The best Stones album in 18 years!
As you might have noticed, the Rolling Stones have a new album. I weigh in, and offer a short tribute to the late Dwight Twilley
Phil Freeman lobbed one at those of us with a few decades under our belt on Thursday:
This hit home, as I am self-aware enough to know I have been that person at various points. I’ll get back to that in a bit. But given this reminder of my advancing age, I thought I ought to lean into it and do the obligatory thing today: weigh in on the new album by the Rolling Stones.
I’m willing to admit I’m on the older side, but I’m younger than the Stones. Hell, I’m younger than a good chunk of the Stones’ best music, making my debut a few days after Let it Bleed. As such, by the time I was aware of the band and it’s music, they were teetering on the brink of being a nostalgia act, Tattoo You bringing their era as a band making must-hear albums to a close.
Perhaps “corporation” is a better descriptor than “nostalgia act.” The Rolling Stones are a business, and so they release new products periodically to promote the most lucrative revenue stream: the live show. Want proof? They have issued six studio LPs since their first “comeback” with 1989’s Steel Wheels. In that time, they embarked on several major tours and issued five live albums related to those album-based treks, as well as an additional dozen “official bootlegs” documenting the same period.
Each of those studio albums was met with varying degrees of excitement by fans and critics who declared the band to be back, and the surprisingly breathless response to the new Hackney Diamonds falls in line with that pattern. The Washington Post raves, “The music pounces to life with an elasticity no Rolling Stones album has possessed since the big ba-boing of Tattoo You,” while Clash magazine gushes that it is “probably the Rolling Stones’ best album in two decades,” and the Guardian avers that the band succeeded in “coming up with that rarest of things: a latter-day Rolling Stones album that requires no special pleading.”
All of that might be a bit much, save for the last comment, which is mostly correct. There is nothing particularly cringe-worthy here. While reviews stating that such-and-such song wouldn’t have sounded out of place on anything before, say, Dirty Work, are scandalously charitable, it’s a perfectly pleasant album from a trio of septuagenarians and octogenarians and the sexagenarians who prop them up.
Don’t get me wrong. There is plenty I could never hear again and still live a contented life — “Mess it Up” was surely cut when Keith was napping in a tree, and you could pop one of those ridiculous looking little Jason Aldean cowboy hats on Mick Jagger and slip “Driving Me Too Hard” onto CMT — but there is a lot to tolerate, if not like.
The snap of “Bite My Head Off” is great, Keith Richards’ guitar riff just barking out of the speakers while Jagger’s preening vocal darts around the groove. “Dreamy Skies,” especially when Keith chimes in on the chorus, approaches the easy grace of earlier country-inflected ballads, even if it lacks the slack charm that characterized the band at its best.
Much has been made of “Live by the Sword,” a track that features the late lamented Charlie Watts on drums, departed bassist Bill Wyman, and fellow megastar Elton John on piano. It’s the most successful attempt to marry the band’s classic sound to anything approximating a more modern vibe and is one of the two or three tracks that might outlive this initial honeymoon period.
Surprisingly, the star turns here aren’t distracting. In addition to John, Stevie Wonder plays keyboard and piano on “Sweet Sound of Heaven,” and Paul McCartney plays bass on “Bite My Head Off.” Even the much-hyped vocal turn by Lady Gaga on “Heaven” is of a piece with the rest of the song. It obviously aspires to some sort of Merry Clayton-driven heights, and while it falls short, it does so in a non-embarrassing way (though Beck may want royalties for the “Debra”esque “oh yeah” falsettos that Jagger and Gaga uncork in the extended closing vocal tag). Perhaps more surprising is that Richards’ sole lead vocal, “Tell Me Straight,” is one of the most forgettable songs on the album. Neither a rocker nor a foolhardy attempt at sounding modern, it’s just… boring.
So, what you’re left with is an album that exceeds expectations by being pretty good. It has high points that should earn a place in live sets going forward, and even its worst moments are at least palatable.
The problem with any Rolling Stones album at this point is that once the shine wears off and this is no longer the new album but simply the latest entry in a vast catalog, will anyone come back to it? Is there a world where, when confronted with the band’s body of work, someone will choose this over Sticky Fingers or Exile on Main Street or even Goat’s Head Soup? Of course not. The only reasonable competition is everything from Steel Wheels on, and measured by that scale, it will earn as many spins as Bridges to Babylon or Voodoo Lounge do these days, which is to say, none. “Bite My Head Off” might sound better than one might expect, but is it any better than “Rough Justice” from A Bigger Bang? No fair cueing it up on Spotify for comparison. You haven’t listened to it in nearly 15 years, and that tells you everything you need to know about the eventual fate of Hackney Diamonds.
RIP Dwight Twilley
Now back to that opening salvo about aging music critics. Freeman was referring to the response to the death of Dwight Twilley, one of the founding fathers of the genre known as Power Pop. Freeman finds it funny when people refer to niche genres in a way that suggests people are familiar with that sound.
I’ve never seen that as the problem so much as the contention — and I’ve been guilty dozens of times, I’m sure — that the songs that fall under that umbrella would be hits in some alternate universe where people appreciated crisply played songs with ample hooks, chiming guitars and sweet vocal harmonies. It would seem they do given that any or all of those are elements of the biggest hits of the pre hip hop/R’n’B dominance of the charts, but it’s the rare combination of all of them that earned airplay, then or now.
He goes on to ask for the most commercially successful songs in the genre, and of course that depends on how you define it. If you allow yourself a bit of leeway and go back far enough, much of the Beatles mid-period work would qualify sonically, while later hits by the Raspberries (“Go All the Way), Sweet (“Fox on the Run”) and even Tom Petty’s “American Girl” would qualify.
Petty is an apt reference here, for he shared a record label with Twilley for a brief time early in his career, and they occasionally played on each other’s records. But where Petty’s everyman appeal led to superstardom, Twilley’s more lovelorn tunes didn’t see the same success. His closest brush with fame was 1984’s “Girls,” which wed power pop charm with a new wave vibe and landed him a Top 40 hit (and yes, that’s Petty on backing vocals), but little else connected with the marketplace.
The thing is, a big part of the appeal of Power Pop is that it wasn’t popular. If the guy in the skinny tie actually got the girl, what would he sing about? Twilley never made it big the way some of us thought he should, but that just meant he was ours to celebrate, not share.
What’s your favorite Power Pop song? When is the last time (before today) that you listened to a Rolling Stones’ album that was released after 1981? Weigh in!