I used to think that, if you were a Beatles man, you had to be a Beatles man all the way.
Never mind that the Beatles and the Stones, throughout their “rivalry,” hung out with each other like they were their generation’s Rat Pack. Never mind that the Beatles and the Stones staked out distinctly separate lyrical focuses, sonic territory, and celebrity personas. Never mind that the Beatles and the Stones used to call each other up to make sure their forthcoming album releases wouldn’t conflict. And especially never mind that I held this belief … in the 1990s, a time when it was, I think it’s fair to say, not necessary to pick sides.
No. I felt that it was my God-given duty, as the most hardcore Beatles fan I knew, to not be a fan of both the Beatles and the Stones.
It hadn’t always been this way. My performative dislike of the Rolling Stones hadn’t always been written, if you will, in stone. When I first discovered oldies radio a month before turning eleven years old, I gravitated toward the Beatles (like, duh), but I wasn’t yet a fully baptized, tithe-paying member of the Church of Beatles. There was a window of potential coexistence, where I might have been open to praying to more than one rock deity without it feeling like blasphemy.
In those days, KFRC trotted out the same eight or nine Stones songs into their regular rotation: “Time Is On My Side,” “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Get Off My Cloud,” “Paint It Black,” “Under My Thumb,” “Ruby Tuesday,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Honky Tonk Women” … you know the ones. Hard to knock ‘em. Not a dud in the bunch. But I enjoyed them the same way I might have enjoyed all the big hits from, say, the Rascals or the Supremes – as memorable elements of ‘60s cultural lore, perhaps, but not as some foundation for religious fervor. The Stones were cool. The Stones were fine. The Stones were like a grittier Dave Clark Five.
Then I hardened. Despite an eventual migration from oldies radio to classic rock radio exposing me to later Stones singles (“Brown Sugar,” “Angie,” “It’s Only Rock and Roll,” “Miss You”), five years into my Beatle idolatry, I had become more anti-Stones than ever. “The Stones are stupid,” I said to a friend on a backpacking trip, the venue where life’s most wrenching philosophical dilemmas are discussed. “They’re trying to be all creepy and evil. They’re like the anti-Beatles.” Being a fan of the Stones seemed like cheating on your wife. A man was supposed to be loyal.
Then, in high school, I fell out with a bunch of my friends. And those friends and I had spent an awful lot of time hanging out together, swapping cassettes, and talking about the Beatles. Suddenly the Beatles reminded me way too much of these friends. Their music now smacked of hopes and promises unrealized. They reminded me of a period of my teenage years, and a former conception of myself, that I just didn’t want to think about anymore.
Also, I’d probably reached Beatle burnout. It happens. One listen to “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” too many, and it’ll push a man over the edge.
Mainly, they just didn’t jibe with my increasingly depressing existence. One could say that psychological “storms” were “threatening my very life” each day. My world felt darker, bleaker. All of a sudden, the Fab Four, for many years my mental security blanket, just weren’t cutting it.
To be fair, I find more gloom, despair, and bitter realism to be present in the Beatles’ work than their detractors assume, but … you understand. In Beatles Land, girls held your hand and you could work it out and all you needed was love and the love you took was equal to the love you made. In Beatles Land, all crises seemed to more or less resolve themselves into a multicolored rainbow of granny glasses and walrus suits. I’d had it. The time had come when I needed a cold, hard dose of reality.
Enter the Rolling Stones.
Enter Let It Bleed.
*****
These days, turn your head and spit and you’ll hit someone who claims that the best Rolling Stones album is Exile on Main Street, but this wasn’t always the case.
When I first entered the hallowed halls of Stones fandom, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, I recall the Big Four Albums – Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street – being held in roughly equal regard. Then one morning, I woke up, Rip van Winkle-style, looked around, and discovered that, by nearly unanimous decree, Exile had been proclaimed the “best” Stones album.
Now hear me out. I love Exile, would date it, marry it and have its baby, but while having this discussion with a friend of mine a few years ago, he uttered the best one-sentence review of Exile on Main Street I think I have ever heard:
“Too many horns … on too many songs.”
Think about it. Did “All Down the Line” really need the horns? Did “Casino Boogie” need the horns? Did “Shake Your Hips”? Just saying.
And this whole cinematic myth about the album being birthed out of Keith Richards’s dingy, cavernous basement in the south of France? You know half the album was recorded in Los Angeles, right? All those amazing Keith guitar solos you think you’re hearing? Probably Mick Taylor. “Shine a Light?” Keith doesn’t even play on that one.
Mainly, I’ve always wondered if the Stones spent a little more time on the album than they needed to – adding this, overdubbing that, reworking this, revising that, overcooking it just a touch. I know this is supposed to be the album’s charm, but I hear so many instruments competing in the mix that listening to it kind of exhausts me. It’s got that whiff of turgid, early ‘70s boogie rock a la the Doobie Brothers/Lynyrd Skynyrd/Bachman-Turner Overdrive to it.
By contrast, though it’s a long way from Their Satanic Majesties, I still hear the occasional leftover psychedelic touch on Let It Bleed: the trippy backwards guitars slipping in and out of “You Got the Silver,” the non-bluesy piano glissandos at the start of “Monkey Man,” French horns, car horns … all these peculiar sonic details that give Let It Bleed a poppier, airier flavor than its follow-ups. Let It Bleed is like the blues rock album that’s almost an art rock album.
Don’t get me wrong. The amazing thing about Exile is how it keeps smacking me over the head with one majestic track after another (“Tumblin’ Dice,” “Sweet Virginia,” “Loving Cup,” “Happy”), and by side four, I figure I’ve heard everything they’ve got, and then they whip out “Shine a Light,” and I’m waving my hands in the air, crying “Uncle!”
But my favorite Stones album? Not quite.
And I’m not saying I’d throw Sticky Fingers or Beggar’s Banquet under the bus either. Sticky Fingers is like the cleaner, more spacious version of Exile, but I get the feeling that it was cobbled together from the ten best tracks the band happened to have lying around, rather than having been generated in a spirit of unified intent, as I sense Let It Bleed was. Also, like Exile, there’s a narcotic weariness from Sticky Fingers that I can only handle (like cocaine) when I’m in the mood for it, whereas I can put Let It Bleed on just about any old time. Although I can’t identify a five-second stretch of Sticky Fingers I dislike, listening to it is such a gruelingly immersive experience that I can find it draining.
