy.

Jagger somehow managed to continually deliver more than was promised. He found a broader emotional range on “Dandelion,” “We Love You,” “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” and, most surprisingly on the Got Live if You Want It! version of “Satisfaction.”

At the end of the decade he began to produce a string of virtually undisputed rock gems including “Street Fighting Man,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Gimmie Shelter,” “Moonlight Mile” and “Tumbling Dice,” the last two my own favorite Jagger performances.

From the beginning, the Rolling Stones have also made an extraordinary number of memorable albums including The Rolling Stones, Now!, Out of Our Heads, December’s Children, Aftermath, Let It Bleed, and possibly their finest work to date, Exile on Main Street. But even their greatest fans have come to expect unevenness, with their low points (“As Tears Go By”) sinking beneath the barely acceptable.

So It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll‘s consistency comes as a real surprise, especially after the occasional lameness of Goats Head Soup. Jagger justifies the loud mixing of his voice by singing almost everything to perfection and reaches a pinnacle on the title track and “If You Really Want to Be My Friend.”

On the first, he uses and exaggerates all of his mannerisms until he finds a line he can blast us back with. And he finds one after another.

As for the second, I criticized Jagger’s singing of Sticky Fingers‘s soul ballad, “I Got the Blues,” because I believed there is a time when the only thing that will do is the right note, correctly sung, and that he couldn’t deliver it. On “If You Really Want to Be My Friend,” he doesn’t bother with notes, whether rightly or wrongly sung. He sings it the way he sang the early soul ballads (“That’s How Strong My Love Is,” “Cry to Me”) — in a mannered, contorted, violent and outrageous voice. In so doing, he immerses us in the emotional turmoil of the kind of quarrel that only takes place when there is nothing left to a relationship but endless arguing.

As for the rest of the Rolling Stones, they continue to prove their worth and their uniqueness. I loved them the first time I saw them tour in 1965 for their rambunctious arrogance and the simplicity of their music. I loved them the last time I saw them, at Madison Square Garden in 1972, for putting on the most accomplished and overwhelming rock performance I had yet seen.

During all that time I find Charlie Watts has barely changed. He plays what he always has, only better. By any reasonable definition, he is an ordinary musician. But when he plays with the Rolling Stones, his style takes on meaning and he becomes a fifth of an indivisible whole.

The guitars are flashier than they used to be. Keith Richard has never quite established the rapport with Mick Taylor, the band’s best technician, that he had with its wildest anarchist, Brian Jones. But they do amazing things together on “Luxury,” “Time Waits for No One” and “If You Can’t Rock Me.”

I once criticized the band for compromising the power of “Brown Sugar” by cluttering it up with acoustic rhythm guitars. They add the acoustics on “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll” but this time it works, lending a stylized and distinctive aura to the sound of the track.

The album has its playful moments but its most characteristic instant is Charlie Watts’s first drumbeat on “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll.” It resonates like the sound of a shotgun. That violence — transmitted through the singing, words and music — makes It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll one of the most intriguing and mysterious, as well as the darkest, of all Rolling Stones records. Time has become just one more reality to face and to deal with.

Guy Peellaert did the cover art. He also did the portraits of rock stars which make up the beautiful book Rock Dreams. There are five impressions of the Rolling Stones, but the one that best captures the feeling of It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll isn’t of the Rolling Stones at all, but of Frank Sinatra. On the last page, Sinatra is standing in the dark shadows of stage lighting with a mike in one hand and a drink in the other. The caption says: “… Hope I die before I get old.”

The Rolling Stones It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (1974)

From sfloman.com

Having ditched Miller, who helped steer the band’s golden era, the Glimmer Twins decided to self-produce for the first time since Their Satanic Majesties Request. Unsurprisingly, the muddy sound is somewhat lacking, and by most accounts the album’s sessions were in disarray as nobody was there to take charge.

