OK Children. Put on your thinking caps (do they still have thinking caps?) and prepare to absorb the truth. Open your minds to let the truth set you free.
IT'S ALL ABOUT THE ROLLING STONES. All. The Beatles were pop music pretenders-the Stones cut right to your heart. The Beatles were cute with their hair and neckties, the Stones were gritty and real. The Beatles were mods, the Stones Rockers. Google it, I don't have all day.
This Band is where your music has it's roots. I don't care the genre or the year, the Rolling Stones set the table for 50 years of Rock and Roll.
Sympathy for the Devil is my personal favorite. If somebody has a funeral for me (I don't give a shit, I'll be dead) I have one request. Play Sympathy for the Devil. I'm not even slightly joking.
Did the Rolling Stones have influences? You better believe it. Reggae, Country, Classical, Pop, Jazz. But most of all it was the blues.
I love the blues, straight and simple. Old blues, New blues, Black Blues, White blues, Delta Blues, Chicago Blues, California Blues.
Currently I am listening to a lot of female blues singers. Etta James is just the Queen unless Ella Fitzgerald is singing the blues. Koko Taylor will knock your socks off. But there is a new crew. Susan Tedeschi, Samantha Fish, Mavis Staples (nothing really new about her) but I think this young woman has it. IT.
Beth Hart. Here with Joe Bonamassa, the best blues guitarist since Stevie Ray and Albert Collins (who taught a young Jimi Hendricks a thing or two) died. If this doesn't move you you better check your pulse. You might be dead. An Etta James cover.
See, this is what I had in mind with this topic!
Passion.
I was pretty sure this topic would bring out a lot of emotion and passion in people because that's what music does. You're a perfect example of this and this comment confirms that!
As I said in another comment I never really got into the Rolling Stones, and actually even less so the Beatles. That doesn't mean I don't respect the influence they had on music. I agree with you too, the Stones had far more influence.
This is a great response Tom, thanks for taking the time and for the passion and vigour with which you wrote it. ✅
Lastly...My favourite Rolling Stones song...Paint it black 1966.
!ENGAGE 25
Thanks man. Seriously. Once in a while it's really nice to just 'let it rip'.
I'm with you on Paint it Black. It was my favorite until the minute I heard sympathy. I can't tell you how far over the edge of the cliff Paint It Black was in real time. It was like the Martians had just landed. The whole music industry changed.
Do you feel you comprehended the enormity of it back then or was that a later epiphany?
Immediately. It was new and right at the same time. A basic fuck you and your horse song.
Yeah, I figured this would be the answer. It must have felt uplifting, freeing and exciting huh?
God I hate to answer a Rolling Stones question with a Who answer but it was on the magnitude of "I just want to die before I get old." The possibilities were limitless!
I still want to die before I get old.
ENGAGEtokens.I am glad you shared her again with us, she has that voice, that takes you way back in time, my Father loved the sound of her voice, I grew to like it, my Mother liked country music and Hoyt Axton, I think her favorite song was Yellow Rose of Texas, so I guess that is one of the reasons I kind of like the country blues sound, Everyone in our house loved Johnny Cash.
Wow, yes. I hadn't thought of it. She has an old voice. That's a good analogy.
My Mother liked lots of music (she got surprisingly into folk music in the late 50s and early 60s) but to my father there were only two kinds of music. Country and Western :)
So I really have a pretty good grounding in all three of those styles, too. I have said that Wille and Waylon played some blues with 'My Heroes have Always been Cowboys" and "Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys." Wrote about that once upon a time.
It is funny growing up we think our parents music is so lame, then later we get it, and we did not even know we got it while we were growing and listening to our own music.
What about when the Stones were still trying to out-Beatle the Beatles? Their Satanic Majesties Request was something but Exile on Main Street is where the Stones really caught me. Sympathy has always been my favorite Stones song, the bad rap it got from Altamont didn't hurt anything either (even thought it was undeserved).
In Louisville the Kentucky Derby is THE event of the year, having worked at the track for several of them and been around the madness for many more I've developed something of a tradition for the day. This consists of reading "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" by Hunter S Thompson while listening to Dead Flowers repeatedly, always puts me right for dealing with the day. I almost prefer this cover of it to the original though
Wow. That's a serious preparation for the Derby. I may not want to know what you do for the Dumbarton Oaks :)
I'm listening for the second time trying to decide whether it's a cover or a version due to Keith Richards playing. 😂 I've read (unsourced) that Dead Flowers is the most covered song ever.
Hunter S Thompson and Dead Flowers. I like it.
Yeah, I never could decide whether that counted as a cover. Thompson was from Louisville so it just seemed doubly fitting. That is one of my favorite HST quotes!
I didn't know that HST was from Louisville. That is entirely fitting :)
Did you know he bought a Vincent to ride for Fear and Loathing? For that alone he shall forever be one of my heroes. It was the fastest production MC in the world in the early 50s and, well, The HAs Harleys weren't. :) If I hit the lottery I'm buying a Vincent. No question.
We haven't had many ballads here, I offer this: Richard Thompson 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
I may have read that, or be getting it mixed up with when he was running with the Angels. I love that song, although I hadn't heard that version until recently. I spent a lot of time in dive bars listening to music, one of my friend's band used to cover that about every night they played.
Del McCourey (from sorta your part of the world) does a blue grass version that is pretty good.
I'm just stone cold sure that I'd love a place where the band covers that song.
The harmonica player in that band was a former president of the local outlaws chapter, they played it every Monday night. That was a hell of a bar for a while.
I'm mostly familiar with del from his work with Steve Earle, but I will have to give that version a listen
I think that Sympathy is probably tied with Paint it Black for my favorite Stones songs. I don't know a hell of a lot of them but my friends growing up would listen to them religiously, even though we were a few decades later on the age group. They have some great songs indeed and I was lucky enough to see them as my first unofficial live concert. They came to Fenway in Boston and we couldn't afford the ticket price for the billion dollar band so we hung outside the stadium, drank beer in black bags and jammed out. It was really a memorable time and a lot of fun.
Fun fact, the only other concert I've been to is Blues Traveler, which was my first and only official concert that I got tickets to lol
Here's a fun track from a bit later in the years of the rock genre but I still like it. Something about the song has always made me love it, not just because it's Joe Walsh.
Joe Walsh - Life's Been Good
That's such a great story about the Stones in Boston. I've seen the Stones 3 times. Last time was the Steel Wheels tour. I think 1980. Greg Kihn and Stevie Wonder opened that show in Seattle, and they played Sympathy. It was only the second time since Altamont. Best $50 I've spent in my life...
I love Joe Walsh and his work with the Eagles and all his solo work. LOVE.
But my fav is from the 60s. Funk 49 from the James Gang.
Man, the Rolling Stones is just a great present to wake up on a Sunday morning.
Reviewing all the videos, I have the feeling music has changed quite a bit during the past decades but great music will remain forever.
I love Rolling Stones's first albums.
Me too! They were edge to edge good music. The Stones got into a habit of 2 or 3 great cuts and the rest mediocre after a time. Those first ones just exploded with music.