I mentioned the new Rolling Stones reissues in another item. Here I just wanted to discuss the musical aspects of the CDs, and maybe a bit about the sound quality of the CD remastering. The two Stones collections I always played as LPs were HOT ROCKS and the first BIG HITS collection; I was never able to get into any of their album releases until STICKY FINGERS. So I was thinking of just getting HOT ROCKS and BIG HITS; there is some temptation to replace them with the late 1980s 3-cd "singles" collection, but I'm not sure I want to hear all the single B-sides. Any Stones fans in the conference?44 responses total.
I'm not sure I qualify as a real Stones fan -- I've only got about ten
or so Stones CDs, mostly from their middle and early periods. Given the
quantity of material they've released over the years I probably have fewer
than half of their LPs. However, I like (and listen to) the ones I've got.
For what it's worth, although I have the two-CD "Hot Rocks" collection,
I generally much prefer to listen to the LPs, especially for their middle-
period material. For the early-period stuff, I sometimes do prefer
the singles collections.
However, Ken, I suspect your Stones tastes are pretty different than mine.
You mention that you never much liked their albums until "Sticky Fingers"
which rules out almost all of my favorite Stones material, with the
"Sticky Fingers" cutoff coming right after my favorite Stones album,
"Let it Bleed."
The LPs I definitely wouldn't want to give up, in order of preference:
Let it Bleed
The Rolling Stones [England's Newest Hitmakers]
Exile on Main Street
Beggar's Banquet
BTW, I have no idea whether my usage corresponds to any official consensus
among Stones fans but in the response above you can read "early-period"
to be anything released up through and including "Their Satanic Majesties
Request" (i.e. the Brian Jones era). Middle-period, in my estimation,
would be "Beggar's Banquet" through "Some Girls", and late-period, I
suppose, would be anything released in the 80s or later..
Perhaps a serious Stones fan can propose a more fitting division..
My Rolling Stones fandom seems to be from their start, thru Satanic Majesty's Request and Let it Bleed, to Goats Head Soup. Though I have CDs beyond that, I listen to them very little.
Two of Mike's favorites, EXILE ON MAIN STREET and BEGGAR'S BANQUET,
are in the LP mound. They've never really caught on with me, even
though I got EXILE back when it was released, in the wake of my
enthusiasm over the previous album STICKY FINGERS. Again on EXILE,
I like the singles ("Tumbling Dice" and "Happy") but I never found a
use for the rest of the album. No doubt I should revisit it, since
I've acquired this whole new interest in American roots music in
the intervening 30 years.
I can't remember a thing about BEGGAR'S BANQUET; I'm sure I got it
because it was a Famous Classic, but it went in one ear and out the
other.
Both my LP and my CD of Sticky Fingers has a zipper.
I think "Exile on Main Street" is uneven, frequently over-praised by critics, and not half the album it's made out to be. However, as is often the case, there's a very decent album's worth of music to be found among the double album's worth of material. "Beggar's Banquet", likewise has a few clunkers, but its high-quality material is unforgettable and none of the greatest-hits collections I've seen include gems like "Stray Cat Blues" It sounds like "Let it Bleed" would be the album for you, Ken -- it's much more consistent than the others, falls during a period of experimentation with new musical influences (in this case, country) and also includes a number of singles everyone's familiar with.
A new wrinkle: Leslie wants to get a collection which includes "Happy" (from EXILE) and maybe some of the later singles, and that suggests that we'll be waiting a month for the release of the 40th anniversary 2-cd anthology "Licks." I think this is the first time that both parts of the Stones catalog -- up through STICKY FINGERS controlled by Allan Klein/ABKCO, and from EXILE on controlled by the band (I think I have the breakpoint right, but I may be off by an album or two) -- will have been mined for one compilation. I am suprised that I'm not finding huge quantities of the Stones reissues in the stores. Downtown Borders had a couple; Best Buy had HOT ROCKS and maybe one or two others. Schoolkids had nothing. I was expecting big displays of the whole 22-disc reissue series. Either the early shipment sold out fast, or else retailers are stocking extra-cautiously.
"Sticky Fingers" seems to be the first post-ABKCO album, judging from AMG.
