The Rolling Stones – ‘The Rolling Stones No. 2’
Whether you like to admit it or not, The Rolling Stones‘ albums did not matter in their early days. Just like every other act in the upstart British pop scene, the Stones were expected to be a singles band. They played inspired covers but didn’t write originals, and they wore suits because The Beatles did too. In essence, The Rolling Stones didn’t exist in the way that the general public would recognise until the mid-point of the decade.
On the flip side, The Rolling Stones were already staring down their in-development identity. Their love of the blues and more rowdy reputation put them up as a direct contrast to the Fab Four. They wanted to record while on tour, and their trip to Chess Records in Chicago was just as much about pleasure as it was about the business of making another record. The Stones were notorious teen heartthrobs, but simply put, they didn’t have the back catalogue to be anything more than a passing fad in 1964.
The Rolling Stones No. 2, the group’s second British album (material from the LP would later be chopped up and assembled into the American albums 12 X 5 and The Rolling Stones, Now!), is largely a rehash of their self-titled debut. The band’s love for swampy Chicago blues and Chess Records is evident. Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ is featured, as is the classic boogie-woogie tune ‘Down the Road Apiece’. But The Rolling Stones No. 2 also attempts to expand the Stones’ musical scope to include rockabilly, soul raves up, pop balladry, and garage rock.
Is it always successful? Not nearly. Mick Jagger desperately tries to cook up some energy on Solomon Burke’s classic ‘Everybody Needs Somebody to Love’, but the stifling studio atmosphere makes the song a non-starter. ‘Down Home Girl’ and ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’ put the Stones in their favourite position as horndog wanderers who can’t settle down or pay much attention to the lower-status girls around them.
Brian Jones and Keith Richards get some shining moments as lead guitarists, with Jones pulling out the slide in ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’ and Richards carving out the delicate intro of ‘Time Is On My Side’. Charlie Watts gets a name check in ‘Down the Road Apiece’ and busts out a Latin rhythm for ‘Susie Q’. Jagger’s vocals are still on the rougher side, but his command of the band is on point.
At the heart of The Rolling Stones No. 2 sits some strange anomalies: three of the most inconsequential Jagger-Richards songs ever written. ‘What a Shame’, ‘Grown Up Wrong’, and ‘Off the Hook’ aren’t hidden gems – they’re pastiches from two young men trying to emulate their favourite songwriters. If The Rolling Stones’ lack of a solid identity comes through anywhere on the album, it’s on the three utterly forgettable original songs.
The other choices range from slightly interesting to unmemorable. Nothing on The Rolling Stones No. 2 is poorly performed or badly recorded, but its obviously dated sound will make it hard for anyone to listen to the entire thing without skipping around a bit. Does the world really need a Rolling Stones version of ‘Under the Boardwalk’? Definitely not, but the fact that they decided to try anyway illustrates the unsustainable truth at the heart of The Rolling Stones’ existence in 1964: they had no musical direction.
That being said, you can see a path toward what the Stones would eventually become. ‘Time Is On My Side’ would pave the way for the band’s pop success later in the decade, while ‘Pain In My Heart’ slips and slides with some of the guitar interplay that Jones and Richards would embrace in earnest in the not-so-distant future. The pieces are starting to come together, but The Rolling Stones were still Beatles lookalikes and blues reinterpreters (and little else) in 1964.
Ultimately, the lack of any true classic recordings dooms The Rolling Stones No. 2. There’s just not enough recognisable hallmarks from the band’s later identity to make the album anything more than a novelty. The ragged garage rock energy is interesting, but the unrefined production style and hasty construction are a bit too haphazard to resemble anything cohesive. As a mile marker in the career of The Rolling Stones, the album is interesting. As one of many unremarkable blues-inspired rock albums from the 1960s, it is not.
