point me in the direction of the really good rolling stones album that's not 'exile on main street'

I'd recommend getting More Hot Rocks (Big Hits & Fazed Cookies). It covers the early (pre-Sticky Fingers) stuff pretty well (a slew of Motown/Chuck Berry/Lieber-Stoller-Lieber covers), Satanic Majesties ("She's A Rainbow" & "2000 Light Years From Home") and classic Stones' tunes that haven't been played to death ("Not Fade Away", "The Last Time", "It's All Over Now", "Dandelion", "No Expectations").

Uh, I'm not pretending.

beggars banquet is i think better than let it bleed simply because there's a real jones presence so the whole band packs more menace -- bleed is a slightly burnt out re-hash of banquet but obviously the occasional good song -- 'monkey man', 'live with me' and especially 'midnight rambler' are just too over the top, with 'country honk' a re-hash re-mix -- imo the country twang vs. ostentatious decadence and self-confidence are much better balanced on banquet

sticky fingers, the precurssor to the cyclic/2-phase blues of main street, is a madison avenue production thanks to new owners atlantic, so it's got too many songs designed to appeal to girls on it, and add in the sexploitation of brown sugar/bitch and the gross sentimetaility of the rest, and what have you got -- three of my friends favourite stones album (2 female, 1 male)

when the stones finally made it to the french tax shelter for sweaty midnight exile sessions they'd actually hit their stride, perhaps thanks to the french atmosphere finally pulling the mistreatment of women into check, but maybe when the brown sugar first really kicked in, the storm before the calm, limp, whatever but i like it era

and 12x5, too. and some girls. nothing can compare to the first album, though.

^_^

Piscesboy (hey!), if you like Memo From Turner, you want Beggars Banquet - tasty slide guitar, raucous posturing and *really bad* social commentary, but a real "spirit of the times" album full of dirty R&B in the old sense. It's where they found their voice again (at 24!) after the psychedelic hit-and-miss of the (previously) under-appreciated Satanic Majesties. If you like the helicopter persecution scenes in Goodfellas, Let It Bleed is your man, for Monkey man and Gimme Shelter. A great album, makes BB sound like really good demos.

I've no idea what Tracer Hand means regarding Sticky Fingers -it came out before Exile and has string sections and a big creamy 70s production, where Exile rattles along in the basement-recording style you'd expect of junky royalty in, erm, exile. Sticky Fingers is great - Can't You Hear Me Knocking journeys through rock, blues, and Latin jazz without getting on your tits, and Sway is just lovely, the kind of song that makes you think Eric Clapton might have been on to something after all.

I've always liked them more than the Beatles. No great theory behind that, they're just more fun - fleshier and stupider, prettier and less formal.

clayton's singing in the background of gimme shelter from '69, and her vocal of the nitzche lyrics "go straight down, way underground" from poor white hound dog get borrowed for torn and frayed on main street -- like peter tosh and chuck berry seem to have suggested, the stones will hang with you and rip you and not return your calls

most importantly "Performance" is jagger ditching the english music business and the altamont-shock satanism, and from 1970 and starring anita pallenberg presents the two main stones protagonists changing trains, neatly bissecting the semi-mess of banquet and bleed for the calculated slick led zep of sticky fingers and the final sensible bail out to europe for main street (w/madison avenue marketing like the revoltingly fake 'rattle and hum' of 20 years later)

but co-director Donald Cammell operated from paris -- the stones had been on the run in the uk for 3 years and the "what happens next" hiatus of "Performance" maybe helped re-focus, 'though even holed up in a hot french basement it seems the us still burnt the stones out in 2 albums -- well that's five years on the run -- thank roeg and cammell for "Performance" -- a legitimate artistic statement about a band running out of steam, losing its powers

And George, it's nice to see someone's thinking about "Performance", but is it really about a band running out of steam, losing its powers? I suppose it's about a number of things, and a rock vocalist in exile after a run of hits is one of them, but I wonder if this is a major theme of the film. Just a dialog here, not trying to get all in your face....

that ken was hanging with donald, maybe getting financial backing from him, well maybe not but maybe then there was a parting of the ways ? -- loog's long gone, goodbye ken, satanic majesties request etc.., this time don'll write the script with creative input from nic and since nic's on the set of this rock'n'roll movie from whomever else's got a good idea perhaps, ry, randy,.. buffy ? jack ?

