The Rolling Stones album Mick Jagger said had no purpose: “The things I like, it doesn’t have”
Every artist wants to make a grand statement whenever they make a record. No matter how many times bands try to write the same song over and over, artists always want to create an album from the heart rather than simply rehash something that came before. For a group that’s been going for as long as The Rolling Stones, there’s going to be a bit of a holding pattern, but Mick Jagger thought that most of their album Tattoo You didn’t have a point.
Regardless of which Rolling Stones album you’re listening to from their early period, all of them at least left you with a clear vision of what they were going for. Between the Buttons was their attempt at making baroque music, and Their Satanic Majesties Request was a grand statement at diving into psychedelia, all while blatantly riffing on what The Beatles did on Sgt Peppers a few months before.
Towards the beginning of the 1970s, though, the rock pioneers found themselves in a middle ground where nothing could go wrong. Each album the group made tended to go for that same bluesy flair starting around Beggars Banquet, but was anyone going to complain when Keith Richards could pump out something as perfect as Exile on Main St?
Even on the occasional lacklustre record, you couldn’t say they weren’t eclectic. Some Girls is one of their most celebrated records on the back of ‘Miss You’, but how often was anyone going to hear that disco smash right next to punk-leaning songs like ‘Respectable’ and country tunes like ‘Far Away Eyes’?
The only problem with a record like Tattoo You is that it’s not technically supposed to exist—at least not in the way that people hear it today. Most of the songs had been lingering around for a while, but that didn’t mean that fans couldn’t appreciate the massive hooks behind tracks like ‘Waiting on a Friend’ and ‘Start Me Up’.
While Jagger said he was still a fan of the record, he admitted there was no cohesion between every song, telling Rolling Stone, “That’s an old record. It’s all a lot of old tracks that I dug out. It was very strange circumstances. It went through all the tracks from those two previous records [Some Girls and Emotional Rescue]…I think it’s excellent. But all the things I usually like, it doesn’t have. It doesn’t have any unity of purpose or place of time.”
Sure, the songs are old, but the claim that it doesn’t have a purpose might be too harsh. If anything, this felt like the last hurrah for The Stones as chart-toppers, allowing them to put one more decade under their belt to have massive hits. And it’s not like the album is devoid of surprises, either, featuring one of the best jams in their catalogue this side of ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’ on ‘Slave’.
But when you look at Tattoo You alongside the other flavours of the day, like Van Halen and Journey, this wasn’t breaking any new ground. This was just The Stones reminding everyone of their legendary status, and the fact that they were just sitting on half of these songs feels like you’re listening to a lost album that has somehow been unearthed from the archives.
