'Goats Head Soup' Never Had a Chance to Be a Good Rolling Stones Album
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So let’s just get this out of the way: Goats Head Soup—the 1973 Rolling Stones album being reissued as a box set this week—isn’t a very good album.
Maybe it never had a chance. Between December 1968 and May 1972, the Stones had one of the greatest runs in rock & roll history, releasing four magnificent records—Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main St.—in rapid succession. They had persevered through the death of Brian Jones and the disaster of Altamont. The flash and excess of their 1972 American tour was documented in Robert Frank’s underground film Cocksucker Blues. Keith Richards was descending deeper into a drug haze, while Mick Jagger had married the glamorous Bianca Perez-Mora Macias and embraced the jet-set lifestyle.
So when they gathered in late 1972 in Jamaica—one of the only countries that would still allow the group inside its borders—to get back to work, it’s no surprise that the Stones were exhausted and uninspired. Sessions at Kingston’s reggae mecca Dynamic Sounds studio were followed by on-the-fly recordings in LA and London, resulting in the ten songs on Goats Head Soup, which Richards would later call “a marking-time album.” Guitarist Mick Taylor described it as “a weak album…a bit directionless,” while engineer Andy Johns blamed the drugs: “People were accepting things perhaps that weren't up to standard because they were a little higher than normal.”
Almost fifty years later, the album’s strongest tracks by far remain its ballads, offering a convincing sense of the hangover the band (and the world) felt from the previous whirlwind years—“Winter,” “Coming Down Again,” and the Number One hit “Angie,” the one song here that would become a standard for the band moving forward. The album’s rockers—“Dancing with Mr. D,” “Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker),” and “Star Star” (better known as “Starfucker,” though their label nixed that title)—are rote nibbles at the dark corners of death, sleazy sex, and urban decay that previously made the band feel genuinely dangerous. It marked the moment the band stopped simply being the Rolling Stones and started playing the part of “The Stones.”
“There is a sadness about the Stones now, because they amount to such an enormous So what?,” wrote the notorious critic Lester Bangs in Creem magazine. “The sadness comes when you measure not just one album, but the whole sense they're putting across now against what they once meant.”
None of which inherently makes the prospect of a Goats Head Soup box set any less interesting. I love this band, and believe that any of their major albums, good or bad, is important enough to re-examine in depth. In truth, a serious look at a flawed project should be more valuable than a simple confirmation that a great album is great (see last year’s Dead Man’s Pop box from the Replacements, a deep dive into the sessions that resulted in their problematic 1989 album Don’t Tell a Soul.) Extravagant, multi-disc reissues, with new mixes and hardbound books and bonus knick-knacks, are the final bastion of physical music releases that anyone (even a limited audience of superfans) might actually buy, and they’re easy to mock as desperate grabs for cash, but when they’re done well, they can help connect some of the dots in essential music history.
The Goat’s Head Soup release is available in multiple formats—a single disc of the album given a brightened-up new mix by Giles Martin, who has overseen all the recent Beatles box sets; a two-disc set with outtakes and remixes—but it’s hard to imagine anyone interested in this project who won’t end up springing for the full three-CD-plus-one-Blu-Ray “Super Deluxe” box (price tag $149.98, or $107.99 on vinyl), which includes the oft-bootlegged 1973 concert long known as Brussels Affair. This show (which was released digitally in 2012 as part of the Stones’ “official bootleg” series) is celebrated by fans for a reason; the band is absolutely on fire. Epic versions of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Midnight Rambler” are breathtaking, and the Exile on Main St. songs are blistering. Ironically, though, when they play four songs in a row from Goats Head Soup midway through the set, it’s immediately evident that this material just isn’t up to the songs that surround it.
The best box sets provide thoughtful insight into a chapter of an artist or band’s career. Last year’s Prince 1999 set, though it flirted with bloat at six discs, allowed listeners to hear the various avenues he explored during the making of that breakthrough album, the roads not taken, the decisions made and experiments abandoned that led to the final release.
Goats Head Soup [4LP Super Deluxe Box Set]
This can even be true for a terrible album. Bob Dylan’s Another Self Portrait (part of his endlessly revelatory “Bootleg Series”) reconsidered 1970’s Self Portrait, generally dismissed as the worst record of his career. By expanding the lens to look at all the music he recorded between1969 and 1971, including songs that wound up on the albums before and after Self Portrait, it framed the reviled record in a new way—risking revisionist history for sure, and probably not redeeming the final product, but providing context, letting us think about why Dylan made the choices he did throughout this musical era and how it ultimately fit in the wider scope of his work.
Goat’s Head Soup offered a comparable opportunity. The liner notes emphasize the dozens of outtakes from the sessions; several songs were attempted that eventually wound up on later Stones albums, including “Tops” and “Waiting on a Friend.” Those aren’t here, though; instead we get four versions of both “Dancing with Mr. D” and “Heartbreaker” (the new mixes, early 1973 mixes, instrumental takes, and the live renditions in Brussels).
In a couple of recent interviews, Mick Jagger has expressed his resistance to plumbing the archives for unreleased material; he said that his general feeling is “Oh, no…things that you didn’t like and didn’t finish!,” and elsewhere added that his initial reaction is that they’re “useless” and “terrible.” But this kind of project shouldn’t be about quality control—fans understand that outtakes are outtakes for a reason; they just want to get further inside a favorite artist’s creative history and process.
The most newsworthy inclusion on the box, meanwhile, is “Scarlet,” an impromptu jam with Jimmy Page; it’s a ragged, slicing groove, and it has nothing to do with this album—it was recorded in late 1974, not just after Goats Head Soup was released, but after the Stones had finished their next album, It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll. Huh? The strongest of the previously unreleased songs is a newly touched-up version “All the Rage” (long rumored/bootlegged under the title “You Should Have Seen Her Ass”), which breaks no new ground but, despite an overwrought Jagger vocal, delivers the kind of swaggering rave-up that the Stones do better than anyone.
The best hint of the direction the Stones could have taken with this collection is the “piano demo” of “100 Years Ago,” with a yearning and sentimental performance from Jagger, and minus the high-flying Taylor solo, funk keyboards, and horn section that always felt grafted onto this simple and affecting song. It makes me hear the song in a different way, and it’s a rare indication that the real disappointment of this box set isn’t that it can’t convince us to love Goats Head Soup, but that it doesn’t seem to have anything new to say about it—other than to buy the damn thing one more time.
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