In 1973, Goats Head Soup marked the end of the Stones’ imperial era, capturing them as they transitioned from the World’s Greatest Rock‘n’Roll Band to just a really good one.
In the period spanning 1968’s Beggars Banquet to 1972’s Exile on Main Street, the Rolling Stones’ title of “World’s Greatest Rock‘n’Roll Band” was less a boastful marketing slogan and more of a plainly self-evident job description. If the Stones started out as rambunctious kids with a press-hyped bad-boy image, by the turn of the ‘70s, the band had acquired a truly sinister aura, the kind of malevolence that had amassed rap sheets, body counts, and iconoclastic admirers eager to feed off their black magic. Not only had the Stones outlasted their rivals in The Beatles, they had become a band that could seemingly do no wrong, even when they were doing things that were very wrong.
But if Exile on Main Street represented a seance-like communion with their most sacred old-school influences (blues, gospel, country), Goats Head Soup was where the spell was broken and the Stones had to contend with the fact that they were a veteran band entering their second decade amid a rapidly changing musical landscape. Glam rock was setting new standards for provocation and transgression, while the fiercest, grittiest street music was coming from the world of funk. So on Goats Head Soup, the Stones landed somewhere between the New York Dolls and Isaac Hayes, straining to push themselves to new heights of campy outrageousness while seriously engaging with the contemporary Black music of the day in a way that would have a lasting effect on their rhythmic DNA.
Even though work on Goats Head Soup began with producer Jimmy Miller mere months after Exile wrapped up, the conditions of their creations couldn’t have been more different. Exile may have been famously been recorded in the humid, moldy basement of Keith Richards’ French villa, but those extreme conditions created a sense of freewheeling, all-in camaraderie that—for all its heroin-hazy atmosphere—exuded a genuine sense of joy, an all-night bender where everyone’s wine glasses are overflowing and so are the toilets. Goats Head Soup was a far more disjointed experience, its recording locations—Kingston, London, Los Angeles—indicative of a band that was starting to drift apart.
Following his marriage to Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías, Mick Jagger was becoming the toast of the society pages and firming up his place in the A-list celebrity establishment; Keith Richards, by contrast, was holing himself up in a Swiss rehab clinic to put the brakes on a worsening heroin habit. As a result, the once-telepathic songwriting team of Jagger-Richards was becoming more like Jagger-or-Richards. “I think Mick and I were a little dried up after Exile,” Richards wrote in his memoir, Life. “After Exile, such a beautifully set up list of songs that all seemed to go together, it was difficult for us to get that tightness again.” So, true to its title, Goats Head Soup became something of a potluck where each threw their random ideas into the cauldron in the hope they’d blend into something palatable.
As Jagger recently quipped to Rolling Stone, Goats Heads Soup may be the first album recorded in Jamaica to include “not the slightest influence of reggae on any of the tracks.” But while that may be true on a superficial level, the record is definitely running on island time, as the band casually wade through the piano-blues romp “Hide Your Love” and the Funkadelic-style swamp-soul chant “Can You Hear the Music” with a palpable lack of urgency. And coming off Exile’s rip-this-joint energy, the rave-ups on Goats Heads Soup can’t help but feel a little staid: “Silver Train” steadily rolls on the same track as Exile’s superior “All Down the Line,” while the X-rated lyrics of “Star Star” (a.k.a. “Starfucker,” a.k.a. the Stones’ raunchiest song this side of “Some Girls”) seem to be overcompensating for its basic “Roll Over Beethoven” backbeat. On tracks like these, we hear The World’s Greatest Rock‘n’Roll Band settling for just being a pretty good one, the menacing shit-kickers of old curdling into good-timey toe-tappers. Even when Jagger summons his old friend Lucifer via the deliciously evil voodoo riff of “Dancing With Mr. D,” he ends up closer to “Monster Mash” than “Sympathy for the Devil,” trading in that song’s politicized fury for puerile B-movie graveyard hijinks.
