Word: jaggers
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...available. The album hit the top of the charts, or thereabouts, after a few days in the stores, and suddenly people who have never been quite sure who that Brian Jones character was are proud to be Rolling Stones fans again. All of this is fine; better to have Jagger and Richards on the radio than Journey and REO Speedwagon. But Tattoo You and the Stones' apparent determination to play until they succumb to shuffleboard and bingo has some dedicated followers worried...
Since Black and Blue came out in 1976, Stones purists have been on the defensive. Sure, the old stuff is great, the skeptics argued, but the group was now well over the hill. Even when Jagger and Richards led their troupe back to more familiar ground on subsequent albums, they had to face the scorn of the critical new wave: "Cliches! Cliches! And furthermore, who can get pumped up over a 46-year-old bassist and a drummer who would rather by breeding sheepdogs?" There is no quick answer...
...simple thing out of the way: Tattoo you is a fine album, stuffed with rambunctious guitar licks and some of Jagger's best vocal work in recent memory. One cut, "Worried About You," is a legitimate hit, even by Rolling Stones standards, and along with several other songs, it provides a powerful reminder of how pure and how sweet the simplicity of real rock and roll can be. Yet there is certainly little innovation on this record, and over that the skeptics will gloat. Once again the faithful will search desperately, as they have for much of the past decade...
...described on Sticky Fingers was somehow more pungent than before, the cynicism even more bitter. Exile had more of the same dripping decadence--the talk was of getting laid, getting wasted, and getting by, as it always has been, but a new theme of incongruity crept into the Jagger-Richards songs. Men born before the end of World War Two juggling groupies and shooting smack and throwing away millions on cars they wrecked and mansions they destroyed. Did all of that hold together? The Stones themselves had begun to wonder...
...that they do their old ones better than anyone else. They're still singing about what it's like to look back on the frantic nights when they cruised London and New York with willing and nameless young women; it all seems to be getting more and more distant. Jagger has always thrived on irony, and he is in top form on the latest album, using his own retreat from hard living to keep the Stones driving forward with a thumping blues number like "Black Limousine." As Richards and fellow guitarist Wood churn out a roughly meshed combination of thick...