BLOG TO COMM

The Rolling Stones-BEGGARS BANQUET CD (Abkco)

Yeahyeahyeah, this 'un might be an oldie but moldie in your collection but (please have pity on me, poor ignerant blogschpieler that I am) this is the first ever harmonic convergence I've had with this "legendary" (and first if you also count SOME GIRLS ten whopping years later) golly gee wasn't that previous album a wrong turn let's go back to the ROCK & ROLL!!! platter and lemme tell you I'm givin' this one the thorough fine-tooth combing that you did well over 35+ years back so if you wanna call me an even more retrograde Johnny-come-latelier feel free to do so. You won't hurt my already bruised inner child one bit. In fact, I flushed my inner child outta my system long ago. It was conflicting with the outer one.

So, like what is so special 'bout this great "back to the roots" disque anyway? True it starts off with the Kenneth Anger-inspired "Sympathy For The Devil" which I'll admit is a snappy enough opening track, but frankly I still think (along with PEBBLES VOLUME 2 liner note writer "A. Seltzer") that the Satans asked the exact same question, mainly "Kan Yew Gess Mah Nayme???" a whole lot better on "Makin' Deals" (which set the pace for that particular PEBBLES volume much better'n "Sympathy" does here). 'n yeah, the hard-blues re-customed for confused white teenage boys on most of the album does kinda fit in with a late-sixties miasma of sorts, the same one that the Stooges so eloquently (!) exploited on their debut a year later. There's also a nice air of sublime intensity here that might have made the Stones the premier punk band of the late-sixties had only the Stooges failed to get off the ground and y'know, if you keep all of those images of Jagger as the preening prancer of the seventies outta it (along with all those records everybody seemed to like but nobody exactly knew why) it DOES digest a lot smoother than one would expect.

Frequent BLOG TO COMM readers will more or less be interested in BEGGARS BANQUET for the inclusion of "Stray Cat Blues," a number than has grown in notoriety over the past three decades ever since Jagger, in a fit of "I'm still hip, trust me!" mentioned in a ROLLING STONE interview that this statutory rape sonata was a direct Velvet Underground cop (at a time [late-seventies] when the Velvets' stock certainly was growing as far as a cult group's could before flopping over into the mindless hero worship of today). This brief aside did have some reverberations across the Rolling Stone fanbase, at least to the point where in a recent book explaining the story behind every Rolling Stone song, the early Velvets are prominently pictured above "Stray Cats'" glowing appraisal of said influence. I gotta admit that I've always liked the song ever since I heard it on an old bootleg (perhaps GET YOUR LEEDS LUNGS OUT), but really, next to such then-contemporary garagemeisters as the Flamin' Groovies or even the Stooges who also tended to slap-dab the Velvets with whatever function of the blues they cared to use at that particular moment, this 'un really ain't that special in the light of a lotta bozos who did more with the drone and got less moolah outta it. Er, it's still worth picking up cheap just like you should try to cop that Ten Years After album with the hot air balloons onna cover just to hear 'em riff the Stooges complete with the dog barks!