The Rolling Stones albums Mick Jagger called a step down: “I think it suffered a bit”
The quality of Rolling Stones albums tends to work in waves. Despite being known as one of the greatest bands to grace a stage, their studio albums were a different story throughout the 1960s, and it was never clear if fans would get the bad boys they saw onstage or a cleaned-up version of themselves used to combat The Beatles. Though Mick Jagger was usually diplomatic about every facet of the group’s career, he thought that things had started to take a downward slide after Goats Head Soup.
Then again, was there any way they could have made things better after Exile on Main Street? The group were far from becoming yesterday’s news, but ever since Beggars Banquet, they seemed to be on an upward trajectory, and it took their double album of material to put everything under one roof, whether that was the sounds of country music, traditional blues, or the old great rock and roll song.
That’s already a lot to take in, so Goats Head Soup was bound to be a comedown no matter what. There are still great songs to be accounted for, like ‘Heartbreaker’ and the immortal ballad ‘Angie’, but just listening to Keith Richards sing on songs like ‘Coming Down Again’ made it sound like everyone was growing tired of being on all the time.
That didn’t stop when they got to Black and Blue, either. Standing at only seven tracks, it’s pretty telling that the band were in a creative slump since one of the main songs, ‘Memory Motel’ was the kind of soft ballad that sounded like they were trying to rewrite ‘Wild Horses’ but couldn’t capture the right emotion again.
When talking about the record to Rolling Stone, Jagger remembered that the whole period seemed like a step down due to Richards’s drug use, saying, “Everyone was using drugs, Keith particularly. So I think it suffered a bit from all that. I think we got a bit carried away with our own popularity and so on. I mean, we cared, but we didn’t care as much as we had. Not really concentrating on the creative process, and we had such money problems.”
That’s not to say that the albums aren’t devoid of charm or anything. Yes, you can hear them desperately trying to put together songs in the studio, but taking their foot off the gas for a few albums lets the fans see Jagger and Richards less like musicians and more like human beings as they sculpt these songs into something that resembles a classic.
And while some people thought that the slump only got worse when they went disco on ‘Miss You’, that was where some of the fire came back. Say what you want about Some Girls being a pop album, but tracks like ‘Respectable’ and ‘Shattered’ at least showed that they still knew how to write a killer rock song every now and again.
In fact, there’s probably a lot more in common between this period of The Stones and what Paul McCartney was going through on his first proper solo release. Most of the songs feel more like fragments that have been stretched out to song length, but every now and again, there’s that diamond in the rough that keeps everything balanced.
