The Rolling Stones Love You Live (1977)

From Nick Kent NME September 1977

Just under a minute into the first side – there’s been the usual audience mayhem, a snippet of exotic percussion, cannons firing, about four bars of “Fanfare For The Common Man”, some Frog making with the curt introduction – comes the first sound of The Rolling Stones.

Those lean, juddering chords swept neat as a meat cleaver over raw steak setting the scene for ‘Honky Tonk Women’ say it all. It’s an old song but it works – oh yes, it works because in those chords lies the very essence of The Stones; a timeless lasciviousness, reminding you all over again that, for real mannish rock and roll kicks, this band is still the king of the jive boys.

A subsequent preponderance of such giddy moments on at least three out of the four sides of this, the first legitimate Stones live album in some seven years, ensure the opus’ excellence. It’s not only ‘very good Stones product’ for the marketplace right now, but also the smartest (arguably) sidestepping manoeuvre to abate the flow of troubled murmuring as to whether the band can still cut it as a fully operative outfit.

Let’s not even bother to concern ourselves with what can only be viewed as a very dicey future.

The fact is that The Rolling Stones have been caught with their pants down this last year – not only by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police but by a whole new generation of potent young rockers, who suddenly don’t want to have their pics snapped as they partake in intimate exchanges with Mick Jagger. Who, moreover, despise The Stones (or at least where they’re coming from) – all that jet set crap, blood changes in Switzerland, Andy Warhol album sleeves…(and if ever Warhol presented watertight evidence of his being the ultimate artistic sham, then this hideous excuse of a gatefold cover is it.)

More to the point, new wave rock seems to have taken few tips from The Stones’ classic style, barring the odd Boomtown Rats blatant rip-off, or the odd Keef lookalike ploughing out familiar rhythm pastiches.

Overall, the whole shakeup has cast the once omnipotent Stones in a somewhat dubious light, open to charges of anti-the-spirit-of-rock-and-roll behaviour, principally that of extreme indolence (which has caused even this once devoted aficionado to throw up his hands in disgust).

Surely someone as bright as Jagger, having just officially signed up his band for four more albums’ worth of endurance, can see that the release of a series of new singles would be the ideal retort to the Sex Pistols ‘problem’. Until now, The Stones’ lack of activity in this area has conceded total victory to their youthful aggressors.

So where does Love You Live fit into this scheme of slothful detente and general group untogetherness?

Well, it’s probably the best move they could make right now, capturing the band at their best as a live force and choosing what amounts to the best of their ’70’s output plus a few tasty detours back to their veritable roots. It’s a convincing argument for their patent brand of white raunch and its continued relevance.

What Love You Live makes clear from the outset is that The Stones still have a way to go before they merit the dinosaur tag. This is a great rock and roll band – one minute slick and tough, the next sloppy yet elegant.

Wisely enough, Jagger and Richard have chosen to spotlight the slapstick raunch angle on the lion’s share of Love You Live; sides one, three and four provide aural testament to The Stones’ imperious rock credentials.

SIDE TWO is the weak link and as such proves what last year’s European tour indicated – that plus Wood and minus Taylor mainline Stones never sounded better live, whereas the more adventurous and diversely paced material that the band had been performing with disarming success in the early 70’s now seemed strained and disorientated, without either austere grace or sensitivity.

In my review of The Stones’ Earls Court dates, I noted the set’s principle casualty was the evergreen ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’.

This sad, limp and perverse rendition unfortunately shows up again here, commandeering eight minutes of valuable time and displaying, if anything, an even more exasperatingly directionless bent to the song’s harsh, wasted realism. This inclusion is nothing short of tragic; the previous version embellished by Mick Taylor’s bittersweet guitar solo and Jagger’s more committed vocal was always a focal point of early 70’s gigs.

Roy Carr informs me that originally Love You Live was to have included one side of Taylor’s final live work with the band and – though one can see why that idea was nixed to present a more unified, contemporary Stones in action – I can’t help but mourn the absence of such finely honed gems from that era as ‘Gimme Shelter’, the previously mentioned ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ or a blistering ‘All Down The Line’, whose excellence on stage is confirmed by contemporary bootlegs.

Whatever, a side two laden as above would have been infinitely more potent than what’s served up here. ‘Tumbling Dice’ follows on from the preliminary muscle flexing. It’s more languidly paced than side one’s six assaults but is still sinuously performed; Richard’s angular guitar bearings crosscut Billy Preston’s chunky organ overlays and Charlie Watts is his usual propulsive self on drums. The side’s best performance.

Next up is ‘Fingerprint File’ from It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll. The number might burst with live potential but here is frustratingly unsure of itself, and ultimately directionless.

Side three’s four pieces are culled from The Stones’ star-crossed Canadian sojourn in the intimate atmosphere of the El Macombo club. This move has given the album its musical heart as The Stones play deja vu time with their R ‘n’ B back pages.

Oddly enough, the side’s starter is a failure. The blues classic ‘Mannish Boy’ received an impeccable reworking by Muddy Waters on his Hard Again album. In one move a 62-year-old man made so many rock and roll youngbloods sound positively wet in comparison.

The Stones’ version doesn’t pack the punch of Waters and Johnny Winter’s sparse eloquence; it’s only adequately ‘dirty’. After all, the song either stands or falls on whether or not the vocalist can back up the self-assertion of the sentiments. Jagger’s doesn’t know whether to play it straight or camp it out, and compromises fatally.

‘Mannish Boy’ spotlights most, if not all, of Jagger’s deficiencies as a singer. His voice is mixed up high throughout the album, but close scrutiny reveals that he’s barely in control of his timbre, is incapable of sustaining a note, and only succeeds through heavily formulated guile which allows him to turn his vocal lines away from being plain flat.

Instead, an argument could be forwarded for either Keith or Charlie being the real star of the show, seeing as they’re the boyos dug furthest into the propellant that gives the band their corporate pizzazz. Thus the El Macombo side comes alive on the reggaefied version of Bo Diddley’s ‘Crackin’ Up’, while The Stones simmer quietly through ‘Li’l Red Rooster’ – not as instantly haunting as its archetype but still a noble performance. ‘Around And Around’ is a tour de force, Richard and Wood swarming all over the Chuck Berry rocker and each other’s tracks.

Yet this is a mere preliminary for Side 4 – again a consistent blast of hard blood-coursing rock, but boasting such an overpowering fierceness and unity of purpose that it easily surpasses the toughness of the first side, while picking up the gauntlet thrown at the conclusion of ‘Around And Around’.

‘It’s Only Rock’n’ Roll’ may well be a paper-thin conceit of an attempted Stones rocker, but again Richard and Wood are in rollicking form. ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ (both cocksure renditions of old faves) cap the intensity quite wickedly, and a final ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ (all seven minutes of it and it’s never been a song I’ve particularly liked) is the final crowning achievement.

Final thoughts: there’s a rough-and-ready quality to the overall recording which leads one to believe that comparatively few studio overdubs were called for; surprising considering the plethora of clean-up trickery that went into Get Yer Ya-Yas Out.

The Stones, on this outing anyway, can still show everyone purporting to play or function around rock’n’roll a whole passel of tricks and styling. Their future may be in doubt, but this is the present, and it’ll stand.