Beggar’s Banquet is like the baby Let It Bleed. It’s the album they had to make before Let It Bleed, the album which allowed them to discover and explore their new, post-Satanic Majesties sound (Keith’s five-string open tuning, the acoustic country flavor to go along with the Chess blues flavor, producer Jimmy Miller’s intuitive feel for groove and atmosphere) but I think it left room to grow composition-wise. I can see two people sitting around writing “Jigsaw Puzzle” and “Stray Cat Strut,” whereas the craft and effort behind the Let It Bleed material feels invisible to me. Also, I think Keith’s attempts to experiment with lo-fi cassette recording on “Street Fighting Man” and “Parachute Woman,” while intriguing, date those songs a bit, whereas the closest Let It Bleed gets to dated might be the old-fashioned film cannister on the album cover.
No, my favorite Stones album, in contrast to the sweaty, strenuous, 67-minute-long bowel movement that is Exile on Main Street, is more like one of those effortless bowel movements that takes ten seconds in total and feels smooth and natural.
What I’m trying to say is that Let It Bleed is like the perfect shit.
To paraphrase Kris Kristofferson, Let It Bleed is a walking contradiction, partly fact and partly fiction. How could the same set of songs feel so pristine … yet so earthy? Vigorous … yet tranquil? Aggressive … yet comforting? The contradiction I sense at the heart of the album is that, while I consider it to have been artfully crafted to sonic perfection, it also sounds like it was improvised in five hours by a gang of drunken hoodlums.
While listening to Let It Bleed, part of me wonders if it was recorded by accident, as if the Stones were merely lounging around late at night, sticking needles up their butts, screwing groupies on a giant, communal pile of ten pound notes, dissecting live frogs in their basement, and, oh, hey, there were a couple of instruments lying around, and, you know, somebody pressed “record,” and, not sure how it happened, but, here’s the album.
Despite all the mythos surrounding Keith and Exile on Main Street, to me, the man’s true opus is Let It Bleed. In fact, it is the one Stones album that is his show from top to bottom. Cut it open, and it bleeds Keith.
*****
I can forgive casual fans for assuming that Mick Jagger is the focal point of the Rolling Stones. He’s got the lips, he’s got the hips, he’s got the pipes, he’s got the pizzazz. Also, he wrote the majority of the band’s lyrics (though certainly not all). But I might mention Mick approximately three more times in this essay, because, as every true Stones fan knows, the emotional fulcrum around which the band’s spirit hovers is Keith.
Keith Richards might be the patron saint of part-time Buddhism. He is the accidental Zen philosopher of rock and roll. Keith Richards, from what I’ve gathered, is no longer a real human being, but has entered the realm of folk legend. He is a man starring in his own three-hour Quentin Tarantino movie, playing himself. And it’s the director’s cut.
Even the tiniest anecdotes about Keith bring a smile to my face. A short while back, I watched an interview clip with Noel Gallagher, where he proceeded to tell the story of meeting Keith for the first time at a hotel in the Bahamas on New Year’s Eve (as one does):
So we go to the bar, there is Keith Richards, looking exactly as you would imagine, like, scarf and hat … and he turned around and he went, “Ah, you’re still around, are ya?” And his second line was, he said, “One thing I’ve always wanted to ask you: Who’s the bigger cunt, your singer or mine?” … But he was great, such a dude … and it kind of reaffirms your faith in all your heroes when you meet Keith, because is the man.
He is the man, indeed. If a cat has nine lives, then Keith Richards has, let’s say, eighty-one. At this point, it would be a fool’s errand to separate fact from fiction. Did he truly declare to a London judge, upon being arrested in 1967 for drug possession, “We are not concerned with your petty morals”? Did he truly become electrocuted on a stage and lie motionless on the wooden planks for 10 minutes, only to pop right up and continue the concert as if it had been just a little zap? Did he truly kick his heroin habit by receiving a blood transfusion in Switzerland, wake up the next day, discover that the procedure had been a surprise success, only to bump into a fellow junkie a couple of days later and resume the habit?
These are questions that need not be answered. To quote The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Or perhaps I can just quote Life, the second greatest rock memoir published in 2010 (the first, of course, being Belinda Carlisle’s Lips Unsealed). Select pearls of wisdom from the Tao of Keith:
Keith on learning to play guitar:
I started where every good guitar player should start – down there on acoustic, on gut strings … I mean, probably if I had been born a few years later, I would have leapt on the electric guitar. But if you want to get to the top, you’ve got to start at the bottom, same with anything. Same with running a whorehouse … I firmly believe if you want to be a guitar player, you better start on acoustic and then graduate to electric. Don’t think you’re going to be Townshend or Hendrix just because you can go wee wee wah wah, and all the electronic tricks of the trade. First you’ve got to know that fucker. And you go to bed with it. If there’s no babe around, you sleep with it. She’s just the right shape.
Keith on songwriting:
Mick and I considered songwriting to be some foreign job that somebody else did. I rode the horse and somebody else put the shoes on … Great songs write themselves. You’re just being led by the nose, or the ears. The skill is to not interfere with it too much. Ignore intelligence, ignore everything; just following it where it takes you. You really have no say in it, and suddenly there it is. ‘Oh, I know how this goes,’ and you can’t believe it, because you think that nothing comes like that … Not to say that I haven’t labored. Some of them have had us on our knees … Well, I’ve got to tame this beast one way or another. But how to tame it? Gently, or give it a beating? I’ll fuck you up; I’ll take you at twice the speed I wrote you! You have this sort of relationship with the songs. You talk to the fuckers. You ain’t finished till you’re finished, OK? All that sort of shit. No, you weren’t supposed to go there. Or sometimes you’re apologizing: I’m sorry about that.
Keith on being a junkie:
And the reason I’m here is probably that we only ever took, as much as possible, the real stuff, the top-quality stuff … When I was introduced to dope, it was all pure, pure, pure. You didn’t have to worry about what it’s cut with and go through all that street shit … basically my introduction to drugs was all crème de la crème … I suppose heroin made me concentrate on something or finish something more than I would normally. This is not a recommendation. The life of being a junkie is not recommended to anybody. I was on the top end, and that was pretty low … It’s certainly not the road to musical genius or anything else. It was a balancing act. I’ve got loads of things to do, this song’s interesting, and I want to make copies of all this stuff, and I’d be doing it for five days, perfectly balanced on this equilibrium of cocaine and heroin. But the thing is that after about six or seven days, I’d forget what the balance was. Or I’d run out of one side of the balance or the other. Because I was always having to think about supplies. The key to my survival was that I paced myself … But I have to impress on anyone who reads this that this was the finest, finest cocaine and the purest, purest heroin, this was no crap off the street, no Mexican shoe scrapings. This was the real shit.
