“Tattoo You”, the latest classic among the Rolling Stones albums
Speaking of anniversaries in rock, August 24, 1981 was the Rolling Stones they released the album “Tattoo you”…what follows in the lines below is our review of the album.
“Tattoo you” is unanimously considered the last great classic among the Rolling Stones albums. I agree: here is its history and the traces of its greatness. The greatest rock and roll band in the world, in 1981, wanted to play for another twenty years “because no one had ever done it before” (Keith Richards). An honorable ambition that, however, seemed a little too ambitious. The apogee of the Rolling Stones It had been nine years before and by now they were playing the dangerous role of survivors of an era buried by new rock talents who had cleaned the genre of its trappings after punk; moreover, they were experiencing, each in their own way, a midlife crisis (anagraphic as well as artistic).
The band was venturing into uncharted territory led by an iconic guitarist who had just recovered from years of heroin abuse, when longevity in rock was still a matter of some debate.
Yet Keith Richards’s renewed sobriety – to which Jagger was no longer accustomed – gave him back authority and a say in the group, and now the tension between the Glimmer Twins was also rising for artistic reasons: “Some Girls” and “Emotional Rescue”, from 1978 and 1980, two albums that can only figure in the middle of the ideal ranking of the Stones’ greatest albums even if they are still better than the masterpiece of any great rock band in history and on the planet, had flirted too much with disco for Keef’s tastes. So, with the Stones in their forties and the Seventies behind them, on the edge of the road ahead the signs indicated only one direction: .tour. That promotional tour that would have crossed stadiums all over the world until 1982. The problem was that the group did not have an album to promote.
An album that would justify the launch of a gigantic industrial machine like the Stones on tour. That was all that was needed. To put it simply, we can say that he thought about it Chris Kimseywho was the associate producer of “Tattoo You” and the true architect of what we can call a magic in retrospect. Mick and Keith barely spoke to each other and he, who had been around the band since 1971, knew that there was plenty of material to patch it up. Tapes in hand, with Mick Jagger available for the missing vocal parts and that genius of Sonny Rollins to add a couple of master touches, he worked in Paris and in a cold studio did what many great chefs of today do in the kitchen with the less noble cuts of meat. He prepared the “fifth quarter” of rocka delicacy cobbled together from scraps and offal that were lying too close to the garbage can.
You say “Tattoo you” and you think of “Start me up”. Of course. One of those singles, yes, that appears in the Stones’ top 5, despite having to compete with a few dozen authentic classics. But also the demonstration of something that some define “sliding doors”some others “serendipity”. Some others too ass. Its final version had been recorded the same evening as “Miss You”, the disco-rock hit that had kept the group in the spotlight and high up in the charts in 1978. But “Start Me Up” had been preceded by about seventy takes and Keith Richards had asked Kimsey to take it away from him forever, so much had he come to hate that song that was born reggae and became rock and, in the end, was never any good.
The genius who doesn’t recognize himself. And the producer who does. “Start me up” also became a symbol of something else. Certainly the rock half of an album that was deliberately conceived as bipolar – side A guitar-based, aggressive, “classical”; side B: confessional, intimate, ballads. It also became synonymous with the stadium rock sound. Finally, nomen omen, also the quintessence of the beginning of the perfect setlist of a rock concert. On the first side of the album, the piece was in the company of others.vintage rockers among which I will mention just “Slave” (of which there is an eleven-minute jam session: a blast), illuminated by the sax of Sonny Rollins thanks to a great intuition by Mick, who evidently frequented not only Studio 54 at night but also jazz clubs; “Little T&A”, Keith’s irreverent cherry on top with tits and ass abbreviated in the title; and “Hang fire”: pure adrenaline.
The second half of the album began instead with the splendid “Worried about you”, which dates back to the days of “Black and blue” and which the band had revealed for the first time live in the legendary concert in Toronto when they performed at El Mocambo under the false name of Cockroaches (cockroaches, what a subtle irony). And which sets the tone for this side of vinyl which ended with “Waiting on a friend” (Sonny Rollins is still there), an ode to friendship that puts on record the eternal partnership between Jagger and Richards, a useful report to reread whenever their dialectic got out of control.
For lovers of the fifth quarter, “Tattoo you” was assembled as follows: four very fresh parts, still on the chef’s counter and left over from the “Emotional rescue” sessions (“Little T&A”, “Neighbours”, “No use in crying” and “Heaven”, which was in fact a new piece since it was only hinted at in the structure present on the tape); three fresh parts, vacuum-packed from the 1978 “Some girls” sessions (the aforementioned super-single, archived under the original title of “Never stop”, plus “Hang fire” and “Black limousine”); two parts from the fridge, preserved from the “Black and blue” sessions (“Slave” and “Worried about you”) and two parts left in the freezer from the end of 1972, at the time of the recordings of
“Goats head soup” (“Waiting on a friend” and “Tops”: Mick Taylor plays here, not Ron Wood).
