You can now buy 'Yesterday's Papers - The Alan's Album Archives Guide To The Rolling Stones' in e-book form by clicking here!
They say (or rather manager Andrew Loog Oldham said) that whilst
your parents wouldn’t mind you dating a Beatle or letting them hold your
daughter’s hand, you would have to lock them up to save them from the Rolling
Stones who are ‘here to burn your town!’ They say too that the Stones was the
music you played to annoy your parents (not that it worked in my family: my
Grandad loved the Stones and didn’t like The Beatles much, which will probably
tell you all you need to know about my family!) The Stones have for so long
been seen as the ‘anti-Beatles’ that it’s tempting to forget that they didn’t
start this way and how we ended up there took a long long time to get there.
Before The Stones got signed to Decca in 1963 it seemed easy:
they were only interested in turning on great swathes of the population on to
the blues who would otherwise never have heard of it. That’s all Brian Jones
thought about from the moment he woke up to when he went to bed several days
later (along with whichever girl he was dating at the time) and though less
passionate Mick, Keef and Bill all believed in the same goal to some extent
(not Charlie – he was just filling in time until a jazz band came along who
wanted his services; you suspect that even now in his seventies he’s still
waiting for that call). The Beatles didn’t exist so they couldn’t compete – all
they knew was that there were rumours of some band up North doing something
similar to what they were doing, albeit with poppier numbers in their set and a
bit of Motown, not the ‘blues’ as authentically as the Stones did. The Stones
didn’t have a reputation for being a ‘dark’ band in this era – they were
serious, sure and howled the blues with all the passion they could, but they
weren’t into devil worshipping yet and had no interest in any shock value
further than ‘wow doesn’t that kid with the blonde hairdo remind you of Elmore
James’?
It took Andrew Loog Oldham to realise what he could do with the
Stones, buying them up from their old manager Giorgio Gromelsky in April 1963.
By then The Beatles were big business, with ‘Please Please Me’ reaching either
number one or number two in the UK charts that March and lots of managers began
to realise that Brian Epstein might be on to something. At the time, though,
there was no rivalry – indeed the very same month the Stones signed with Oldham
The Beatles had discovered them by accident during some downtime during their
first extended stay in London. The two bands got on really well, swapped notes
on instruments and songs and the fab four even plugged the band a few times in
the press before getting them that deal with Decca on the back of their
friendship (having already turned the fab four down, Decca were eager to hear any
of their tip-offs about who to sign next). Chances are, left to their own
devices the Stones probably wouldn’t have got the interest of anyone: they
wanted to be an authentic blues act and spurned the idea of having hit singles.
Loog Oldham, though, had a different vision: the draw for The Beatles, he
figured, was their slight air of danger which had then been ‘tidied up’ for a
mainstream audience by Epstein because that’s what you had to do to jump
through hoops and open doors back then. But now the door was already open, The
Beatles had been groomed and turned cuter than anyone who saw the band between
1957 and 1961 could ever have guessed and all he had to do was find the right
group to act as The Beatles’ ‘shadows’.
He wasn’t, at the time, sure that he’d found them. The blues
wasn’t as marketable as R and B covers were. Mick was, at the time, deeply shy
and hated being upfront (he only became the band’s lead singer by accident when
their original vocalist dropped out). Their ‘real’ leader, Brian, looked the
part but didn’t sound it, with a gruff squawk that was perfect for authentic
blues performances but not exactly hit material even for the ‘darker’ look Loog
Oldham was going for. The Stones didn’t quite know what they wanted to be yet:
Brian was adamant that they should be blues players, but Chuck Berry fans Mick
and Keef persuaded him that a bit of R and B in the set would get people
dancing. Far from the leering, genuinely frightening band the Stones would
become, they were a group of five earnest musicians who were only anti-Beatles
in the sense that they didn’t smile on stage and were instead too busy
concentrating on getting the notes
right. The entire invention of The Rolling Stones as we know them today was all
Loog Oldham’s doing: younger than the band and aged just nineteen when he first
met them, he actually had to get his mum to sign them on his behalf as legally
in Britain at the time he couldn’t be held responsible for regular wage
payments before the age of twenty-one!
