The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
The Rolling Stones · produced by Jimmy Miller · Rolling Stones Records · about 46 minutes
Mode
Hard rock with horns beside country, acoustic Delta blues, Memphis soul and a string ballad, played by one band with session players
Mythos
A night and its morning after: the party, the addict at the end of the line, the outlaw lover, the traveller going home
Phase
Ten tracks on two equal sides; each opens hard and frays in the middle; the first side ends on gospel, the second on the road home
Presentation
Album; ten tracks, about forty-six minutes, the first record on the band’s own label, in a sleeve conceived by Andy Warhol with a working zip
Register
Open-tuned rhythm guitar and a lyrical lead, horns, a Latin-jazz coda, slide guitar, strings entering late, a voice sly, pleading and nearly still
Scale
Appetite, its bill and its buyers; one large history taken as the occasion for a riff
Governing Proposition
A band at the height of its powers, on its own new label and with a new guitarist, plays hard rock, country, Delta blues and Memphis soul as one music and runs a night from its first riff to a road home at dawn, so that the pleasures of its decade are heard presenting their bill to the people who sold them. The making is complete and the heights are real; the record consolidates a turn already taken, and its largest subject is named and left unexamined.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on a riff, and the riff sets its terms: appetite and swagger, horns punching behind a band that sounds pleased with itself. The first words put the listener on a “Gold Coast slave ship”, and the song turns that atrocity into a party. Everything the record will do is in that collision: the pleasure, its source, and a refusal to look hard at either. It ends some forty-six minutes later on a road at dawn, in the quietest singing on the album, and the distance between those two points is the record’s subject.
Rolling Stones Records issued the album in April 1971, distributed by Atlantic in the United States: the first record on the band’s own label, produced by Jimmy Miller. The band is Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Mick Taylor, on his first full album with the group, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts. Three tracks, Brown Sugar, Wild Horses and You Gotta Move, were cut at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama in December 1969. The sleeve was conceived by Andy Warhol, with a working zip on the first pressings, and the tongue that became the band’s emblem appears here for the first time.
Ten tracks fall on two sides of almost exactly equal length, about twenty-three minutes each. Side one runs Brown Sugar, Sway, Wild Horses, Can’t You Hear Me Knocking and You Gotta Move; side two runs Bitch, I Got the Blues, Sister Morphine, Dead Flowers and Moonlight Mile. Each side opens hard and frays in the middle. Nine songs are credited to Jagger and Richards, Sister Morphine later also to Marianne Faithfull; the tenth is the traditional You Gotta Move, in Fred McDowell’s arrangement. The standard sequence is the object here, not the Spanish issue of 1971, which replaced Sister Morphine with a live track and changed the sleeve.
Movement II
At the centre of side one is a love song with nothing defended in it. Wild Horses is two acoustic guitars and a voice that strains at the chorus, a plain, aching height, and it is the one place on the record where appetite gives way to need. It was cut in Alabama, and it sounds like a country song made by Englishmen who loved the music and knew they were visitors to it. The record needs it, and it needs that knowledge of being a visitor too.
That double position, heirs and tourists at once, is the record’s inheritance and its method. The band had begun its turn back to American roots on Beggars Banquet in 1968 and carried it through Let It Bleed in 1969; behind both stood the blues, Memphis soul and the country of Bakersfield and Nashville, and beside them Gram Parsons’s country rock. Sticky Fingers continues that path rather than leaving it. Hard rock, country, Delta blues and soul sit side by side, played by one group with horns and a studio of session players, and the mixing of idioms is part of what the record knows.
The stakes were high in the band’s affairs and lower in its music. This was the first record on a new label, with a new guitarist, and the first after Altamont and Brian Jones’s death. The musical wager was placed on ground the band had already proved. Its departures are local and real: a coda in which a rock band becomes a Latin-jazz combo, strings and an Eastern-tinged modal figure on the closing track, a drug ballad set without moral comment. A consolidation made this well carries its own authority, and this one carries it from the first riff to the last string.