I probably should buy a copy of the re-issue.
I'm not particularly recommending it, but it seems to me I've got
a Stones hits collection ("Rewind") that I think has "Happy" in addition
to most of the singles I care about from their 70s & 80s albums (chiefly
I enjoy it for the ability to get "Angie" and "Heartbreaker" without
buying "Goat's Head Soup"
STICKY FINGERS was the first album released on the label/imprint Rolling Stones Records (I've got the original, very well-manufactured LP from 1971, still sounds great after years of heavy play) but when the singles from that album go on anthologies, they go with the ABKCO stuff. "Brown Sugar" is on HOT ROCKS, and I think "Wild Horses" is too. Maybe there were special contractual arrangements. IIRC, the REWIND anthology which Mike mentions is listed as out-of-print by allmusic.com. Hmmmm, should dig around some more. On reflection, I'm a bit annoyed about how the whole Stones reissue package is being handled. It seems that no consideration has been given to creating a unified canon for collectors, as was done with the Beatles CDs years ago. There are an awful lot of overlapping hits collections being reissued: at a mininum, BIG HITS, BIG HITS vol. 2, HOT ROCKS and HOT ROCKS vol 2, a late 80s(?) 3-cd set called SINGLES and then the new collection LICKS. I suppose the BIG HITS and HOT ROCKS sets are historic compilations which should be left alone. I also am led to understand that for most of the early Stones albums, they have issued a CD with the UK running order, and a separate CD with the US running order. Sheesh. Why not issue the UK running order, put the US tracks on as bonus tracks, and tell people how to program up the US sequence? But then, my understanding is that ABKCO has always been more about milking the Stones catalog for all that could be gotten from it, rather than giving up a few bucks to make the fans a little happier. :( More so than average for the record industry.
The early Stones catalog is terrible as far as unnecessary duplication is concerned. My new standard for re-issues from that period is the work done by Castle, the folks who recently re-issued the Kinks' catalog. The Kinks' catalog, though, isn't even remotely as valuable as the Stones' work -- it's conceivable to me that there might be Stones discs that, in any given year, outsell all of the Kinks' albums put together.. "
The correct title of the new collection is FORTY LICKS, and I just saw a TV ad for it today. The push on this is going to be massive.
I was in Best Buy the other day (which qualifies as the closest thing to an actual record store here in the Muskegon, MI, area) and took a look at the Stones re-issue discs. I drastically underestimated the annoyance and the screw-the-consumer implications of the decision to release US and UK versions of the early albums separately. The differences in track lists are small but important -- popular singles have been included on either the US or UK versions of albums like "Aftermath" but not on both -- and there was no album where space couldn't have accomodated both versions, or at least all the tracks needed for a combined version. Additionally, the re-issues are in those quick-wearing folding cardboard thingies rather than traditional jewel boxes. Highly annoying.
I liked very much how the Beatles reissues were handled. The albums were restored to the original British form, and all the singles that were never on any albums were collected on two CDs titled "Past Masters". I don't know the Stones discography well enough to know whether this would be possible. But I get the impression with some other groups of that vintage that their early albums included a lot of duplications of songs between albums. That would make straightening things out for reissue a lot harded.
Yes, the Beatles re-issues were well done -- thank goodness they didn't
mess around with the butchered American LP versions.
Unfortunately the case of the Stones reissues is not so clearcut.
Take, for example, the album "Aftermath". The All Music Guide sums
up the differences:
The British version of Aftermath was released earlier than its
American counterpart and had several differences beyond its
cover design: it runs more than ten minutes longer, despite not
having "Paint It Black" on it (singles were usually kept separate
from LPs in England in those days), and it has four additional
songs -- "Mother's Little Helper," which was left off the U.S.
album for release as a single; "Out of Time" in its full-length
five-minute-36-second version, two minutes longer than the
version of the song issued in America; "Take It or Leave It,"
which eventually turned up on Flowers in the U.S.; and "What to
Do," which didn't surface in America until the release of More Hot
Rocks more than six years later.
