Back in 1976, amid the white heat of punk, the Rolling Stones were written off as a spent force. “They really don’t matter any more,” the American critic Lester Bangs wrote in a review that dismissed Black and Blue as “the first meaningless Rolling Stones album”. And even their most loyal fans struggled with the white man’s boogie of Hot Stuff and the cod reggae of Cherry Oh Baby. Credibility flushed down the loo, punk rendering them surplus to requirements, and it looked like Black and Blue meant curtains for the former greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. Bad news for Ronnie Wood, who had just fulfilled a lifelong dream by becoming their new guitarist. Oh well. Nobody was expecting Mick Jagger to be still singing Satisfaction as he edged toward his fifth decade.
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Of course, history turned out rather differently for the Stones, Ronnie Wood and music in general. And with this (almost) 50th anniversary deluxe edition featuring a new mix by Steven Wilson, lost tracks and a handful of jams with Jeff Beck and Harvey Mandel, it’s time to reassess an album in which Jagger was attempting to push the band towards new directions while holding on to their essential spirit. Yes, the eight songs on the original album are generally a minute too long, and don’t so much reach a shimmering climax as crawl away into a corner and die, but the unmistakable Jagger yowl never sounded better, a drug-battered Keith Richards was still pulling out the riffs, and there’s a loose, messy soulfulness throughout.
Memory Motel, which Jagger wrote after a short-lived romance with a woman in Montauk, is up there with Angie as a lamenting ballad, rich in tenderness and the sadness of things passing. You can hear the influence of New Orleans blues on Melody, while Hey Negrita is a rambunctious rocker with a Latin touch, although Jagger’s lyrics about a poor man trying to bargain with a prostitute haven’t aged so well. Then there’s Fool to Cry: pure, tear-jerking soul, with the Stones paying tribute to heroes such as Solomon Burke and Otis Redding over five exquisite minutes of masculine pain.
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The real reason to shell out for the deluxe edition is the bonus material. There’s a DVD of the June 1976 concert at Les Abattoirs in Paris alongside a great Earls Court show of the same year, and a previously unreleased recording of the Stones doing Shirley & Company’s high-pitched 1975 disco stomper Shame Shame Shame; a classic example of Jagger getting hip to the new thing and dragging his truculent, hairy gang towards it with him. Yes, Jagger’s Jamaican accent on Cherry Oh Baby is still as bad as ever, but otherwise the spruced-up edition of Black and Blue is a ragged delight. (Polydor)
★★★★☆