Movement III
The longest track on the record is two things. It runs its song, on a hard riff, in under three minutes, and then it keeps going. A saxophone enters, then Mick Taylor’s long solo over congas and organ, and the rock band turns into a Latin-jazz combo for more than four minutes while nobody stops the tape. The turn into the coda is a real transport. The coda itself is beautiful in places and not compelled, and it runs past its shape.
That doubleness is the record’s form at small scale. Some tracks are instruments of what the record knows: Can’t You Hear Me Knocking enacts a song dissolving, Dead Flowers knows its subject because it is a country song, and the order carries the slide from appetite to wreckage. Others are containers. I Got the Blues is a loving Memphis soul pastiche that adds a style rather than a turn, and You Gotta Move is a faithful cover that gives side one its one breath of gospel and could be lost. Most of the songs would stand alone.
The making is what binds the collection. Keith Richards’s open-tuned rhythm parts and Taylor’s lyrical lead interlock without crowding; Charlie Watts swings the hard rock rather than pounding it; horns punch Brown Sugar and Bitch, and strings enter Moonlight Mile late and lift it. Jagger’s singing is a command of persona, sly, pleading and, at the end, nearly still. The faults fall on a share of the record: Jimmy Miller’s mixes are murky on Sway and thick in places, and the idiom pieces are competent rather than commanding.
Movement IV
Side two turns to the place where the appetite comes due. Sister Morphine is a dying addict in a hospital bed, begging, set over a slide guitar that moves beneath a voice beginning to fray, the arrangement building to a pitch of panic. It is the plainest disclosure on the record and its dreadful height. Then Dead Flowers sets the same condition as a jilted junkie’s bitter farewell, with a “needle and a spoon”, in a country song too cheerful for it. One condition at two temperatures, dread and irony, and the irony carries as much truth as the dread.
What the record brings into the open can be stated: the pleasures of the late sixties were already presenting their bill, and the people who sold the pleasure were paying it. The disclosure holds, and it comes through these two songs and the exhaustion of the closing track. Elsewhere the yield is a mood of decadence and fatigue more than a meaning. And Brown Sugar, which opens on the founding crime of the music the band inherited, exposes the entanglement of rock’s pleasure with what it draws on without examining it. The record’s widest reach is also its loosest joint.
The figures are old ones: the junkie at the end of the line, the outlaw lover in his basement room, the gospel summons of death borrowed whole in You Gotta Move, the slave ship and the plantation. Across the sequence a pattern is half built, a night and its morning after. But the particulars are attitudes more than persons, and no figure on the record has a face or a place beyond a word. The archetype is reached largely by allusion to the blues tradition the band had taken as its own.
Movement V
The record ends on a road. Moonlight Mile opens on a modal guitar figure, and Jagger sings more quietly than anywhere else on the album; strings enter late and rise under him, and the whole track lifts as it nears home, a traveller going back to no one named. It is the record’s summit and its one stillness, the exhaustion of the road given without self-pity, and it answers Brown Sugar as the cost answers the night. One law governs the whole: appetite and its bill, sung by people who are both the buyers and the bought.
The reach was wide. Brown Sugar became a template riff of rock radio; the Muscle Shoals sessions helped make that studio a destination for rock bands; Wild Horses and Dead Flowers passed into the country-rock and alternative-country repertoire; and a band owning its own label and emblem became a model, though that is partly business. The record has been in print throughout, its two famous songs in broadcast, its sleeve known beyond its listeners, and its warm, dry sound has aged well. Part of its surface has not: Brown Sugar’s words are harder to hear now than they were in 1971.
What it holds is desire, craving and fatigue; the body as sex, addiction and a hospital bed; love once, in Wild Horses; money in a rich girl; the working life of the road; death as the addict’s and as a gospel summons. History enters once, largely, in the slave trade, and is a riff’s occasion rather than a held order. The family, labour, the state and the natural order stay outside. The orders sit side by side under one mood, and the record holds that mood with full command, from the first riff to the strings at the end of the road.
