Goats Head Soup takes us to a new locale. If Exile on Main Street, many of the important sessions were done during that long period where the group was in the south of France recording in Keith's the house that he was renting there using the Rolling Stones mobile unit. Now, in November and December of 1972, the group goes to Jamaica to record the, the, some of the important tracks from Goats Head Soup, and then recording resumes in London in May and June of 1973. Goats Head Soup, as it turns out, is going to be the last Rolling Stones album to be produced by Jimmy Miller. So with this album we kind of say goodbye to Jimmy Miller, and hi, and the string of sort of classic records going back to Beggar's Bank with that, that Jimmy Miller has been producing for the group. I think in many ways, the way, if you, if you read some of the comments that the Rolling Stones have made Jimmy Miller's role was increase, was decreasing eh, as Mick and Keith were really kind of running those sessions anyway. And so they felt entirely comfortable producing the next record, It's Only Rock and Roll, themselves. So this is it for Jimmy Miller. Goats Head Soup has no cover songs on it, so that's something that's a little different from what we've been seeing in the last couple of releases. As I've mentioned before, released in August of 1973, going to number one on both sides of the Atlantic, the US, and the UK, with the following album cover design. So let's say a little bit about the Goats Head Soup album cover design. The design itself was done by Ray Lawrence, but the photography of the head of Mick Jagger that's on the front of that album was done by David Bailey. Now that's interesting to us in that, because he was the, the, the friend of Mick who was the photographer for a lot of those earlier records, and his name has popped up a couple of times during the course of our story. He did the cover for 12 by 5, and The Rolling Stones Now, and records like that, so he's, he's back in the picture for a minute here with the, with the photo from Goats Head Soup. The two singles, as we mentioned in a previous video, off of Goats Head Soup, were Angie, backed with Silver Train, which was released in August of 73 together with the record. And then, after it had sort of run its course on the charts, and of course it takes a while for a number one single to run its chores, run its course on the charts, Heartbreaker, backed with Dancing with Mr. D was released in December of 1973, doing pretty good in this country as well, at number 15. So as I said before, the first big sessions for this album were recorded in November, December in at a, at a place called Dynamic Sounds in Kingston, Jamaica. They did not go back after the tour that followed in early 1973. They did not go back to Jamaica, but finished out the rest of the record at Olympic Studios, familiar stomping grounds to us by now for the Rolling Stones, and also Island Studios. Both those studios, of course, in London, during May and June of 1973. There's one track here that was begun, Silver Train, which was begun earlier in October, November 1970. But most of the rest of these tracks are for, pretty much from the same sessions. So let's do what we've done before. Let's run through the tracks and talk a little bit about, stylistically, where these songs sit. And, I think what we'll see here is that we're not only seeing continuities, as I said in the last video, with things that we looked at in some detail, Exile on Main Street, and back. But we're also going to see a few new things popping up on these records that we haven't seen so much before in Rolling Stones music. Well, the first track on the record, Dancing with Mr. D, is a track that is really kind of a guitar-driven rocker. And a lot of people have thought about this song as kind of being a revisiting of Sympathy for the Devil, because of course Mr D here or Mistress D, the different characters that show up in this lyric, are pretty much manifestations of the devil. But what's different about this one is the, the lyrics to Sympathy for the Devil cast the devil as a, as a very, sort of, sophisticated and wealthy character. Here, the, the way the story is told is almost kind of like a horror movie kind of thing. And so it's not re, it doesn't really have the same kind of powerful impact in that kind of way. They have a little bit more fun with this idea of the devil. And the, the, the sort of the horror movie kinds of images that occur in the lyrics actually remind me less of the Doors, with the kind of dark, sort of brooding on the, on the, the dark side of life, remind me less of that, and maybe more of somebody like Alice Cooper. Now, if you only know Alice Cooper from the things that Alice Cooper did in the second half of the 70s, the more sort of campy stuff, it, it, it'd be good to sort of understand the early history of the group which really was kind of bound up with a lot of this horror movie stuff. So what I'm going to try to argue is that the Rolling Stones are beginning to react to the other music in the early 1970s that's on the charts, that's happening in the rock world along with them. And so I'm going to suggest that there might have been a little bit of a kind of Alice Cooperish kind of influence on the, their take on Dancing with Mr. D. Anyway, it's a song that Alice Cooper could easily have done