Still, the album that emerged from the drug rampant (nothing new there) sessions is in my opinion better than what has often been reported, though there are reasons why this album is often overlooked and is primarily remembered for three things: the anthemic title track, which was actually a chart disappointment (#16 U.S./#10 U.K.) but has since reached iconic status as a long time stage favourite, for being the first post-Miller album, and for being their last album with Mick Taylor. Though his fluid, graceful playing elevated certain Stones songs immeasurably, Taylor apparently never felt completely comfortable in the band, and he was rankled by not receiving what he felt were proper song writing credits.

His departure was a major loss for the band, what with him being their only traditional lead guitarist and quite simply the most talented player they ever had, but at least he makes his presence felt on It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, which truth be told like Goats Head Soup is a pretty hit or miss affair. Still, there are few flat out bad songs on the album. Among the lesser songs is the leadoff track “If You Can’t Rock Me,” a funky riff rocker that never really catches fire, though it is still moderately enjoyable. “Luxury” has really annoying reggae affectations from Jagger, though at least it has some tasty riffing and is pretty catchy.

“Dance Little Sister” is a Stones-by-numbers boogie rocker, and “Short and Curlies” is another short boogie that’s among their silliest songs ever (my friend calls it “the dumb ‘she’s got you by the balls’ song”). Though I appreciate the ambitiousness that is too often lacking elsewhere, the funky wah wah infused “Fingerprint File” is also only semi-successful, in part because like several songs here this one is longer than necessary (6:30, to be exact). Still, it was tracks such as this one (whose paranoid lyrics I actually really like) and the earlier “Dancing With Mr. D” that paved the way for their later massive disco hit “Miss You.”

As for the songs I like, and again I don’t really dislike the lesser efforts, let’s start with their cover of The Temptations “Ain’t To Proud To Beg.” Well, it’s certainly better than the earlier “My Girl” (if not as good as the later “Imagination”), and it’s notable for a rare Richards (as opposed to Taylor) solo, but though it’s quite enjoyable the song’s mere presence indicates a certain cruise control mindset that permeated The Rolling Stones at this point. The band does seem to be trying their hardest on certain songs, such as on the classic title track, but this tune is very telling, too. Although tongue in cheek to a degree, Jagger’s provocative lyrics (i.e. “if I could stick a knife in my heart, suicide right on stage, would it be enough?..”) indicate that he feels put upon, that rock ‘n’ roll has become a job.

It’s only rock n’ roll, after all, he doesn’t need to do this anymore, but it pays the bills (handsomely) so he and his bandmates continue onwards. Heck, maybe I’m reading too much into it, and either way I certainly like the song’s slashing guitars, and it’s quite catchy and rocking (in a T. Rex sort of way) as well. As for other songs that I’d consider highlights, “Till The Next Goodbye” and “If You Really Want To Be My Friend” are two of the band’s better ballads. The former song is a twangy, regret-filled acoustic ballad on which Hopkins (whose elegant playing is all over the album) adds delicate decorations and Taylor also shines.

The 6-minute latter song is a soul ballad with support from the vocal group Blue Magic; the song takes awhile to get going, and it’s not as inspired as some of the churchier attempts on Exile, but it’s still quite enjoyable, with Taylor’s solo again providing the icing on the cake. Speaking of Taylor, his lack of a co-credit on the albums second best song, “Time Waits For No One,” which also exceeded 6 minutes, was reputedly the last straw that ensured his departure. One can see why, as even though Jagger supplies the philosophical lyrics, Taylor musically dominates the song with his beautiful soloing, though some critics had a point when they said that it sounded more like Santana than the Stones. This was in no small part due to percussionist Ray Cooper, who also has a significant presence throughout the album, though the horn section of Keyes and Price, recently so prominent, is mysteriously absent.

Anyway, on the whole this is an enjoyable album, but it’s also true that with this album, or maybe the previous one, The Rolling Stones became just another good working band whose transcendent peaks from here on in would be few and far between.

