The Rolling Stones - Goats Head Soup

Goats Head Soup  COC-59101

Released 1973

Dancing With Mr. D
100 Years Ago
Coming Down Again
Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)
Angie
Silver Train
Hide Your Love
Winter
Can You Hear The Music
Star Star

"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. We hadn't been in the studio for a year. But we had some good ideas. "Coming Down Again", "Angie", "Starfucker", "Heartbreaker". I enjoyed making it. Our way of doing things changed while we were recording it, and slowly I became more and more Jamaican, to the point where I didn't leave.'" (Keith Richards, 2010)

Once upon a time, if you'da asked me to rate Goats Head Soup I'd have said it sucked.  One of their worst.  The beginning of the end.  The only copy I ever owned was one i picked up for $1 at a garage sale.  The inner sleeve had been lost, replaced with one from a Hot Tuna album.  It was scratched.  But it had a couple good songs I wanted for the post-Exile Stones comp which I've made and remade many times, always with different track listings.  

Fast-forward to the 00's, and I'm now burning my Stones comp to CD, rather than cassette.  So I get hold of the lesser albums from the library, rip them, and start building my comp from the tracks.

And here, in my late 30's, I discover that, while It's Only Rock and Roll and Black and Blue yield only some tracks (actually, most of Only is pretty good), I really wanted all of Goats Head.  Even the duff tracks.  

"Dancing With Mr. D" - much maligned, I dig it.  Keef's guitar uncoiling the song like a snake (is it really any sillier than the Stones other horror-movie songs?  I think not).  The Stones were always assimilating whatever was going on in the musical world around them, inhaling it and exhaling it, Stones-ified.  They've been doing it since the beginning, taking in The Beatles, Merseybeat, Dylan, Motown, Stax, psychedelia, the Velvets, The Band in the 60's.  In the 70's (and since), they just kept it up.  Goats Head is one big inhale/exhale.  "Mr. D" is Alice Cooper country - but it's all Stones, down to the "Sympathy"-style whoops in the background and Mick's street violence lyrics.  Hidin' in a corner in New York City/Lookin' down a .44 in West Virginny.

It's a slow album.  Even the rockers are slow.  "Dancing" is slinky, not manic.  It gives way to "100 Years Ago", which illustrates another ish.  It's a patchwork song.  Part Band-ish, loping roots, then country lilt on the bridge ("call me ... lazybones"), then veering into a Billy Preston-led jam before falling back to earth.  It's all longing and regret: 

Now all my friends is wearing worried smiles, Living out a dream of what they was; Don't you think it's sometimes wise not to grow up?
Went out walkin' through the wood the other day; Can't you see the furrows in my forehead? What tender days, we had no secrets hid away

Good stuff, and easy to miss, buried in the murk and haze of the album's sound.  Mick has rarely before or since sounded so vulnerable.  

Then Keef answers him.  "Coming Down Again", a lugubrious soul ballad, sung by Mr. No-Sleep, with some gentle backing vocals from Mick ("sky fallin' down").  More regrets.  "Slipped my tongue in someone else's pie; Tasting better ev'ry time;He turned green and tried to make me cry; Being hungry, it ain't no crime."  Was this the story of the Brian-Anita-Keef triangle? 

Things pick up speed.  "Heartbreaker" kicks in with crashing electric piano chords and "Bitch" style horns.  More violence, drugs, New York streets.  Another .44.  Mick in social protest mode - which isn't his strongest.  But the music kicks hard - its the one Stones classic on the record.

"Angie" - the big hit and the big ballad.  Ack!  I used to hate this one, too.  Despite Mick's affected vocal, now I find it affecting.  The air of regret and sadness continues.  The strings work.

Side Two is where things start to break down.  "Silver Train", a loping blues-rocker about a prostitute, with shining Mick Taylor slide.  "Train" seems to be a minor fave of Stones fans (frequently covered), maybe cause its the closest to Stones 101 this album gets.

What's left is one minor classic, two basically filler jams (with interesting qualities), and one Chuck Berry-style rocker that many adore.  The jams are "Hide Your Love", a loping Jimmy Reed on quaaludes blues that sounds fine but never goes anywhere, and the more intriguing "Can You Hear The Music", an odd bit of ethno-musical wandering, shimmering Latin/African/who knows flashing around - the whole track seems to emerge from a strange, drug-fueled haze.  Or enter one.  It doesn't go anywhere, either, but its a fun trip.    The rocker is "Star Star" aka "Starfucker".  This one's much loved by Stonesophiles, mainly cause Mick says "fucker" repeatedly on the chorus.  Me, I've always gone for "honey I miss your two-tone kisses, legs wrapped around me tight/If I ever get back to Fun City girl, gonna make you scream all night".  It also has some of the dirtiest lyrics in the whole Stones catalog (which is saying a LOT!).  But it's no masterpiece.  

In between all this, comes "Winter".  And that's not a masterpiece, either.  But its close.  Very much in the "Moonlight Mile" mode (my favorite Stones ballad).  Strummed open chords.  It's sure, been a long, long winter.  And Mick rolls out his tale of longing and loneliness (on an album loaded with regret and remorse).  


And I wish I'd been out in California 
When the lights on all the Christmas trees went out 
But I been burnin' my bell, book and candle 
And the restoration plays have all gone 'round 

Goats Head may be the least of the Jimmy Miller-era (i.e. the Golden Age) of Stones albums.  It may be lacking in top-of-the-line material.  But its a statement of how strong the band was at that moment that an album of lesser material resonates as powerfully as this.  I keep coming back to it, again and again.  That's a sign.

