Forty Licks Music

Average Rating:

The Stones songbook never sounded better than on this first collection to feature remastered hits from their entire catalog. How these guys evolved and even defined their musical times remains fascinating: "She's a Rainbow" is a tingling, well-executed trip, "Get Off My Cloud" flips off the world, "Angie" is incredibly gentle. In addition to the hits, there are four fine new songs here: "Keys to Your Love," "Stealing My Heart," "Don't Stop, and" "Losing My Touch." Forty years in, the Rolling Stones still own the best licks in rock 'n' roll, and they're proving it again here.

At long last it's here. Fans have been crying out for a proper Stones retrospective for aeons and, finally, the price is right for the respective record companies and 'Forty Licks' is the result. A double set, with the 60s Decca/ABKCO material on one album (plus 1971's 'Wild Horses') and everything post-'71 on the other, although the tracks aren't sequenced chronologically. All told 40 songs from four decades, including four new tracks.

Any an album that can boast 'Street Fighting Man', 'Gimme Shelter' and 'Satisfaction' as its opening three tracks is certainly onto a winner. Even though Mick Jagger's familiar pouting, snarling voice hurtles out from another place and another time, part of tracks that are now an integral part of our culture, it still sends shivers down the spine. Same goes for the opening chords, from 'Street Fighting Man's insistent, ringing acoustic opening to 'Gimme Shelter's menacing, serpent-like notes and, of course, the all-too familiar calling card of 'Satisfaction'.

The first album is as bulletproof a selection as you could want. From the breakneck cover of Buddy Holly's 'Not Fade Away', through the classic string of self-penned singles ('The Last Time', 'Satisfaction', 'Get Off Of My Cloud', '19th Nervous Breakdown', 'Paint It, Black') to the meltdown of 'Have You Seen Your Mother Baby?', this is the mid-60s documented in all its incense-scented, scandal-ridden, narcissistic glory.

That's the signal for the trip to get darker, though the provocative 'Let's Spend The Night Together' and the wistful beauty of 'Ruby Tuesday' proved that the band could still churn out incredible four-minute pop songs. Unsurprisingly, the nervous breakdown of a single that was 'We Love You', which documented their paranoid incarcerated summer of love, is omitted in favour of the light and airy 'She's A Rainbow'.

The second album also races out of the blocks, with the legendary riffs of 'Start Me Up' and 'Brown Sugar' followed by the disco shuffle of 'Miss You'. It's no secret what the Stones themselves consider their best albums of the later period, with 1978's 'Some Girls' getting three tracks, 1972's magnum opus 'Exile On Main Street' and 1994's semi-return to form 'Voodoo Lounge' two apiece.

Of the new tracks, 'Don't Stop' is a solid mid-paced rocker with a memorable chorus, the kind of single the Stones still seem able to churn out at will. But 'Keys To Your Love' and 'Stealing My Heart' are merely slight versions of what's gone before, the former with Jagger's falsetto vocal circa 1980-81 and the latter a countryfied ditty of the sort Sir Mick usually saves for his solo albums. Keith's 'Losing My Touch' is much better, though, the latest in a long line of slow-burning album closers he does so well.

As ever with compilations covering such a huge body of work, there are omissions - 'Little Red Rooster', 'Time Is On My Side', 'Rocks Off', 'All Down The Line' could have easily slotted in instead of the album tracks or a couple of the new ones. But to criticise a collection containing so many incredible songs would be churlish.

On the contrary, 'Forty Licks' exists as ample evidence that, away from the drugs, the women, the media manipulation, the huge stages filling one end of stadiums the world over, the Stones have got where they are because they've made music that has been, and will continue to be listened to and revered by generation after generation. Try as you might, you still can't lick 'em.

BIG DAN's OVERALL REVIEW: 9.8/10

So what to make of the rest? It's all amazing/five- star/timeless/epochal, of course, and it now takes first prize among Stones comps for being the only one to comprise hits from all phases of their forty-year (!) career. Forty licks for forty years, I suppose. I don't mind that the songs aren't in chronological order; some songs are very well placed in mood, sound or theme next to others. Overall, however, I tend to slightly prefer disc one (which covers the 1964-69 era) to disc two (1971-2002); songs like "Paint It Black", "Gimme Shelter", "Sympathy For The Devil" and "Satisfaction" have a real cultural importance to them, with the Jagger-Richards lyric team penning words just as cutting and insightful as their stratospheric rivals, Lennon-McCartney. Here we have by turns humorous and beguiling meditations on class, women, nihilism, individuality, commercialism, religion...and of course sex, drugs & rock'n'roll, that are colored by Brian Jones' eclectic fancy: the sitars, marimbas, fuzz guitars, Latin congas, tambouras, horns, strings, recorders and organs are integrated so fully into each track that they never seem like over-indulgent, trendy or superfluous additions.

Disc two contains many, many classics ("Start Me Up", "Miss You", "Brown Sugar", "Shattered", "Angie", etc) but these begin to sound increasingly written to order, and stay within well-defined boundaries the group set for itself sometime around 1970. The band could still pull an incisive lyric out of the hat when necessary, but for the most part as the 80s progressed you can hear the drastic degeneration of their sound leading up to the four new cuts. Now a dinosaur act still claiming supremacy as "the world's greatest rock'n'roll band", "Forty Licks" will still easily convince you of that label if you stick to the songs here which stem from 1964-81. What few 80s/90s tracks that are there range from decent ("Mixed Emotions") to embarrasing ("Anybody Seen My Baby" and a couple of the new songs), which only serves to point out that while The Beatles' breakup may have been timely in retrospect, The Stones have been rolling without real inspiration for some time now, which mildly hampers their overall status in comparison.

Finally, a word about the sound quality: it is outstanding and far better than any other CD (or in some cases, even vinyl) versions of these songs, although in a few cases I noticed that the mix was not quite the same as that used for the individual album remasters ("Ruby Tuesday", most notably, is sped up by fifteen seconds!). The sound alone makes this an essential purchase; when matched to the fact that it offers 35 or so definitive all-time classics from all stages of The Rolling Stones' unforgettable history, it becomes an absolute must even if you've heard those classics thousands of times over by now (and for those just getting into the group, this is a near-perfect primer; if only they'd solely stuck with the *hits* and
not bothered with any half-hearted "new" material, it would in fact be perfect). So crank the volume and groove to the ecstatic, trademark rhythms that permeate this collection, for they are the essence of rock'n'roll itself--and that's just for starters.