The Rolling Stones have been the World’s Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band™ for so long that, over the past three decades, they haven’t had to worry about being an especially good one. Since the mid-’80s, they’ve been releasing forgettable records at increasingly protracted intervals, all while their ever-extravagant world tours have taken on the feel of a traveling Hard Rock Café resort—a glitzy simulacrum of a rock’n’roll show catering to those who can afford to experience it. Fittingly, earlier this year the band went from being a proverbial museum piece to becoming an actual one.
The knock on the Stones isn’t that they’re too old to play a young man’s game—even at 73, Mick Jagger can still run laps around performers a third his age—but that aging has brought no greater depth or texture to their music. What the Stones have lost over the years is not their capacity for raunchy rock’n’roll, but their ability to invest it with purpose and meaning. Jagger and Keith Richards used to be among the best (and most underrated) lyricists in rock; their last album was called A Bigger Bang and kicked off with a tune that included a “cock” pun in the opening verse.
However, the Stones’ new album is as introspective as we can expect them to get in 2016—even if it they are playing songs that are nearly as old as they are. Blue & Lonesome is a covers collection that pays tribute to the post-war Chicago blues that first got the Stones rolling and inspired their very name. And since then, the blues have served as the foundation the band can dig into whenever their sound threatens to turn too au courant, whether they were reacting to the hippy-dippy whimsy of Their Satanic Majesties Request with the sleazy acoustic struts of Beggars Banquet, or devoting a side of Black and Blue-era concert document Love You Live to Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon worship.
But Blue & Lonesome represents more than just a back-to-basics mission, It’s the most honest music the Stones have released in years—not because the source material confers it with the patina of authenticity, but because the entire blues-covers concept is a tacit admission that they don’t really give a shit about being a contemporary concern anymore, so they’re just going to do something that feels good. (The record was reportedly spawned as a warm-up exercise for a postponed album of new material.) And now that the band are older than Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf ever lived to be, they can fully inhabit the grizzled-bluesman archetype to which they've always aspired, and exude a genuine get-offa-my-lawn imperviousness to the modern world.
Blue & Lonesome was bashed out in three days, and for the first time in eons, the Stones sound like a band playing together in the same room rather than one that travels on separate jets. Jagger is, naturally the star of the show—but not in his usual vampish ways. Whether he’s embodying the down-on-his-knees despair of Memphis Slim’s title track or playfully assuming the role of sad-sack cuckold on Little Johnny Taylor’s “Everybody Knows About My Good Thing,” his ageless voice sounds like it’s emanating from the middle of the band scrum rather than the lip of a catwalk. And while Chicago blues may have introduced the concept of jamming and guitar gods to the rock lexicon, Richards and Ronnie Wood’s grinding interplay ultimately plays a supporting role to Jagger’s harmonica honks, which cut through these songs like a rusty hacksaw with “Midnight Rambler”-worthy gusto.
But as much as Blue & Lonesome plays it raw, it’s not all that raucous—the energy here is less rip-this-joint than rocking-chair steady. On paper, the idea of the Stones running roughshod over a set of classic blues tunes seems like a long-suffering fan’s dream. (The “best Stones album since Some Girls!” headlines practically write themselves.) However, what made the Stones the Stones wasn’t their purism—it was the sacrilegious impulse to corrupt their influences with their own singular swagger. But Blue & Lonesome is more about adhering to tradition than encouraging sedition. The Stones may be drinking from their fountain of youth here, but they’re content to just savor it rather than spit it back in our faces.
On their best blues covers—Beggars Banquets’ “Prodigal Son,” Sticky Fingers’ “You Gotta Move,” Exile on Main Street’s “Shake Your Hips”—the Stones handled the songs like Ouija boards; they were less about paying homage to their heroes than channeling their sinister essence. Blue & Lonesome has flashes of that insidious inspiration: On the revved-up run through Howlin’ Wolf’s “Commit a Crime,” Jagger’s vocal oozes with implied violence overtop a repetitive, trance-inducing riff that rings like a police siren; on Little Walter’s “Hate to See You Go,” his pained baby-please-don’t-go pleas climax with an extended harmonica drone that threatens to swallow the song whole.
But for the most part, Blue & Lonesome doesn’t aspire to be anything more than a good-time frolic among old pals (Eric Clapton cameos included), with the interchangeable, upbeat takes on Buddy Johnson’s “Just Your Fool” and Eddie Taylor’s “Ride ‘Em on Down” more conducive to knee-tapping in a seated supper club than tearing the roof off a juke joint. For an album rife with tales of heartache, duplicity, and death threats, it’s positively brimming with bonhomie. And, hey, given all the shit-talking Keith did at Mick’s expense in his autobiography, Life, that audible camaraderie is something of a minor miracle in and of itself. On its own modest terms, Blue & Lonesome offers promising proof the Stones can still be a band instead of a brand.