Good to know. Keith on how to conduct oneself in a knife fight:
I’ve almost always carried a knife … You’ve got to be quick in this game. The way it was explained to me, if you’re going to use a blade, the winner is the one who can make a quick horizontal cut across the other’s forehead. The blood will fall like a curtain, but you don’t really hurt the cat that much, you just put an end to the fight because he can’t see. The blade’s back in your pocket before anybody knows about it. The big rules of knife fighting are (a) do not try it at home, and (b) the whole point is never, ever use the blade. It is there to distract your opponent. While he stares at the gleaming steel, you kick his balls to kingdom come – he’s all yours. Just a tip!
Very helpful. Keith on being a court defendant:
I did make some speech along the lines of, this is my life, this is the way we live and shit happens. You don’t live like me. I do what I have to do. If I fuck up, I’m very sorry. I’m just living a peaceful life. Let me go to the next gig. In other words, ‘Hey, it’s only rock and roll.’ But tell that to a bunch of Aylesbury plumbers … because my attitude was, I need a jury that’s at least half full of rock-and-roll guitar players to have anybody know what the fuck I’m talking about. A jury of my peers would be Jimmy Page, a conglomeration of musicians, guys that have been on the road and know what’s what. My peers are not some lady doctor and a couple of plumbers.
Makes sense to me. Keith on performing:
But I’ve always felt very comfortable on stage, even if I screw up. It always felt like a dog, this is my turf, piss around it. While I’m here, nothing else can happen.
Keith on traveling outside Britain:
When I was growing up, the idea of leaving England was pretty much remote … You just read about other countries and looked at them on TV, and in National Geographic, the black chicks with their tits hanging out and their long necks.
Keith on quitting heroin:
I can’t imagine what other people think cold turkey is like. It is fucking awful. On the scale of things, it’s better than having your leg blown off in the trenches. It’s better than starving to death.
Keith on topping the “Most Likely to Die” list:
New Musical Express drew up a top ten of rock stars most likely to die, and put me at number one … Ten years I was number one on that list! It used to make me laugh. That was the only chart on which I was number one for ten years in a row. I was kind of proud of that position. I don’t think anybody’s held that position as long as I have. I was really disappointed when I went down the charts. Finally dropping down to number nine. Oh my God, it’s over.
Keith on modern recording equipment:
Very soon after Exile, so much technology came in that even the smartest engineer in the world didn’t know what was really going on. How come I could get a great drum sound back in Denmark Street with one microphone, and now with fifteen microphones I get a drum sound that’s like someone shitting on a tin roof?
Keith on heaven and hell:
I’ve never found heaven, for example, a particularly interesting place to go. In fact, I take the view that God, in his infinite wisdom, didn’t bother to spring for two joints – heaven and hell. They’re the same place, but heaven is when you get everything you want and you meet Mommy and Daddy and your best friends and you all have a hug and a kiss and you play your harps. Hell is the same place – no fire and brimstone – but they all just pass by and don’t see you. There’s nothing, no recognition. You’re waving, ‘It’s me, your father,’ but you’re invisible. You’re on a cloud, you’ve got your harp, but you can’t play with nobody because they don’t see you. THAT’S hell.
Damn. I’m going to need to think about that one for a bit. But you get the idea. Keith Richards is a man who appears to have reached at least a primitive stage of enlightenment. I can’t even crack jokes about him because he’s already cracked them about himself.
Yet beneath all the absurd quotes, tall tales, and improbable yarns lies a man who cares. Keith’s got a big heart, but he’ll only share it with you when he’s ready. He’s the guy at the bar who seems like an asshole, but once the place empties out and you really get to know him, once you’ve proven you’re not laying some phony bullshit on him, he’ll be the best friend you ever had.
It’s the spirit of Keith that permeates Let It Bleed like a dog pissing on his turf.
*****
Let It Bleed is the rare rock album that sports an unofficial subtitle. Having been released in November 1969, it must forever be described by rock critics, presumably under contractual obligation, as the album that represents “the death of the ‘60s.”
I think this is kind of stupid.
Tell me how, precisely, does an arbitrarily divided ten-year stretch “die”? In the MusicHound album guide, Greg Kot’s one-sentence review of the album reads, “Let It Bleed slams the door on the ‘60s with such harrowing anthems as ‘Gimme Shelter’ and ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want.’” Slams the door? Maybe there was just a sudden gust of wind? In Old Gods Almost Dead, Stephen Davis writes, “No rock record, before or since, has ever so completely captured the sense of palpable dread that hung over its era.” On Ultimate Classic Rock, Michael Galluci writes that “the record manages to instill an overwhelming sense of dread, claustrophobia and despair into all nine of its songs.” “Harrowing”? “Dread”? “Despair”? Is this what people take away from Let It Bleed?
Two events surrounding the album’s recording and release invariably find their way into discussion of the album’s contents, without, in my view, meriting that sort of thematic correlation: 1) Altamont; 2) The death of Brian Jones.
You want to talk about lazy rock critic narratives? Let’s start with the laziest rock critic narrative of all time: Altamont, and, by extension, Let It Bleed, somehow represented “The death of the ‘60s.”
Give. Me. A. Break.
One poorly planned concert goes bad, and that concert happens to take place in December of 1969. Maybe it was just a poorly planned concert? No, it has to mean something.
I’ve met more than a few Bay Area residents who claim to have attended Altamont, and claim to have had a pretty good time there (I presume they were sitting way in the back?). Some people died at Woodstock too, but nobody ever talks about that, do they? A couple of babies were born at Altamont too. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of people in a field – there are going to be a few snafus, OK? As Keith puts it, “I was amazed that things didn’t go more wrong than they did.”
Anyway, the laziest part of this laziest of narratives is that Let It Bleed, an album recorded and released before Altamont was even a glint in a Hell’s Angel’s eye, is somehow an album “about” Altamont. Do people realize that the concert happened after Let It Bleed was released? Were the Stones clairvoyant? Were they composing material for their new album in anticipation of an event that had not yet taken place, magically providing the soundtrack for a thousand overblown rock critic metaphors? It would be like saying Abbey Road was somehow “about” the Native American occupation of Alcatraz. I remember watching Gimme Shelter with a friend, who, like me, found it engrossing, but when I went on to spout my canned analysis of what it all “meant,” he rolled his eyes: “Maybe it was just a concert that went wrong, not some grand metaphor.”
