The Rolling Stones - Blue & Lonesome

Drowned In Sound 80

'It would be great to make another record, but it's almost, “why bother?” Records don't sell, and they don't do anything. There's no record companies to pay for it, so you have to pay for it out of your pocket. There's really no money per se to be made on records. We used to make a lot of money on records. Now all of our money is made on touring.'

However much you might take artistic or even factual issue with what Kramer was driving at there, you can see where he’s coming from. Once you’re a legacy act, especially one capable of filling stadiums, fresh creative endeavours are not strictly necessary, especially not from a financial standpoint. A new album is not going to be the thing that pays for your seventh house, your third divorce or your stratospheric coke habit. There is nobody on the planet that this is truer of than The Rolling Stones. Absolutely everything about them and the way they’ve operated since, to be generous, the early Eighties has been more in keeping with the conduct of a multinational corporation than any kind of rock band, let alone one that cut its collective teeth on rough-and-ready blues. Their recent career retrospective at the Saatchi Gallery, Exhibitionism, dedicated almost as much square footage to the group’s image and marketing might as it did to the music; it was telling that the room based around the tongue-and-lips logo was roughly the same size as the one housing a collection of classic guitars.

Also revealing was that, once you passed the halfway mark of the exhibition and swapped music for costumes, artwork and stage design, the input from Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts more or less ceased (Mick Taylor, in case you’re wondering, was mysteriously airbrushed from history entirely). Instead, nearly all of the commentary on the non-musical side of the group - whether printed on the walls or playing through the speakers - came from Mick Jagger.

This is an important point when it comes to talking about Blue & Lonesome. The band’s first new record since 2005 challenges a very long-held perception about the nature of the relationship between Jagger and Richards; the latter’s supposed to be every inch the gnarled old bluesman, with the former being all about fame and flash, renowned for promiscuity both musically and privately. Since 2012, when the pair called an uneasy truce in order to take the band’s fiftieth birthday party on the road, Richards has consistently claimed that a) he was eager to get back into the studio and b) he was struggling to bring his bandmates around to the same way of thinking.

It is for all of these stated reasons that Blue & Lonesome feels like such an upset; it’s a record entirely comprised of blues covers, and yet it feels more like Jagger’s record than it does Keef’s. These are not the sort of blues tracks that you could ever really spin as being stylish or relevant, as you might expect Jagger to. We’re in aficionado territory, going right the way back to Chicago with the likes of Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon, and yet it’s difficult to pinpoint when was the last time that the Stones made a record that felt this free of conflict, this far from being compromised by a clash of ideologies.

Jagger’s vocals have never sounded as well suited to undiluted blues than they do now. The funny thing is, his cords haven’t really been weathered by anything other than age. He’s been living clean for a long time now, not half because he probably never was that much of a hellraiser, even when he served as the poster boy for the Sixties counterculture; a bit like with the past week’s Kate Bush furore, it’s not like the signs haven’t always been there - he’s a cricket-loving graduate of the London School of Economics. But what he is now is old, having experienced more than most of us might in ten lifetimes, and that’s why he sells these songs so well. You hear his ragged, vulnerable turns on ‘Hate to See You Go’ and ‘All Your Love’, and you know you’re listening to a man well acquainted with heartbreak.

Not that it’s all the Jagger show. Ronnie Wood never has been afforded that much credit by Stones historians, having missed the purple patch of the late Sixties and early Seventies that produced Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. In that respect, less-than-favourable comparisons to Mick Taylor were inevitable, and perhaps his biggest achievement as a Stone was keeping the band together during the cold war of the Eighties, when he more or less pieced together Undercover and Dirty Work on his own when Jagger-Richards relations were at their most volatile. His biggest problem, musically, has been that he’s a touch too similar to Richards stylistically to ever achieve the same purity of simpatico guitar-weaving that Keef managed with Taylor, which is why it’s nice that four years on the road seem to have helped the pair lock into each other much better than ever before on record; a ramshackle version of ‘Hoo Doo Blues’ is a real highlight, on which they sound truly close to capturing the studio telepathy they’ve craved for so long.

