Let It Bleed

Nine tracks in about forty-two minutes, and the subtractive test finds more than one cut. The frame is required: Gimme Shelter must open, the storm announced, and You Can’t Always Get What You Want must close, the storm’s aftermath settled into a hard bargain. Love in Vain is required as the inherited blues the record measures itself against, and Midnight Rambler as the violence of the opening made a figure; You Got the Silver is slight and earns its place as the one tenderness. The test bites at Country Honk, a remake of a single already released, whose function is relief; at Live with Me and Monkey Man, two tracks in one mode of leering swagger that restate each other; and lightly at the title song, which says at five and a half minutes what it says in two.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds, but it is mostly mood. A generation’s shelter is gone: violence is near and general (“just a shot away”), love is the only cover left (“just a kiss away”), and what remains is need rather than wish (“get what you need”). You Can’t Always Get What You Want states it most plainly, a meaning and not only a mood, its scenes of a reception, a demonstration and a drugstore all ending in the same bargain. The title song shows love as mutual use, a body to lean or “bleed on”; Midnight Rambler makes predation a performance. Sound discloses as fully as words: Merry Clayton’s voice cracking in Gimme Shelter is the condition heard. Held well below the bar because the dread is rendered more than articulated.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Elevation comes at the top and more than once, in dread and in grandeur. Gimme Shelter is the summit: a tremolo guitar and wordless voices out of nothing, the band entering like weather, and Clayton’s vocal rising to the point where it breaks, terror and exultation at once. You Can’t Always Get What You Want rises from a choir and a French horn through a slow gospel build to a massed coda, grandeur earned over seven minutes. Love in Vain is beauty, slide guitar and mandolin over a slowed blues; Midnight Rambler’s slow middle is dread made physical; You Got the Silver has a small, warm height. The rest has force, not elevation, and Country Honk is a joke. Four or five of nine rise, two of them as high as the medium goes.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Myth is evoked often and built in two figures. Gimme Shelter builds the deluge: storm, fire and flood threatening at once and a shelter sought, an apocalypse of the oldest shape set in the present without a date. Midnight Rambler builds the predator who comes in the night, the bogeyman given a long song whose changes of tempo stage the approach, the crawl and the strike. Around them the patterns are evoked: the crossroads blues of Robert Johnson, borrowed whole and his legend with it; the devil’s swagger of Monkey Man, which mocks itself as “a trifle too satanic”; a choir that turns a parable of the street into a hymn. Held below the bar because the figures are positions and poses, not persons, summoned track by track and not carried across the record.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The inheritance is the band’s own: the return to blues and country roots made on Beggars Banquet the year before, after the psychedelic detour of Their Satanic Majesties Request. This record walks that path further. The additions are real, a gospel singer at the top of the opening track, a classical choir at the close, a country remake of the band’s own hit, and they enlarge the palette; but each extends a proven manner rather than turning from it, and the wager made was small. The stake that existed was circumstantial, not formal: a band losing its founder in mid making and finishing with a new guitarist, and it kept its course. A consolidation of a style at its height, a deviation that risked little. Under The Dark Side of the Moon at 8.0.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Change the form and some of the knowledge goes, chiefly in the frame. The record is built between two large productions: it opens in the storm and closes in the settlement, and the passage from one to the other is what the record knows, that the hope of a decade ends not in rescue but in a bargain with need. Inside the frame the songs are a band’s set: blues, country, two rockers, a ballad, a long jam. Midnight Rambler is the one track whose form enacts its subject, its tempo changes staging the predator’s approach; Love in Vain slowed and recast, and Country Honk as the hit turned inside out, are forms that comment on their sources. The sequence is counted here, once: framed, but the middle could be reordered without loss, and most songs would mean the same alone.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over fifty-seven years, of two kinds. By report, musicians have long studied the guitar parts, the open tunings and interlocking of Gimme Shelter and Midnight Rambler, and the production of the opening track, its isolated vocal much heard and discussed. The record has been reopened in use more than in reading: Gimme Shelter and You Can’t Always Get What You Want have been set in films and at public occasions for decades, each time meaning something slightly different, which is a kind of yield. The semantic return is thinner. The words of most songs give what they give at first hearing, and the arguments over Midnight Rambler’s relation to its subject and the record’s relation to the end of its decade are mostly about the band. Formal more than semantic, and narrow.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The field is the rock album of the late 1960s. The intrinsic force is the smaller part: the record brought gospel voices and a choir into hard rock, recast country and the Delta blues inside a rock band’s sound, and fixed a manner, loose, heavy, rooted and sexual, that was a consolidation more than a reorganisation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the band’s records of these years set the template of the rock and roll band for the decades after, its guitar sound, its stance, its relation to the blues, and Gimme Shelter has become the sound by which a whole culture remembers the end of its decade. But that reach belongs to a run of records more than to this album, and much of it travels as one song. Half a point under The Dark Side of the Moon at 8.9.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Survival is weighed over fifty-seven years. The form is whole: the recording as released is the record still sold. Presence is wide and continuous, in print throughout, and two of its songs are among the most played and most used of their decade, in broadcast, film and public occasion. Presence is not proof, and the album is heard much less than its two great tracks; much of what is present is Gimme Shelter, not Let It Bleed, and that holds it at the foot of its span. The fabric has aged well: a band in a room with piano, guitars and voices, little fixed to a studio fashion of 1969, and the choir and the gospel voice have not dated. Midnight Rambler’s subject sits less easily now, a small charge. A survival of decades, far below what has lasted centuries.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and it is load-bearing at the top. Gimme Shelter is a production of the first rank: the tremolo guitar and the wordless voices set in space, the entrance of Charlie Watts and the piano, Clayton’s vocal pushed until it breaks and kept. You Can’t Always Get What You Want is an arrangement in stages, choir, horn, acoustic guitar, organ, band and choir again, built so that each entrance is heard. Keith Richards’s guitar parts interlock and carry the record, and Watts holds the slow middle of Midnight Rambler with real control. Against that, Country Honk is loose by intent, Live with Me and Monkey Man are thick and generic in their mix, and the lead vocal is mannered more than commanding. A tenth under Remain in Light at 8.7.

Score: 8.6 / 10

One law governs most of the record: a world gone violent, and the body’s appetites, for sex, drugs and comfort, offered as the only shelter, with need the last word. The two most distant elements are Gimme Shelter, an apocalypse, and Country Honk, a fiddle, a car horn and a barroom joke, and they obey the same law only loosely: the joke is the appetite without the storm, relief rather than answer. Midnight Rambler and You Can’t Always Get What You Want, predator and parable, obey it fully: violence, then the bargain. Love in Vain fits as the old form of the same loss. The range is wide, and the band’s sound holds it more firmly than the law does; Live with Me and Monkey Man obey in attitude only. Strains at three tracks, no break.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Violence and war are held, as weather, in Gimme Shelter. Desire and the body are held throughout, as appetite and as use. The couple appears in the title song and in You Got the Silver; the city and its society in You Can’t Always Get What You Want’s reception, demonstration and drugstore, and politics only in that demonstration. Drugs and dependency run through several songs. History enters as the blues tradition carried in Love in Vain; the sacred is evoked in a choir and a mock devil, without weight; one stance joins them. What holds the figure lowest: the family, labour, the state and the natural order beyond the storm are absent or glimpsed, and most orders appear as single images inside a pose rather than held together in one structure.

Score: 7.5 / 10