This contender for the most disappointing follow-up album ever has caught mucho flak over the years, and for good reason. It’s immensely difficult to imagine how The Rolling Stones could have topped its predecessor, 1972’s Exile on Main Street, easily one of the most brilliant rock LPs of all time. But then again the band had been one-upping themselves every time out since 1968’s Beggars Banquet, and if anyone stood a chance of besting Exile on Main Street it was the Stones.
Needless to say, 1973’s Goats Head Soup is no Exile on Main Street. Again, hardly shocking. The Stones would have had to be able to walk on water to up the ante once again. What is shocking are the precipitous drop-off in song quality and the occasionally rote and desultory performances. Goats Head Soup is not a “not as great as” proposition. Goats Head Soup is a merely good album from a band that could seemingly do no wrong and was at the height of its powers.
Worse, it was the beginning of a prolonged decline, and indeed the band’s death rattle if like me you’ve never warmed up to their “comeback” album, 1978’s Some Girls, or anything that came afterwards for that matter. Mick Jagger said at the time, “It wasn’t as vague as [Exile on Main Street] which kind of went on so long that I didn’t like some of the things. There’s more thought to this one.” “More thought”? No one ever called Mick a deep thinker.
Critical reception was mixed. Some deluded souls said it stood up against Exile on Main Street and 1971’s Sticky Fingers—victims, I suspect, of either wishful thinking or outright denial. Others weren’t so kind. Lester Bangs called it “sad.” Greg Shaw wrote that the album had “no redeeming qualities whatsoever” and then doubled down by writing there was “nothing good” about it.” The word “decadent” got bandied about a lot, and oddly enough—given the Stones’ reputation for excess—it was not meant as a compliment.
And even some of the folks who liked the album conceded that it lacked coherence, and was merely a collection of songs. As for the blame, most pointed to Jagger’s transformation into a jet-setting celebrity whoremonger and Richards’ graduation to full-blown junkie. I also blame Bill Wyman, even though he only plays on three songs on the album. But then again I blame Bill Wyman for pretty much everything, including global warming.
It goes without saying that there are several very good songs on Goats Head Soup. And most of its songs stand up, although I find it disconcerting how much I like certain parts of some songs more than I like the songs themselves. That’s never good. And Goats Head Soup also includes some shoddy goods. Astounding that average from the band that gave us Exile is demoralizing enough. Bad is a solid blow to the solar plexus. And as I can’t stress enough, only a year had passed since the band released their masterpiece. Goats Head Soup is more than just the biggest letdown in rock history—it’s a physician-certified case of Rapid Onset Musical Dementia.
The trouble begins, well, at the beginning. “Dancing with Mr. D.” is B-movie kitsch in the same way that “Midnight Rambler” from the Stones’ 1970 live album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! was bad psychodrama. On “Dancing with Mr. D.” Jagger’s flirtation with the dark side finally degenerates into self-parody and ludicrous farce. Keith Richards may have been dancing with Mr. D. at the time, but Mick was far too busy hobnobbing with the likes of Princess Margaret. The song reminds me a bit of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” but Jackson was consciously celebrating kitsch, and besides you can dance to it—something you can’t do (ironically enough) with “Dancing with Mr. D.” Its “spooky” vibe (isn’t that opening guitar figure creepy?) is a joke, Jagger’s vocals are hit or miss, and while the song grinds away nicely, it also has a congealed feel to it.
Jagger’s vocal performance on “100 Years Ago” sounds lazy—he’s not his mean self until about halfway through, and even then he comes across as a guy who’s strangling on his $1200 Hermès scarf. The song itself goes through as many changes as your average prog-rocker. Billy Preston’s bright clavinet and Jagger’s vocals in the song’s early stages are downright pastoral. Then things pick up, Mick Taylor performs miracles (as always) on guitar, and Mick finally wakes up.
Then comes this incongruously lackadaisical interlude in which Mick sings “Call me lazybones” (Hi Lazybones!), which is followed by some total rock out, on which Taylor really shines, Charlie Watts outdoes even Charlie Watts, and it’s pretty exciting but would be far more exciting if the beginning and middle of the song made it inevitable. As it is, it has an extraneous, tacked-on feel. It’s not there because what came before made it inevitable—it was there because the band decided to put it there.
“Coming Down Again” features Richards on lead vocals, some great piano by the legendary Nicky Hopkins, and a wonderful baritone saxophone solo by Bobby “I’m a Legend too!” Keys. It’s a slow crawl and drugged-out bummer of a song for sure—what did you expect with a title like that?—but the melody’s lovely and the sentiment is perfect for Keef—it captures the wasted and weary aftermath of some spectacular debauch. And when Richards sings “Where are all my friends?” you get to the heart of addiction—loneliness.
