50 yrs and counting: Rolling Stones's 'Let It Bleed' continues to rule charts, hearts

Since Mick Jagger’s heart surgery in April and subsequent recovery, the Rolling Stones have been on our minds — and in our headlines. The fact that they are in top-notch performing form in their ongoing ‘No Filter’ tour in the US, selling out stadia after stadia, is astonishing and worthy of our hat tips by itself. But what the greatest rock’n’roll band does not need is to become patron saints of longevity. That would be like celebrating Jimi Hendrix for playing guitar with his teeth.

The Stones’ lighthouse is, indeed, a thing to behold. But at the centre lies the light from the lighthouse: Their music. Once again, I was locked and loaded last week on to what I have considered their greatest album, their 1969 masterpiece 'Let It Bleed', which was recorded exactly 50 years ago as we shut up and listen to it today.

What marks it from the other contenders for the prize of greatest Rolling Stones album —1971’s 'Sticky Fingers' and 1973’s 'Exile on Main Street' — is its deceptively hang-dog viciousness. It is a veritable sonic assault. Nothing to my mind in music matches up to the billowing storm that lands Gimme Shelter as the first track. It’s a violent song, conjured up by Keith Richards as a riff, a son-of-a-strum growing up to capture all the damage and release of the world.




Love in Vain has Jagger do plaintive to Richards’s countrymusik, while Country Honk — the un-countryised version had appeared a few months ago as the percussion bangs-galore single Honky Tonk Women — is high hick, before the city slick jive of 'Live With Me', its blistering pace kept by Charlie Watts like a rope holding up a bank hold-up. The title track is a wry gum chewed and stretched out: “Yeah, we all need/Someone/We can dream on/And if you want it baby/You can dream on me.” 'Midnight Rambler' is an astonishing track that start-stops three times, coming back through whiplash guitar skids from Richards, stops to a standstill and finally crashes through. All the while threatening to ‘Smash down all your plate glass windows/Put my fist through your stairway doors.”

Richards’s interlude 'You Got the Silver' is a Hank Williams-style blues whose potency as a love song lies in its cracked leather surface. 'Monkey Man', with its chandelier-tinkling piano start, has Jagger bringing out 1969 and its happy desecration of all the shiny-hippie joss-stick and peace bollocks that preceded it with a liceridden romp. The end, as it turns out, is the choral shining light with a wink: “You can’t always get what you want/But if you try sometime you find/You get what you need.” If you think that’s St. Mick being inspirational under a halo, hold that thought. You’ll come out of the song wiser knowing it’s a song of sanction for grab-and-run.

'Let It Bleed' marks the nodal point from where the Stones’s greatness and grandeur gush out from. To hear these songs from half-a-century ago come one after the other like a pack of wolves changing midstream into a pack of bulls, changing into a pack of cards, into a pack of Stones, is worth every alone time with music in the world.



(The writer has relatively clean ears and plays his music loud.)