Black and Blue

by

The Rolling Stones

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This often overlooked album in the Stones' oeuvre shines with good to great songs and contains some brilliant reggae. It kicks off with the funky Hot Stuff, followed by the passionate Hand Of Fate which is vintage Stones. Cherry O Baby is a lovely slice of reggae with intriguing organ lines and brilliant vocalizing, while the road epic Memory Motel is a moving story song. Hey Negrita is a wailing bluesy number and Melody soulfully ambles along with lovely guitar, sax, piano and Mick's falsetto voice. Fool To Cry starts as a gentle ballad but gets pretty raucous eventually, while Crazy Mama is the Stones at their rocking best, a powerful conclusion to this great album. It may not be amongst the Rolling Stones' top ten albums, but Black And Blue contains some strong songs with great melodies and playing throughout and no dud tracks. Rediscovering it was a great pleasure.

I'll be the first to admit it, I'm a 68-74 Stones snob, but I have always tried to like this album. Hand Of Fate, Hey Negrita, and Crazy Mama rock pretty good, and they do a decent job of reggae on Cherry Oh Baby, but they just start to sound sloppy. In a perfect world Mick Talyor would have stuck with the Stones, Ron Wood would have stuck with the Faces (where he actually used to play pretty mean guitar...what happened?), and all would have been well. Instead the Stones put out one more pretty good album (Some Girls) before phoning it in, and Rod Stewart went Hollywood...pretty much a lose/lose situation. That said, even mediocre Stones is much better than most bands could hope to achieve.