The Stones finally kick things into rock ’n’ roll gear (what took them so long?) with “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker).” You get two, count them, two storylines, both of them involving children who die tragically, but the song’s no threnody—it’s a riot at a wake. What the Stones have on offer is adrenaline and rage. Billy Preston plays the angriest clavinet you’ll ever hear, the horn section is maximum R&B, and Taylor’s wah-wah guitar is Cool City. As for Mick he sounds fully engaged, and not like he’s preoccupied with hooking up with, I don’t know, Elizabeth Taylor.
Everybody knows “Angie” to death, it’s a tender love song to Angela Bowie or Angela Davis or (so some say) Police Woman’s Angie Dickinson, and while it’s a classic of course it’s also a song I grew sick of decades ago. Mick pours everything he has into it, slurs his words like he’s drunk with grief and remorse. Keef wrote Hopkins’ part and it’s a winner, and the string arrangement politely declines to be a distraction.
“Silver Train” is a sleek machine, a straight-ahead, no nonsense rocker and a solid one at that, but it sounds to me like a song that wasn’t quite good enough to make it onto Sticky Fingers, which come to think of it is when they first began working on it. Jagger’s at the top of his game, plays great harp too, and as usual Taylor rips it up and tears it up on the six-string. Still it’s hardly gold standard Stones. Far from it—truth is I’ll take the Johnny Winter version any day, and how often can you say you prefer a cover of a Rolling Stones song?
On the dead simple and bluesy “Hide Your Love,” Mick accompanies himself on piano. Plays some funky boogie-woogie, he does, as the song slides across the floor to the accompaniment of Charlie Watts’ dumb simple bass drum thump. He’s also joined by Taylor (who’s all over the place) and Bobby Keys, whose baritone sax blurt adds coloration. Dirty it up a bit and it could be an outtake from Exile on Main Street, but that “outtake” says it all—it’s a solid number, but anything but indispensable, in part because the damn thing only heats up at the end.
I’ve always thought of the ballad “Winter” as The Rolling Stones’ retort to Rod Stewart’s “Mandolin Wind,” and a damn fine retort it is. The melody’s lovely, the song builds wonderfully as the strings come in, and Mick, who may be freezing but is always the gentleman, says he wants to wrap his coat around you. And light a candle for you as if that’s going to warm you up. I love the lines “And I wish I been out in California/When the lights on all the Christmas trees went out” in part because I have no idea what they mean; I don’t know what the lines “But I been burnin’ my bell, book and candle/And the restoration plays have all gone ’round” mean either, and I like them too.
“Can You Hear the Music” is a disaster. It’s exotic mystical hoodoo hokum and five years (easy) past its sell-by date. The bell, exotic percussion and flute that open the song are psychedelic Brian Jones era balderdash, and that chanted “Can you hear the music?/Can you feel the magic?” is ridiculous and rendered even more ridiculous by Mick’s “Love is a mystery,” yeah right. The real mystery is how this atavistic throwback ended up on an album recorded in 1973, especially given the fact that its sentiment is so hackneyed it makes the Doobie Brothers’ “Listen to the Music” sound smart.
Fortunately the Stones shut things down with one of the best Chuck Berry throwaways ever recorded, “Star Star.” From its opening “Johnny B. Goode” guitar riff the boys go at it with positive glee, and never before (or after) would Mick truck so blatantly in pure raunch:
“Yeah, I heard about you Polaroids
Now that’s what I call obscene
Your tricks with fruit was kind a cute
I bet you keep your pussy clean.”
Some say the song’s about Carly Simon but I don’t buy it—if Mick ain’t singing about a groupie I’ll eat the banana he’s almost certainly referring to. Believe it or not the song everybody calls “Starfucker” (the title the band wanted) was actually released as a single in a quartet of European nations, and it potty-mouthed its way into Switzerland’s top ten. But then again the Swiss are famous for keeping a clean cat.
We’ll never really know if with Goats Head Soup The Rolling Stones got lazy or complacent or simply let their extracurricular activities outweigh their commitment to producing absolutely essential music. Because that’s the problem with Goats Head Soup—there isn’t an absolutely essential song on it unless you count “Angie” or “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)” or “Star Star,” which I don’t. It’s a good album, but as we all know the good is the enemy of the best, and anybody (which was basically everybody) who thought The Rolling Stones could do no wrong came in for a rude awakening.
And the saddest thing, of course, is that the album wasn’t a one-off blunder. It marked the end, Some Girls notwithstanding, of the band’s triumphant tenure as the world’s greatest rock and roll band. Call it the Decline and Fall of The Rolling Stones Empire—the Glimmer Twins would produce some great songs afterwards, but they would never again really matter, exact as celebrities and cultural signifiers. They became famous for being famous, went into the studio when they were supposed to and went through the motions, and in general fiddled around until the Sex Pistols burst through the gates to burn them down for good.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B-
