Do any of you think that when Ron Wood joined The Stones back in '76, that it was a turn for the worst for the band ever since? Obviously I am not speaking about financially, since that has clearly not affected the group in the very least. No, I am talking about the music. It became very stale and predictable to me. Keith has always said that he prefers playing with Ron more than anyone else and that he was the best guy for The Stones. Perhaps all that dope really did have an effect on Keith's brain and his way of thinking, yes? I mean the man is a mediocre guitar player(but so is Keith, or at least he has become one over the last 20 years).
Other than their guitar weaving on the gorgeous 'Beast Of Burden' from the 'Some Girls' album back in '78, they have made a very uninspiring and dull guitar combo throughout the many years since.
[Edited 1/29/07 23:20pm]

PurpleJam said:

it took many years before I figured out what I liked best about the Stones: Mick Taylor

No. Mick Jagger, in the last 20 some-odd years has.

SleezyG said:

No way! In the last 20 years, Jagger, with his relentless interest in new music and desire to stay contemporary, kept the band relatively fresh. If it were up to Keith Richards, The Stones would've turned into Status Quo thirty years ago. Richards was the "brains" behind Dirty Work and you know how THAT turned out.

As for Ron Wood "ruining the Stones". I'd say no. According to Glyn Johns, he was the worst thing that happened to the Stones and they to him. He brought them nothing they didn't already have (a Keith Richards-style guitar player), and they stifled his development as a guitarist. The band hired him because he got on with everyone and made everyone laugh. In short, Ronnie was their court jester. With Ron Wood they've made one great album (Some Girls), a very good one (Tattoo You), some good to average ones (Undercover, Steel Wheels, Emotional Rescue) and some average to poor ones - the rest. All that in thirty years.

Mick Taylor was a virtuoso who pushed the band to great heights. In his six years in the band, they made Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street, Goat's Head Soup and It's Only Rock'n'Roll. The latter is patchy, but has some sublime moments (Time Waits For No One, Fingerprint File). There are NO sublime musical moments on the Ron Wood albums, just great tunes.

Brian Jones - the musical polymath and, frankly, genius - had the same galvanising effect on the band too.

Ron Wood can't hold a candle to those two. He's good at what he does (particularly on the 2003 Licks tour), but he doesn't push the band.

He didn't destroy them. Jagger kept them moving forward, experimenting, staying relevant, their sound resolutely of its time but never out of time. This has resulted in none of their albums after Steel Wheels being anything you'd truly want to hear more than twice, but it's preferable to the kind of route they might have gone down if it was all down to Keith - basic rock n roll with dreadful reggae covers thrown in.
[Edited 1/30/07 9:14am]

carlcranshaw said:

He was better in The Faces than he ever was or will be in The Stones. Guitar-wise Wood's Keith's mirror image.

...


Apparently, Billy Preston called Shuggie Otis in the mid- 70's to tell him that the Rolling Stones were interested in Shuggie possibly replacing the departing Mick Taylor, but Shuggie politely declined. "I had my own group, my own label deal," Shuggie later recalled. "I just wanted to do what I wanted to do. I had my own identity." .

I wonder how that would have turned out...




...
[Edited 1/30/07 14:32pm]

The Stones meet Cher.

http://www.youtube.com/wa...1BAqpJJHg0

There's a thread on the Fender Forum about Mick Taylor as well. Here's Mick doing some great soloing with the Stones: http://www.youtube.com/wa...4oOmzFCQa8

Shapeshifter said:

Thank you!

Brian Jones will always be...



...the Rolling Stone.


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

Nope. Ronnie's great.

They had no where else to go but down after Begger's Banquet, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile... I mean, honestly - how do you top that?

NorthernLad said:

You don't top it, you evolve, you experiment, you branch out. Plenty of bands follow career peaks with more experimental work (The Beatles, The Who, Sly & The Family Stone, The Beach Boys, The Clash all spring to mind), but that wasn't for the Stones. The rot set in in 1972. Jagger actually admitted as much to Nick Kent in a 1978 interview, when he was asked why it had taken so long for The Stones to make a decent album again: "In 1972 I thought: "it's 1972, we've just made Exile on Main Street - fuck it!"".

In all fairness, The Stones DID experiment a little - on It's Only Rock N Roll and Black & Blue. They branched out into funk (successfully) and reggae (absolutely fucking laughably dire - is there a decent Stones reggae song? - NO! - The POLICE were better at it than they ever were).