The reason it worked, though, was because he did find the
‘right’ band after all. Their blues roots is an important and overlooked factor
in what made The Stones’ appeal so dark and alluring. R and B was a largely
1950s variation of soul, without yet a history beyond teenagers having a
giggle. But blues was hundreds of years old, it was what slaves sang on
plantations and it was born out of real pain – not the sort of pain of losing
your job and not being able to afford a Corvette as per Chuck Berry but the
pain of losing your wife, your life, your liberty and freedom. The Stones’
early material isn’t all that far removed from their competitors, many of whom
also performed blues songs, but the difference is the Stones were steeped in it
and blues is itself darker than anything their competitors were playing. Well
most of them: The Stones weren’t the only band to come to fame in the 1960s
playing a white version of the blues as opposed to R and B; up in Newcastle The
Animals were a far more experienced and authentic band, whilst just down the
road in London The Yardbirds had a far wider repertoire and record collection. But
The Animals used the blues as a vehicle for change, with many of their chosen
songs about working class characters who wanted to do right for themselves – the
fact that they were themselves such a success with a vehicle with a song as
depressing as ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ (a whorehouse which was the only place
the narrator could pick up a girl, if you hadn’t already guessed or heard that
or maybe read the watered down distillation of the song handed out to music
magazines in the day) is almost like an Animals song itself, the working class
kid everyone ignored somehow coming good despite the odds. And The Yardbirds
were scholars, treating the blues with the precision of a museum curator, the
Pentangle of the blues world. For The Stones, though, the blues was a matter of
life and death and as many of the songs were too, that has to cloud your
judgement of life to some extent.
The odd thing to say here though, while we pause a second, is
that nobody knows quite why: The Animals and The Yardbirds were poor and would
have ended up down the mines or on the dole had music not worked out for them;
The Stones were – comparatively – rich and Mick had to drop out of a degree his
parents were paying for when the band took off (riding his motorbike into the
middle of the quadrangle when telling the dean he was going!) Admittedly Brian
had cut himself off from his rich parents after getting not one, not two, but
three teenage girls pregnant in quick succession while Bill and Charlie were
genuinely poor, but Keith’s mum even sent her lads food parcels to keep them
going (The Beatles didn’t get those in Hamburg!) If anything The Beatles were
the ‘real deal’ and were the dark shadows to The Stones.
Oldham was clever: he told the newspapers what to write half the
time and they were happy to use it because it was ‘good copy’ and even bad
publicity – perhaps especially bad publicity – was good publicity (that famous
headline ‘Would you let your daughter go out with a Rolling Stone?’ is really
his). Oldham took every opportunity to contrast his band against The Beatles,
to the point where almost every magazine and fan assumed there was a ‘real’ war
between them (not true, but it helped both bands – those afraid of The Stones
ran towards The Beatles and vice versa). Oldham played up the idea that his
generally serious band didn’t smile and got them to look like that on almost
every album cover and publicity material he okayed; at best he allowed a bit of
smirking but The Stones didn’t show off their teeth in public until at least
1967! There was also the infamous incident when after hours cooped up inside a
tour bus Bill found himself caught short outside a garage and asked if he could
use the private one; the grumpy elderly owner said something rude so four of
the band (Charlie stayed in the van) decided to take revenge by urinating
against his forecourt (Brian quote: ‘I will if you get off my foreskin!’) Other
managers would have paid a lot of money to hush something like this up; Loog
Oldham on hearing rubbed his hands with glee and phones up reporters himself to
tell them about the incident, with huge coverage of the Stones getting fined a
few odd pounds for their ‘obscenity’.
But it wasn’t all fake publicity or exaggeration. There was just
enough darkness in the Stones’ world to make them natural shadows to The
Beatles’ light. There was a creeping misogyny in their material even this early
on, which was mostly because of the era of the material they were performing:
the blues singers, long since dead, had no idea of feminism and though much of
their material was about being young, hungry and poor, some of it was
specifically about being male, hungry and poor, with a wife taking half of what
they had left. Women don’t come out of any blues song well right up until the
likes of Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton started singing it – and most of
their songs were about the wrongness of men treating them badly anyway. Just
check out some early songs of theirs, from [33] ‘Down Home Girl’ (where a
working class girl ‘smells of pork and beans’) to the strutting peacock of [14]
‘I’m A King Bee’. Women are objects, it’s male sexual gratification that
matters, not love. It’s only a small step to move to the point where, rather
than thanking their largely female fans the way the Beatles did, The Stones
looked down on them with a sneer in song once Loog Oldham persuaded Mick and
Keef to write their own material (Brian discovering early on that writing
wasn’t for him). This was especially true when the Stones knew the girl in
question, with Mick’s first girlfriend Christine Shrimpton getting particularly
short shrift ([89] ‘Yesterday’s Papers’ claims that she’s an anachronism
dressed up in yesterday’s fashions, [91] ‘Back Street Girl’ has Mick forcing
her to promise never to show up when his friends are around because he’s
ashamed of her and [75] ‘Out Of Time’ refuses to listen to any excuses and
dumps her for hesitating when he asks her out). You wouldn’t catch The Beatles
doing this and The Stones were encouraged to play this angle up – a lot of
girls love ‘bad boys’ and Loog Oldham recognised that there was a vacuum to be
filled here.
