The Rolling Stones England's Newest Hitmakers
Released: November 25, 2003 Origination Year: 1964 Time: 32:20 Tracks: 12 Produced by: Andrew Loog Oldham Style: Studio / Reissue Format: Vinyl Enhancement: DSD: Stereo Label: Abkco Records Website: www.rollingstones.com
Track Listing Not Fade Away Route 66 I Just Want To Make Love To You Honest I Do Now I've Got a Witness Little By Little I'm a King Bee Carol Tell Me Can I Get a Witness You Can Make It If You Try Walking The Dog
Rolling Stones Mick Jagger: Lead Vocals Charlie Watts: Drums Keith Richards: Lead Guitar Bill Wyman: Bass Brian Jones: Guitars

Rolling Stones fans were thrilled with last year’s incredibly ambitious reissue of the ABKCO Rolling Stones catalog in the hybrid SACD format. Now, vinyl fans can rejoice at ABKCO’s reissue of eleven Rolling Stone albums on 180-gram virgin vinyl. After a decade’s slump, we are seeing more and more vinyl releases popping up, and seeing The Rolling Stones among them is pure joy.

I will be reviewing all eleven releases over the next few weeks, so be patient. There is a Santa’s bag of goodies to go through here.

More than any other band, The Rolling Stones have defined the sound of rock and roll. Here on their debut, however, the Stones were still defining the Stones. While wired with a wild energy and some killer licks, the band was still figuring out how to take their R&B and blues roots, not to mention their obvious adoration of Chuck Berry, into the mid-sixties. As a result, the album often sounds a bit like a tribute to their heroes. Only one original song appears, and it rather sticks out in this context, as the rest of the tracks are remakes of older songs the band spent their schooldays absorbing.

Still, this record does not sound like a compilation of other artists. Even at this early stage, the boys were amplifying their favorite music into their own creation. While R&B always played a larger role in their sound than most realize, their love of blues music was apparent from the first mention of their name. The Beatles were already claiming Britain, but the Stones saw a greater fidelity to roots music (and a blind ear to the Everly Brothers) as the chisel to hack out their unique identity. With a rough, often put-on, attitude to match the tougher music, they went about using distortion, compression, and speed to bring out a special quality in the music they could identify with. They had never been sharecroppers or drenched in Southern sweat, but they could be fast, and they could be loud. Focusing on this developing sound, the Stones grabbed hold on electric roots and yanked their very own music straight out of the fertile rural fields of the blues.

This is a great debut. While Jagger at times still seems to be forging his own identity and finding it all too easy to assume the voices of others, the band is already a tight, blistering unit. If it is true that, in true 1964 style, some songs seem like filler gluing the album together, nothing here is exceptionally weak or even particularly boring. It’s just that not everything here impresses like the stomping "Not Fade Away", the juiced-up and blazing "I Just Want to Make Love to You", the bluesy "I’m a King Bee", or the classic closer, "Walking the Dog". Also worthy is the band’s fuzzed-out, sped-up version of Berry’s "Carol", with Richards making his guitar godfather proud.

"Tell Me", however, is an odd hint of promise here. Laying down tracks for future classics such as "Lady Jane" more than reflecting their past influences, the song builds on chiming guitars to a chorus where the various voices blend into a ragged, rough plea. Not only does the tune show that Glimmer Twins were working on writing their own material, it also shows avenues the band would later explore. Add their revamped covers to this song, and you start to hear potential.

Still, though, while this is a terrific opening shot, their wasn’t much here that promised that the gun was loaded for future classics. There were scads of albums at least this great at the time, and part of the murky mystery of the Stones is how they leapt from such a young, energetic blast of immature restlessness into the worn, burnt-out, and absolutely brilliant crew that would carve out such later masterpieces as Exile on Main St. They could certainly play, but listening to this album in 1964, few would have imagined how radically Jagger would later fashion the future of rock frontmen into the swaggering, campy, yet dangerous role it would assume, and fewer still could hear the strains of roots slowly pulling thin into the hedonistic yet charged languor they would later make their own. This was only the beginning.

So, you say, enough yapping about an album every rock fan already knows so well, what about the vinyl? Well, the artwork is impressive, faithfully recreating the look of the original sleeves. The pressings are on nice, thick slabs of vinyl that is quite quiet, and the cutters took obvious, even loving, care with the direct metal mastering that created the platters. Have you heard the SACDs? If so, then you have largely heard the mastering here, and you know what a great job Ludwig has done transferring the master tapes to his DSD masters.

Here, however, is my one major gripe, and I’ll just get this off my chest here and largely leave it alone on my other reviews. We vinyl fans love analog. We don’t just dig having vinyl for nostalgia’s sake or for show pieces. We love how music mastered from the original tapes, properly handled and processed in a pure analog stream, breathes on records. While the DSD remasters are largely excellent, I really wish they were not used for these fine releases. I can only regret that ABKCO did not cut these albums straight from the original master tapes, omitting the DSD digital masters from the chain.

Still, as I said, the DSD masters are rather great in their own right, and I am sure I am not alone in being thrilled to hear these albums on vinyl again. To be bluntly honest, they sound better than the US London pressings, heck any US pressings, ever did, and, to my knowledge, only the original UK Decca releases top these. After years of substandard CDs and some pretty crappy vinyl reissues, these albums once again sound fresh and vital, and right now, that makes me very happy.

Thank you, ABKCO.