1970’s live Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out is the first Rolling Stones album I ever heard. It was 1974, I was just an impressionable kid, but even so I remember thinking Get Yer Yawn-Yawn’s Out would make a better title. Afterwards I asked my older brother what all the hoopla was about, and he replied that Mick Jagger used to be Satan in the flesh but he’d become an old fart and Alice Cooper had taken his pitchfork. He then recommended that I file the album under D for Decrepit and buy a copy of Billion Dollar Babies. I was inclined to agree. I didn’t catch a whiff of brimstone as Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out was playing, and “Midnight Rambler” in particular struck me as being about as demonic as tapioca. If these were The Rolling Stones, I’d stick with Elton John.
My problem with Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out goes beyond its bogus Satanism. It lacks energy and fire; if Mick and Keith are both elegantly thin, their bloated cover of Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie” isn’t. “Stray Cat Blues” should be alley cat quick—instead it’s a spayed “look at what the Stones dragged in” proposition. “Honky Tonk Women” has a ham-fisted feel, and to make matters worse the cowbell is MIA. Missing! The cowbell makes the damn song.
The Stones turn “Midnight Rambler” into a Saucy Jack mini-musical and kill the song’s momentum during the histrionic and tedious psychodrama that is Act II. The band slows to a crawl, stops playing altogether, then works its way back to a crawl—that “rambler” in the song’s title is all too appropriate.
Somewhat better is show opener “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” although to be honest the part I like most is when Jagger says, “I think I busted a button on my trousers, hope they don’t fall down. You don’t want my trousers to fall down, do you?” I once dated a woman who’d previously gone out with Engelbert Humperdinck (only two degrees of separation from the world’s greatest entertainer!) and she swore up and down he’d said the exact same thing the one time she saw him live.
That said, I have no reservations about the Stones’ cover of Chuck Berry’s “Carol.” Its crunch doesn’t come at the expense of forward momentum, and Jagger proves he can do justice to rock’s brown-eyed handsome man when he isn’t busy losing his pants. Ditto the cover of Robert Johnson’s doleful slow blues “Love in Vain,” on which Mick Taylor shows off the guitar skills that made him the oft-overlooked key to the Stones’ success during the years they recorded their greatest albums.
Jagger goes full throttle on “Sympathy for the Devil,” but the real highlight again is Taylor’s guitar work—he upstages Mick as he does throughout the show, not that anyone in the crowd noticed. The Stones keep things tight and the tempo fast on “Live With Me,” but closer “Street Fighting Man” is the LP highlight precisely because it was made for the big stage treatment—it’s a cudgel and you can practically feel the walls shaking. Once again Taylor shines, but what I like most about the song are the choruses, where Jagger and Keith throw in on vocals with more enthusiasm than I detect anywhere else on the LP.
Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out was recorded in November 1969, when The Rolling Stones were at their zenith. Let It Bleed was released the following month, the recording of Sticky Fingers wrapped up in October 1970, and Exile on Main Street was yet to come. Yet this live document is a disappointment. I suspect it’s been lionized as a showcase of Mick at his demonic best, and there are those in the audience who actually bought into his satanic shtick.
“Paint it black you devil” cries a woman before the band goes into “Sympathy for the Devil,” and so he did until Altamont, where the Hell’s Angels scared him out of his aforementioned trousers. I’m guessing the poor mistreated beast of burden on the album’s cover got a big kick out of Jagger’s comeuppance. As they say in the donkey world, “He who brays last brays longest.”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
C+
