If your wallet has just about recovered from the retail gorging that was last weekend’s Record Store Day ‘drop’, and you’ve got some cash left that doesn’t need to go on food, heating and electricity for the remainder of this first official month of autumn, then the Rolling Stones, perennial masters of a shrewd bit of business, have come up with another diversion for your discretionary funds. 1973’s Goat’s Head Soup has arrived, again, in a number of formats including a beautifully boxed ‘super deluxe edition’ that might actually be worth the awkward letter from your bank manager. These box sets have, of course, become a lucrative money spinner for so-called heritage acts, but there is a market for them, namely people like me who are genuinely keen on adding to their record collections with newly remastered, high-quality vinyl recordings and extras like rarities and, with some bands, multichannel remixes.
The Stones have been no slouches in this department. Their deluxe reissue of the legendary Exile On Main Street ten years ago went to No.1 in the album charts. That appeared again two years ago in the gargantuan Studio Albums 1971-2016 box set containing spruced-up vinyl editions of their releases over that 45-year period, including the imperious run that began with Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile, progressed through the punk era in defiance with Some Girls and ends up with their last studio album to date, Blue & Lonesome. This year the band has commenced another run of reissues, with ten of their albums progressively released as half-speed mastered vinyl pressings (and for the definitive guide to this, check out Paul Sinclair’s excellent post on his Super Deluxe Edition site). While this might remain something of a niche audiophile preserve, as with most legends’ reissues, there is plenty of merit to the revisions, if only to either hear again or, in my case, to hear for the very first time, and with new sonics to enjoy at the same time.
You see, the thing with the Stones is that most people think they know them. Like their contemporaries, the you-know-whos from Liverpool, the ubiquity of Satisfaction, Jumping Jack Flash and the entire litany of hits over their 55-year career as a recording band, the compilations tend to write themselves. Indeed, as the only real megaband from the 60s to still be touring (well, they would be if it wasn’t for COVID-19…), even their set lists require little deviation. But this misses the point. With 30 studio albums to their name, the Stones’ back catalogue is deep. And even when things went off the rails, as drink, drugs, the 80s and personnel disputes got in the way, as they frequently did, that depth throws up plenty of pleasant surprises, even today.
It was the Rolling Stones album that followed Exile, still regarded as their best moment on record (the result of capturing the loose, frequently debauched process to record it at Nellcôte, Keith Richards’ now-infamous rented house on the Côte d'Azur). Life in the Stones had, by 1972, become dysfunctional, what with the drug busts and whatnot. The band were largely living in exile, but even that started to become an issue as Richards, in particular, found doors increasingly closed by countries that would rather not play host to rock music’s most notorious dabbler in chemical recreation.
It was to Jamaica that the band eventually found a safe harbour, forming a lifelong bond with Richards in particular, mostly for its lifestyle, but also for the practicality that it was one of the few places that would let him in. “By that time about the only country that I was allowed to exist in was Switzerland, which was damn boring for me, at least for the first year, because I didn't like to ski... Nine countries kicked me out, thank you very much, so it was a matter of how to keep this thing together,” he revealed in the bands’ own autobiography, According To The Rolling Stones.
Goat’s Head Soup brought about a new working relationship between Richards and Mick Jagger, but also between the entire band and its coterie of side musicians who reassembled at Kingston’s Dynamic Sound studios. “By the time we got to cut Goats Head Soup, Mick and I — well, all of the band — had separated over the world for a while,” Richards told The Sunday Times’ Paul Sexton recently. “So we had to figure out how to write songs not being in each other’s pocket. Mick and I finally agreed, ‘We’d better get together,’ I don’t even remember where, and said, ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’ So it really came out of that way of working a bit more separately and then putting it together.”
Richards’ frequent brushes with the law had also partly become his muse, supplying the Goats Head sessions with a rich array of moments to develop. Focus, though, was the other key ingredient, contrasting with the prolonged process that produced its predecessor: “Most of [Goats Head Soup] was recorded in Jamaica, but not all of it, and it’s obviously very different from Exile," Jagger told Sexton in the same Sunday Times interview. “Exile was this sprawling thing. It was recorded over a long period, and it was mixed up with excerpts from previous sessions. I don’t really recall us having a sit-down talk and saying, ‘OK, we’re going to make a record that’s different.’ I don’t think we did at all.”
