On the way to the shrink I heard "Look What The Cat Dragged In".\u00c2\u00a0 No, not Poison but the Rolling Stones.<\/p>\n
Somehow it’s creepy.\u00c2\u00a0 Mick Jagger refuses to age and Keith Richards seems to be fighting off death.\u00c2\u00a0 The music they play lies somewhere in between.\u00c2\u00a0 Mick wants us to believe he’s twenty five and Keith wants the respect of an old bluesman.\u00c2\u00a0 Can you really criticize him?\u00c2\u00a0 He’s still LIVING!<\/p>\n
Now I’m here to tell you "Look What The Cat Dragged In" isn’t bad.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s missing what the Stones used to have.\u00c2\u00a0 There was the sneering danger, the ATTITUDE of their youth.\u00c2\u00a0 Hard to believe oldsters singing THESE lyrics.\u00c2\u00a0 But worse is the absence of musicality.<\/p>\n
Can’t they just bring back Mick Taylor?<\/p>\n
Ron Wood was great with Rod Stewart, but he’s got very little sense of melody, of lyricism.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s a Keith Richards clone.\u00c2\u00a0 Mick Taylor was a genius with the Stones.\u00c2\u00a0 He was a sideman who shined.\u00c2\u00a0 Who didn’t write the songs but added a layer, a patina, a SOUL that pushed the songs into stratospheric legendary works.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, there’s his incredible solo on "Time Waits For No One".\u00c2\u00a0 But what about those licks on "Can’t You Hear Me Knocking"?\u00c2\u00a0 "Sticky Fingers" was his.\u00c2\u00a0 He was energized, he had something to PROVE!\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what we love, people with burning talent who just want to SHOW US!\u00c2\u00a0 To MESMERIZE US!\u00c2\u00a0 To WOW US!<\/p>\n
This wasn’t early period Stones.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s my favorite epoch.\u00c2\u00a0 "Exile On Main Street" doesn’t sound dated the way "Look What The Cat Dragged In" does.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s kind of like "Citizen Kane", shot in black and white but timeless.<\/p>\n
Then there are the American Stones.\u00c2\u00a0 Aerosmith.<\/p>\n
I don’t know what Aerosmith does now that MTV doesn’t play music anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what sustained them.<\/p>\n
Then again, although the quality of their latter-day works eclipsed that of the Stones, at least when viewed as albums not tracks, they never did anything quite like those first four records again.\u00c2\u00a0 When they were hungry.<\/p>\n
And the great thing with Aerosmith in those days was there was no artifice.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s hard to put on airs when you’re American.\u00c2\u00a0 Rather than being exotic, Aerosmith represented what was on the floor of the garage.\u00c2\u00a0 The oil, the dust.\u00c2\u00a0 They wallowed down there.\u00c2\u00a0 And you wanted to too.<\/p>\n
Funny how the throwaways of the new Stones and the new Aerosmith roll right off of us but the superfluous tracks of their heyday…we love them.<\/p>\n
Last night when "Sick As A Dog" came on the radio my mind fired how I liked "Get Your Wings" and "Toys In The Attic" better than "Rocks".\u00c2\u00a0 But then, the song went into a drug-induced hallucination, the music slowed down and bent like a funhouse mirror and I thought to myself this is FUCKING GREAT!<\/p>\n
It’s the little moments that make us love our rock and roll.<\/p>\n
When "Sick As A Dog" slows down completely.\u00c2\u00a0 When everybody gets their balance three minutes in and Joey pounds the drums and Joe plays the riff.\u00c2\u00a0 When everybody’s standing.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like the day after.\u00c2\u00a0 When you’ve dusted yourself off from a night of debauchery, checked for damage and found none.\u00c2\u00a0 You feel GOOD!\u00c2\u00a0 And then you get BACK INTO IT, just like Aerosmith does here.\u00c2\u00a0 They and YOU are ready to do it all over again.\u00c2\u00a0 One more night on the town.\u00c2\u00a0 In a string of ENDLESS nights on the town.\u00c2\u00a0 Yup, we might have only been able to do it a couple of nights a week, but Aerosmith was doing it week in and week out FOR us.\u00c2\u00a0 They were our stand-ins.\u00c2\u00a0 And in some bizarre way our heroes.<\/p>\n
It was always the little tracks that made the difference.\u00c2\u00a0 That hooked us.<\/p>\n
Not that the Stones and Aerosmith never swung for the fences.<\/p>\n
But today’s acts ONLY swing for the fences.\u00c2\u00a0 They need that SINGLE!\u00c2\u00a0 Whereas if you put "Sick As A Dog" on at a party, EVERYBODY would get energized, would start to nod his head, would BELIEVE!<\/p>\n
Nobody can believe in "Look What The Cat Dragged In".\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know if Aerosmith can record another "Sick As A Dog".\u00c2\u00a0 If they did, I don’t know if anybody outside a small circle of friends would hear it.\u00c2\u00a0 But, you do it in pursuit of art, in pursuit of excellence, not in pursuit of revenue.\u00c2\u00a0 The music comes first, the money comes after.\u00c2\u00a0 The Stones have got it all backwards.<\/p>\n
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On the way to the shrink I heard "Look What The Cat Dragged In".\u00c2\u00a0 No, not Poison but the Rolling Stones. Somehow it’s creepy.\u00c2\u00a0 Mick Jagger refuses to age and Keith Richards seems to be fighting off death.\u00c2\u00a0 The music they play lies somewhere in between.\u00c2\u00a0 Mick wants us to believe he’s twenty five and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-2u","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}