D,” he ends up closer to “Monster Mash” than “Sympathy for the Devil,” trading in that song’s politicized fury for puerile B-movie graveyard hijinks. Even when Jagger summons his old friend Lucifer via the deliciously evil voodoo riff of “Dancing With Mr. On tracks like these, we hear The World’s Greatest Rock‘n’Roll Band settling for just being a pretty good one, the menacing shit-kickers of old curdling into good-timey toe-tappers. the Stones’ raunchiest song this side of “Some Girls”) seem to be overcompensating for its basic “Roll Over Beethoven” backbeat.
And coming off Exile’s rip-this-joint energy, the rave-ups on Goats Heads Soup can’t help but feel a little staid: “Silver Train” steadily rolls on the same track as Exile’s superior “All Down the Line,” while the X-rated lyrics of “Star Star” (a.k.a. “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.” So, true to its title, Goats Head Soup became something of a potluck where each threw their random ideas into the cauldron in the hope they’d blend into something palatable.Īs Jagger recently quipped to Rolling Stone, Goats Heads Soup may be the first album recorded in Jamaica to include “not the slightest influence of reggae on any of the tracks.” But while that may be true on a superficial level, the record is definitely running on island time, as the band casually wade through the piano-blues romp “Hide Your Love” and the Funkadelic-style swamp-soul chant “Can You Hear the Music” with a palpable lack of urgency. “I think Mick and I were a little dried up after Exile,” Richards wrote in his memoir, Life. As a result, the once-telepathic songwriting team of Jagger-Richards was becoming more like Jagger-or-Richards. Goats Head Soup was a far more disjointed experience, its recording locations-Kingston, London, Los Angeles-indicative of a band that was starting to drift apart.įollowing his marriage to Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías, Mick Jagger was becoming the toast of the society pages and firming up his place in the A-list celebrity establishment Keith Richards, by contrast, was holing himself up in a Swiss rehab clinic to put the brakes on a worsening heroin habit. Exile may have been famously been recorded in the humid, moldy basement of Keith Richards’ French villa, but those extreme conditions created a sense of freewheeling, all-in camaraderie that-for all its heroin-hazy atmosphere-exuded a genuine sense of joy, an all-night bender where everyone’s wine glasses are overflowing and so are the toilets. So on Goats Head Soup, the Stones landed somewhere between the New York Dolls and Isaac Hayes, straining to push themselves to new heights of campy outrageousness while seriously engaging with the contemporary Black music of the day in a way that would have a lasting effect on their rhythmic DNA.Įven though work on Goats Head Soup began with producer Jimmy Miller mere months after Exile wrapped up, the conditions of their creations couldn’t have been more different. Glam rock was setting new standards for provocation and transgression, while the fiercest, grittiest street music was coming from the world of funk.
Not only had the Stones outlasted their rivals in The Beatles, they had become a band that could seemingly do no wrong, even when they were doing things that were very wrong.īut if Exile on Main Street represented a seance-like communion with their most sacred old-school influences (blues, gospel, country), Goats Head Soup was where the spell was broken and the Stones had to contend with the fact that they were a veteran band entering their second decade amid a rapidly changing musical landscape. If the Stones started out as rambunctious kids with a press-hyped bad-boy image, by the turn of the ‘70s, the band had acquired a truly sinister aura, the kind of malevolence that had amassed rap sheets, body counts, and iconoclastic admirers eager to feed off their black magic. In the period spanning 1968’s Beggars Banquet to 1972’s Exile on Main Street, the Rolling Stones’ title of “World’s Greatest Rock‘n’Roll Band” was less a boastful marketing slogan and more of a plainly self-evident job description.