Goats Head Soup, then, doesn’t vary too much from the, by now, well formed Stones formula. But there is a noted relaxation by comparison to Exile, and one track in particular - the ballad Angie, written by Richards while drying out in a Swiss clinic. “Angie was a pretty ballad with strings,” Jagger explained to Sexton, “so if you’re going for the lead-off track, it couldn’t be further away from the gritty stuff of Exile.” Jamaica may have played a part. Richards has likened the spirit there in 1972 and 1973 to London ten years earlier. On top of that, Bob Marley’s Catch A Fire had just come out. The sunshine isle offered plenty to infuse the recording process, resulting in an album with a decidedly more soulful feel.
Jagger recently explained, appropriately, to Rolling Stone, where Goats Head Soup fits in the Stones chronology: "It’s not an album that’s as revered as Exile On Main Street, which preceded it, in most people’s minds — I suppose including me," he said, pointing out that a few tracks still feature in their stage sets. "We do Angie. We do Heartbreaker. We sometimes do Dancing With Mr D. It’s not an album we do that many songs from. I mean, it’s a different kind of album. It was more or less done in one place, in a relatively short space of time, as opposed to Exile, which was very spread out time-wise. And so it is a different-sounding record. It’s got some good things."
Work on Goats Head was a lot more focused, resulting in less overmatter than its predecessor. That said, some lucky soul at Universal Music managed to unearth the unreleased Scarlet, All The Rage, and Criss Cross, which appear in the box set. As he's done with other reissues, Jagger applied some new work on them from home. "Actually not as much work as some of the ones I’ve done on previous releases," he told Rolling Stone. "All The Rage, didn’t really have much vocals, so I had to write that, basically. And obviously do the vocals. But Criss Cross and Scarlet, I didn’t do any vocals for. I just did some stuff at the end [for] my fade-out vocal."
Scarlet, in particular, is arguably the new release's point of interest. "It's a bit of an odd one," says Jagger, "because it wasn’t really recorded for Goats Head Soup. It was just a song that we had knocking around. I remember doing it with a couple of other people, in addition to the version that was found." Those "couple of other people" included one Jimmy Page, who plays lead guitar on the track, which wasn't, either, recorded in the Jamaica sessions. Prior to joining Led Zeppelin and indeed the Stones’ West London blues scene contemporaries The Yardbirds (where he replaced Eric Clapton before handing over guitar duties to Jeff Beck), Page was one of the most sought-after session musicians. Barely out of his teens, he played on Beatles and Kinks tracks, and even The Who’s debut single, I Can't Explain. Scarlet ended up being recorded in the basement studio of The Wick, a legendary residence up on Richmond Hill once owned by Sir John Mills, then owned by Ronnie Wood, and now owned by Pete Townshend (and Mick Jagger once owned a house just a few doors further down the road) .
“Ronnie didn’t actually play on it,” Page told Paul Sexton. “Keith came in and set up his equipment, and I took my guitar. Obviously I paid a lot of attention to what he was doing and then came up with a riff that would go with a contraflow. It was great to work with Keith right from the bare bones of something.” The result is a track Page now finds “really powerful”, 48 years later. “I thought it sounded really solid, and everybody’s really on form.”
Goats Head has been considered to be the record that ended that golden run of Stones albums. Their next, It’s Only Rock'n'Roll, saw Mick Taylor make his penultimate - an often underestimated - contribution (Wood would make an appearance on Rock'n'Roll, ahead of Taylor quitting the band for health reasons). On the Live In Brussels ’73 companion album contained in the Goats Head box set, you can feel the stage chemistry between his and Richards’ guitar work.
Critics, then, are free to express their opinions about Goats Head Soup, but it is at the end of the day, a Rolling Stones album and a very good one at that. If you divorce from their casual slide into international playboyism and even cliche over the rest of the 1970s and 1980s, it’s albums like this that remind you what the Stones represent and why their place in rock and roll’s star gallery should be unimpeachable. What they lack in The Beatles’ late-period creativity and progressiveness, they more than make up for in their relentless energy and the mask of simplicity that often hides the cleverness of Jagger and Richards’ songwriting, and the joy of hearing a band, one you think you know, still coming up with surprises, almost five decades after they were first planted on record.
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