Tempting metaphor, though.
Now, as for Brian Jones. Every so often, I will come across pockets of Stones fans who claim that Brian was some “misunderstood genius” who brought “so many forward-thinking musical ideas” to the table, and that the Stones were never the same once Mick and Keith “callously drove Brian to his doom.” Everybody’s got to have their angle. But from what I’ve read, the moral of the Brian Jones story is this: some people (Keith Richards) can handle fame and drugs, and some people (Brian Jones) can’t. From Life:
I never saw a guy so much affected by fame. The minute we’d had a couple of successful records, zoom, and he was Venus and Jupiter rolled into one. Huge inferiority complex that you hadn’t noticed. The minute the chicks started screaming, he seemed to go through a whole change … I’ve known a few that were really carried away by fame. But I never saw one that changed so dramatically overnight … He was getting really stoned, out of it. Thought he was a intellectual, a mystic philosopher. He was very impressed by other stars, but only because they were stars, not because of what they were good at. And he became a pain in the neck, a kind of rotting attachment.
Brian allegedly plays congas on “Midnight Rambler” and autoharp on “You Got the Silver,” but I’ll have to take the album sleeve’s word for it; equally surprised to be told this while writing his book, Keith dubbed it “the last flares from the shipwreck.” I like how diplomatically Wikipedia describes Brian’s contributions to Let It Bleed: “Brian Jones, the band’s founder and original leader, had become increasingly unreliable in the studio due to heavy drug use, and during most recording sessions was either absent, or so incapacitated that he was unable to contribute meaningfully.” “Hey guys, I’m not a ‘narcissistic drug casualty,’ I’m just ‘so incapacitated that I’m unable to contribute meaningfully.’” Oh, that’s different then. Here’s my question to all those Brian partisans out there: How critical could a band member’s contributions be when he literally dies and the band gets better?
I mean, Brian’s passing may weigh heavily on the minds of rock reviewers and Stones biographers, but my impression is that, to Mick and Keith, it was more like “Whatever, man, he was getting on our nerves.” After about two weeks of awkward mourning, they moved on. I wouldn’t consider any of the material on the album to have been “informed” by the situation, or to have referenced it. We’re not talking Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett here.
What I’m trying to say is, I hear all this talk about Let It Bleed being some sort of “nihilistic descent into the clutches of evil, decay, depravity, and fatalism.” No, no, and double no. To me, Let It Bleed is a heroic bulwark against evil, decay, depravity, and fatalism.
Take “Gimme Shelter” – coming soon to a Scorsese film near you. Call the metaphor obvious, but the opening does suggest a Category 5 hurricane forming in the Gulf: 1) Keith’s initially benign riff; 2) Charlie Watt’s surreptitious entry; 3) best-ever use of a guiro in a rock song; 4) high-pitched “ooh” backing vocals; 5) unusually low, infrequently placed piano chords … before we’ve even had time to call FEMA, we’re bearing the brunt of it. Charlie’s “THWACK-a-THWACK-a” fills are branches smacking against the window, Mick’s harmonica is wind howling across the chimney top, Merry Clayton’s wailing is the roof blowing off. And stuff.
But while few songs conjure up an air of threat and menace as effectively as “Gimme Shelter” does, listening to it doesn’t fill me with threat or menace. On the contrary, listening to it fills me with strength and resolve. The attitude I get from “Gimme Shelter” is not, “The four horsemen of the apocalypse are upon us and we’re all doomed,” but “The four horsemen of the apocalypse are upon us, but we’re going to take these bastards ON.” The Stones are bloodied but not unbowed. “Don’t know who to cling to in the chaos? Come and cling to US.” Despair, cowardice? You’ve got the wrong band, baby. And let’s not forget that Keith Richards is indestructible; simply stand in his vicinity and you’re basically protected.
Mainly, I find the groove of “Gimme Shelter” too hypnotic and sensual to pass for “harrowing.” Like, if this is the apocalypse, then this is one sexy apocalypse. No, “Gimme Shelter” draws me in. It’s inviting, comforting, fortifying. “Gimme Shelter” is the shelter.
See, an album touching on bleak and nihilistic themes isn’t necessarily bleak and nihilistic itself. If anything, in the worldview of the Stones, intimately knowing one’s enemy is the best way to vanquish one’s enemy. Creeped out by rapists and serial killers and not sure how to handle it? Write a seven minute song about a rapist and serial killer.
I’ve long held a theory. Being raped and murdered by a psychopath would probably feel terrible. But part of what I think strikes the average citizen as being so terrible about it isn’t merely the act itself, but the juxtaposition between the victims’ dewy-eyed innocence and their grisly fate. Like, if the Manson Family is stabbing you to death, and the record playing on the turntable as they put their fist through the steel-plate door is Johnny Mathis’s “Chances Are” or Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” – you know, placid pop straight out of a David Lynch soundtrack – that would somehow make it worse. But if they bust in while you’re playing “Midnight Rambler” … yeah. It would still be awful, but it would be more like, “I knew you were coming, and I was READY for it.”
Seven-minute bluesy paeans to serial killers can go wrong in several ways, but I can’t think of a single tweak I’d make to this one. Despite the band, roughly two-and-a-half minutes in, throwing in a chant of “No don’t do that,” what I’m thinking after each new twist and turn is, “Yeah guys, do precisely that.” Jam around Keith’s tipsy downward guitar slides for a couple of bars while Mick catches his breath? Yeah, do that (I can almost see Keith’s neck swooping toward the floor like an ostrich with each deployment of the slide). Ride Charlie’s double-time pattern while chanting “Don’t do that”? Yeah, do that. Continue to chant “Don’t do that” for several seconds even after Charlie drops out? Yeah, do that.
I’ve come across Stones fans who say, “Well, the Let It Bleed version of ‘Midnight Rambler’ is OK, but the live version of ‘Midnight Rambler’ is so much better. You need to listen to the version on Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! Or that one bootleg from Milwaukee in 1973.”
No.
