Your top ten Rolling Stones songs

[Beef Oven!]

Nowt wrong with Start me Up and Tatoo You was the last decent Stones album. See my comments on the delayed song thread re Aftermath.

Best 10 tracks, in no particular order - 10 not enough!

You can't always get what you want
Sympathy for the devil
Mother's little helper
Lady Jane
Goin' home
19th Nervous Breakdown
Little Red Rooster
Jumping Jack Flash
It's all over now
Satisfaction

Just listened to Aftermath through. Such a strong album. The US track-klisting is all wrong. I wonder if the the A&R people were right. Not just on this album, on any of those almost countless transatlantic releases, both ways.

One interesting thing was that I wasn't really getting much of a sense of a Brian Jones flavour. Out of curiosity I checked the song-writing credits and the songs are all Keef & Mick!

Brian Jones had died before I was old enough to know about anyone beyond Mick Jagger and Keith Richard (maybe my memory is playing tricks, but Charlie Watts seems to stick out in my mind), so he's always been in the shadows for me. But this Bill Wyman quote about Jones is interesting....

"He formed the band. He chose the members. He named the band. He chose the music we played. He got us gigs. ... he was very influential, very important, and then slowly lost it – highly intelligent – and just kind of wasted it and blew it all away."[Wicki]

[french frank]

I wonder why this thread is posted under 'Talking about music', which surely relates to R3's output? Even the Proms in their present state haven't yet included the Rolling Stones.

I proposed a while ago moving Talking About Music to Platform 3 so that it didn't come under the 'Classical Forum' category - given the regular threads about popular music. But I was outvoted

(I did intend TaM to be about classical music - hence the name, reflecting the old Antony Hopkins programmes).

[cloughie]

H

Just listened to Aftermath through. Such a strong album. The US track-klisting is all wrong. I wonder if the the A&R people were right. Not just on this album, on any of those almost countless transatlantic releases, both ways.

One interesting thing was that I wasn't really getting much of a sense of a Brian Jones flavour. Out of curiosity I checked the song-writing credits and the songs are all Keef & Mick!

Brian Jones had died before I was old enough to know about anyone beyond Mick Jagger and Keith Richard (maybe my memory is playing tricks, but Charlie Watts seems to stick out in my mind), so he's always been in the shadows for me. But this Bill Wyman quote about Jones is interesting....

"He formed the band. He chose the members. He named the band. He chose the music we played. He got us gigs. ... he was very influential, very important, and then slowly lost it – highly intelligent – and just kind of wasted it and blew it all away."[Wicki]

The songwriters were Jagger and Richard but the evolution of the tracks in the studio were significant and Jones was something of a multi-instrumentalist and I would say that his mark is very much on Aftermath - sitar on Mother's Little Helper and dulcimer on Lady Jane being examples. Then the disillusion and substances set him on a a downwards spiral, round about the time of Aftermath. I guess Andrew Oldham's championing of Jagger and Richards contributed to this downturn.

[Beef Oven!]

H

The songwriters were Jagger and Richard but the evolution of the tracks in the studio were significant and Jones was something of a multi-instrumentalist and I would say that his mark is very much on Aftermath - sitar on Mother's Little Helper and dulcimer on Lady Jane being examples. Then the disillusion and substances set him on a a downwards spiral, round about the time of Aftermath. I guess Andrew Oldham's championing of Jagger and Richards contributed to this downturn.

The 12-string electric guitar that Jones uses on Mother's Little Helper (apparently not a sitar as I always thought, like you) is a good example, plus Lady Jane, but other than that, it felt very Keef & Mick to my ears. But I'm not that familiar with the whole album. Further listening might lead me to hear more Jones.

Oldham would've had his reasons for choosing 'The Glimmer Twins' over Jones, and with hindsight, can we say he was wrong?

[johncorrigan]

Factory Girl
Prodigal Son
2000 Light Years From Home
Love in Vain
Midnight Rambler
Bitch
Start Me Up
It's all over now
Jigsaw Puzzle
You can't always get what you want (LP version)

[cloughie]

Oldham would've had his reasons for choosing 'The Glimmer Twins' over Jones, and with hindsight, can we say he was wrong?

At the time I think the basis was envy. He wanted a Lennon-McCartney for the Stones and they were made to work hard in becoming half-decent songwriters. Prior to the Jagger-Richards compositions were Nanker-Phelge compositions which included contributions from the other members of the group. A feature of many groups' hit singles in the sixties was self-penned 'b' sides which generated royalties on the sales of the 'a' side. Whilst this might be cynical on the part of the songwriters it did facilitate development of songwriting skills.