The Rolling Stones in 1968: the greatest return to form in music history

My son is bored with contemporaries telling him that the Beatles are their favourite group. Which of us oldsters who were around during the 1960s would have thought anyone would still be saying that nearly five decades later? I wonder if anyone now feels that way about the Stones? Probably not.

It’s hard to be hip when your lead singer has a knighthood: the main interest in the group these days (as it has for several decades) seems to revolve around the possibly supernatural ability of Keith Richards to go on cheating death.

The Beatles produced the most musically brilliant, inventive, and ground-breaking recorded music of their era. But being a perverse bugger, and because of a taste for earthier, cruder, popular music, while I recognized their pre-eminence at the time, I was a much bigger fan of rootsier groups like the Rolling Stones and the Animals. When it came to sheer musical genius, Brian Wilson was my man – even after his brain and the Beach Boys’ career imploded following the astonishing success of “Good Vibrations”, I was buying Beach Boys albums and desperately trying to convince myself they hadn’t lost it (they hadn’t – Sunflower and Holland still sound wonderful, but back then my enthusiasm was taken as a sign of eccentricity or pretentiousness). 

Of course you don't look like a bunch of prats, lads!

I only lost faith in the Stones one time during that magnificent stretch between the release of their superb second single, the Lennon McCartney-penned “I Wanna Be Your Man” in 1963, and the  release of Exile on Main Street in 1972. After 1966’s breathtaking Aftermath album and the great January 1967 single, “Let’s Spend the Night Together”, we were treated to Between the Buttons, an exhausted, below-par LP (especially compared to The Beatles’ astonishing Revolver). But those of us who regarded Buttons as a temporary aberration were in for an even greater  disappointment. In August the Stones released their “answer” to Sergeant Pepper - the abject Their Satanic Majesty’s Request, with its silly 3-D cover on which the former kings of hip apparel were pictured in the wankiest set of hippie duds imaginable. They were supposed to be wizards or necromancers or something – it was Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts I felt sorriest for! The single at the time was the dire “We Love You” – about as convincing as a Charles Manson Christmas carol.

  

Game over, we all assumed. Fun while it lasted.

But then, somehow, impossibly, in May 1968 they released a roaring classic of a  single, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” – quite simply the best thing they’d ever produced: ridiculously hard and sassy and swaggering and unbelievably in the groove. Jagger had made a total arse of himself in his younger days trying to dance like James Brown – now his band was creating music as rhythmically dynamic as anything produced by their black American heroes. 

Thus began possibly the greatest musical return to form in pop history. December saw the release of the first in a run of five magnificent albums, whose quality and verve will never be equaled. Ever. All in three and a half years while half the band were breaking world records for substance abuse, and Mick Jagger was trying to kick-start a film career (apparently undaunted by the fact that he couldn’t act).

Beggars Banquet (which included “Street Fighting Man” and “Sympathy for the Devil”), was released in December 1968, leaving no doubt that the Stones were well and truly back. July 1969 saw the release of the brilliant single, “Honky Tonk Women”. In December ’69 we got Let It Bleed, which included “Midnight Rambler” and the sublime “Gimme Shelter” – quite possibly the greatest rock track of its era (bizarrely, neither song was released as a single).

Then came my favourite live album of all time – Get Yer Ya-Yas Out (containing stupendous versions of  “Midnight Rambler”, “Love in Vain”, “Sympathy for the Devil”, “Live with Me” and “Little Queenie”).

April 1971 brought us the single “Brown Sugar” - whose arrogant opening riff confirmed that no one now did openings better than Keith Richards – and the album, Sticky Fingers (“Wild Horses”, “Dead Flowers” – endlessly covered by country rock artists ever since – and “Bitch”). 

A year off in France, and then “Tumbling Dice” in April 1972, followed by the gloriously shambolic, rootsy double album Exile on Main Street a month later (“Rocks Off”, “Rip This Joint”, “Shake Your Hips”, “Sweet Virginia”, “All Down the Line”).

There would be one or two more highlights to follow – notably “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll” and their last genuine top-notch single, 1978’s final farewell to greatness, “Miss You” –  and then a handful of singles that almost sounded as good as their early stuff (“Start Me Up”, for instance) – but it was basically all over by the summer of ’72.

Oddly enough, no one at the time realized that Exile would come to be regarded as one of popular music’s pinnacles: I seem to remember being quite sniffy about it at the time myself. Now, of course, we all know better. I wonder how much of their wealth the Stones would have been prepared to give up to create another album even half as good as any of those they cut in their glorious pomp. (In “Sir” Mick's case, I’m guessing none.)