Sean Paul Murphy, Writer

Sean Paul Murphy, Writer
Sean Paul Murphy, Storyteller

Monday, January 28, 2019

My 5 Favorite Rolling Stones Albums


I've already written blogs about Bob Dylan and The Beatles, it is time to fill out the musical trinity of the 1960's rock and roll with a blog about The Rolling Stones.

I am not saying the following records are the best Rolling Stones albums. Anyone can compile a list of their most critically acclaimed albums. It's been done before and the choices are obvious. This is a list of my favorites. Albums that speak to me for one reason ore another. This is more a feel list, than a quality list. My choices are more about who I was and what I was doing at the time when I first heard them. As a result, these are the ones I am most likely to throw into the CD player. (Yes, I still have CDs!)


5.  BRIDGES TO BABYLON, 1997

Each summer when "legacy" bands hit the road for their tours, you have to ask yourself whether the group is still the old band whose music you loved. The Doors without Jim Morrison? Queen without Freddy Mercury? The Who without Keith Moon? And John Entwhistle? How about the two versions of Yes on the road? Which one is legitimate?

I essentially stopped listening to The Rolling Stones after Bill Wyman left the band. I was way too young to be bothered by the transition from Brian Jones to Mick Taylor.  Granted, Brian Jones had a wider range as a musician, but you can't argue with Mick Taylor's playing. I didn't mind the transition from Mick Taylor to Ron Wood. Ron Wood was certainly no Mick Taylor, but his playing meshed excellently with Keith Richards. But I drew the line with Bill Wyman. To me, the Stones were always about Keith playing against the rhythm section of Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman, while Mick Jagger pouted and postured. To me, the thrill was gone when Wyman left.

I didn't get this album when it was first released.  I picked it up over a decade later and I was surprised by how much I liked it. One of my complaints about the Stones was that they remained very superficial and juvenile, refusing to grow up with their audience, as Elvis, Dylan and John Lennon had. I mean, geez, they were still using sex as a car analogies on their previous album Voodoo Lounge. This album, probably as a result of Richards' brush with death, showed some surprising, if defiant, maturity.

On the negative side, the music isn't driven as much by the familiar sound of the twin guitars of Wood and Richards. And it had more credited bass players than their were songs..... Bill, where are you?


4. STEEL WHEELS, 1989

If you were a Rolling Stones fan at the time, you must have been caught up in the excitement surrounding the release of this album. The band seemed dead.  It had been three years since their previous album -- the mean-spirited and underwhelming Dirty Work. For a while, it looked like all we were going to get were lame Mick Jagger solo albums....

I had no mixed emotions when this album came out. It was a taut, well-produced album. The songs seemed well thought out and constructed. 98 Rock, my local AOR radio station, went very deep on the album. Better yet, the band went on a massive tour to promote it. I saw them in Washington, D.C. I'm glad I did. Bill Wyman would leave the band soon afterwards, and it would be another five years before they released another album.


3. STICKY FINGERS, 1971

I really didn't get into this album until I learned to play the guitar, and it is the guitar playing that brings me back to it again and again. Powered by the band's most politically incorrect single, Brown Sugar, and one of their most sensitive ballads, Wild Horses, this album is a rich sonic experience. This was Mick Taylor's first complete album with the band, and his country blues playing propels it, interlacing beautifully with Keith's own playing.  Despite the presence of a few rockers, this is mainly a mellow album. Druggy, some might say. Forget some: it's what most people say. Questioned endlessly about the drug references, Keith complained that people were reading too much into it. "It's not the Bible," he said.


2. SOME GIRLS, 1978

In 1978, The Rolling Stones needed a hit. Their previous three albums, Goat's Head Soup, It's Only Rock 'n Roll and Black and Blue all featured some good tracks, but the albums themselves failed to set the world on fire. Mick Taylor was gone and replaced by Ron Wood, who, while not a standout guitar player, meshed beautifully with Keith Richards. In the general marketplace, rock was losing ground to disco, and acts from the sixties were being ridiculed by the punks. So what could a poor boy do?

Everything was on the line and the Stones delivered a lively and entertaining disco tinged album. The former street fighting men moved into the nightclubs powered by their massive, danceable hit Miss You.  This song proved to be their last Number One hit in the United States.

The tracks don't have the weight or gravitas of some of their edgier material, but the quality remains consistently high, as opposed to other albums where the lyrics to the filler tracks often have a "first thing to come to mind" feel. The lyrics also display a sense of humor often absent from their work. This is one of the few albums I never find myself tempted to hit the skip button on.


1. LET IT BLEED, 1969

To me, the early Stones have always been a strange mish-mash. On one hand, the band positioned themselves as a white boy blues/R&B combo but they would alternate that material with openly poppy songs like Get Off My Cloud. Don't get me wrong, their poppy material was pretty good and inventive, but it led to some inconsistent albums.

Some people opine that the Stones didn't find their own specific voice until the Beatles began disintegrating. I disagree. I would credit their more consistent voice to the rise of "rock" in the late sixties, as opposed to the more chart oriented rock 'n roll. They found their natural voice in the what would be defined as the AOR format, and this album hit that bulls-eye. It was hard rock that tipped a hat to all of their influences, like the Chicago blues of Midnight Rambler, and the country blues of Love in Vain. Plus, the album features their best song: Gimme Shelter.

I topped my list of my twenty favorite Beatles songs with A Day In The Life. I called that song rock 'n roll's apocalypse. Gimme Shelter, the Stones' moodiest and most foreboding song, captures the dark side of 'sixties and might have surpassed A Day In The Life, if the last verse didn't back away from the darkness....

Great album. Every song is a classic.


Honorable Mention:

EXILE ON MAIN STREET, 1972. I know the critics love this album. I understand why, too. However, I find the vocals and mix too murky for sustained listening. I traded my CD of this album to my brother Mark for Frampton Comes Alive and never looked back. EMOTIONAL RESCUE, 1980. This one is not a critical darling, but it is a sentimental favorite. Back when I was in Amway, we listened to this album constantly while we were driving up and down the East Coast for events. (Other big Amway driving albums were The Blues Brothers Soundtrack, John Cougar Mellencamp's Uh-huh, and, strangely, Wham! Make It Big.)  BEGGARS BANQUET, 1968. Lots of classic tracks. Perhaps my favorite of their 'sixties albums after Let It Bleed. It would make my Top 10. Maybe my Top 6.  DIRTY WORK, 1986. A sentimental favorite because I remember driving around with a friend of mine listening to it the day it came out. Hard to listen to now. Angry and mean-spirited even by Rolling Stones standards. TATTOO YOU, 1981. The album seemed like a return to rocking form after Emotional Rescue, but we later learned most of the songs were simply ones that didn't make the cut on previous albums. BLUE & LONESOME, 2016. I really admire that the Stones did this back to their roots album that covers many classic blues songs. When they covered songs like this early in their career, they always seemed like they were posing. Now, however, it feels completely authentic.

Check out some videos I edited here:
FD Automatic: Red Shoes
Crack The Sky: Mr. President
Greg Kihn: Horror Show
Nils Lofgren: Alone

Other Lists:



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