Rolling Stones, ‘It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll’ (11/27/74)

They may not be the “Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band In the World,” but there never was a rock ‘n’ roll band worth half as much. What can you say about a band that’s been wrestling with its audience for ten years and still hasn’t been pinned? Ten years at the top, mind you? You can catch a revival of The T.A.M.I. Show, the ’65 rock extrava­ganza that showcased third-rate Beatle imitators, Chuck Berry, Motown groups, Leslie Gore, Jan & Dean, James Brown, and five kids who called themselves the Rolling Stones. Whose performance stands up across those years, still jumping off the screen full of shock and surprise, no excuses, THIS IS IT, TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT? James Brown and the Stones. It’s not easy to believe they were that good.

Ten years gone, a new album. Every cut matters. I detested the single on the radio but here it just sings off “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg” and makes it home. There are no grand statements these days—no “Sympa­thy for the Devil,” no “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”—the meaning of the music is as simple as a song title—“Time waits for no one… and it won’t wait for me”—and as complex as the sense you get from the record that “the Rolling Stones” might be the richest image we’ve got. A pose, of course, that image—some­times startling and dangerous, and sometimes merely fey, but a pose that drops away as soon as you’re ready to accept and dismiss it—leaving you with a little drama of struggle for what you want that you recognize instantly—and deeply.

Take their number “Luxury,” for one. It comes on as if the Stones are trying to cash in on reggae—the pose—but by the time it’s halfway done what it really sounds like is a reggae band playing like Stones. The chords that seemed copped in the first minute are magical by the third—there isn’t a group in the world that can play like this.

The fake accent Mick begins with dissolves, and you hear a man singing. His outrage and resentment (he’s a poor Jamaican working seven days a week in an oil refinery), so contrived in the first verse, is completely real by the time he’s through with you (he’s a hard-working rock star but his wife is bleeding him dry). “All the rum I want to drink it,” he yells—“I’ve got responsibilities!” And how could you argue with that?

Quick, punchy, straight-ahead and twisted, lyrical and utterly honest in the shrug-of-a-shoulder manner the Stones nailed down so long ago, the Stones have made the best album of 1974. One more time, they offer just a grin and a mystery; one step ahead of the devil, they beat it on down the line again.