let's change the name -- no let's keep the name, we'll put it right underneath [whatever flowers was calling himself at the time] -- the film ends with harry's hands (?) and that name changing device that goes on the front of your desk -- harry lime today ? -- well everybody was working for harry or anita one way or another weren't they ?

why make a film merging such disparate elements unless it's better for everyone to point out that those elements in fact belonged together, or at least sometimes go with each other in swinging london ?

not buying in to any crazed web site or book (and ken certainly wasn't telling) i nevertheless find myself feeling this was when certain angles of control over rock'n'roll wider london were being re-negotiated, what with the break-up of the beatles, the stones legal domicile hassles and the emergence of peter grant with his own little gang of demons playing the same tune using new equipment

and some people here seems to agree that somewhere in the middle of the buttons, the banquet, the blood, helicopters over altamont, warhol/ny, france, (and i don't know about the goats) the temperature was rising

jack's "gone dead train", randy's sicko specialty is failure/ america ain't it, and this song's about impotance, right ? why would jagger have had it on ?

maybe we've just got off to a bad bad start in the west coast (look nita, there's bad and then there's bad) so we'll have to aim at new york -- ok, i like it, a posher, longer island of a place anyway, suits my airs and graces what, don'ya wanna live with me ? so let's shoot ourselves up a little creative nadir, 'cause if we just leave that sad honest snuff movie "gimme shlter" for posterity, we'll be remembered as just bad -- a little creativity, chin up lads, here's to old england !

Goat's Head Soup probably is the most underrated one, I'd agree. Comin Down Again is a great track.

Some, hmmm, interesting opinions in this thread... never thought I'd hear Satanic Majesties described as the Stones best album, Goat's Head Soup as their last great one, Sympathy for the Devil and No Expectations as B-sides or Some Girls as no better than Voodoo Lounge!

I heard Shattered off Some Girls on the radio the other day and it sounded fantastic--that bassline is so great, the lyric is so late 70s New York... you can almost fit that track in with all the other punk funk disco that's getting revived lately.

The Performance soundtrack is really cool too... from Ry Cooder blues to proto-electronica...

Most underrated: Black and Blue... there's something really lazy about that album, in a good way...

The people round here prob'ly won't give you much cred for getting turned on by the nasty blues-based rock that forms the bedrock of this album, much less for getting excited by it, but one listen to Streetfighting Man confirms that nobody rocks better than the Stones.

The album bites and snarls just like you'd expect but it also recoils - Sympathy is followed up straight away with the beautiful No Expectations, Streetfighting by Prodigal Son - its this ebb and flow of the whole which keeps Beggars fresh and compelling, human evcen, unlike the later self-parody and empty posturing. It also keeps Beggars from becoming obnoxious - the Stones you sense are beginning to get jaded by the rock star thing, and before the drugs and excess take full effect, they are getting proper pissed off. It's like they're trying to keep their feet on the ground, even as the madness sets in and they ascend to become the biggest rock band in the world. The album is certainly earthy and the symbolism throughout is undeniably rooted in the blues traditions of blood and sweat.

Also, it's on Beggars that I always feel Jagger is beginning to reallise that he can actually write alright lyrics - check Jigsaw Puzzle and tell me if you think he's been listening to Zimmerman. Maybe he doesn't quite pull it off but I give him points for trying.

One more thing - Jones' guitar work here is fascinating. I can never work out if the guy is a drug addled wastrel or a pied-piper genius. I think I'm right in saying that it's his trills an Symapthy, which are hideously out of time but for that, absolutely on point. And also the filthy cat's claw on metal noises he wrings from the thing on Stray Cat Blues - its just fucking spot on, all the way through.

Oh, and what Andrew L said about Goats Head is OTM.

"Later self-parody": I have to say Mick comes off as a poseur on Stray Cat Blues... but the music makes up for it.

God, my Stones bore mode is becoming engaged... must leave this thread alone....

and a really good Rolling Stones album that hasn't been mentioned yet: Out of Our Heads (she said yeah!)

Aftermath is great, but you still get the sense that they're doing some filler tracks ("Doncha Bother Me," "High and Dry").