The studio version of “Midnight Rambler” is the version I want. I want to hear Mick’s harmonica way up in the mix, pressing against my ear with its harsh friction. I want Charlie’s cymbals to crash through my skull. During the middle section, when the whole enterprise grinds to a barely present crawl, as Keith’s licks ring out into the still summer night air, I don’t want to hear some drunken concertgoer puncturing the silence. I want to feel that emptiness, that hushed moment where the song grows so quiet I can practically hear the crickets chirping in the Mississippi moonlight, or the frogs croaking in that soggy marsh on the outskirts of London that Magwitch crawls out of at the beginning of Great Expectations. All the secrets of the universe reside within that silence.
And then the slow, stealth ramp-up from the silence into an all-out assault. But instead of this tension-soaked conclusion being an audio verité representation of the title character’s crime, I find that it serves the opposite function. In other words, I don’t think “Midnight Rambler” is “pro-Midnight Rambler.” For me, the ferocity of the final minute symbolizes the Stones’ disgust and opprobrium at a universe which allows men like the Midnight Rambler to exist. When Mick shouts, “I’ll stick my knife right down your throat baby, and it hurts!,” he’s not so much playing the Midnight Rambler shouting at his victim, but he’s playing Keith shouting at the Midnight Rambler, “We’re on to you, fucker!”
*****
Does it sound like “Midnight Rambler” is my favorite song on Let It Bleed? Don’t ask me what my favorite song is on Let It Bleed, because each track comes on and I’m thinking, “This is my favorite song. No, this is my favorite song.”
The only track I can say with certainty is not my favorite song is “Live With Me,” which might have too much “rock” and not enough of Keith’s preferred “roll” for my taste. First of all, the opening bass riff (played by Keith?) has always sounded to me like someone trying to play the riff from Sticky Fingers’ “Bitch” and screwing it up – which may be unfair, as this song predates “Bitch,” but, as the Stones know so well, life is often unfair. It’s the one song on the album that, for me, doesn’t organically flow down from Stones Mountain with the effortless grace of a springtime brook like the others do.
That said, it may feature the album’s single greatest lyric: “My best friend, he shoots water rats and/Feeds them to his geese/Don’t you think there’s a place for you/In between the sheets?”
I mean, if that line doesn’t work on her, nothing will. The song gets a pass for that lyric alone. Between the moral majority-baiting sentiments and the overall frenetic energy level, this one still skates by. I skip nothing on this album, you hear me? NOTHING.
The problem with “Live With Me” is that there’s a better 1969 Stones track that features almost all the same elements (rollicking piano, beefy horns, brand new member Mick Taylor dueling with Keith). It is time, ladies and gentlemen, to discuss “Honky Tonk Women.”
“Honky Tonk Women” is the kind of song that is better heard, not discussed, better felt in the bones, not scrutinized with words. But like Keith Richards, I’m a man who tempts fate.
The solitary cowbell kicking things off is like the guest who’s arrived to the evening’s festivities a tad too early (or perhaps an insinuation that the female members of this establishment are cattle?). Charlie’s drums are like the guy who shows up to turn the lights on. Keith’s fat open-tuned riff is like the guy who lets everybody know that, oh yeah, there’s something going down tonight. I can see him now, welcoming each and every arrival in succession: “Hey Mick, quit fiddling with your pants and get over to the mic.” “Nicky Hopkins, good to see ya, mate, piano’s in the corner.” “Hey, Mick Taylor, think you can hang with us? Well turn it up and show me what you got.”
And by about the halfway mark, the whole room is dripping with sweat and vomit and nobody knows how many rounds of the shamelessly singalong chorus they’ve gone through but the whole track is swinging and grooving harder than James Brown’s worst nightmares, with Mick Taylor laying down his licks on the left channel and Keith riffing away on the right, the two of them gyrating not merely against each other, but also against the poor horn players who’ve found themselves stuck in the melee (technically, in the stereo mix, the saxes are on the right with Keith, but, poetic license).
And by the time it all ends with a faintly shouted “Whoo!” and Charlie collapsing in a heap, one hears the Doppler-tinged sound of the horn section speeding off into the Memphis night, as if the sax players hopped on the nearest train the moment they could get the hell out of that mess. The cowbell player has gone completely M.I.A.
In other words, the day I get sick of listening to “Honky Tonk Women,” I will let you know.
Also, it’s not on the album.
Well, it is on the album. Just, you know, a little worse for the wear. Consummate pranksters, these boys. When potential flaws of Let It Bleed are discussed, the substitution of “Country Honk” for the single version of “Honky Tonk Women” universally appears toward the top, but honestly, I’ve always thought it was a good move. “Why put that version on there? They’ve already heard that version.” Precisely, Keith, precisely.
“Country Honk” is funny! They’re taking the piss out of their own song. And yet, despite being campy and kitschy, I wouldn’t say it slides into the realm of novelty. To me, the essential strength of the composition shines through even in a rendition that sounds as if it were recorded on Keith’s back porch with the microphone dangling from a tree and Charlie slapping his knees for percussion. You can’t screw up that chorus.
I remember, in college, loaning my CD copy of Let It Bleed to a friend, and the very first time he listened to the album, he happened to be in his car. His comments to me the following day: “So I was at a stoplight, and I heard somebody honk, and I was like, ‘What the fuck? Am I doing something wrong?’ Like, I swiveled my head around in a panic.” Indeed, that is one convincingly captured honk at the start of this recording. I am ashamed to admit that the brilliance of the pun had escaped me until now. Car “honk.” “Honk”-y tonk. Amusingly, when my friend later heard the single version, he considered it inferior.
The reason I feel like the campy acoustic version works nicer on the album than the single version is because, in this guise, the song is able to form more of a continuous piece with the acoustic “Love in Vain.” I sense a nifty melding of time and space here, the Stones sneakily blending in with their own heroes. At this point, is it outrageous to suggest that “Honky Tonk Women” has become just as much of a “classic” or a “standard” as Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” has?
The single version of “Honky Tonk Women” may deserve the title of “Greatest Closing Seconds of a Stones Song,” but in the contest for “Greatest Opening Seconds of a Stones Song,” I nominate the first few seconds of this album’s title track. One might describe it as the aural equivalent of Keith attempting to rouse himself from his smack-fueled stupor after being informed that, ahem, the red light is now indeed on, plucking a few unfocused notes that reverberate with a woozy insouciance, before promptly nodding off again, then being poked with a stick, jumping to attention, and hastily proceeding to perform his professional duties as a recording artist, his sudden reemergence surprising the engineer in the process, who manages to turn the tape machine on about half a second too late. You can literally hear Keith sitting up in a panic, cracking open his eyes by the merest of millimeters, and starting to strum.
