Rolling Stones

“Aftermath” is the first Stones album to feature exclusively songs written by the Jagger/Richards partnership, the endpoint of a slow journey that had seen them start out reinterpreting classics of African-American music (blues and the more recent r&b) before arriving at the maturity of a personal and incredibly influential songwriting style.

The band's past and the early Sixties, with the exclusivity of the 7-inch single, seemed a million miles away: the Beatles (counterpart in a historic yet largely fabricated rivalry with the Stones) had shown just a few months earlier (on December 3, 1965, to be precise, with the release of “Rubber Soul”) how attention could be focused on the album as a whole rather than on isolated (however numerous) chart hits, and from that point on, over the span of just five years, rock, freed from every creative constraint, would experience endless metamorphoses of fertile and unruly freedom, in which Jagger and co. would actively take part, branding the path with fire. But “Aftermath” is only at the very start of all this, and it's astonishing how prophetically it anticipates so many future directions.

Released in April 1966, by which point their fame already preceded them thanks to unforgettable tracks like the (multi)generational “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” and “Get Off Of My Cloud”, the album strings together a series of songs that represent both the best and the worst of the Sixties, alternating moments that haven't aged a single day with others where the weight of time is clearly felt, which only heightens the record's paradigmatic value.

The dirtiest, most fetid and misogynistic blues alternates with rural country tinged with folk shades - Robert Johnson meets Hank Williams and the already-established Dylan star, giving birth to one of the greatest examples of white blues in history, all seasoned with the band's well-known dissolute lifestyle, split between alcohol, drugs and sex (was there ever a blend so classic and so imitated in rock?), which the media eagerly highlighted (one example above all, Mick Jagger's notorious and unhappy fling with Marianne Faithfull), setting up the kind of spectacle that rock would never again escape (and which, at the dawn of the Eighties, would end up swallowing the band's own musical creativity).

The album came out more or less at the same time as the "Paint It Black" single; it wasn't included on the original British edition but found a place a few months later on the American one. The song is the manifesto of the Stones' whole poetics: the heart of darkness is not merely a human condition to be passively accepted, but an active choice of will (a will to power?), a free stand against the bourgeois respectability of adults (in this sense, a genuine embodiment of Elvis's primal rebellion); the menacing words still echo through the tidy studies of power's dolled-up slaves: “I see a red door and I want it painted black/ No colors anymore I want them to turn black...”, and even as fear creeps in (“It's not easy facin' up when your whole world is black“), the impression is one of a luxurious, gleeful belonging to the devil (a “Sympathy for the Devil”, so to speak).

The song, with its driving rhythm, is led by a sitar riff (played by Brian Jones, following in the wake of the raga-rock pioneered the year before by the Yardbirds and the Kinks), and its arrangement features, among other things, fretless bass lines (an invention credited precisely to Bill Wyman), Hammond organ (also played by Wyman) and castanets (played by drummer Charlie Watts).

The Lp's tracklist opens with “Mother's Little Helper”, in which Richards and Jones, playing twelve-string slide guitars, imitate the sound of the sitar, once again venturing into raga-rock territory. The lyrics seal an entire era with that splendid spoken opening: “What a drag it is getting old...“, describing the wretched, frustrating condition of the bourgeois housewife, forced into a humiliating life devoid of fulfillment and in service to the family (feminism and women's liberation still had a few years to wait), which is precisely why she needs a bit of “help” - tranquilizers and drugs. The world of the young slips out of adult control, and while men take refuge in work, women are left with nothing but dependence on mind-altering substances.

“Stupid Girl” portrays women as a soulless icon devoted to the care of her own body, stupid because she's fixated on life's trivial things; even though feminism would rightly cry scandal at its none-too-latent machismo, here we find the entirely male voyeuristic pleasure in confronting the female universe, man's irresistible need to engage with the other world, sometimes in downright misogynistic and androcentric terms, other times as romantic, chivalrous submission (the age-old dichotomy of whore-woman/angel-woman). The music echoes a Fifties-flavored r&b, terribly roughened up by Wyman and Watts's funky groove.

“Lady Jane”, sweet as its medieval-flavored elegy may be, already carries within it the later “woodsy” degenerations of rock music, and today sounds rather stale, dulled by time (with a bit of a stretch, we might consider it a forerunner of Led Zeppelin's powerful “The Rain Song”, which is saved by the prog accentuations of its era). Undoubtedly captivating is the ambiguity over the identity of the one the song is addressed to (a woman, or marijuana?).

One of the album's high points (as if there weren't enough already) is undoubtedly “Under My Thumb”, a jazz-funk base with added marimba (played by Jones), a rapt vocal worthy of the finest blues and soul crooning, syncopated guitar, and lyrics that are scornful and still shot through with strong misogyny - a track that truly soaks in that reckless, damnably trusting innocence of the Sixties. It's impossible not to move every time the verse kicks back in (with the second line varying): “Under my thumb/ The Girl who once had me down/ Under my thumb/ The girl who once pushed me around/ It's down to me...“. And to hell with decorum, convention, proper language and formalism.

“Doncha Bother Me”, “Think” and “Flight 505” are three classics in the way they revisit genre tropes: rural blues for the first, blues-rock for the second (assembled in a blend that would become the band's trademark: Watts's solid, propulsive drumming, Keith Richards's roaring, sinuous guitar, Mick Jagger's lush black-inflected vocals, Wyman's cavernous bass), and smoky jazz filtered through a beat sensibility for the third. Flight 505 plunges into the sea, dragging down with it the protagonist too, who had been dreamily gliding toward unknown lands in search of an unattainable existential redemption; a song that seems to hold within it the fears and failures of an entire generation, the fall of the gods to whom thousands of young people - swept up in a rebellious, revolutionary fervor as utopian as it was tragic - had sacrificed themselves (literally, in many cases, given the frequent, reckless use of hard drugs).

“I'm Going Home” stretches out over eleven minutes and joins the blues roots of the Stones' sound with the incoming wave of psychedelia: the journey home (one of blues' classic themes, of the hobos who wandered far and wide across America carrying the warm memory of the hearth, modern-day Ulysses sustained by the thought of Penelope) draws itself out in a long vocal jam without ever truly arriving, anticipating another of Jagger's spiritual brothers, Jim Morrison, who can rightly be considered his American counterpart.

“High And Dry” is a perfect transitional stomp, ferrying things toward the soft acoustic psychedelia of “I Am Waiting”, a gentle portrait that is once again paradigmatic of a generation waiting for the new golden age in which freedom and equality would reign in peace.

"Out Of Time" is instead superb jazzy r&b (the marimba shows up again, laid down like a carpet alongside the rhythm section) that evokes mellow Fifties atmospheres, steeped as it is in a romanticism that nonetheless never gives up its sting. "You can't come back and think you are still mine/ You're out of touch, my baby/ My poor discarded baby/ I said, baby, baby, baby, you're out of time". Once again, it's impossible not to dance.

In the years to come the Rolling Stones would pass through psychedelia, create that other superb masterpiece that is "Beggars Banquet", ferry rock into the Seventies, and finally sacrifice themselves on the altar of the monumental "Exile On Main Street" (1972). But that's another story. These fourteen tracks still ooze freshness and still speak to new generations today, teaching them what it means to turn music into art.

Revision by Federico Romagnoli

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08/11/2006