Not sure about the effort part, but those early LPs are as solid as the Beatles and Who ones you mention, to my ears (and as the other chuck said, with no more filler than many later, allegedly "solid" albums) (not that consistency is a great way to judge albums, anyway.)

I guess there are different philosophies of grading albums. For instance, do you grade like the SAT test and subtract for wrong answers, thereby penalizing guesses, or do you just give credit for the right answers and ignore the misfires? I tend to think that with the advent of CDs (and MP3 players) bad tracks are much less of a handicap to an album, because they're easier to skip.

There's a difference, though, between thinking that some tracks on albums are just bad and thinking that they were created when the band were still thinking that it was okay to do filler tracks. I don't think that the Beatles bought into the idea of filler tracks from the beginning, but not so sure about the Stones. Not to say that they were bad offenders at all. The Kinks were probably worse, right?

Why? Mediocre tracks are mediocre tracks; who cares how they got there?

That's why I say the Stones were originally a singles band. I don't care how great an album 12x5 or Out of Our Heads is; I just care about the fact that there are some songs on there that I might want to play.

I actually don't think those tracks are bad, I see them as filler because they feel so offhand. A country lark version of a hit and a bit of Stones schtick, respectively. They feel exactly like product to me. Superior product, maybe, but product nonetheless.

And again, what exactly does intent have to do with making an album better, and what does slapped out product have to do with making them worse? Albums are just a bunch of songs, Tim. Lots of times when bands strive consciously to make them conceptual units, that makes them *less* entertaining. To me this seems completely obvious, and not just with the Stones. Paul Revere and the Raiders made better albums than Pink Floyd or the Grateful Dead ever will, in my book.

To quote Frank Kogan again, in the CD era, all albums are EPs.

And but so hold on now... Would that imply that e.g. Gimme Shelter isn't "product"?

Plus bridge on Monkey Man > bridge over troubled water

Nothing. Didn't say it did. Just pointing out that I didn't see those songs on Let It Bleed as being "filler" in the same way that tracks on early Stones albums feel like filler.

"and what does slapped out product have to do with making them worse?"

I'm not making some black and white statement about it. Some slapped out product can be great. Obviously, a lot of slapped out product created as filler for early rock and roll albums was not.

"Albums are just a bunch of songs, Tim. Lots of times when bands strive consciously to make them conceptual units, that makes them *less* entertaining."

Yeah, I'm not talking about "conceptual unit" albums. I don't think of Please Please Me or With the Beatles as conceptual unit albums. I do think of them, however, as solid programs of songs.

er, not you tim!

>they simply won't let their music do what the Rolling Stones would do. I'm not sure how best to convey what I mean, but notice the lyrics to "Brown Sugar": "Gold Coast slave ship bound for cotton fields/Sold in a market down in New Orleans/Scarred old slaver knows he's doin' all right/Hear him whip the women just around midnight." And that sadistic slaver inhabits and contaminates every sex act in the rest of the song. And this stoking the fire, pulling the rug, yanking up the floorboards, is just what Brooks & Dunn won't do, with either their sound or the words. Not that they're required to, any more than the Stones were required to reincarnate Howlin' Wolf. I'm just pointing out what's missing, where the real barrier is. And hell yeah, sorry for wimping out, they should cross the barrier, or someone should, 'cause if they or Montgomery Gentry or some other performers of that caliber don't cross it (this feeling of mine colored by the fact that Toby's horse-vomit song cited earlier, which came within a hair's breadth of endorsing lynching, lived high on the charts), the genre will continue to be a fake moral, fake rowdy, bullshit lie. (But not an uninteresting one.)<

Yes and no! It's fun to take the piss out of the band, and its self-important critics. Do you know how many bar fights I've almost started defending Emotional Rescue and Dirty Work over fucking Let it Bleed and shit?

Edd, I'm buying drinks tonight.

i vote sticky fingers. but even then, just like all the other albums in their purple patch, you have to put up with the mawkish/sentimental/somewhat unlistenable fillerish ballads and downhome country-blues tributes that arent as good as the rock tracks next to them. exile is good in that its so consistent but its highpoints dont stick out immediately like with the others. but then i dont really think the stones are an albums band either, for the most part. hot rocks 1 is my fave album of theirs.

Of the earliest albums, Now! is great. Their version of "Mona" kills.

I like Goat's Head Soup better than Exile.