As reliable as Watts’ mastery of rhythm remains on Blue & Lonesome, Richards is still the band’s bedrock. Wyman once remarked that the Stones were one of those rare groups in which everybody else followed the lead guitarist, not the drummer, and as much as he was talking about tempo more than anything else, it’s a sentiment that can surely be applied in a more general sense. Richards never fell out of love with the blues, but so much of his recent work - from his autobiography, Life, to last year’s sturdy solo LP, Crosseyed Heart - seems imbued with a really touching, clear-eyed passion for the same records he spotted tucked under Jagger’s teenage arm at Dartford station more than a half-century ago. It’s nice to see that reach some sort of musical fruition on Blue & Lonesome, where his licks carry the knowing weight of somebody well aware that he’s assured of his place in the pantheon alongside his heroes - look for the fizz and crackle he brings to Wolf’s ‘Commit a Crime’, for instance.

The past 12 months have robbed us of the right to be complacent about the old guard lasting forever and there’s something about Blue & Lonesome that’s endearingly open, as if by revisiting the tracks that brought them together in the first place, the Stones are acknowledging their own mortality. Perhaps what’s most pleasing about it, though, is that it’s so difficult to feel cynical about this album. Remember - this is a band that gladly plays corporate shows for the right amount whilst pricing out all but the most affluent from their proper gigs. Their sets seldom include many tracks that postdate the seventies. You could feasibly argue that Jagger and Richards’ combustible friendship has proved more interesting than their recorded output ever since Some Girls.

And yet, even with all of that considered, there is a lovely, childish innocence to how much fun you can hear them having on this record, revisiting the music that once made them dream of making music their life’s work. At one point in his book, Richards calls Jagger the greatest blues harmonica player he’d ever heard, and on Blue & Lonesome’s evidence, you’d be brave to rebuke him; the mouth organ work here is every bit as important as the vocals and guitars. In reality, though, that’s never going to shift as many papers, or invite as many clicks, as 'KEEF: MICK’S GOT A TINY WILLY.' Perhaps it’s time to focus on the positives while we’ve still got the Stones. There’s no shortage of them here.

The Guardian 80

(Polydor)
Jagger, Richards and co reconnect with their youth on this joyful collection of blues covers

Cinema requires the suspension of disbelief to operate. Music, by contrast, often needs a suspension of cynicism in order to provide its serotonin hit.

You might argue that the Rolling Stones have long been a gimlet-eyed heritage operation, with Messrs Jagger, Richards, Watts and Wood shareholders in a profitable legend that pumps out product and tours to a moneyed audience of heavily co-invested baby boomers willing to shore up that giant mouth logo with their cash. The zeitgeist largely goes on elsewhere.

Jagger wrings offhand innuendo out of lines such as 'call the plumber, darlin’, must be a leak in my drain'

Pitchfork 69

The Rolling Stones have been the World’s Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band™ for so long that, over the past three decades, they haven’t had to worry about being an especially good one. Since the mid-’80s, they’ve been releasing forgettable records at increasingly protracted intervals, all while their ever-extravagant world tours have taken on the feel of a traveling Hard Rock Café resort—a glitzy simulacrum of a rock’n’roll show catering to those who can afford to experience it. Fittingly, earlier this year the band went from being a proverbial museum piece to becoming an actual one.

The knock on the Stones isn’t that they’re too old to play a young man’s game—even at 73, Mick Jagger can still run laps around performers a third his age—but that aging has brought no greater depth or texture to their music. What the Stones have lost over the years is not their capacity for raunchy rock’n’roll, but their ability to invest it with purpose and meaning. Jagger and Keith Richards used to be among the best (and most underrated) lyricists in rock; their last album was called A Bigger Bang and kicked off with a tune that included a “cock” pun in the opening verse.

