Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. Had somebody told me The Rolling Stones, who haven’t done jack shit for me since the late seventies, or the mid-seventies for that matter, actually had a decent album in them at this late date, I’ve had written the poor soul off as a candidate for the laughing academy. I say “decent” because unlike most of the critics gushing over 2016’s Don Was-produced Blue & Lonesome, I’m not much of a fan of the blues, and this album of blues covers doesn’t make me love the blues any more than I already don’t.
And yet. On Blue & Lonesome the Stones manage to sound like they’re not only in it for the money, as if they’re not as rich as Marcus Licinius Crassus already. It’s the pursuit of filthy lucre that has kept them upright all these years, but on Blue & Lonesome the further accumulation of wealth doesn’t sound like their raison d’être. Which is, to me at least, a feat in itself. Why, the money-sucking vampires in a band well past its sell-by date almost sound impassioned, alert, still twitching, and very much alive.
So yeah, Blue & Lonesome is a miracle of sorts. Mick Jagger’s harmonica playing alone is worth the price of the damn record. And he sings like he did before he joined the undead, or the upper classes for that matter. As if he means it. And miracle of miracles, guest Eric Clapton (who plays slide guitar on “Everybody Knows About My Good Thing” and lead guitar on “I Can’t Quit You Baby”) sounds alive as well, on fire even. Will miracles never cease?
The Stones cover Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Magic Sam, and more, and their covers aren’t merely overly reverent and embalmed salutes to their early inspirations; instead, the Stones actually interpret the tunes, twisting them this way and that, and you can almost feel the joy they take in their work. I wish the sound were rawer, but hey. The crushing guitar work on Eddie Taylor’s “Ride ‘Em on Down” and the Little Walter-penned title track, for instance, is complemented by some brilliantly heavy drum thumping by the always brilliant Charlie Watts, while Jagger’s singing and harmonica playing on Otis Hicks’ and Jerry West’s “Hoo Doo Blues” are downright authentic sounding. He sounds like he’s striving for something other than another big payday, and that alone is revelatory.
Blue & Lonesome brings the Rolling Stones full circle, back to their birth in the blues, and I suspect that by having returned to their beginnings the Stones may have said all they have to say, and that Blue & Lonesome could be the final statement of a once great band. I can say that I don’t like the blues covers on Blue & Lonesome as much as I do the ones on Exile on Main St.; the latter are grittier, smokier, the blues as heard in some jumpin’ juke joint on the south side of Chicago. They’ve got no sweat on them, the songs on Blue & Lonesome. But then again, everybody knows the undead don’t sweat.
But Blue & Lonesome is enough to disprove my belief that MickundKeef—who have long since ceased to stand for anything, whether it be Satan, Sex, or Mars-Bar-in-the-vagina contempt for authority and their elders—would never again be anything more than well-paid organ grinders’ monkeys and money-making fossils. They haven’t been a band for decades; they’ve been a corporation. Hell, Lester Bangs declared them irrelevant way back in the Year of Our Lord 1973, and I tend to agree with him. Yet here they are, with an album that almost sorta matters. And that’s something, I guess.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