Meanwhile, the track’s outro, where these fine, upstanding English gentlemen abandon any sense of propriety and sloppily tumble toward the end of side one, might best be described as the aural equivalent of the album’s disheveled back cover.
Have you ever planned an event months in advance, combed over every minute detail, thought through every possible contingency, and yet, when the special evening finally came around, it all went completely, utterly to shit, and by the end of the night, a black eye on your face and a toilet seat around your neck, you just had to laugh to yourself with an almost perverse sense of admiration? That’s the spirit I take from back cover of Let It Bleed, and from the final instrumental vamp of “Let It Bleed.” There’s a nail in the bicycle tire, a slice of pizza on the shattered record, the plastic figurines are lying face-down in the frosting, but you’re so far past the point of being upset that you’re just rolling around in it.
And only the Stones could turn an outro featuring the lyric “You can come all over me” into something almost … touching? Charlie giving those cymbals a few striptease-like smacks, Mick drawling out “Awww, bleeaahh-aw-right,” Ian Stewart hitting four correct notes on the piano for every wrong note, and Keith answering with sloppy slide runs of his own is like the aural equivalent of Oscar Wilde’s famous epigram, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
(Note: Just before I sat down to write about “Let It Bleed,” I randomly experienced a bloody nose. Coincidence?)
Speaking of Keith Richards and woozy insouciance: “You Got the Silver.”
My God. Honey, it can sing.
The key adjective I would use to describe Keith’s Richards’s vocal style is “unsteady.” Listening to the trajectory of his singing is sort of like following the trajectory of a helium balloon: while the general pathway is clear, the precise direction of the zigs and zags are impossible to predict, even a split second ahead of time. Most singers can control their breath, but when Keith Richards sings, it’s sort of like a race against the clock before the power runs out. As suspense, it can’t be beat. “Well that’s all right …” Hold on, hold on, can he get through the rest of the lyric before the air goes dead … “It’llbuysometime.” Phew! Similar story with “Just waitin’ here … atyourkitchendoh.”
Then at 1:54, the amphetamines that producer Jimmy Miller slipped into Keith’s coffee at the start of the take finally kick in. It’s like watching a beaten-up Volkswagen Bug attempt to put-put-put its way up a steep grade. Come on Keith, you can make it, you can make it … annnnnd he makes it! Perhaps the surging music underneath carries him further than he otherwise would have been able to go. I’ve always suspected that the last note of the finale (“That’s no big surprise!”) was intended to land at a certain pitch, but merely came out as a tuneless bark, Keith figuring, “Probably as close as I’m gonna get, no point in trying another take.” Maybe I shouldn’t be too impressed, but Keith making it to the end of “You Got the Silver,” as the reverse guitar effects siphon him back into the secondary vocal role where he belongs, gives me a feeling of triumph. If he can do it, then maybe we all can do it.
But with a Nicky Hopkins piano glissando (or possibly a keyboard made out of icicles?), droning feedback from Keith, and a menacing Bill Wyman bass lick, the triumph quickly turns frosty, for we have entered the disquieting realm of “Monkey Man.” Even 17-year-old me, when reading Richie Unterberger’s AllMusic review of Let It Bleed, bristled at the following line: “The Stones were never as consistent on album as their main rivals, the Beatles, and Let It Bleed suffers from some rather half-assed tracks, like ‘Monkey Man’ and a countrified remake of the classic ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ (here titled ‘Country Honk’).” At some point Unterberger (or another AllMusic staffer?) edited the online review, not by offering the reappraisal of “Monkey Man” that it clearly deserves, but by swapping out the phrase “half-assed” for “perfunctory,” an edit that strikes me as a bit perfunctory. Although I disagree with his dig at “Country Honk,” I understand. But “Monkey Man”? Who thinks “Monkey Man” is one of the throwaways?
At first glance, I guess the lyrics seem slight or tossed off. At first glance, the lyrics to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” also seem slight or tossed off, but on closer inspection, they express a theme that might be best summarized as “Things used to be bad, but now they’re better.” “I was born in a crossfire hurricane/And I howled at my ma in the driving rain/But it’s all right now, in fact it’s a gas”? I feel that. So let’s call “Monkey Man” a sequel:
I’m a fleabit peanut monkey
All my friends are junkies
That’s not really trueI’m a cold Italian pizza
I could use a lemon squeezer
What you do?But I’ve been bit and I’ve been tossed around
By every she-rat in this town
Have you, babe?But I am just a monkey man
I’m glad you are a monkey woman tooI was bitten by a boar
I was gouged and I was gored
But I pulled on throughYeah, I’m a sack of broken eggs
I always have an unmade bed
Don’t you?
Translation: I’m a mess and I’ve been through some shit, but if you’re a mess who’s been through some shit too, then this just might work out.
Somehow, I hear that sentiment in the riff. Well, it’s more accurate to say that there are two riffs, as if Keith couldn’t quite decide which one he preferred, so he just shrugged and thought, “Let’s use ‘em both.” Whatever, “Monkey Man” is all about the instrumental break. There are instrumental breaks, and there are instrumental breaks, you know what I’m saying? At 1:48, Mick finally shuts his trap so that Keith and Charlie can groove, then Nicky Hopkins casually comes back in after ten seconds or so, Keith adds a slide guitar overdub, and everybody enters a ZONE. Then at 2:34, a key change prompts Hopkins to fly off into outer space, and the whole song feels like it’s spinning out of control and you just want to shout “Whoo!”
For all their merits, how often did the Beatles capture that feeling of spinning out of control and making you want to shout “Whoo!”? The music of the Beatles is always in control. That’s why it’s so good. But at certain times in my life, it’s what has made the Beatles’ music feel like … kind of a lie. It’s too pristine, too godlike, too perfect. Where are the flaws? But Let It Bleed has never struck me as a lie. It’s fallible music, it’s damaged music, it’s been to the depths and back. Which is why I trust it a little more. To borrow a Neil Young album title, there’s a ragged glory to Let It Bleed. And I don’t know which force has the upper hand here, the “ragged” or the “glory.” But nowhere is the glory more ragged than it is on “Love in Vain” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
*****
Somewhere beyond the urban wasteland of the modern metropolis, beyond the cookie cutter homogeneity of the modern suburb, miles and miles along a stretch of abandoned railroad tracks, past the derelict shacks and sheds, through a musical wormhole that only Keith Richards has ever discovered (and that only Keith Richards has ever returned from), one will, I believe, come across the place where the Rolling Stones’ version of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” exists. It is not of the same world as ours. It carries within it the wisdom of the ages. It hovers on the turntable, untouched by time, mortality, and Keith’s cigarette butts.
