I’m with the folks who regard the Big Four (Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Exile, and Sticky Fingers) as their peak. They had matured by then but still had their youthful energy. (I remember listening to Voodoo Lounge for the first time and hearing, in “Brand New Car,” the lyric “I want to check if her oil smells good, mm, smells like caviar” and thinking, "Wow, this sure isn’t the Mick Jagger of “Satisfaction.” I guess I shouldn’t have expected it to be, thirty years later, give or take, but still.) Throw in Some Girls as their last great album (in my opinion), and you have the Essential Stones Collection in those five titles.
Anyway, to address the actual topic, all their later ones are, to my ear, pretty “meh,” with maybe one standout track. I like “Saint of Me” on Bridges to Babylon quite a bit. I like “Rock and a Hard Place” on Steel Wheels. But if I’m in the mood for a whole Rolling Stones album, I’m going to go with one of the aforementioned essentials. For me, they’re the ones that deliver the goods.
That said, they’re still in the small group of artists whose new releases I’ll buy automatically without the need to hear anything first (although at this point, there may not be any more new Stones releases.). But I put them in that group (mumble mumble) years ago.
And now I (and probably a few others) am going to be listening to the song with headphones trying to find the three-syllable word: “One word is made up of three syllables and they come from three different takes.”
Way back when I bought Blues Traveller’s album four because I liked the song “Run Around” so much, and I thought the rest of the album would be like that. Actually the rest of the album is mediocre bluesy pop. Not bad music, but nothing to write home about either.
I bought the Randy Newman album Land of Dreams on the strength of the song “It’s Money That Matters”. That’s the only song on the album that sounds like that… maybe because Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits played guitar on it?
Perhaps, if I got it back out and listened to it again as an adult, I would feel differently, but I did not care for anything else on that album.
Len’s “Steal My Sunshine” was a complete outlier on You Can’t Stop the Bum Rush album. I think that was the last time that I rushed out and bought a whole album based on one song (in the days before streaming).
Just for fun, here’s what they look like in Audacity, undoubtedly compressed and limited and EQ’d and rerecorded so much that all seams have been erased:
Stories floated for years that he refused to pay that song in concert and “hated it.” Not long ago he was asked about that and said “Why should I hate that song? It made me a millionaire overnight.”
Way, WAY back in the day, I ran out and bought Crazy World after seeing Brown perform “Fire” on Ed Sullivan (or Smothers Brothers, I can’t quite recall).
I would highly recommend listening to at least “The Great Spontaneous Apple Creation” just to learn where the “crazy” comes from…
I’m sure I must own a number of albums where I like only one song. Certainly back in the 1980s, I didn’t hesitate to buy an LP at a used record store where the LPs were just a buck or two, just to get the one song on the record that I knew I liked. But my collection is large enough that the records like that gather dust, and I have no idea whether I’d like any of the other songs on the LP if I listened to it now.
It wasn’t theirs either. They straddled the worlds of pop, disco, and New Wave, but New Wave wasn’t punk by any means, and Blondie was nowhere close to punk.
Hard for me to imagine liking pop music and not liking Parallel Lines’ opening combo of “Hanging on the Telephone” and “One Way or Another.”
Not just one song on the album, one in the entire oeuvre! Donna Summer’s version of State of Independence is better than the original, but I cannot stand anything else she’s ever done.
I forgot One Way was on that album. I’ve always liked it.
I always selected the songs I liked and recorded them to a cassette hits tape. The albums I bought had some value even if it was only for a couple songs.
It wasn’t theirs either. They straddled the worlds of pop, disco, and New Wave, but New Wave wasn’t punk by any means, and Blondie was nowhere close to punk.
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Very true. A lot of bands around that era got labelled as ‘punk’ because it was the buzzword of the moment. But I was in London when actual punk got started, and let me tell you, the ‘real thing’ was absolute rubbish.