Had they had another Mick Taylor or Brian Jones instead of Ronnie Wood, they would have made more than just one more great album in the last 35 years.

Shapeshifter said:

I agree with you 100%. Both Brian Jones and Mick Taylor brought incredible creativity to the group and were able to push them into more new and exciting musical directions. Jones with his great talent of pursuing and playing all kinds of different and exotic instruments to add much more texture to the group's sound. And Taylor with his amazing and virtuoso guitar skills that made them stay viable enough to continue into the seventies and especially live. Wood brought nothing but his cheerful and easy going demeanor to accomodate Richard's difficult and demanding pesonality. And without Jagger, Keith would have been continuely recycling his tired old Chuck Berry sound and guitar licks, with maybe one song deverting from the standard norm.
The fact that Keith considers the Ron Wood era to be the best years of The Stones entire carrear, makes me seriously question the man's musical taste and talent. Like I said before, maybe it was all that dope.

PurpleJam said:

Needless to say, I completely agree. Richards is massively overrated, as far as I'm concerned - especially these days, where he's heralded for being the only member of The Stones to still embody the "soul of rock 'n' roll". All bullshit. This, simply because he still drinks and - gosh! wow! - still smokes on stage. He looks ridiculous in his tin foil headbands, shirts straight out of the Dirty Work wardrobe and fishing tackle in his hair. Elton John actually said something true about him, calling him "an arthritic monkey, doing his best to look young". If The Stones got seriously dull after Undercover (which, album wise, they have, give or take a few songs - nearly all of them Jagger's), it's because he's the most musically conservative of them all. Ronnie Wood is his mirror image.

Slipping Away and Happy aside, Richards' solo contributions to Stones albums have been forgettable to fucking awful. And the only reason Talk Is Cheap remains the best solo Stones album by a long stretch is because he had a great co-writer and an absolutely awesome backing band, sweetened quite considerabky by Sarah Dash.

The Stones are only still rolling because of Jagger. And they can still cut it live (and on a good night, they're astounding) because of the understated, steady, unflappable engine that is Charlie Watts.
[Edited 1/31/07 3:01am]

And of course Brian introduced Jimi at Monterey.

To add a little more commentary about Brian Jones. Bob Dylan's 'Like A Rolling Stone' is widely believed to have been written about Mr. Jones, as was also Dylan's other classic song, 'Ballad Of A Thin Man'.

Jones was the first major rock casualty of the late sixties, even though his death is not talked about as much as the other artists' that were also lost from the rock world of the late sixties and early seventies(Hendrix,Joplin and Morrison). Coincidently, Jones was also age 27 when he died under mysterious circumstances in '69, as were the other three. I think that Cobain was also 27 when he took his own life in '94. What is it with the age of 27 and rock music?
[Edited 1/31/07 3:06am]
[Edited 1/31/07 3:07am]

Shapeshifter said:

The Stones always experimented, sometimes with dire results. Their quasi-psychedelic period in the wake of Revolver and Sgt. Peppers was laughable. With few exceptions, the best Stones work was done by staying close to the template that worked best with them.

Post-Exile, they haven't had a single amazing album, but they've had plenty of brilliant singles. The problem wasn't lack of experimentation, but laziness, arrogance, drugs, and - as you said - "the rot." Maybe you're right, and they needed another Mick Taylor or Brian Jones... for whatever reason they stopped making great albums. It was if as long as they had a couple killer tracks, they didn't mind recording a bunch of filler and hand in the album so they could get back to partying.

But I would say in reference to your Beatles comment - what was their peak? I don't see them having "peaked", and moved on and experimented. Every album from "Rubber Soul" onward was a different peak of its own, IMHO.

great thread people. Thanks for the education. You guys are sharp.

NorthernLad said:

Now, I'm not much of a Beatles fan (I get on the bandwagon around Magical Mystery) so I'm coming at this with half empty pockets, but "Revolver" is generally considered to be their best album - i.e: every one's a winner. They followed that up with "Sgt Pepper", "Magical Mystery Tour" (which I consider way superior to "Pepper", "The White Album" and that astonishing second half of "Abbey Road". "Pepper" was hugely experimental.

The Stones were at their most experimental with Brian Jones - and because of him. Although he was mostly reduced to crying in a corner in the studio during Sympathy For The Devil, I'd go so far as to say that Jagger - highly competitive - wouldn't have had the creative impetus to come up with a song that complex (either lyrically or musically), if Brian Jones hadn't lit the touchpaper.