One other important element of the Stones’ sound that always
gets forgotten is the fact that they were signed to Decca. The slowest of the
‘five main’ record labels of the 1960s to realise the commercial potential of
rock and roll, they didn’t invest in recording it properly until the 1970s
(after all their biggest rock bands had left). To Decca there was no reason why
you couldn’t record pop and rock acts the same way you did orchestras; as a
result the microphones were often a way above the performers to capture the
‘general’ sound in the room (as opposed to EMI, Capitol and Pye where
everything was miked a hundred times over) and the soundproofed walls gave off
a particular echoey sound peculiar to Decca recordings of this period. Usually
it sounds dreadful: Cat Stevens isn’t himself at all until he leaves for Island
Records in 1970 and The Small Faces fought
to get off the label and sign to Loog Oldham’s own ‘Immediate’ franchise
in 1967. The Stones, though, stayed put until 1971 (when they set up their own
label with help from Atlantic) partly through contractual stuff but also
perhaps because they realised how integral this sound was to their records. The
Stones, you see, sound great when set against this muffled sound. Together with
their already pretty blurry techniques as heard in concerts around the world in
this era - they played slower than most bands do – this really gives their
recordings a ‘swampy Delta’ feel that no other band of the era matches. Not
until ‘Sticky Fingers’ in 1971 do their records start becoming crystal clear
(realising this they get ever more murkier still for ‘Exile On Main Street’ in
1972 and thereafter turn into a parody of themselves – partly, so I think,
because of this loss to their integral sound). The Rolling Stones, at least in
the 1962-1969 and 1972 period, sound like shadows: they’re dark and oppressive
and it’s hard to separate what’s happening from one instrument to another. Just
check out, if you dare, the intended second single [3] ‘Posion Ivy’ aborted for
sounding a mess (really it’s because the band are covering a ‘busy’ song and
haven’t yet learnt that less is more inside Decca studios) or [86] ‘Have You
Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadows?’ where the murky sound is the
whole point. If your recordings sound dangerous even when you intend them to be
sweet (hey, [69] ‘Lady Jane’ is sweet! Although there aren’t many other
examples…) then you may as well make your recordings dangerous.
The Rollers then be came unofficial spokespersons for everything
that was wrong in the 1960s – at a time when bands were falling over themselves
to say how wonderful everything is. After struggling for their first couple of
years to keep up with their publicity department, The Stones hit a groove from [61]
‘Satisfaction’ on as updated Chuck Berrys, purveyors of everything that was disappointing
in modern day living. [82] ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ takes things
further, the narrator driven to despair at the state of modern-day living,
signalled by a bass riff that in opposition to nearly every song around in 1966
fears the future and plunged as low as it can go. While everyone else is
singing about love and peace The Stones are wishing that they could [84] ‘Paint
It Black’ because they’re too depressed for all the bright lights and colours.
It’s surely no surprise that The Stones discover drugs somewhere
around around this time in 1965 and unlike The Beatles no one is surprised when
they announce it. What’s odd, though, is that for every other band discovering
drugs makes their music lighter – it opens the door to technicolour and
curiosity and invention, with the world (generally speaking) seen anew with
brighter colours. For The Stones this only happens once (and [105] ‘She’s A
Rainbow’ is such a one-off in their canon it sounds like a pastiche to me,
especially Keef’s angry howling guitars at the end as if he’s fed up of having
to play this soppy muck!) Usually, drugs make an already dark world darker:
[108] ‘1000 Light Years From Home’ is the very epitome of a bad trip as the
Stones float out into space as alone in an alien land as they could ever have
experienced. [100] ‘Something Happened To Me Yesterday’ tries to add a jaunty music
hall jaunt that’s decidedly creepy. The big Stones singalong jam [101] ‘Sing
This All Together’ gets very creepy very quickly, as if the band can’t keep
this away. Most infamously a song with a title that in other hands would be
upbeat (the astonishing [112] ‘We Love You’) ends up being as sarcastic as
hell. ‘We don’t care who you fall in love with’ The Stones chant on the single
held back just in case Mick and Keef really did get sent to prison for a very
long time by an establishment who were itching for an excuse to bust them and
thought they’d found one when a party turned up pills (which were given to Mick
on prescription and he even had the paperwork for. Throw away the key I tell
you, hanging’s too good for them!) Interestingly this song was conceived as a
specific shadow to The Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’ recorded at the same
time; Mick and Keef are part of the crowd on that song and John and Paul sing
creepy falsettos at the front of the Stones’ record! (Loog Oldham tries a
similar thing with cute B-side [113] ‘Dandelion’, with parts of each song
‘seeping’ onto the other side of the disc, but its these two songs that are
really the ‘twins’ of the flower power era). While every other band was
enjoying a summer of love, The Stones had a real year of darkness in 1967 and
that made them seem more like ‘shadows’ than ever before, a darker ‘mushroom’
alternative grown in isolation and darkness compared to the direction the rest
of the world was taking.
