We weren’t committing adultery with each other’s permission. There’s a strange quote from Bryan Forbes, pictured with Nanette Newman, who sings on two tracks of Let It Bleed: “The curious thing is that ideas float in the air and a lot of us explored the same territory there was no collusion. The book reaches for that sense of freedom already past, urging images of one long party lasting through the years, some still looking for it. It’s called Goodbye Baby & Amen - to translate the subtitle, “A Wild Dance for the Sixties.” It attempts to capture, in pictures and print, the liberation London found when the Empire was jettisoned, when Christine Keeler cut the boards out from under the platform of the British Establishment, when John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Peter Townshend drove out the old with the noise of the new music, when movie stars and directors and models took art out of the museums and took their clothes off at the same time. Meanwhile, as the Rolling Stones close out the Sixties and move into the Seventies with Let It Bleed, a new book’s been published, photographs by David Bailey (once the Stones’ photographer) of the celebrities who meant something in London these last ten years. That’s not a pace to maintain, obviously. This song, caught up in its own momentum, says you need the other too.īill Wyman Remembers His Troubled Pal Brian Jones: ‘He Inadvertently Made the Wrong Decisions, to His Detriment’ Their answer and their way out matches the power of the threat: “It’s just a shot away, it’s just a shot away … it’s just a kiss away, it’s just a kiss away.” The truly fearful omen of the music is that you know just a kiss won’t be enough. When Mary Clayton sings alone, so loudly and with so much force you think her lungs are bursting, Richard’s frames her with jolting riffs that blaze past her and take it back to Mick. It’s a full-faced meeting with all the terror the mind can summon, moving fast and never breaking so that men and women have to beat that terror at the game’s own pace. The band builds on the dark beauty of the finest melody Mick and Keith have ever written, slowly adding instruments and sounds until an explosively full presence of bass and drums rides on over the first crest of the song into the howls of Mick and a woman, Mary Clayton. “Gimmie Shelter” is a song about fear it probably serves better than anything written this year as a passageway straight into the next few years. And now Mick sings it this way too: “I went down to the demonstration/ To get my fair share of abuse …” Once the Stones were known, someone’s said, as the group that would always take a good old-fashioned piss against a good old-fashioned gas station attendant. The music of these two songs is just that much stronger than anything else on the album - they can’t be ignored, and the images and moods they raise blur the old stance of arrogance and contempt. That’s not to say the Stones can’t move fast and play all their roles at once - they can, right on stage - but the force of the new vulnerability blurs the old stance of arrogance and contempt. On “Monkey Man” they grandly submit to the image they’ve carried for almost the whole decade, and then crack up digging it: “All my friends are junkies! (That’s not really true…)” And there are other songs, hidden between the flashier cuts, waiting for the listener to catch up with them: the brilliant revival of Robert Johnson’s exquisite “Love In Vain,” and Keith Richards’ haunting ride through the diamond mines, “You Got the Silver.” On songs like “Live With Me,” “Midnight Rambler,” and “Let It Bleed,” the Stones prance through all their familiar roles, with their Rolling Stones masks on, full of lurking evil, garish sexuality, and the hilarious and exciting posturing of rock and roll Don Juans. And like Beggars’ Banquet, Let It Bleed has the feel of Highway 61 Revisited. There’s a glimpse of a story - not much more. The Stones as a band and Jagger and Mary Clayton and Keith Richards and Nanette Newman and Doris Troy and Madelaine Bell and the London Bach Choir as singers carry the songs past “lyrics” into pure emotion. Let It Bleed is the last album by the Stones we’ll see before the Sixties, already gone really, become the Seventies it has the crummiest cover art since Flowers, with a credit sheet that looks like it was designed by the United States Government Printing Office (all courtesy of the inflated Robert Brownjohn), and the best production since, well, “Honky Tonk Women.” The music has tones that are at once dark and perfectly clear, while the words are slurred and often buried for a stronger musical effect.
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