“I can’t see myself doing that”: Noel Gallagher on the last time The Rolling Stones were good
No rock and roll outfit is expected to make the best material of their career every time they walk into the studio. It’s nice when people can be on a hot streak, but even legends like Bob Dylan knew that it was important to take their foot off the gas once in a while and make albums that left fans a bit more perplexed than usual. Noel Gallagher may only have a handful of records that he would consider to be among his worst, but he knew that he was doing a lot better than his heroes as well.
Granted, a lot of what Noel did during his prime in Oasis was far from the greatest rock and roll ever conceived. He had a lot of fantastic songs at his disposal, but given how high they were riding when touring for Be Here Now, it’s clear that they didn’t see the massive brick wall that they were about to run into when everything dropped out from under them only a few years later.
Although the 1990s was the absolute peak of Oasis’s time in the public eye, some of the best artists know how to ride that wave for a little longer. Artists like Pink Floyd and Stevie Wonder may have had some time to get to their classics, but when each of them started making their classics, they could notch up multiple masterpieces within the span of a few years without thinking too hard.
The Beatles may have started the idea of that kind of album hot streak, but The Rolling Stones had taken their music a bit further. Despite spending the first decade of their career in the Fab Four’s shadow, The Stones managed to settle into their blues rock roots for years, turning in albums that any other act would count among their finest hours, whether that’s the grime of Beggars Banquet or the smorgasbord of blues, country, and rock and roll on Exile on Main St.
“As for Liam in spandex, leaping around like Mick Jagger, I think he really is sad enough to still be doing that when he’s middle-aged.”
Noel Gallagher
But there seemed to be a certain moment when The Stones stopped being as relevant as their peers. Sure, they would still have a few great songs on every album, but ever since ‘Start Me Up’, none of their tunes had to be in heavy rotation the same way that ‘Gimme Shelter’ or ‘Paint It Black’ was. If you were to ask Noel, the downslide started well before then.
Even though The Stones had some solid gold in the late 1970s, Noel felt that nothing past Sticky Fingers was worth revisiting that often, saying, “The Rolling Stones are doing it, and they haven’t done anything good since 1971. I can’t see myself doing that. As for Liam in spandex, leaping around like Mick Jagger, I think he really is sad enough to still be doing that when he’s middle-aged.”
If Sticky Fingers marks the moment most people draw the line, though, there’s still a wealth of material to go through. Granted, later albums like Bridges to Babylon and A Bigger Bang might be a bit more lopsided than their classics, but there are still tunes like ‘Angie’ off Goats Head Soup and the entirety of Exile on Main St to explore, including tunes like ‘Tumbling Dice’ and ‘Sweet Virginia’.
But Noel’s comments speak more to the way he saw The Stones. They had a lot of their classic material in the 1960s, and when looking at what he brought to Oasis, many of ‘The Chief’s lessons came from the era when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were neck-and-neck with John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
