Wading in the Velvet Sea

It didn’t take me too long to reply---Beatles, I replied. But qualified it, saying that I had to give props to the Beatles for being as innovative, as far-reaching in their influence, as (along with Brian Wilson and Phil Spector) pioneers of using the studio itself as an instrument. Considering everything as a whole, I had to give my nod to the Beatles. However, if you asked me to list my top 5 songs from each group, I’d outrank my #5 Stones’ song over the #1 Beatles song.

Oh, the lists you ask?

The Beatles:

5) Sister Morphine
4) Bitch
3) Gimmee Shelter
2) Can You Hear Me Knockin’?
1) Loving Cup

‘In My Life’ may be the single greatest pop song ever written, but give me the sloppy, sexy brilliance of ‘Bitch’ and the nightmarish ‘Morphine any day over it. Pop music has its place, in terms of its sheer melodic perfection---notes and chords which seem, intuitively to HAVE to be the notes and chords played at that particular moment. I have no problem saying I really like ‘Baby…One More Time’ while slamming Britney. Today’s pop market is far too saturated with people singing to pre-made songs. That was one of the things that made the Beatles so damn amazing---they forced the other pop acts of their time to actually write material. But the sheer sonic precision of the Beatles is also what is turning me off to them these days; when I picked up the ‘1’ album a year or so ago, the song I was attracted to was ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’, with its messy slide guitar and unpolished production that sounded like a jam session that they never bothered to clean up.

Which brings me to the Stones---as you can see from my top 5 list above, I don’t favor the 60’s classics such as ‘Satisfaction’, ‘Under My Thumb’, ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, etc. I really like those songs, but I’ll take late 60’s-early 70’s Stones to just about anything these days. Like Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richards were a songwriting duo of amazing proficiency and proclivity. But while the Beatles copped largely from American R+B, The Stones went ever further back to Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and the blues legends, gave the music a kick in its pants, and reformulated it into a far different beast that has ever been heard before. This music has all the melodic hook you could want, while favoring emotion over precision. That was music to dance to, to have sex to, to make you intuitively FEEL within the core of your being. And by the time they hit ‘Sticky Fingers’ and ‘Exile on Main Street’, they hit their peak.

‘Sticky Fingers’ is just pure blues-rock perfection. Only ‘You Gotta Move’ prevents this from being of those ‘throw it, hit ‘RANDOM’ and be happy’ CDs. How can you argue with an album that has both ‘Brown Sugar’ AND ‘Wild Horses’? Throw in ‘Can You Hear’’ and ‘Bitch’, and you have a rock record that truly rolls. They take the innate sexuality and despair of the blues, the confessional lyricism of the modern songwriter, and punched it up with great sonic production values (to rival the other sonic masterpiece of that year, The Who’s ‘Who’s Next).

A year later, when they recorded ‘Exile’, they went even deeper into the heart of their roots. ‘Exile’ is recorded to sound almost exactly like a scratchy blues record you can pick up in a 2nd hand store now. The production seems to insinuate that very little money was spent on the recording and mixing of the album. It’s as direct a declaration of musical homage as you can get. And as such, you’ve got 17 dirty, nasty, messy tracks that get to the heart of rock and roll roots more than just about any record I have ever heard. ‘Tumbling Dice’, ‘Rocks Off’, ‘Ventilator Blues’; all classics which have entered into the language of songwriters just as much as ‘Abbey Road’ and ‘The White Album’ (which itself was The Beatles trying to strip off the layers of perfection that had brought to their studio output).

The five songs from my Rolling Stones list appeal to me for the same reason that Phish now appeals to me. The Stones in these songs (and basically over the entire course of ‘Exile’) are looking to represent a specific musical moment that is difficult to recreate. The spontaneity laden in these tracks, the audible mistakes you can hear being made’ all of these things are insignificantly when weighed against the sheer emotive force behind these records. Yes, they are the product of the studio, yes there are undoubtedly a few overdubs, but the organic nature of them is something I simply have a harder time finding in a Beatles record. I want the innate danger of ‘Gimmee Shelter’. I want the boogie stomp of ‘Bitch’. I want the expansive, Santana-esque jamming of ‘Can You Hear Me Knockin?’. I want the even-grimier-than-Lou-Reed lyricism of ‘Sister Morphine’. And most of all, I want the sheer, joyous, sensual abandon of ‘Loving Cup’ (which, non-incidentally, Phish covers the hell out of). It’s the spontaneity that lifts music like this above the sheen of pop music. This is why the Rolling Stones can endure for forty years while people wonder what in the Sam Hell happened to Color Me Badd.

To quote Roger Daltry, ‘Give me a bum note and a bead of sweat anyday...