So yesterday I posted up a list of all the Rolling Stones studio albums, ranking them from worst to best. I thank all of you for your comments (and several of you for pointing out my innocent Some Girls error). I still struggle with that list, I know it isn’t right. But I’m going to leave it, and now the internet has access to it. Yay. Which leads me to…
All The Rolling Stones… Part 2
As a result of all of this Stones ranking business, I was thinking that I don’t have enough Stones in my car player. Sure, I have them all on my iPod but I’m not always the most organized person and I often forget it at home. My crappy old cell phone doesn’t hold much music, because 1) it’s crappy and old, and 2) usually my phone is full of cute pictures of my kids.
So I thought I’d do the time-honoured thing and burn a couple of CD-Rs containing all of the studio albums (my car’s CD player accepts MP3 discs wahoo!). I left out hits sets and live records, same as my rankings list. For the record, iTunes tells me I have 63 albums, 787 songs that would take 51 hours and 18 minutes to play it all. Yes, that’s a lot of duplication (hits sets, etc), but still. That’s just a little bit of Stones! Ain’t life grand!
As to why I hadn’t made discs like this already is beyond me. It was high time (an appropriate use of terms, with this band), so I’m glad this project instigated their creation. Anyway, I burn all of my MP3s at 128 kbps, for reasons I’m sure I’ve already stated in these pages. But even at that low bit rate, something interesting happened. Let’s have a look:
CD-R #1: 1964-1974 (10 years)
15 albums. Well, 14 albums and the Jamming With Edward disc (not included in the rankings list), which I included anyway because awesome. Everything from England’s Newest Hitmakers through to It’s Only Rock ’n Roll. Oh, plus Honky Tonk Women off Hot Rocks, and three otherwise unreleased tracks off Flowers (shhh!). I’m sure I forgot stuff, but this is way more than anyone needs to get their Rocks Off (see what I did there?). As you can imagine, this is one helluva fucking disc. I recommend you all make such a disc.
CD-R #2: 1975-2015 (40 years)
10 albums, everything from Black And Blue through to A Bigger Bang. Oh, plus Metamorphosis, simply because that’s almost all different stuff (even if a lot of it was only one or two players here or there), and the extra new tracks from Forty Licks and Grrr! (shhhh!). A lot of people might pull one or two albums from this pile and skip the rest. Not me. I still like it all, some less than others, but so what? There’s still a metric shit-ton of good stuff here.
In Sum:
I think these are going to go very well in the car. Very well indeed. And the kids will get an excellent chronological education of one of the world’s greatest rock and roll bands, too!
Interesting to note:
CD-R #1: 10 years, 15 albums
CD-R #2: 40 years, 10 albums
I find myself constantly wondering what would have happened if drugs, egos and all the other bullshit hadn’t gotten in the way. Sure, they couldn’t have mainained pace for 50 years like they did in their first 10 years, but imagine if they’d been able to get their act together, work together and make more records more often! Imagine how much more music we’d have! The mind boggles.
keepsmealive 
I blame Jagger. Or Sir Mick. Whatever he is these days. Everything I read points to him becoming way too focussed on himself as some sort of brand. It’s been 9 years since A Bigger Bang … 9 years! I’d read not long before Doom and Gloom (awesome!) they wanted to get together to make an album, but Mick instead wanted to focus on that SuperHeavy thing. Have you heard that? I mean, good grief!
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Ha he was probably trying to get into Joss Stone’s pants. Anyway, they’re all guilty of massive ego, and perhaps rightly so (who knows?), but they’re just not all as vocal about it as Mick (and sometimes Keef) is. Ach well, it is what it is at this point. No going back, now, but I know what I would have told them around 1975 or so.
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I’m with Ya Mike on this as well in regards to the Stones not wanting to do a full album. Like why? BUT I still love Doom And Gloom!
Having said that I guess bands creative wells do finally dry up at a certain point. Look at VH as they dipped into the reserve big time for A Different Kind Of Truth which for them was the right move!
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LOVED Doom and Gloom.
But hearing some artists speak, they say they don’t get no satisfaction from albums anymore. They work a year writing…recording…choosing artwork…doing videos…and then 5600 people buy the CD in the first week. I’m sure many artists say, “Well fuck! What was the point of this if nobody is going to listen to it?” Paul Stanley has said that many times, so has Gene.
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I dunno man, I see it the opposite way. A band like the Stones, for whatever else they are, they’re a blues band playing rock and roll. And they’re damn good at it, with a sound all their own. If they had just kept their heads (instead of being Out Of them) and just steadily kept playing, they could’ve done an album every couple of years, maybe three, and just toured when they wanted and JUST KEPT PLAYING. Who cares if few people buy the record, it’s the live experience that nails it, with them, and people would come. They don’t need money from record sales to survive, and haven’t for decades. But as for being creative people…
It’s like a muscle. If you don’t use it, you will lose it. It needs regular attention. And that’s why people stopped caring about their records and started making jokes about their age instead. They left it too long, they lost their edge and let go of what made them so damn cool in the first place. They wasted SO much time and for no reason.
You ask me, they should’ve been playing every place that would have them, and putting out blues-infused records every so often and just living it up without giving a toss what people thought because that’s how they’re built.
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Yeah you know what, I think you’re right. The muscle comment…like Deep Purple keep going, people see them differently than the Stones. They’re out there every year doing something new. Yeah I get it.
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Purple, yes. The Stones became stadium cariacatures of themselves instead of being the vital, involved and still creating machine they should have been all along. Not to knock the new stuff, I like it. I’m just saying it’s too few and far between. They oughta be everywhere, down and dirty. And at this age, people would embrace stripped down blues records. You know they could do it, knock them out every two years and people would salivate. Ah well, they made their millions.
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I think most bands naturally slow down over the years. Look at Maiden. First five years? Five albums. Last five years? One. Same with Kiss. First 10 years of Kiss is like…what, 15 albums? Last 10 years – two albums. It’s just getting up there in years and things changing. Albums haven’t meant what they used to mean in about 15 years…I doubt the Stones have any motivation to create a new album at this stage.
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