If you read Nick Kent's book The Dark Stuff, he captures the post-Exile Stones very well, especially the 73-76 period, where Jagger was more interested in being a jetsetter than making music and Richards' life and talent were going to shit because of his heroin addiction. Like you, Kent thinks it was basically all over for The Stones creatively after 1972.

The Stones made one great album post-Taylor - "Some Girls". All but one song on it is killer (Lies is filler). There are reasons for this. Punk had threatened to make The Stones obsolete, Keith Richards was facing a twenty year stretch in prison, and Jagger had fallen in love with Jerry Hall (then engaged to Bryan Ferry), which all kicked Jagger into gear. They came up with close to 50 songs during the sessions. Of course you're right about their laziness, because they picked the first ten they completed to go on the album, instead of pushing the envelope a little bit further. Some Girls was, by and large, Jagger's album.

The closest they came to taking risks again was on "Undercover", with its dance-dub-rock hybrid (Jagger's vision, naturally; Keith Richards, the "spirit of rock n roll", contributed the massively dull "I Wanna Hold You" (lyrics: "I know you think it's fun-eeee/That I ain't got no mon-eee") and got into fights with Jagger), shallow, cartoonish lyrics (apart from the title track). But it was risk-taking with a safety net and a parachute. It was of its time and sounds very very dated now. And they didn't include "I Think I'm Going Mad" on it, which is one of their best late period ballads in my opinion.

Shapeshifter said:

Undercover was really a missed opportunity, IMHO. They had stumbled upon a perfect sound for them, and "Undercover of the Night" is arguably their finest single of the past 25 years. That being said, too much of the album is filler.

Maybe they thought they could just shamble into the studio, and the mere fact that they were The Rolling Stones would result in some sorta magic. I think at a certain point they began believing they didn't have to work for it, that there were invincible, that they could half-ass it and still folks would lap it up.

As for "Some Girls"... don't get me wrong, I like it, but it doesn't approach their finest work. I've always thought it was so highly rated because, in relation to the works immediately before and after it, it IS much better overall. To me, though, it's definitely in the 2nd tier. Not that a 2nd tier Stones album is a bad thing, by any means!!!

On a side note - I've always had a soft-spot for "Steel Wheels." I think overall it's a pretty solid record. I'd love for a nice reissue of "Steel Wheels", and hopefully it would include the 12" mix of "mixed emotions", which i've always liked

While I'm no Ronnie Wood/ Stones expert, I've always found that Wood's pre-Stones work with the Faces and Rod Stewart to be better than anything I've heard him do with the Stones. Artistically speaking, Wood joining the Stones turned out to be a big mistake for him imo.

Or maybe he knew he was getting burnt out by the mid-'70s anyway and didn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

I do agree tho that Mick Jagger seems to have been the main creative engine in the Stones in the last 30 years. When there has been any signs of creativity over those years, Mick was in the driving seat. Keef seems to have been more or less coasting on past glories for a long time now, tho if you ask a lot of famous rock/ blues rhythm guitarists of the last 40 years, they will probably name him as one of the gods.

NorthernLad said:

Steel Wheels is the last good Stones album, I think. Half of it really stands up. Half of it is throwaway.

It's ironic that you should mention it in the same breath as Some Girls becausae they're kindred albums - both essentially Jagger-engineered, both made after a creatively fallow period, both made at what seemed to be a breaking point for the band.

.

Miles said:

Ronnie was way better in The Faces. He was simply in awe of The Stones, despite the fact that Rod Stewart was - and still is - a way better singer than Jagger. Ronnie still IS in awe of The Stones.

Shapeshifter said:

i think people forget sometimes what a great rock vocalist Rod Stewart was at his peak.

NorthernLad said:

Rod Stewart was an incredible singer .... then he sold his soul and became the punchline in every bad joke about leopard skin trousers.

Shapeshifter said:

so true....

Shapeshifter said:

Certainly Rod was wonderful with the Faces and on his first solo records, but I still think Mick's the greatest white blues singer ever. The measurement I use in my head is this: would Rod have sounded good singing No Expectations, the greatest acoustic blues song the stones did by my reasoning, with the same arrangement? I think the answer is no, but I'm not the final authority on this, of course.

damosuzuki said:

I actually think Rod could have done a nice job on "No Expectations"... but it would have been a very different song.

The one I think he'd have more trouble with is Gimme Shelter... I just can't hear anybody but Mick singing that one!