The Rolling Stones -- "Stray Cat Blues"
Here's a song that makes me cringe. I can't seem to stop listening to it, though.
I'm always one to enforce a separation between the singer and the singer's persona. And I'm not one to moralize about art. Still, this track seems to be crossing a border. "I can see that you're 15 years old / No I don't want your I.D." It might not be a capital crime, but Roman Polanski got in a lot of trouble for this sort of thing. Sir Mick, apparently, can get away with anything, though. Of course, it's always possible that the song is tongue-in-cheek, but given the singer's reputation I doubt it.
If we can just set the lyrics aside for a moment -- if that's possible -- we've got a great, searing, rocked-out blues number here. One of the Stones' dirtiest, grungiest best. It's got the standard Stones open-tuned rhythm track and a few notes borroweed from that stinging lead that we start hearing about halfway into "Sympathy for the Devil" (it's Keith Richards, I think, but it's hard to tell sometimes). It's got the lengthy, toned-down coda that the band played with a few times in the late 60s/early 70s. It's a great, dirty song from a great, dirty album. Let's just give Sir Mick the benefit of the doubt and assume it's tongue-in-cheek.
No comments:
Post a Comment