Additionally, the song lineup is different, "Goin' Home"
closing side one instead of side two. And the mixes used are
different from the tracks that the two versions of the album
do have in common -- the U.K. album and CD used a much cleaner,
quieter master that had a more discreet stereo sound, with wide
separation in the two channels and the bass not centered, as it
in the U.S. version.
How do you sort out a mess like that? If running time permits, you can
put both versions on a single CD, but in this case you can't fit both
versions in their entirety and if you decide to save space by only
selecting one mix of the songs that were duplicated between the two
releases which do you pick? In the end, if you want the two classic
Stones singles from the "Aftermath" period ("Paint it Black" and
"Mother's Little Helper") you either wind up paying ~40 for two greatly-
similar versions of the same material or you wind up bypassing "Aftermath"
entirely and just buying a greatest hits collection. Blech.
And while I'm still carping about the Stones re-issues, can I pick on
the decision to package these things in those awful cardboard "digipaks"
instead of in jewel boxes? This is music that people are still listening
to nearly forty years after it was initially released. Wouldn't it be
nice if they put it in packaging that will still look good after at least
a couple of years' worth of average use?
Mike, while that description of "Aftermath" may be more complex than anything that happened to the Beatles, it's not much more complex, or different in kind. Songs on early UK Beatles albums were regularly left off the US releases; the US album "Yesterday and Today" (the "butcher cover" album) was a 'phantom' album consisting of the songs deleted from earlier albums on their way across the Atlantic, some of them a couple of years old. There were also issues for Beatles songs concerning remixes, cuts, and master quality. Usually with the Beatles it's possible to determine the preferred, "authentic" version. For instance most of their early songs were mixed by George Martin in mono, and the stereo versions are, IIRC, fake stereo. But in a few cases both versions have a claim to authenticity, notably "Love Me Do", which was issued on LP and single in completely different recordings. (But the US album used the UK single recording, or something like that - I don't remember offhand.) In that case, I recall that the UK album version turned up on the album CD, and the UK single version turned up on the collection of singles.
In the Beatles' case, however, the superiority of the British releases was so clear-cut that I find it difficult to imagine anyone ever arguing objectively in favor of the US LPs. That's not necessarily the case with the Stones' work. Again I'd like to cite the wonderful re-issue work done by the German(?) label Castle on the Kinks' catalog, another band whose British-invasion era recordings were scrambled a bit in the trip across the Atlantic. But when Castle re-issued their masterpiece "The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society" they included not only the original 15-track mono version but a 12-track stereo album with a different track ordering plus two songs not found on the original, plus a mono single version of one of the new tracks from the stereo album.. It'd be great if something similar had been done with the Stones' "Aftermath" -- start from the UK version, add the "Paint it Black" single which was present on the US version and absent in the UK, then add as many of the alternate mixes released on the US version as space allowed. Instead they'd rather sock the consumer for two full-priced CDs of newly-remastered but 40-year-old material from their back catalog. Figure that anyone who's likely to buy both US and UK version probably already owns the existing CD release of "Aftermath" and clearly it's all about milking the hardcore fans for all they're willing to pay. I don't find that very endearing..
Over-complete releases seem to annoy people who aren't hard-core fans, though.
That's true..
If I were a Stones fan, I wouldn't mind missing the stuff that was on the US release but not on the UK, so long as I could get it on some other CD where it belonged. (I think there may have been one or two Beatles songs put on US releases that weren't on the UK releases, and on the CDs those songs were put on the UK releases they originally belonged to.)
(( resp:15 :: Castle Communications, who Mike praises for their Kinks reissues, is to the best of my knowledge a UK operation. Castle has won great esteem among British folk fans for their reissues from the important 70s folk label Transatlantic -- most were packaged 2 LPs to 1 CD (though not the most valuable/ popular band, Pentangle) and sound quality was about as good as one gets on folk albums from that era. ))
Ken's right.. Castle seem to be British. Maybe Bear Family are the German re-issue specialists I was thinking of..
NP: "Forty Licks," just out this afternoon. Couldn't resist. More after I play it a bit.
You bought it the afternoon it was released? Flipping heck. How was it?
Saw it recently when I was looking at cds for my mother, whose birthday was last week. A bit put off by the ~ 40 USD price tag, though.
