The Rolling Stones
Let It Bleed (Abkco)
From the beginning, the Rolling Stones had been carefully positioned
by mastermind hypester Andrew Loog Oldham as the evil alternative
to the cheerful, mop-topped Beatles. In other words, they were
the rockers you'd never allow your daughter to date.
There was a kernel of truth behind this image, and if the Fab
Four crafted the supreme sunny-side anthems for the idyllic, idealized
version of the cultural rebellion that has come to be called "The
Sixties," the Stones answered with the ultimate exploration
of its darker shadows: a masterful album that many consider their
best, as well as being the death knell for a generation's Utopian
fantasies.
About half of Let It Bleed was recorded during the same sessions
that yielded 1968's Beggars Banquet. It would be the last album
to feature guitarist Brian Jones (he drowned in a zonked-out haze
midway through the recording), but if the band's founder was mentally
absent for much of the time, the rest of the group was at the
top of its creative game.
Jagger, Richards, and company delved even deeper into the blues roots of their early days (Robert Johnson's "Love in Vain") while incorporating more of a country lilt ("Country Honk") as well as indulging in some studio experimentation that still sounds ahead of its time (listen to Bill Wyman's Mellotron on "Monkey Man" or the stately orchestrations on "You Can't Always Get What You Want"). The result is a style that for the first time can be best described as "Rolling Stones music."
Through it all looms the darkness. "Gimme Shelter" will
always be associated with death, its sense of dread and foreboding
evoking not only the killings at the Stones' free concert at Altamont,
but the Vietnam war that was then at its height and the race riots
that erupted on the streets of America's cities during the long,
hot summer of 1968. The druggy "Monkey Man" is a reminder
that psychedelics can produce bad trips as well as transcendent
ones, and "Midnight Rambler" is a horrifying depiction
of a serial killer that predates the Manson murders that would
soon make shocking headlines.
And while the elegiac "You Can't Always Get What You Want"
ends the album with a hint of promise ("If you try some time
you just might find you get what you need"), it is nonetheless
a strong opposing argument to the rose-tinted -- and fundamentally
false -- "All You Need Is Love."
Jim DeRogatis