It's All Over Now (Rolling Stones)

Little Steven played it on his satellite radio show this morning (when we were, on an unrelated note, driving through Hope, Arkansas, birthplace of the 42nd president). I tuned in partway through his introduction, but I believe he was saying it was recorded at Chess Studios. He said Muddy Waters helped the Stones carry in their gear.

The track’s got a pretty bad guitar solo. It’s not completely without charm, certainly has youthful exuberance, and I’m sure plenty of Rolling Stone fanboys would argue for it actually being ‘note-perfect’ or some other such nonsense. But I couldn’t help but think of the swagger and assuredness the regular Chess Studio denizens possessed (the Chess grand masters, as it were) and wish one of them had taken a crack at it instead. Also on the negative side of the ledger, the five or ten second intro is worse than the guitar solo. It’s all washed out, incredibly dated sounding, and almost enough to make me switch the station before the song kicks in. There are, after all, a couple hundred stations on this thing,. No need to linger.

But I’m glad I didn’t, cause those two complains notwithstanding it is a pretty good little rocker. It’s a cover, but just like when you’re listening to covers the Beatles recorded early on, you can hear why the band became huge. Other bands undoubtedly could have played it better, but the Stones play it exactly how you want to hear it. Of course, this could be revisionist history, they’re playing it the way the following 40 years of pop music have trained my ear to want to hear it. But I don’t think it’s just that. Despite the subpar guitar break, and despite the best efforts of the engineer to fuck it up in the mix, and despite the fact that they reportedly recorded this and 14 other tracks in two days (maybe partly because of that last one), it is as alive and direct as any recorded music. That swagger missing in the lead guitar is in abundance most everywhere else.

What struck me most, though, was how good Mick Jagger sounded. It’s hard to remember that he really was a great singer. He’s like Dylan in that way. It’s like they both listened to their own records too much, and started doing cheap imitations of themselves. Taking the quirks that gave their voices character and bringing them to the front, until the real substance was near buried. On their early records they’re among my favorite vocalists, but it’s not long before they sound like caricatures of themselves.