The Rolling Stones
Black and Blue [Super Deluxe Edition]
INTERSCOPE/UME
When it comes to everyone’s favorite Rolling Stones albums, no one ever says Black and Blue, the group’s 1976 musical chairs of lead guitarists after Mick Taylor left the party. Sure, Let It Bleed and Beggars Banquet psychedelically sum up the Stones’ mad, bad, sad ’60s, and Some Girls proved they could compete with—and better—the punks of 1977, and Exile on Main St. is the out-of-England outfit at their sloppiest best. But Black and Blue is the album—their only album as such—where Jagger, Richards, Watts, Wyman, and itinerant Stone Billy Preston had no fucks to give.
After elegantly lyrical guitarist Taylor had left the Stones in the lurch in 1974, the Glimmer Twins weren’t in a rush to replace him, pushing Canned Heat’s Harvey “The Snake” Mandel, R&B session cat Wayne Perkins, and The Faces’ Ronnie Wood to compete against each other throughout what became Black and Blue’s sessions. Wood may have had the rooster-y haircut, but make no mistake: it wasn’t Ronnie’s gig to take. Instead, each player did their thing while the Stones and Preston did theirs, even welcoming Tennessee country-soul player Robert A. Johnson, Irish guitar hero Rory Gallagher, and the legendary Jeff Beck to jam. In fact, jamming is what makes Black and Blue so rich, so loose, so funky but chic, so damned rocking and soulful, and, ultimately, so damned Stones-y. In fact, no other Stones album—including live albums—is this alive and spontaneous.
In this new deluxe package, the original album is left mostly unfettered, save for the air lent to its ballads by archival remixer genius Steven Wilson. Usually left to his own devices to remake records from King Crimson, Yes, David Sylvian, and Jethro Tull, Wilson lets the core eight songs of 1976’s original album percolate smoothly, with just a hint of chicory to heat up the dramatic piano-heavy disco-funk of “Hot Stuff,” the lingered-long soul of “Melody,” the baleful ballads “Fool to Cry” and “Memory Motel,” the sinsemilla-scented reggae on “Hey Negrita” and “Cherry Oh Baby,” and two of the best Stones rockers of the 1970s in “Hand of Fate” and “Crazy Mama.” And that’s it. Eight songs, 20 minutes on each side. Perfect.
The original album features Jagger’s most salacious, slippery, Mick-isms since Exile, paving the way for Some Girls. Work with me here, linguistically, and imagine if you will a prime-time shaggy Jagger singing “hot stuff” as he laments New York City going broke, a pained and yelping falsetto crooned against a spare, spacious R&B groove; his trading verbal swords with co-vocalist Preston on “Melody”; grousing about the backstage groupie girls of “Memory Motel” while opening its bridge to one of Richards’ best vocal interludes. Along with Jagger and Richards sounding their best, Watts and Wyman—as always—were locked in a groove, even more so here.
So where’s all of this deluxe edition’s moments worth its mini-epic’s time, and your money? First off: the jams. There’s the coughing, cackling, magnificently jazz-soulful “Blues Jam” with Jeff Beck, where he sounds as if he’s auditioning his own sweet neo-fusion albums of the time, Blow by Blow and Wired (weirder still: Blow by Blow’s “Freeway Jam” is on this Stones box with Watts armed for bear, and matching Beck beat-for-beat). There’s also Beck’s expansive “Rotterdam Jam” with Robert A. Johnson along for the ride, in battle with Richards. And as far as actual songs go, if you’re the Stones and you wanted to find a like-minded disco moment in real time 1975, why wouldn’t you either (a) cover Shirley & Company’s giddy classic “Shame, Shame, Shame,” or (b) make your own “Fame”-like, wah-wah flanged, and Fender-Rhodes-filled “I Love Ladies”? Why not both?
As for Ronnie Wood and where he figures into this box set, it’s his live stuff from 1976’s London’s Earls Court shows that prove his worth and invention. Not only does he recreate new parts for tracks he didn’t play on during the Black and Blue sessions (“Fool to Cry” and a tough-as-nails “Hand of Fate”), he makes his own way through daringly fresh takes on the chugging “It’s Only Rock and Roll” and “Street Fighting Man.” I haven’t seen the Blu-ray’s concert footage from Paris’ Abattoirs, but if they sound anything like the tracks culled from that same period’s Love You Live, they’re funky and fine. For a legacy act such as The Rolling Stones to find something as dynamic as this box set’s additions, while proving the worth of a record once thought of as middling, this edition of Black and Blue is sheer genius.