without stepping outside of his character in his music. The next one, 100 Years Ago is a mid-tempo rocker with a contrasting middle section and a guitar jam at the end. As I listen to this tune, and again, I'm listening for new influences, so that skews it a little bit, but I hear a sort of a cross between Van Morrison and maybe Leon Russell. Van Morrison, of course, everybody, everybody knows the, the big Van Morrison's songs, but from the late 60 to early 1970s. But Leon Russell had a real kind of run there in the first half of the 1970s with an album called Carney, and eh, so anyway, he was also kind of a session guy who played a lot of these different sessions with the, with the Stones, they knew from around the L.A. scene. And so it's not unlikely that there could have been a little bit of influence there. But I hear a little bit of that, again looking for the ways in which the Stones were reacting to the music that was on the charts, that was in circulation, around the time they were working on this music. Coming Down Again features a Keith vocal. This is probably almost exclusively a Keith Richards song. Reminds me of mid-tempo 60s soul, so this would be one of those, one of those times in which they're looking back at music, the kind of music that we have seen them influenced with before. There's a kind of, wah-wah guitar. Keith has said that it's not a song about heroin use, but very much inspired by his heroin use, and I don't mean inspired probably in a good way. I mean the idea for the song came from experiences he's had, he'd had as a, as someone who was using heroin, especially the idea of melancholy, and, and some of the, some of those kinds of feelings. He also mentions Graham Parsons, in one quote, as kind of a possible influence. So anyway, that one I would see as more of a kind of, of looking back to mid-tempo 60s soul. Now Heartbreaker, which we'll spend more time on in the in the song close up coming up in the next video, is a song that really does seem to be inspired by 70s soul, that is, soul from the from the first half of the 1970s. It's driven, the song is driven, by a clavinet part played by Billy Preston. And this is not the first time we've talked about Billy Preston playing keyboards with the Rolling Stones. Of course, the horns sounding sounding very much like things that we've heard before on Exile on Main Street and Sticky Fingers. Maybe the inspiration here is Curtis Mayfield, but I don't want to give too much of the story away, we'll save that for the next video. Another one we'll talk about on the next video is Angie, which is clearly an acoustic ballad. It's very much a singer-songwriter kind of tune. Reminds us sort of the next installment maybe of Wild Horses, maybe going back to to No Expectation, and if you really wanted to go all the way back to As Tears Go By, especially in the use of strings on Angie which really kind of makes it into a sort of mainstream pop kind of ballad. So that one very much about continuity. Sliver Train is the song I was mentioning before that had begun during the Sticky Fingers sessions. That's kind of a driving blues rock tune, you hear some slide guitar, harmonica, you know, the lyrics deal with trains and no-good women. So this is a fairly familiar kind of blues rock bag that we've, that we've seen from the Stones before, as is the next song on the record, Hide Your Love, uUh, which really is I think Mick Taylor referred to it the blues song on the record. Sort of started out with Mick Jagger kind of fooling around at the piano. And Andy Johns saying, hey, I'm going to, I'm going to get that. I'm going to get that recorded. So you're, you get to hear, on that track, you get to hear Mick Jagger on the piano. But it really is the Stones doing their blues thing. So again, there's a sense in which they're looking back, looking back. The song Winter is singer-songwriter ballad, I think, with a touch of soul. It's got an extended ending, and, and, and again the use of strings here to kind of sweeten the sound of it. A song that we're going to talk about in the song close up which I think is really the sort of, the may, maybe the kind of most interesting song for me in a lot of ways on the record is the song Can You Hear the Music because it's such a, a, a, a flashback to the psychedelic era of the Stones. I don't want give to much of that away so I'll stop right there and move on to the last one, Star Star. Boy, there's some stories that go with this song, Star Star, but in terms of style I would say it looks back to 50s rock. It's a very, kind of Chuck Berry kind of tune. So as I went through the tracks that are on this album, Goat's Head Soup, you saw that there was kind of a mix between things that look back at some of the familiar styles that we've talked about. But also some that really seem to be taking part in some of the styles that are happening in the music around the Rolling Stones. So that's the way, really, I'm going to cast both of these records, Goats Head Soup and It's Only Rock and Roll. And it's really, sort of, looking in two directions, with one ey, w, w, in one way looking back and one way looking forward. So let's take a little bit of time to look into some of these, the songs from the album in some detail. We'll take a look at Heartbreaker, Angie, Can You Hear the Music and Star Star in the next video, a song close up.