Amazingly this didn’t hurt sales and something seemed to click
in the brains of Mick and Keef, even while Loog Oldham, himself now a drug
addict, was being kicked aside from the group. Only now after believeing in
their own publicity do the Stones end up where they ended up in 1968-1969, the
period when people remember them best, as they broke every taboo going as if it
was their birthright. Devil worship? You’ll be wanting [114] ‘Sympathy For The
Devil’. Revolution? [119] ‘Street Fighting Man’. Under-age sex? [121] ‘Stray
Cat Blues’. Impending doom and Armageddon? [128] ‘Gimme Shelter’. Rape? [133]
‘Midnight Rambler’. Sex with slaves? [142] ‘Brown Sugar’. Drug addiction? [149]
‘Sister Morphine’. [131] ‘Live With Me’ even laughs at bands who think they can
be as ‘hard’ or as dark as the Stones but don’t really cut it (‘I’ve got nasty
habits, I eat tea at three!’)
Perfect! Think most of their fanbase. The Stones are going to be
rock and roll’s bad boys forever and if it goes wrong it will be because of a
jail term/overdose/airplane crash. Nothing is going to make this band grow
up!!! And then comes ‘Altamont’. When Woodstock happened in August 1969 there
was something in the air that wanted it to happen – so many acts giving their
time for free (well, a few got paid but the organisation was such a shambles few
people actually got their money), so many people all gathered in the same spot
to share their love for the music and to point at each other and go ‘wow, there
are enough of us to change the world and turn it onto peace, love and flowers
now. Yay!!!!’ And then The Stones come along, latching on to a proposed free
concert Jefferson Airplane want to give in San Francisco and agreeing to
perform mostly to counteract accusations from fans that they were charging too
much for tickets. The irony was ‘Altamont’ that December was free and it was
‘Woodstock’ that cost you money to get in. If anything Altamont had a bigger
percentage of hippie acts too with history conveniently forgetting that the
Airplane, CSNY, Santana and The Flying Burrito Brothers all played (the
Grateful Dead were meant to play too but took one look at the bad vibes and ran
back to their helicopters).
Some fans said later that they just felt something was going to
happen that night. After all, it had started in the worst possible way when the
band decided rehearsing for their tour that Brian Jones wasn’t cutting it and
threw him out the band he’d formed and started from scratch, wasted on drugs.
Brian had, despite comments to the contrary, been in a good place after this
and had already considered a future as a pioneer of world music, travelling to
exotic lands and recording it for release through the Stones’ own label (of
which he remained a part share-holder). But something (an asthma attack, a row
with a builder, Brian being obnoxious) on July 2nd 1969 left him
face down in his own swimming pool on the estate he’d bought so proudly from
the descendents of Winnie The Poor creator AA Milne. The Stones decided to
carry on with new guitarist Mick Taylor and continue with the gameplan – but
their utopian hippie idyll was changed on them at the last minute when the
Mayor of San Francisco, horrified by reports of the sea of people who descended
on Woodstock, cancelled at the last minute. The replacement venue in
California, Altamont Speedway, didn’t look like a hippie paradise – it was ugly
and filled with concrete. The stage was badly made (it was meant to be up a
hill until the venue was changed at the last minute) so the Stones were
effectively playing at the same level as their audience. The local Californian
Hell’s Angels, drafted in at the last minute when the more peace-loving San
Franciscan Hell’s Angels begged off travelling, suddenly had their work cut out
keeping the crowds who kept surging forward. Every concert that night was hit
by skirmishes in the crowd who kept being pushed towards the front and the
security (to this day I refuse to go anywhere near the front of gigs without
set seating plans, just in case the same ever happens again; as it sometimes
does – Oasis’ Manchester comeback in 2005 was hit by similar problems and was
stopped repeatedly). Somebody was always going to get hurt – and that someone
was Meredith Hunter, a nineteen-year-old fan protecting his girlfriend from
being hurt by flashing a knife and getting pummelled to death instead.
