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Rolling Stones and the Making of Let It Bleed
Author: Sean Egan
Publisher: Unanimous
Price: £9.99
Pages: 206

Anyone with a pair of ears and blood stop-starting through his veins will recognise the sound of fire and brimstone in the opening one chord rumble that announces 'Gimme Shelter', that swirl of a song that introduces us to the Rolling
Stones 1969 masterpiece, Let It Bleed.

Bookmarked between this apocalyptic vision and the Bachmeets-rumba advice of 'You Can’t Always Get What You Want', Let It Bleed finds, inarguably, the greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world at its arguable best.

But how did the Stones reach this sex ’n’ violence-drenched apogee?

Like any other artistic production—whether it is Van Gogh’s self-portraits or Wagner’s Ring cycle—there is a story to tell about its coming into existence. Journalist Sean Egan tells this story.

Egan is a fan. But he refrains from dipping into fanzine territory by going into the mechanics and the backgrounds, rather than producing a gush in print. In fact, he lets us know that Let It Bleed “is a great Stones album but not their best”
(Sticky Fingers or Exile on Main Street are, in his opinion, the top contenders).

But what settles the matter for him is the “presence on it of those two titanic classics that top and tail it, 'Gimme Shelter' and 'You Can’t Always Get What You Want'”.

In other words, Let It Bleed is the most powerful rock album ever. Let It Bleed  marks the end of the happy, chirpy Sixties. And the beginning of that end is sounded by the opening number, which Egan carefully explains could be the direct result of the pain and humiliation that its creator, Keith Richards, went through when his friend and partner Mick Jagger stole his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg.

The Rolling Stones in action

That may sound a bit pat—girl meets other boy, creates pain, that goes into a record. But we are convinced about Egan’s thesis that the naughty, hygienically-dodgy antitheses of the Beatles turned into the riders of apocalyptic rock ’n’ roll — menacing and alluring at the same time — from a certain moment.

In the middle of 1968, Jagger and Pallenberg were acting in a Donald Cammell movie called Performance. It was about a young and retired rock star (Jagger) living in “soporific decadence with two women in a house in London”. A gangster on the run, played by James Fox, enters this world that he initially despises, but by the end of the story becomes all too comfortable in this disturbingly alluring setting. During and after the love scenes in Performance, Jagger and Pallenberg
stop acting somewhere down the line — the director even went on to win an award for a pornographic version of the film.

But apart from explaining the alluring sense of damage and destruction created by this treachery that Richards pours on to the record, Egan also points to the fact that Jagger changed his Stones persona forever to become Turner, the aristocratic, decadent rock star character that he plays in Performance. And the Stones also changed with him.

But it’s not all psychoanalysis from Egan. He details each song on the album — and a few like 'Memo From Turner' and Sister Morphine created during the autumn-winter of 1969 that were kept out — giving us a lucid and clear view of how the Stones made their music.

“That’s Jimmy [Miller] playing the cowbell [in the intro of the single 'Honky Tonk Women' that wasn’t on the album] and either he comes in wrong or I come in wrong,” Egan quotes Charlie Watts. “But Keith comes in right, which makes the whole thing right.”

Whether it’s the ironic garishness of 'Monkey Man' ("I’m a flea-bit peanut money/ And all my friends are junkies/ Well, that’s not really true") or the bravado of 'Live With M'e or the sheer aesthetic danger of 'Midnight Rambler', Let It Bleed was made from a cauldron bubbling with musical genius.

In the sixth of the Vinyl Frontier series (the others include the making of the Beatles’ White Album and of Led Zeppelin IV), Egan provides us the dope. And it is grade A stuff.

E-mail Indrajit: ihazra@hindustantimes.com