First of all: the acoustic guitar sound. Every acoustic guitar that has ever been recorded has walked up to the studio engineer and politely asked, “OK, but can you make me sound like the acoustic guitar on ‘Love in Vain’?” It’s like they captured the acoustic guitar at the absolute peak of its acoustic-ness. They turned the knob to “max acoustic” and left it there.
And has any electric guitar ever sounded so weightless and buoyant as Keith’s electric guitar on the right channel? It’s like the lava lamp of guitar tones. Despite the sorrow and disappointment addressed in the lyrics, I feel like the accompanying music taps into an emotional equilibrium of pure calm. Whatever mental state the alien beings who planted the monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey have supposedly achieved, “Love in Vain” exists in the same state. It’s the musical equivalent of Keith putting his arm around you and saying, “Everything’s going to be OK, mate.”
Are you one of those people who prefers the original Robert Johnson version? Fine. But to me, the Stones’ version is like the widescreen, auteurist, two-hour ‘70s remake as compared to the original’s 20-minute black and white silent original. Johnson’s version has the right attitude, but maybe it doesn’t say all that could have been said with the source material. The Stones’ version is slower, it’s grander, and I can sense more happening in between the lines:
Well I followed her to the station
With a suitcase in my hand
Yeah I followed her to the station
With a suitcase in my hand
Whoa, it’s hard to tell, it’s hard to tell
When all your love’s in vainWhen the train come in the station
I looked her in the eye
Well the train come in the station
And I looked her in the eye
Whoa, I felt so sad, so lonesome
That I could not help but cry
Although I can guess how this is going to turn out, it’s not quite preordained. The suspense generated by placing the solo between verses two and three is almost lethal: 1) He follows her to the station; 2) The train has arrived; 3) And …? And … ? Does our narrator have a chance at reconciliation? Ry Cooder’s mandolin perhaps serves the role of the girl, the gist of her words rendered ambiguous until the third verse confirms what one might have suspected from the start:
When the train left the station
It had two lights on behind
Yeah, when the train left the station
It had two lights on behind
The blue light was my baby
And the red light was my mind
Yep. But he pretty much knew that going into this, right? The song’s not called “Love That’s Maybe in Vain and Maybe Isn’t.” She’s done with you, man. But you go to the station anyway, because there is always that sliver of hope. And you weren’t a fool to hope. When Keith’s final electric guitar slide wraps up the tale, I can feel my troubles floating away on that slide like a feather floating away on the wind. If a deep exhalation of acceptance were a sound, it would be that sound. “Love in Vain” is where I think the Stones captured that essential part-time Buddhist truth: Life is suffering, and yet, suffering, when sprinkled with a dash of acceptance, is the ultimate badge of honor.
Which brings me, at last, to its sister track in acceptance, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” “Love in Vain” could almost work as the album’s closing track, but why close the album with “Love in Vain” when you have “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” lying around?
I could almost buy the simplistic image of Let It Bleed as this “nihilistic descent into the clutches of evil, decay, depravity, and fatalism” if the closing track weren’t “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Because what song is more inspiring than “You Can’t Always Get What You Want?”
Although I am kind of sick of it.
But the transition from “Monkey Man” into the choir is sheer gold. You go from a macho voice gruffly screaming “I’m a monkaaaaaaay babe!” to the pitch-perfect, decidedly feminine tones of “I saw her today at the reception …” Like, did someone at the record factory screw up the album pressing? Oh, far from it, my friends. It’s the dash of unexpected sonic variety that I wouldn’t mind a little more of on Exile and Sticky Fingers. Let’s admit it: the London Bach Choir’s time was much better spent singing on a Rolling Stones song than the umpteenth recording of St. Matthew’s Passion.
And yet, the Stones somehow have their cake (that they’re lying face down in) and eat it too, for while the usage of the choir is puckishly tongue-in-cheek, it also provides this scuzziest and filthiest of albums with an unexpected whiff of holiness.
I thought everyone was on board with the choir, but leave it to my favorite YouTube “reactors,” Andy & Alex, to prove me wrong. While they frequently disagree with each other, when they reacted to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” they both had the same exact reaction to the opening choir:
Alex: “That beginning is bullshit.”
Andy: “I hate it.”
Alex: “Horrible.”
Andy: “Honestly, honestly, that beginning is probably one of the worst, most annoying things I’ve heard on the channel in over a year.”
Alex: “I one hundred percent agree, it’s so dumb.”
Andy: “Didn’t like it to the highest degree.”
Alex: “And in the mix, it’s OK. But at the beginning, when it’s just that? What are you doing? The Stones? No. This is like that bullshit thing we listened to on the White Album where it’s like, “Number nine, number nine” … at this point you’re just doing it to mess with us.”
Andy: “And here’s the thing. When it was happening, I was like, ‘I know they’re gonna recover,’ and that’s what bothers me the most. Is that, like, I know they’re gonna recover this … it just, like, it feels pretentious. It feels like you’re disrespecting your fans.”
Alex: “It’s one hundred percent disrespect. Because I guarantee none of them, NONE OF THEM, are like ‘Hey, when we play this song, that’s my favorite part. That beginning part with the bad children’s choir.”
Andy: “Maybe that’s how they got a certain audience to, like … imagine you’re a super churchy, you’re driving home, you know, they don’t know it’s the Rolling Stones yet, and they’re really trying to sneak up on ‘em, you know, ‘Oh, this is … this is … good.’ And then it kind of goes into the acoustic and they’re like …’
Alex: “ ‘I can do this.’ ”
Andy: “ ‘This youth group is going wild.’ And then it kind of like just develops, until it’s too late, and now they’re enjoying rock and roll. I don’t know. Either way it’s, like, just kind of ridiculous. I feel like the song should have started just at that acoustic part, like when the acoustic guitar came in, BAM, song starts.”
Alex: “Should’ve been.”
Andy: “Easy. If there’s not a single version that’s been on the radio … if the radio version of this plays that beginning, that just shows that the world is pretentious.”
Alex: “It shows that there is no justice in this life.”
