41. The Rolling Stones, "Let It Bleed"

 



Yes.

The very first track on this mindblowingly great album is in fact "Gimme Shelter" and let me tell you a little story.  Soon after I procured by completely legal means my first car as a youth I went out for a drive in the country and had the windows down and the sunroof back and was just blasting this song as loud as my system could go and I have never felt more like the main character in a movie.  Absolutely one of the greatest songs in the history of rock.

Have you ever heard the isolated vocal tracks?  CHILLS.

So yeah I could do a whole blog post about that one song and I almost just did but there are so many other songs.  Recorded mostly through 1969 and released in November of that year, this album (temporarily) displaced Abbey Road from the number 1 slot, which, come on.  It's a ragged, country-blues-rock affair, expertly produced while still sounding like the lads were just sitting around and picked up some instruments and started to jam.  

I guess the other best-known song on this album is "You Can't Always Get What You Want" (hi again, Big Chill soundtrack), another one of the most famous songs of all time, an obviously gospel-influenced operatic seven-and-a-half minute triumph, a gloomy meditation on the yawning gulf between desire and reality.  The song charged back into our current nightmare reality when a certain disgraced former president habitually played it at his Nuremberg-for-Dummies rallies, despite repeated demands from the Stones that he stop.  It's a really, really odd choice for a political rally, unless you're the Nihilism Party, which I guess in a lot of ways fits now that I think about it.

As I have alluded to in the past, I have successfuly convinced more than one person that "Monkey Man," track 8, is objectively the Best Rock and Roll Song of all time.  It's hard to argue with!  That Keith Richards guitar riff, one of the many All Time riffs he's written, the spooky tinkling piano, Mick's snarling vocals and shrieking "I'M A MONKAAAAAAAAAAAAAY," god that shit delivers on every level.  

"Country Honk" is, of course, the stripped-down acoustic guitar and fiddle version of "Honky Tonk Women," the way Keef has said it was intended to be heard.  Now I think you can  make very strong arguments for both versions, this one and the full electric version that gets more airplay.  And there's the title track, which maybe you know as "We all need someone we can leeeen own."

I could just listen to this album all day, and have.

Is this album in my personal Top 100? Yes, yes, yes, one of the three Stones albums on there.

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