David + David - Boomtown

Boomtown  A&M SP-5134 

Released 1986

Welcome To The Boomtown
Swallowed By The Cracks
Ain't So Easy
Being Alone Together
A Rock For The Forgotten
River's Gonna Rise
Swimming In The Ocean
All Alone In The Big City
Heroes

"We didn't play a single show until after the record came out, ... I still don't know what happened. I was in a lot of trouble with a lot of different things and I was engaged in this 'young guy catharsis' thing. It was a couple of screw-ups in someone's bedroom with a portastudio, that's all it was.  And talk about an unlikely duo, I was wrestling with paranoia and depression, and he was essentially agoraphobic. One day I was looking at 15 years in prison and he was a set painter at a movie studio, and the next we're being asked our opinion on world events. Both of us were freaked. It was like 'What happened?'". (David Baerwald, 2002)

For me it all started with this girl.  
See, I met her at the barn we had down here in the 80's called One Step Beyond.  It was too big and had lousy sound but I saw a lot of great bands there.  And one night I met this girl.  I was 20 years old.

So I got her number and we spent a week playing phone tag (we didn't call it phone tag back then.  And there were no cell phones or e-mail).  Finally when we did manage to catch each other, she told me she was going to see David+David at One Step Beyond next week, and did I wanna hook up.  So I said yes.

Gulping, because I hated that damn "Boomtown" song that was always playing on the radio in the stockroom where I worked.  I was not impressed with David+David, but I was very impressed with her.  So I made my way down there and hung out with the throng outside the completely sold-out show until some girl sold me a ticket for $12 or something.  And I got in and found her, and I got to see David+David.

***

If I was gonna describe the music on Boomtown, well, think 80's.  I mean, 80's all the way.  So 80's it oughta come packaged in a pair of parachute pants, with a picture of Ronald Reagan embossed on the disc.  It's a time capsule straight from it's era.  More dated, sound-wise, than probably anything else on this blog.  Buried in sythesizers.  Layers of jacked-up guitar.  Mechanical-sounding drums (even with a live drummer).  It's perilously close to - well, no, actually it is, what a friend once referred to as "El Lay Barf Music."  And I hate El Lay Barf Music.  And I hate 80's production and synths and layers of guitars.  But Boomtown, well, there's always an exception.  It has something else.

In part I know it's because, underneath all the glitz and glamour of the production are songs that bite hard and deep.

Ms. Cristina drives a 944
Satisfaction oozes from her pores
She keeps rings on her fingers

Marble on her floor, cocaine on her dresser
Bars on her doors, she keeps her back against the wall

The songs roll out a cast of characters - Handsome Kevin, who deals dope out Denny's, listening to the ground.  The anger-management challenged singer of "Ain't So Easy", who cajoles his lover back after punching her with promises of future happiness, all deeply felt and insincere ("I'm sorry about your eye, I'll find a way to make amends" he says).  The ships-in-the-night lovers of "Being Alone Together" - which does not refer to having private time as a couple.  The mysterious lynch mob in the vaguely gospel-ish "River's Gonna Rise" ("God ain't in his heaven, something ain't right/I hear church bells ringing in the middle of the night/They're dragging a man by his insides/Through the broad daylight).  The adventurer of "Heroes" ("Past the battered old bodies of dead, dead dreamers/Past the tethered and fettered"), the bartender pouring drinks for lonely drunks in "A Rock For The Forgotten", Steve, Eileen, and the unnamed dancer of "Swallowed By The Cracks" ("Me, I became this drunken old whore").  If these lyrics and characters and themes sound awfully close to Velvets territory, its because they are.


Which brings us back to the music.  And this is the puzzle.  Because normally I would, should, and want to, hate any record that sounds like this - "the upscale mixes and faux-soul exaggerations of generic AOR are such a turnoff that I wouldn't have played this twice ..." as Christgau accurately put it.  But he did.  And so did I.   Eventually I wound up buying a copy.  Then it went in the Great Record Purge.  I never wanted to hear such a thing again.  And I didn't even think about it again for probably a decade.  And then I did.  And I wanted to hear it.  Hey, guess what?  As a former Top Forty hit it's in still in print - in a budget-price edition, too!  

The thing is, normally, an album with songs like this, I would regret that it didn't sound the way it should sound.  That the songs weren't something more stripped-down, hardier, edgier sounding - music that backs the lyrics all the way.  Sometimes, I do, almost, feel that.

But then I do, and I realize that's the key to Boomtown.  The sparkly 80's music fits.  Maybe it doesn't back the lyrics all the way, but it sounds right, in a way that a Velvety drone or Stoogey rampage or even sparse acoustic just wouldn't.  Boomtown sounds like its supposed to sound.

*** 

Now, a great way to end it would be to say what a great show D&D put on, and what a magic night it was and how I married the girl.  

Nah.  We went out a few more times and then went our separate ways.  As for David and David - well, they played the whole album - I don't know if it was in order or not, nor do I recall if they played any unreleased stuff.  They did one encore - a rather pointless cover of "My Generation" - a choice I found very odd - which The Who - even the fagged-out Who of 1987, would have no need to worry about.  And then they were gone.

And then they were gone.  David and David never made another album.  Boomtown is their statement.  And it's a good one.