Act III · The Twelve
Ten tracks in about forty-six minutes, and the record stands on pillars that hold. Brown Sugar must open: it sets the record’s terms, appetite and swagger, in its first riff. Moonlight Mile must close, the long road home after the night the record has spent. Sister Morphine is required as the place the appetite comes due, Dead Flowers as its sardonic answer, and Wild Horses as the one undefended love song. The subtractive test finds give in three places: I Got the Blues adds a style rather than a turn, You Gotta Move is a faithful cover the record could lose, and the coda of Can’t You Hear Me Knocking is beautiful without being compelled.
Score: 8.5 / 10
What the record brings into the open can be stated, and it holds: the pleasures of the late sixties, sex, drugs and the road, were already presenting their bill, and the people who sold the pleasure were paying it. Sister Morphine is the plainest disclosure, a dying addict begging in a hospital bed. Dead Flowers sets the same condition as a jilted junkie’s farewell (“needle and a spoon”) in a country song too cheerful for it, and the irony carries the truth. Moonlight Mile gives the exhaustion of the road without self-pity. What holds it at the bar and not above: much of the yield is a mood, and Brown Sugar raises its largest subject without examining it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Elevation comes on about half the tracks, and where it comes it is high. Moonlight Mile is the summit: a modal guitar figure, strings rising late under the quietest singing on the record, the whole track lifting as it nears home. Wild Horses has a plain, aching height, two acoustic guitars and a voice that strains at the chorus. Sister Morphine is the dreadful height, a slide guitar under a voice that frays, the arrangement building to panic. The turn into the coda of Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, a saxophone and then Mick Taylor’s long solo over congas and organ, is a real transport. Brown Sugar and Bitch have force rather than height, and three tracks stay on the plain by design.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth is evoked often, and one pattern is half built across the sequence: a night and its morning after, from Brown Sugar’s party to the dawn road of Moonlight Mile. The figures are old. The slave ship and the plantation of Brown Sugar summon the founding crime of the music the band inherited; the junkie stands at the end of the line; the outlaw lover of Dead Flowers waits in his basement room; the traveller of Moonlight Mile goes home to no one named. You Gotta Move brings in the gospel summons of death, borrowed whole. What holds the axis: the particulars are attitudes more than persons, and the archetype is reached largely by allusion to the blues.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is the band’s own turn back to American roots, begun on Beggars Banquet (1968) and carried through Let It Bleed (1969), with the blues, Memphis soul and the country of Bakersfield and Nashville behind it, and Gram Parsons’s country rock beside it. The departures are real and local: a coda in which a rock band becomes a Latin-jazz combo and lets the tape run, strings and an Eastern-tinged modal figure on Moonlight Mile, a drug ballad set without moral comment. The stakes were high in the band’s affairs: a new label, a new guitarist, the first record after Altamont and Brian Jones’s death. What holds it: the musical wager was placed on a path the band had already proved.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The sequence is counted here, once. Change the form and part of what the record knows goes: it moves from Brown Sugar’s swagger through the frayed middle of each side to Moonlight Mile’s road, and the slide from appetite to wreckage is carried by the order. The mixing of idioms is part of the knowledge: country, blues and soul side by side show the band as heirs and tourists at once, and Dead Flowers knows what it knows because it is a country song, its cheer set against its subject. Can’t You Hear Me Knocking enacts its form, a song dissolving into what happens when nobody stops the tape. What holds it: most tracks would stand alone, and two are containers for a style.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over fifty-five years, though its particulars are reported here rather than verified. The guitar interplay of Keith Richards and Mick Taylor, the open tunings and the long solo of Can’t You Hear Me Knocking have been studied by players for decades. Wild Horses and Dead Flowers have been taken up by other singers, the second in country and alternative country, which shows songs found open rather than spent. The argument over Brown Sugar’s words is itself a yield: the record keeps open a question it does not answer. What holds the figure: the words give most of what they hold on a first hearing, and much of the return is to a sound and a period.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is the rock album of 1970 to 1972. The intrinsic force is the smaller part: the record fixed a model of the rock band as a roots ensemble, hard rock, country and soul played by one group with horns and session players, and showed that the band’s darker matter could sit inside its swagger. The larger turn had been made on the band’s records of 1968 and 1969. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Brown Sugar became a template riff of rock radio; the Muscle Shoals sessions helped make that studio a destination for rock bands; Wild Horses and Dead Flowers passed into the country-rock and alternative-country repertoire; and the band’s own label and emblem set a model for a group owning its imprint, a reach that is partly business.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival is weighed over fifty-five years. The form is whole: the stereo master of 1971 is the record still sold, and the sequence is intact. Presence is continuous and wide: the album has been in print throughout, Brown Sugar and Wild Horses are in broadcast, and the sleeve is known beyond the record’s listeners; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric, a warm, dry rock sound of the early 1970s, has aged well. What holds the figure: part of the surface is fixed to its moment, as Brown Sugar’s words have become harder to hear, and the album’s presence runs partly through its two famous songs rather than through the whole.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, load-bearing on most tracks. Richards’s open-tuned rhythm parts and Taylor’s lyrical lead give the record two guitar voices that interlock without crowding, and Charlie Watts swings the hard rock rather than pounding it. The arranging is exact where it matters: horns that punch Brown Sugar and Bitch, strings entering Moonlight Mile late and lifting it, a slide guitar placed under Sister Morphine as a second voice. Mick Jagger’s singing is a command of persona, sly, pleading and, on Moonlight Mile, nearly still. The faults are real and fall on a share: Jimmy Miller’s mixes are murky on Sway, two tracks are competent idiom rather than command, and the coda runs past its shape.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs the record: appetite and its bill, sung by people who are both the buyers and the bought. The two most distant elements, Brown Sugar, a horn-driven party on a slave ship, and Moonlight Mile, a string-lit road home at dawn, obey it as the night and its cost. Sister Morphine and Dead Flowers set the same subject at opposite temperatures, dread and irony, and both obey. The range is wide: hard rock, country, Delta blues, Memphis soul, Latin jazz, a string ballad. The law strains at You Gotta Move, which obeys it only by sitting near death, at I Got the Blues, which obeys it as style, and at Brown Sugar, whose subject the law does not judge. Strains, no break.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held as desire, craving and fatigue; the body as sex, addiction and the hospital bed of Sister Morphine; love in Wild Horses; death as the addict’s and as a gospel summons. Money appears in the rich girl of Dead Flowers, the road and the working musician’s life in Moonlight Mile. History enters once and largely, in the slave trade of Brown Sugar. What holds the figure lowest is the join: the orders sit side by side under one mood, the largest of them, history, is a riff’s occasion rather than a held order, and the family, labour, the state and the natural order are absent.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.0, then The Sublime at 8.9. Two guitar voices that interlock without crowding, exact arranging and a singer’s command of persona; elevation on about half the tracks, highest in the late strings of Moonlight Mile, the dread of Sister Morphine and the turn into the coda of Can’t You Hear Me Knocking. Then Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 8.7: a model of the rock band as a roots ensemble, and fifty-five years in print with a sleeve known beyond its listeners.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4: desire, the body, love and the road held under one mood, history brought in as a riff’s occasion rather than held, and the family, labour, the state and the natural order absent. Below the rest, The Swerve at 8.0, a consolidation of a turn begun on the band’s two records before it; then The Archetypal Deep at 8.2, a night and its morning half built in the sequence, its figures attitudes more than persons.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 and The Swerve at 8.0 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.5, stands below it as well.
Basis · the LP as released by Rolling Stones Records in April 1971, distributed by Atlantic in the United States, ten tracks in their standard sequence on two sides of about twenty-three minutes each, about forty-six minutes in all; produced by Jimmy Miller; judged from knowledge of the recording, its words and its reception. No recording, lyric sheet or credits were in hand, and running times are approximate. The Spanish issue of 1971, later remasters and expanded editions are evidence of presence, not the object. Songs are cited by title, and words are quoted only where certain and never beyond four words. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact day of release, the players beyond the five members of the band, the studios used beyond Muscle Shoals, the sessions from which Sister Morphine comes, and the later stage history of Brown Sugar, are not given.