Well guys, I have some bad news for you. There is, in fact, a single edit that starts with the acoustic guitar and the French horn, but the radio never plays that edit, because everyone wants to hear the version that starts with the choir. A swing and a miss, fellas. Fortunately, some commenters came to the rescue:
“The only two kids on earth to criticize this iconic intro. Congrats you masters of music”
“The formality of the choir at the beginning, followed by the segue to rock-n-roll, symbolized the social transition of the era. It was put there for contrast.”
“I like the choir intro. It makes sense and is completed by the ending where everything is blended into an amalgamation of greatness.”
“you have the pure boys choir singing the intro then comes in Jagger with the worldly and experienced tones in his voice. One of the greatest contrasts in rock and roll……..I’m not your friend but I forgive you 😊”
“You missed it. The first part is ironic. The protagonist is at a wedding where the love of his life is there with someone else. He sat through the wedding ceremony, thinking nothing besides if he was going to run into her. The boys singing this are torture to him. Set the whole scene- memory, regret/nostalgia, uncomfortable social setting. Genius.”
“The school boy choir thing is definitely a British thing that they were using to create the picture/story/context for the song. It wasn’t just a pretentious gimmick. You say that none of the Stones would say that’s their ‘favorite’ part, but you might be surprised that they would defend it to the death – and probably had to with the record execs. It took something that was at the core of their upbringing and which sets up all the hopes and expectations that get dashed later in life.”
“When this was released there was a clear divide between established and new music. The Stones were British, well-educated and yet youth icons and true Rock Gods. Their use of the choir was a nod to established musical beauty – they understood the power of using it, and then turning it into their own device. Also, you would not have loved the ending so much if the choir was not in the background – in synch with the song. And, the acoustic would not have sounded so good without your familiarity with the chord structure, established by the choir already.”
I mean, here I was, clicking on a reaction video, expecting to hear these two perceptive members of the younger generation gush all over the song and, well … you can’t always get what you want. The choir’s melody line is even a bit more expansive than Mick’s; I also wish he’d hit the same notes they did. That choir had some good ideas, man! The Stones going disco on “Miss You”? That was divisive. The choir on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”? No one considers that divisive. Honestly, I’d never heard a single person complain about the choir until they did. The choir is it. The choir is what makes it fly.
Well, a lot of things make it fly. Al Kooper’s double duty on French horn and organ make it fly. Jimmy Miller’s (curiously not Charlie’s) drum groove makes it fly. I’m not sure if the verses make it fly, exactly.
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” may be the most well-known rock song in which no one understands what the hell the verses are about. “At her feet was a footloose man”? “We decided that we would have a soda/My favorite flavor, cherry red”? “I could tell by her bloodstained hands”? Wait, why are her hands bloodstained? Is Mick’s favorite soda flavor really cherry red, or is he merely playing a character whose favorite flavor is cherry red? And why, by the final verse, has the “footloose” man turned into the “bleeding” man? Is Kenny Loggins somehow involved?
No one knows, and no one cares. Because hello, that chorus? “You can’t always get what you want/But if you try sometimes, you just might find/You get what you need.” A man can live his entire life off that. That chorus belongs on the Mount Rushmore of part-time Buddhist choruses. (And as much as I’m on Team Keith, I believe the chorus was Mick’s; I don’t wish to imply that the man’s contributions were somehow less than essential.) You might want other philosophical nuggets from other pop songs, but do you need other philosophical nuggets from other pop songs?
It raises the question of what a person really needs. Not much. Oxygen. Water. Food. Inner peace. Not that massive pay raise, or that sports car, or that hot spouse, or the local NFL team winning the Super Bowl. Well, all you need is love, according to that “other” British band, but … let’s not get into that right now.
At any rate, I learned this lesson the hard way. There were a lot of things I didn’t have growing up that the other kids at school seemed to have. A nice house. Nice clothes. Athletic ability. Functional parents. You know – stuff. But I consoled myself with the thought that this was OK because, one day, I would get all that stuff, and then everything would balance out. I thought the universe was fair, and that eventually, whatever I had to do without would be mine, because that would only be fair, right?
There were a lot of things I thought I “needed” that were merely things I “wanted.” My conception of happiness was an immature one. And when immature me crossed paths with female high school classmates who had all those nice things, I thought, “Well, if I just date one of these girls, then all my problems will be solved.” I was basically Pip in Great Expectations. Who knew that girls didn’t want to date you just so they could solve all your problems?
But the day I realized that was a good day. A great day. A glorious day. A day my notion of happiness became untethered from superficial wants. In an ironic twist, not getting what I wanted turned out to be exactly what I needed. What I needed was the knowledge that I didn’t need much of anything at all.
I learned the beauty, not of having, but of doing without.
I could generate my own energy, fill in my own gaps. I filled in a lot of gaps with music. And “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” filled in one impressively sized gap.
A few days after I turned seventeen, I began experiencing a wild stream of epiphanies that I quickly built on, and still draw on to this day. Part-time Buddhism was in its infancy. One day during this infancy, I was sitting in the backseat of my family’s car, cruising down the highway on a partly cloudy afternoon, headphones on, the radio on my Walkman tuned to the classic rock station, and lo and behold, the sounds of an angelic choir filled my eager ears. “I saw her today at the reception …”
This was not the first time I’d heard “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” but it was, shall we say, the first time I truly listened to it. Once the song reached the 4:16 mark, the part where the band cycles through a series of modulations and the choir sneaks back in, only for the main groove to return at the 4:28 mark, and for that baroque wall of voices to emit its spectral “Ahhhhhh,” I mean … I felt like a man reborn.
And then, at 6:59, after the choir switches from harmonizing on one chord to alternating between the two main chords of the song, after Mick lets out his grittiest James Brown howl, and after Jimmy Miller kicks the rhythm into double time, well, I cannot tell a lie: at that exact moment, gazing out the window of the car, the sun came out from behind the clouds.
I saw God.
Or an airplane. I don’t remember. But to say that chills ran down my spine would fail to do justice to either chills or spines.
And even today, when the phase of the moon is just right, those chills can come back to me. How did the Stones know I was going to make it, that I was going to be all right? I think the wisdom of the song, and Let It Bleed as a whole, is rendered more powerful coming as it does from two complete monkey men like Mick and Keith (and whatever the average life expectancy of a monkey man is, I suspect they’ve both long surpassed it).
On those days when I feel like I’m merely a monkey man, I don’t want John and Paul telling me they are the walrus. I want Mick and Keith telling me they are merely monkey men too.