The papers the next morning had a field day. Ignoring all the
other acts on the bill they blamed The Stones for the fiasco completely. A
garbled version got back to the music press that the band had been playing
‘Sympathy For The Devil’ at the time of the stabbing and had been performing
black magic on stage (actually they were performing the even uglier [70] ‘Under
My Thumb’ and the stage magic was the band desperately flicking through their
setlist for a song that would calm down the crowd). Nevertheless it speaks
volumes that things went wrong not at the more general gig that happened down
the road but at one where the Stones headlined. It speaks more volumes that
things went wrong at this gig, which featured more of the Stones’ shadowy songs
than maybe any other: ‘Rape, murder, is just a shot away!’ rang out one song.
‘I’m called the hit and run raper in anger!’ screams another. ‘I can see that
you’re just fifteen years old, but no I don’t want your idea!’ cackles another.
‘She’s a squirming dog whose just had her day!’ is the Stones’ ugliest song
performed just at the point of death. And then there’s pretty much every line
in ‘Sympathy For The Devil’. If any gig was going to get bad vibes from the
songs in the room it’s this one, without any of the usual levity or beauty like
[69] ‘Lady Jane’ or [105] ‘She’s A Rainbow’ or [111] ‘Ruby Tuesday’. The Stones
didn’t really think they’d caused it – but you can see them wondering for a
moment in the film of the festival ‘Gimme Shelter’ that was meant to be a
celebration and ended up a commiseration instead. Just look at Mick’s and
Charlie’s eyes as they view back the footage, comparing notes on what they were
up to on stage and what they were thinking and wondering where it all went
wrong. Keith and Bill are too moved to appear on screen.
Thereafter something pretty big shifts in the Stones’ psyche. It
would be too easy that ‘Altamont’ is when the Stones stopped being shadows to
the Beatles and the 1960s scene and the self-destruction of the fab four themselves
in 1969 is another very valid reason (without anything to be anti-to and push
against The Stones Aren’t too sure where to go). They still make some of their
most daring material in this era: which song has the record for the 20th
century of containing the most swear words of any song ever? Why that’s [187]
‘Star Star’ which includes the ‘f’ word no less than fifty-six times in an era
when you couldn’t say it once! However The Stones withdraw a little from the
darkness that once burned so bright in them. As time goes by they’ll start
moving away from the gloomy darkness of their album covers to the bright neons
of ‘Goat’s Head Soup’ and ‘Dirty Work’ (what on earth are they wearing?!?)
Their sound will develop after moving away from Decca and into deeper studios
into something clearer and crisper that better lends itself to bright and
breezy pop like [190] ‘It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It!)’. Their topics
will move back from celebrating devils and murderers (bar one last go on [256]
‘Too Much Blood’ – the kind of song that protests while still staring through
fingers covering eyes) and putting down girls to songs of love and marriage and
even the occasional song where the girls get the better of them ([174]
‘Following The River’ [323] ‘Rough Justice’ [334] ‘Laugh I Nearly Died’) which
is what comes of marrying girls as tough as Bianca Jagger and Anita Pallenberg!
The Stones, though, can’t escape from their past even though they don’t want to
go back there, which is my theory as to both why the band now are treated like
a caricature these days and why they keep releasing so many flipping live
albums (both as an attempt to rid their fanbase of the taste of Altamont and
because they are ‘allowed’ to live in their past when they could get away with
songs like these).
Don’t get me wrong: I like the modern Stones more than most fans
it seems and they’re at their best on material that pushes towards the edge of
where they used to go ([310] ‘Saint Of Me’ is a rebellious cry that could have
been done in any era; [336] ‘Look What The Cat Dragged In’ is as mean as any
Stones song out there and [311] ‘Might As Well Get Juiced’ suggests the band
aren’t going to be canonised any time soon). But the biggest fan in the world
will admit that they’ve lost….something since their heyday and I don’t think its
just age (if anything the band get more energetic with every tour after their
early ones when they were stock still, till Jagger developed his persona and
cute dancing skills). The Stones lifted the box off something it feels as if
they wished they’d never let out – and yet it’s that acceptance that mankind
does have such a box of darkness that made them so very special in the first
place. It wasn’t just the Stones who caused the end of the 1960s and they’d
been doing much the same for much of the decade with less attention given to
them anyway. It was when people took them seriously and it stopped being a joke
that they begun to back away from it. There is though always a place in every
generation for shadows and that’s as true now if not more so in this
Godforsaken Trump filled world. If you see your grandfather, baby, standing in
the shadows chances are he’ll still be waiting for the Stones to tell the truth
about life in a way few other bands can. Even if it all originally started as a
publicity stunt.
A Now Complete List Of Rolling Stones
and Related Articles To Read At Alan’s Album Archives:
'Rolling Stones' (1964) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/news-views-and-music-issue-100-rolling.html
'No 2' (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/the-rolling-stones-no-2-1965.html
'Out Of Our Heads' (1965)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/the-rolling-stones-out-of-our-heads-1965.html
‘Aftermath’ (1966) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/the-rolling-stones-aftermath-1966.html
'Between The Buttons' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-9-rolling-stones-between-buttons.html
'Their Satanic Majesties Request' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-16-rolling-stones-their-satanic.html
'Beggar's Banquet' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-26-rolling-stones-beggars.html
‘Aftermath’ (1966) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/the-rolling-stones-aftermath-1966.html
'Between The Buttons' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-9-rolling-stones-between-buttons.html
'Their Satanic Majesties Request' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-16-rolling-stones-their-satanic.html
'Beggar's Banquet' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-26-rolling-stones-beggars.html
‘Let It Bleed’ (1969)
https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/the-rolling-stones-let-it-bleed-1969.html
'Sticky Fingers' (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/rolling-stones-sticky-fingers-1971.html
'Exile On Main Street'(1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/news-views-and-music-issue-61-rolling.html
'Goat's Head Soup' (1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-58-rolling-stones-goats-head.html
'Sticky Fingers' (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/rolling-stones-sticky-fingers-1971.html
'Exile On Main Street'(1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/news-views-and-music-issue-61-rolling.html
'Goat's Head Soup' (1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-58-rolling-stones-goats-head.html
'It's Only Rock 'n' Roll' (1974)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-rolling-stones-its-only-rock-and.html
'Black and Blue' (1976)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-rolling-stones-black-and-blue-1976.html
'Some Girls' (1978) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/news-views-and-music-issue-30-rolling.html
'Some Girls' (1978) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/news-views-and-music-issue-30-rolling.html
'Emotional Rescue' (1980)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-rolling-stones-emotional-rescue-1980.html
‘Tattoo You’ (1981) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-rolling-stones-tattoo-you-1981.html
'Undercover'
(1983) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/rolling-stones-undercover-1983-album.html
'Dirty
Work' (1986)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/the-rolling-stones-dirty-work-1986.html
'Steel Wheels' (1989)http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/news-views-and-music-issue-113-rolling.html
'Steel Wheels' (1989)http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/news-views-and-music-issue-113-rolling.html
‘Voodoo
Lounge’ (1994) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/rolling-stones-voodoo-lounge-1994.html
'Bridges
To Babylon' (1998)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-rolling-stones-bridges-to-babylon.html
'A
Bigger Bang' (2005)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-rolling-stones-bigger-bang-2005.html
Ronnie
Wood and Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings Solo
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/a-short-aaa-guide-to-ronnie-wood-and.html
Rolling Stones: Unreleased Recordings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/another-journey-through-past-darkly.html
Surviving TV Clips and Music Videos
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-rolling-stones-surviving-tv-clips.html
Non-Album Recordings Part One 1962-1969
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/01/rolling-stones-non-album-songs-part-one.html
Non-Album Recordings Part Two 1970-2014
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-rolling-stones-non-album-songs-part.html
Live/Solo/Compilations Part One 1963-1974
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-rolling-stones-livesolocompilationa.html
Live/Solo/Compilations Part Two 1975-1988
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-rolling-stones-livesolocompilation.html
Live/Solo/Compilations Part Three 1989-2015 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-rolling-stones-livesolocompilation_30.html
Rolling Stones Essay: Standing In The Shadows https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/05/rolling-stones-essay-standing-in-shadows.html
Landmark Concerts and Key Cover Versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-rolling-stones-landmark-concerts.html
