#316 The Rolling Stones - Let it Bleed

Another odd one. I was working on a song, knew I needed a series of chords I couldn't play, realized they were similar to some in Gimme Shelter, thought, hey, how about all those albums? I like Exile on Main Street a heck of a lot, but never really heard a lot of the other Stones albums in earnest.

My growing sense is that The Rolling Stones are a misunderstood band in the modern era. Their singles are a mix of overblown bombast and early-Kinks stripped-down stomp. But neither of those is a good picture of the workmanlike middle portions that I see in this album and Exile.

This album opens with the gospelled out, aforementioned Gimme Shelter and ends with the choir-featuring You Can't Always Get What You Want. These are the known songs of the album, and the biggest outliers. The meat of the album is all twang, country fried and blasted, with clear basslines, slide guitar, rattle, strum, dylanism and pianey. It sounds like a band tired, dried out, and more interested in making rock than being rock stars. Its weirdly grounded, curiously humble given the big blasts that bookend it. It is an album that is utterly different than the impression given by its best-known songs.

And I like it. I like the fried middle, and I like the grandiose buns on either end better when they buttress this particular sandwich. There's something respectable here that doesn't come out in the singles. They become a band I'd like to be in, which I've oft-argued is a key quality in a band.

There's some bands you can get a sense of from their well-known songs. You can pretty much figure out the essence of Led Zeppelin and The Doors from their best known songs, but I think that the stones are a different band than you might think. I don't think you'll necessarily like them any better, but if you haven't heard their albums, I think its worth a go just to get a sense of what kind of band they really were at heart: far simpler and more rustic and desperate than you might expect from all their swagger. For me, this isn't quite for me, but was a crunchy eye opener, worth putting on for poker nights and moments of grooved grit, good for the high end of 4/5