$40 seems way high for the Stones collection "Forty Licks;" it was $26 when it was released at Barnes & Noble, and Amazon US has it for $24. In general it satisfies most of my Rolling Stones needs; it seems to completely replace the "Hot Rocks" anthology and picks up the few post-1975 hit songs I might want to hear. Sound quality seems as good as can be expected on the early material. I suppose I should be more into the Stones' early-mid period album work, but the only album I ever grew to love was "Sticky Fingers," the one which was current when I started listening to rock music. So, overall, "Forty Licks" seems to be a good example of a career-spanning compilation done right.
I bought "Forty Licks", at a clearance sale of an obscure CD store that was going out of business. And having listened to these greatest hits of the Rolling Stones several times with great care (as opposed to, say, hearing a song as background music at some party or on a radio station in some store, which is my usual low-fi way of encountering rock), I can now say with complete confidence that I am not a Stones fan. At all. Period. There's not a single song here that spurs any appreciative feelings in me whatever.
Having been a friend of David's for over 20 years, this does not surprise me in the least. :)
*chuckle* I don't much like a lot of Stone songs save "Satisfaction" and "Under My Thumb," the latter which is really my fave. Just struck a chord with me and who knew a xylophone could sound cool in a rock song?
captain beefheart
the best stones = we love you, 10,000 light years from home..i hadnt heard such great music. i discovered this stuff only 3 years ago. amazing stones. i really dont care for much of the "radio' stones.
I just bought the 2-CD Led Zepplin greates hits album (I forget the name, since it's at work right now). Really good stuff. I'm surprised that I haven't heard most of this sooner. Heck, I never even heard Stairway to Heaven until 3 years ago. BTW, Best Buy is selling both CDs for $15. Much better than the $16 each at other stores.
Wow. I wish I'd been able to avoid Stairway to Heaven for that long. I mean, it's a good song and all, but still...
I think I heard "Stairway to Heaven" once, but I'm quite sure I'd have to be told what it was if I heard it again.
no way. i do not believe you.
Jules, why would I lie? It wasn't that instantly memorable a song. The tune never struck me when people have tried to croon "Stairway to Gilligan's Island" at me, either.
Hey, I liked that parody.
"Mother's Little Helper" was by the Stones? Never knew that. Cool.
There is little by the Stones that I like. "Mother's Little Helper" is one major exception.
It's hard to imagine, given how wide a range of music the Stones recorded, that that would be the only song to suit your tastes. On the other hand, it's not much of a stretch to think that maybe you haven't heard much on the radio to suit your fancy since only a small portion of their catalog ever gets airplay.
And since there is little I have liked on the air, why would I go searching it out. And I never said it was the *only* song I liked. :)
> And since there is little I have liked on the air, why would I go > searching it out. If you generalize the scope of that question to include all music, not just the Stones, would you arrive at the same answer?
No, but somewhere sanity requires that you start excluding whole areas of music from your life, and sometimes one is going to make those judgements on flimsy evidence. I've got hours and hours of recordings demanding my attention, stuff I think there's a good chance I would like; so if there's music I have any reason at all to think that I *won't* like, I'm probably going to zone it out of my mental space.
The "wide variety" of music that the Stones recorded doesn't seem all that wide to me, not when compared to the wide variety of all music. So if I hear some Stones and don't like it, I'm more sure that I won't like the rest than I am of most music. And other music has randomly produced things that struck me as wonderful. That's never happened to me for a Stones song, and - as I mentioned before - I went through the whole of "40 Licks" in a failed attempt to figure out what people see in this band. That was dedication in a hopeless cause, man. Almost as bad as the time I listened to Jeff Smith's tape tape of his favorite Rod Stewart songs four times, with utter and increasing revulsion each time. But by gum I was going to give this fellow a fair try.
> The "wide variety" of music that the Stones recorded doesn't seem all > that wide to me, not when compared to the wide variety of all music. No, of course not. But compared to the output of your average band, it is pretty wide. Most bands you really can write off after hearing a bad song or two on the radio. Even if you wind up hating the Stones, it takes more than a song or two to prove it.
Sure. Even if the Stones are a bad band, they're not THAT kind of a bad band.
You have several choices: