12/03/2020
The Rolling Stones...
“Let it Bleed” album released in 1969. Are you familiar with this incredible arrangement of songs all beautifully played with so much soul and fiery passion? There is not one weak song start to finish! It is a must have for the music lover’s collection...most definitely in the top 10. You know the one with the hamburger looking birthday cake and the LP on the cover. “Gimme Shelter”, “Love in Vain”, “Midnight Rambler”, and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” stand out in our music repertoires.
I was perusing through some of the Apple Music suggestions after I listened to some Paul McCartney and Wings where I was choosing some of my favorite songs to add to a compilation playlist for listening later at my leisure. It started with the Beatles “Rubber Soul” and ended up with “Helen Wheels” with everything inbetween.
Following some of the recommended bands one might like at the bottom based on what you were currently listening to, there was The Rolling Stones. One click to expand the albums they have produced over the span of their fifty plus careers, and there was It was. Let It Bleed. It was my very first Rolling Stones album to own and listen to until it was engrained into my soul...etched into my heart...burned into my memory. I think that sounds right? It is one of the few albums to have that effect on me. You know what I mean.
Well, oftentimes there are short commentaries on the band and/or the album chosen to queue up. I read them every chance I get finding them informative and always enlightening to some unique and off the wall event or piece of trivia you were unaware of regarding the band and the recording. The Let It Bleed short commentary truly caught my attention as I fell into a trance reading it start to finish with out even giving much thought. I was pulled in like a piece of metal to magnet.
See for yourself what you think about the Let It Bleed album by the Rollinng Stones. It is amazing to see how much a band’s compilation of songs reflects and encompasses the voice of a society in utter confusion and turmoil dealing with all the social and cultural changes occurring. It follows:
Calling 1969’s Let It Bleed the end of the 1960s ignored the obvious: If you’d been listening to The Rolling Stones, you knew that the ’60s—that mythical, innocent time of sexual liberation and social equity—had been over for years, if it’d existed at all. Yes, the free concert at Altamont Speedway in December—a day after the album’s release—was tragic: four dead, more injured, a moment of collective elation ruptured by panic, violence, and fear. But trace a line from “19th Nervous Breakdown” and “Paint It Black” through “Gimme Shelter” and you could already see a cultural order crumbling: the alienated youth (“Satisfaction”) and their duly alienated parents (“Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?”), the retreat into fantasy (Their Satanic Majesties Request) and the harsh boomerang back to earth (Beggars Banquet). As the writer Robert Christgau put it in 1972, people didn’t talk about Altamont because it ended the era, but because it offered a perfect metaphor for how that era’s end played out.
For as much as Let It Bleed is tied to “Gimme Shelter”—the brewing storms, the streets on fire, the portrait of a world at the edge of tipping—the album’s overall mood was sanguine and reassuring. Need someone to bleed on? Bleed on them. Didn’t get what you want? You might just get what you need. The confusion was clear: You could hear it in the sprawling arrangements (“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”), the violent visions (“Midnight Rambler”), in the way Jagger’s slurred voice roiled under the mix, an incoherent guide for incoherent times. Four years earlier, the band had become an emblem for rebellion, for hard stances, for “Satisfaction.” Time moved fast, and broke a few bones in the exchange—leave the real apocalypse to MC5 or The Stooges. You can’t control the ocean, Let It Bleed seemed to say. But you can have a pretty good time if you learn to ride the waves.
End commentary.
I know you are sitting there most informed and satisfied with learning of its significance and impact a generation and a nation at unrest. I bet your next step is to find your copy of Let It Bleed. You will most likely listen to it differently this time, and when you are through, it will have a whole new feeling about it. Aren’t you glad you revisited your copy of the nine songs from 1969?
The Good Doctor
Okay, so maybe it isn’t a hamburger looking cake after all. Then what the hell is it?