The Rolling Stones It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (1974)

From donignacio.com

The critical consensus of It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll is unanimous, or about as unanimous as these things get. This is widely known as the worst Rolling Stones studio album of the ’70s. Of course, this being The Rolling Stones in the ’70s, that still means this album is pretty dang good, and it should be owned by Rolling Stones fans the world-round! Nevertheless, it hasn’t been since December’s Children that these guys have released something so woefully uneven.

The unfortunate thing about it is that it really shouldn’t have been a lacking album. It’s been touted by the band members as a return-to-form (which makes it about the third so-called return-to-form of their career this far), and they concentrate mainly on pure, Stones-style rock ‘n’ roll. Good for them, I say! Not that I didn’t love Goats Head Soup where they experimented pretty extensively with funk and mysticism, but when it comes right down to it, I’d prefer these guys spend their resources on a straight rock ‘n’ roll album. If it’s for no other reason, it’s because my favorite albums of theirs tend to be the ones with all the fun concert staples in it!

Unfortunately, despite their multiple attempts here, they only succeeded at creating one major concert staple, which is the title track. I remember they played this song at their concert I went to in 2006, and everyone joined in the chorus even though nobody could remember the verses. (That, by golly, is part of the criteria for a great rock ‘n’ roll concert song!) Keith, being the universe’s ultimate master of the riff, comes out with another one, and the guitars all throughout it are fantastic to behold. Indeed, it is a Rolling Stones classic. It might not be a “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” but that only goes to show us how great of a song “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” is!

The opening two numbers are pretty good would-be concert staples—they rock fine and they have good riffs—but they’re just not memorable. The melodies are not very striking, and they also seem to be played much more stiffly than a Rolling Stones song should. Where’s that legendary Rolling Stones drive? “Dance Little Sister” has a nice beat that you can dance to and it seems like it could have been morphed into a great Rolling Stones concert song, but it also never catches fire. There was something amiss going on with the Rolling Stones… My guess is they were worn out. Nobody can blame them for that.

I haven’t even talked about the bad stuff yet. “Short and Curlies” is a big old hunk of disappointment. It’s definitely an attempt at a good-time rock ‘n’ roll song, but all it does is flop around like a fish on the dock trying desperately to breathe water. The sluggish instrumentals don’t let it catch fire, and the simplistic melody is waaaay too dumb. I’m also scratching my head over the song called “Luxury,” which I suppose is supposed to be a melding of hard-rock and reggae. Er… I guess it could have been worse, but I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial when I say that these two genres go together about as well as boogars and fries.

There’s one ballad on here, which is a bit of a change from the previous album that had three. “Till the Next Goodbye” is very nicely written with a nice melody and pleasant instrumentation. It’s not greatly memorable and it certainly pales next to “Angie,” “Wild Horses,” etc. etc. etc., but it’s all in all quite a nice song. If you’re a fan of Rolling Stones’ ballads, yer gonna like it. Probably the real masterpiece of this album is the closing “Fingerprint File,” which shows us that even though their songwriting powers have gotten a little patchier since their heyday, they could still jam up a storm when they put their minds to it. That’s a terrific funk-inspired song that begins with a pretty devastating pop hook and an exciting lead vocal performance from Jagger, and it ends as a fast-and-furious funk-jam. The atmosphere it creates is almost as frightening and compelling as “Street Fighting Man,” and the tightly knit guitar groove they come up with is almost as mesmerizing as “Midnight Rambler.” Much more importantly, that song is just fun as hell to listen to! Good show, boys!!

I mentioned it above, but I feel it warrants a reiteration: Even though this is The Rolling Stones’ worst album of the ’70s, it’s still a very good album that I love listening to. In case you didn’t get this impression through the multiple Rolling Stones reviews I’ve written so far, I firmly believe that this is the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band that ever LIVED! They’re so awesome that pretty much everything they did deserves to be heard by you! (Sans some of their ’80s stuff. But even their ’80s stuff is pretty good. Relatively speaking, that is. I have reviewed Michael Bolton albums, lest you forget.)