Rewind is a mighty enjoyable 55 minutes, although I would have included “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” the only Top 20 Stones single from the 1971-84 period missing from the disc. And ever since the summer of 1972, when this first hit the radio, I have wondered: what the hell did Keef do to his guitar to get the sound of that opening riff? “Tumbling Dice.” Where “Brown Sugar” is the Stones rockin’ hard at full throttle, “Tumbling Dice” is the Stones, well, stoned-we’re invited to a party that’s been underway for a while, with wine and weed and girls and gambling, four things Mama told you to stay away from. But listening to it in the context of Rewind, I came to a different conclusion.ġ. It’s everything that makes them great in three minutes and 51 seconds-a sound nobody else could get and a lyric of unparalleled sleaze, especially for a #1 song. “Brown Sugar.” For a long time, I have ranked “Brown Sugar” as the greatest of all Rolling Stones singles. I could listen to that ghostly electric piano for half-an-hour, except the sadness of it would drive me away long before that.Ģ. “Fool to Cry.” Rewind is sequenced effectively, rockin’ for seven tracks, then backing down with “Emotional Rescue” and “Beast of Burden” before getting to this. “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker).” Maybe the most menacing thing they ever recorded apart from “Gimme Shelter.” The introduction is what it sounds like when something is chasing you in a nightmare, and the nightmare doesn’t stop until the record is over.ģ. “Waiting on a Friend.” The best and most sincere love song the Stones ever did, and it isn’t about a woman.Ĥ. “It’s Only Rock and Roll.” All of these songs sound great on the radio, but if we were ranking them that way, “It’s Only Rock and Roll” would be higher than #6.ĥ. And you might need only the introduction to get the point across.Ħ. “Start Me Up.” If you wanted to prove to somebody that nothing else sounds like prime Rolling Stones, this might be the song to play first. I had never felt the pain in it quite so vividly-pain not so much in Mick’s voice, although it’s there, but in the acoustic guitar, piano, and the aching chorus of strings that underpins it-and it knocked me sideways.ħ. But on a gray morning recently, when I wasn’t all that thrilled with the prospects of the day, it sounded different. The lyrics make no damn sense at all, and the way Mick turns “Angie” into three syllables–“ah-EEN-jeh”-has grated on me since 1973. I wish I could remember the rest, because when it came up in the car the other day, I didn’t mind it all that much.Ĩ. The only thing I remember saying about it is that Mick sings it like he’s being squeezed through a door. “Emotional Rescue.” When I was writing for a few years ago (in a post that’s no longer available online, and I have no offline copy of it), I called this one of the world’s worst songs. “Beast of Burden.” I have nothing against this song either. It’s down here because I like other things more, that’s all.ġ0. “Miss You.” You’d have to go back to 1964 or 1965 to find Stones music that sounds as dated as “Miss You.”ġ1. “Undercover of the Night.” Even as I recognize that the Stones are playing the hell out of this, I can’t claim to like it.ġ2. What follows is a ranking of the tracks on the album.ġ3. Two years later, it became the first official American Rolling Stones release on CD, and I’m pretty sure it was among the first CDs I ever bought. It’s a best-of that came out in 1984 as one last cash grab by Warner Brothers and EMI at the end of their distribution deals with Rolling Stones Records. On a recent trip, I carried the Rolling Stones compilation Rewind: 1971-1984. Some of the most interesting listening on my car travels comes when I fill up the CD bag in a hurry.
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