However, the Stones’ new album is as introspective as we can expect them to get in 2016—even if it they are playing songs that are nearly as old as they are. Blue & Lonesome is a covers collection that pays tribute to the post-war Chicago blues that first got the Stones rolling and inspired their very name. And since then, the blues have served as the foundation the band can dig into whenever their sound threatens to turn too au courant, whether they were reacting to the hippy-dippy whimsy of Their Satanic Majesties Request with the sleazy acoustic struts of Beggars Banquet, or devoting a side of Black and Blue-era concert document Love You Live to Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon worship.

But Blue & Lonesome represents more than just a back-to-basics mission, It’s the most honest music the Stones have released in years—not because the source material confers it with the patina of authenticity, but because the entire blues-covers concept is a tacit admission that they don’t really give a shit about being a contemporary concern anymore, so they’re just going to do something that feels good. (The record was reportedly spawned as a warm-up exercise for a postponed album of new material.) And now that the band are older than Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf ever lived to be, they can fully inhabit the grizzled-bluesman archetype to which they've always aspired, and exude a genuine get-offa-my-lawn imperviousness to the modern world.

Blue & Lonesome was bashed out in three days, and for the first time in eons, the Stones sound like a band playing together in the same room rather than one that travels on separate jets. Jagger is, naturally the star of the show—but not in his usual vampish ways. Whether he’s embodying the down-on-his-knees despair of Memphis Slim’s title track or playfully assuming the role of sad-sack cuckold on Little Johnny Taylor’s “Everybody Knows About My Good Thing,” his ageless voice sounds like it’s emanating from the middle of the band scrum rather than the lip of a catwalk. And while Chicago blues may have introduced the concept of jamming and guitar gods to the rock lexicon, Richards and Ronnie Wood’s grinding interplay ultimately plays a supporting role to Jagger’s harmonica honks, which cut through these songs like a rusty hacksaw with “Midnight Rambler”-worthy gusto.

But as much as Blue & Lonesome plays it raw, it’s not all that raucous—the energy here is less rip-this-joint than rocking-chair steady. On paper, the idea of the Stones running roughshod over a set of classic blues tunes seems like a long-suffering fan’s dream. (The “best Stones album since Some Girls!” headlines practically write themselves.) However, what made the Stones the Stones wasn’t their purism—it was the sacrilegious impulse to corrupt their influences with their own singular swagger. But Blue & Lonesome is more about adhering to tradition than encouraging sedition. The Stones may be drinking from their fountain of youth here, but they’re content to just savor it rather than spit it back in our faces.

On their best blues covers—Beggars Banquets’ “Prodigal Son,” Sticky Fingers’ “You Gotta Move,” Exile on Main Street’s “Shake Your Hips”—the Stones handled the songs like Ouija boards; they were less about paying homage to their heroes than channeling their sinister essence. Blue & Lonesome has flashes of that insidious inspiration: On the revved-up run through Howlin’ Wolf’s “Commit a Crime,” Jagger’s vocal oozes with implied violence overtop a repetitive, trance-inducing riff that rings like a police siren; on Little Walter’s “Hate to See You Go,” his pained baby-please-don’t-go pleas climax with an extended harmonica drone that threatens to swallow the song whole.

But for the most part, Blue & Lonesome doesn’t aspire to be anything more than a good-time frolic among old pals (Eric Clapton cameos included), with the interchangeable, upbeat takes on Buddy Johnson’s “Just Your Fool” and Eddie Taylor’s “Ride ‘Em on Down” more conducive to knee-tapping in a seated supper club than tearing the roof off a juke joint. For an album rife with tales of heartache, duplicity, and death threats, it’s positively brimming with bonhomie. And, hey, given all the shit-talking Keith did at Mick’s expense in his autobiography, Life, that audible camaraderie is something of a minor miracle in and of itself. On its own modest terms, Blue & Lonesome offers promising proof the Stones can still be a band instead of a brand.