#695 The Rolling Stones - Out of Our Heads (US)

The Stones are a misunderstood band. Their stomp and swagger can come across as simplistic and uncharismatic, and I know a half dozen guys who love The Doors and Led Zeppelin and The Who, but who kind of just shrug and say "I never really saw what the big deal with them was" when you mention The Rolling Stones. It's easy to hear their singles and deem them unimaginative, or to simply come away, strangely...unmoved. Their music is wildly popular, they're undeniably a gigantic global force to be reckoned with, and yet their music is strangely out of step with the modern world.

I'm usually a big believer the music needs to speak for itself, but I think appreciating the Stones demands some context. It demands understanding that they are quite possibly, quite literally the only band that started off making R&B in its heyday that is still intact and making music today. Furthermore, along the way, they've made only the barest attempts to change: their music sounds out of step with modern music because it is: it is stubbornly still steeped in the traditions it came from. They're not R&B revival, they're not psychobilly, they're an actual R&B band, still on tour forever and ever. And once you see their songs as extensions of that lineage, once you hear their sound applied to covers by the originators and hammered into originals, its much easier to appreciate what they're doing, and why they're doing it, and the message and mastery that that represents.

The band had done originals before Out of Our Heads, but exact moment that smithing of an original, of delivering it hissing and spitting from the forge into the world occurs just as you start side 2 of this record: when the first riffs of Satisfaction* kick in, and tradition is honored and desecrated and never the same. At that moment it all makes sense.

This album is where Jagger fully embraces a James Brown desperation, where the whole band finds its voice, where they finally cut the apron strings and wheel off into the world, not just as performers, but as a creative force. This is where you say, oh, I see what you were trying to do. If you see every album, every hit single that came after as an extension of this moment, as a variation on this leap from tradition to twist, it all makes a lot more sense. Sometimes if you want to understand music, you need to understand the band, and sometimes the only way to do that is to understand their music. When a band's got a history this long, and built itself on the history that preceded it, that can take some effort, maybe more than the casual classic rock fans born 2 decades after the Stones got started has got the gumption to put in.

Heck, I'm a self-professed rock wonk and I'm still figuring out something as basic as The Rolling Stones. That's downright maddening. The more you know, the more you know you don't know; its a cycle that don't end cheap 4/5

* don't let anyone convince you that that song is overrated. It is the perfect realization of the Stones sound, an exciting and bracing and singular moment in rock and roll