However, Goats Head Soup’s best tracks are so good, they not only carry the album, they make it sound like nothing else in the Stones’ catalog. While the lurid urban-crime narratives of “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)” read more like TV Guide cop-show synopses than probing social commentary, the combination of Jagger’s raging vocal, Billy Preston’s apocalyptic clavinet riff, and a hair-raising brass refrain give the song an unmatched intensity among Stones singles of the era. (The obvious influence of blaxploitation funk would also loosen up the group for their oncoming disco years.) And if the mid-’70s may not have been a peak for the Stones as a rock band, it was a golden period for Stones ballads, as heralded by the still-sumptuous “Angie,” which is arguably both the most genteel and desperate song in their canon, and the mold from which future tearjerkers like “If You Really Want to Be My Friend,” “Memory Motel,” and “Fool to Cry” would be cast.
But it’s a pair of album cuts, each tucked into the No. 3 position on their respective sides, that makes Goats Head Soup worthy of classic status, despite the album’s flaws. Richards’ countrified reverie “Coming Down Again” is the sobering counterpoint to Exile’s saloon-door swinger “Torn & Frayed,” as if he were surveying the scene of that album’s basement bacchanalia the morning after, wondering, “Where are all my friends?” Even better is the exquisite “Winter,” a dazed daydream of a song where Jagger’s uncannily Van Morrison-esque vocal is left to float atop Mick Taylor’s snowdrift guitars and swirls of regal orchestration. For all their stylistic fluidity, the Stones have always been a verse/chorus/verse kinda band, but “Winter” is a rare moment where they put feeling over form, letting themselves unravel in elegantly wasted fashion. When you think of the many bands who’ve channeled the disheveled spirit of ‘70s Stones—Primal Scream, The Replacements, early Wilco—the target was usually Exile on Main Street, but in their own beautifully damaged ways, they wound up a lot closer to Goats Head Soup.
This record features another excellent ballad that has thus far gone unmentioned here—because, on the album proper, it’s trapped inside a rambling, clavinet-powered arrangement that tries to pass it off as a soul-funk workout. But “100 Years Ago” always seemed like a song that deserved a better fate, and the outtakes disc in this deluxe reissue does it justice through a raw, utterly compelling piano demo that anticipates the stark, ivory-pounding punk romanticism of Patti Smith. It’s no overstatement to say that, had the song been originally released in this form, it’d be considered a classic of the period. But its inclusion here highlights just how much tinkering and second-guessing went into Goats Heads Soup, as does a looser alternate take of “Dancing With Mr. D” that sounds like it was cut by Neil Young and the Stray Gators.
The Goats Head sessions famously yielded songs that wouldn’t surface until 1981’s Tattoo You; those demos aren’t featured here, but we do get three previously unreleased tracks that suggest the record could’ve gone in an entirely different, more party-hearty direction. While the jolly “All the Rage” verges on cruise-ship-commercial frivolity, “Criss Cross” is the sort of cowbell-clanging boogie that Royal Trux spent half of their existence chasing, and the Jimmy Page-assisted “Scarlet” poses a question—what if the Stones decided to groove more like Zeppelin?—that would go unanswered until the second Black Crowes album.
If these Goats Heads Soup rarities betray the album’s indecisive, scatterbrained origins, the reissue’s third disc—an oft-bootlegged but greatly enhanced recording of a Brussels show from October ’73—finds the Stones still very much at the top of their game as a live act. In sharp contrast to the rough ‘n’ tough 1970 live set, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, the Brussels concert sounds like it could’ve been recorded earlier this year—and that says as much about the pristine remastering job as how well it captures the Stones’ mid-’70s transformation into the crowd-pleasing, showbiz-savvy revue that would top Forbes music-biz listicles for decades to come. The extended sax solo on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” the call-and-response crowd participation on “Midnight Rambler,” the breakneck, scribble-outside-the-lines jamming on “Street Fighting Man”—this is a document of the Stones’ arena-rock playbook being written in real time.
Tellingly, the Stones sequester the selections from Goats Head Soup together into a four-song mini-set, as if they needed protection from seasoned warhorses like “Gimme Shelter” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” By the end of their 1975 tour, only one (“Star Star”) remained, and by the time of their 1981 stadium jaunt, practically any trace of Goats Head Soup had been erased from the setlist. This would suggest Goats Head Soup’s true significance is that it marked the moment where a new Rolling Stones record ceased to be a game-changing cultural event, and more like a fresh pile of coal shoveled into the engine room to keep the show on the road. But if Goats Head Soup revealed the first real chinks in the Stones’ armor, its eternally wounded ballads turned that fallibility into a virtue. Ultimately, Goats Head Soup remains fascinating for how it makes the Stones seem a little less mythical and a lot more real.
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