The Last Great Rolling Stones Album

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I have friends who would say that 1978's "Some Girls" was the Rolling Stones' last great album.

And it was a good one for sure.

But I would disagree that it was the band's last great album. "Tattoo You," which was released on this day in 1981, was the Stones' last great album. It just didn't have as much of a radio presence as "Some Girls" did.

Oh, sure, it had a huge hit in "Start Me Up" — which, in hindsight, seems to have been written to be played on sports arena loud speakers. It's a song that pumps up its listeners, which is what you want to do with a home crowd at a sports event. I saw the Stones in concert a couple of months after they released "Tattoo You," and probably no other song on their play list got such a raucous response.

Not even the classics.

It was still new, then, of course, and it had that fresh appeal that goes along with being something new. But it also had something that "Some Girls" and all the albums that came before it did not have — MTV.

MTV was new then and still finding itself. Playing a role in the promotion of new music was essential to its success, and "Start Me Up" was an enormous hit, rising to #2 on Billboard's Hot 100.

Like "Emotional Rescue" the year before, "Tattoo You" was mostly outtakes from the sessions that spawned "Some Girls" — filler, for lack of a better term. But there is filler and there is filler.

"Start Me Up" was the first single released from the album. In fact, it was in the stores 10 days before the album.

The second single, "Waiting on a Friend," was released as a single about three months after the album hit the stores and rose to #13 on the U.S. singles chart. The song had existed for nearly a decade, going back to the "Goats Head Soup" sessions in the early '70s. Well, it was a tune with no lyrics, but it became the Stones' first song to be packaged specifically with an MTV video in mind.

And the video became enormously popular, no doubt contributing to the song's success.

I liked the melody better than the lyrics.

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By the way, if the setting of the video seems familiar, it should. It was featured on the cover of Led Zeppelin's "Physical Graffiti" album.

The album's third single, "Hang Fire," was released in the spring of 1982. I didn't think much of it, frankly. To my great surprise, it managed to get to #20 on the charts.

Most Americans probably didn't realize that the lyrics represented one of the few times when the Stones have been political in their music. Their largely satirical lyrics skewered the British economic decline of the '70s.

Most listeners on this side of the Atlantic probably thought the music was kind of light and airy and the lyrics had no relevance to life in North America, which they didn't. As I say, the lyrics referred to the British economy and marrying one's way up the British economic and social ladders.

One song I always liked — but was never released as a single — was "Slave," the longest song on the album at 6:33.

Rolling Stone called it "a standard Stones blues jam," which is probably what attracted me to it.

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It came into existence during the sessions for "Black and Blue" when Ronnie Wood was filling the vacancy left by the departure of Mick Taylor.

Presumably "Slave" was more filler — but no one could pull off filler like the Stones. I kept hoping to hear it when I saw the Stones in concert.

But I don't think the Stones have ever performed "Slave" in a concert.

'Satisfaction:' The Triumph of the British Invasion

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If you weren't alive during the so–called British invasion of the mid–20th century and you would like an idea of how thoroughly and how quickly it succeeded in capturing the imagination of American youth, you really need look no further than the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," which was released in the Stones' homeland — the United Kingdom — 50 years ago today.

It was released in the United States nearly three months earlier.

Although there had been earlier reports in the American media of the popular music being made in England, the British invasion of United States pop culture generally is believed to have begun when the Beatles arrived in New York to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. By 1965, it seems the invasion was over, and the British performers were here to stay. America was where the money was. Media, too.

There is a pretty convincing case to be made for the significance of the year 1965 in modern popular music history. The Beatles had three of the top five hits of the year — "Help!" "Yesterday" and "Ticket to Ride" — but the Stones' "Satisfaction" was the top–selling single of the year, followed by America's Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man."

If you listened to the radio in 1965, you heard some of the biggest hits ever recorded by The Kinks, The Who, The Supremes, The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, The Yardbirds, The Moody Blues, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Roger Miller, Tom Jones, Herman's Hermits, The Temptations, and the list went on.

I was a small child in those days, and many of my peers had older brothers and sisters who introduced them to the music of the time, but my experience was different. I was the oldest in my family but far too young to be interested in the radio, and my parents rarely listened to the radio (my father would switch it on in the car if there was a good football game being played). I suppose my exposure to the music of my generation would have been further delayed if not for the fact that my father was a professor at one of the three colleges in my hometown, and he and my mother typically hired his students to watch my brother and me when they wanted to go out for dinner or a movie or something else. Sometimes the students came to our house to watch my brother and me; other times, my parents dropped us off at the dorm, and I can remember hearing the music of that time echoing through the halls of the dorms.

Undoubtedly, that is where I heard many songs for the first time. It is probably why I feel as if I have always known the words to some songs — I heard them played over and over again when I was young.

(If brainwashing were as benign as simply implanting song lyrics into one's brain, I could probably support it. But, I suppose, that form of brainwashing already exists.)

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Speaking of which, it is funny how the brain functions, isn't it? I mean, every time I hear "Satisfaction," I remember — however briefly — when I saw "Apocalypse Now" and it was featured on the movie's soundtrack.

The Meaning of 'Angie'

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"With no loving in our souls
And no money in our coats
You can't say we're satisfied
But Angie, Angie,
You can't say we never tried."

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

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My life followed an unusual pattern in 1973 — well, it was an out–of–the–ordinary pattern for me, to say the least.

That summer, my parents decided to take part in a program in which the college where my father taught was a participant.

Under this arrangement, students could enroll in summer college courses being offered at the University of Graz in Graz, Austria. My parents could receive significant discounts on airfare and accommodations if they took classes as well, which they did, but they didn't seem to take their classes seriously. It was mostly a low–cost way for the family to take a trip to Europe.

Faculty members from other schools did the same thing. I remember becoming friends that summer with a couple of boys my age whose fathers were teachers in Nebraska. I even visited them in Nebraska once after we returned to the United States.

Speaking of which, we returned to America in early to mid–August, as I recall, and my family had to pack our things quickly because my father was about to begin a four–month sabbatical in Nashville, and we had little time to get everything ready for our move.

Consequently, August of 1973 is a blur for me now. But all I have to do is hear a song that was on the radio in those days, and I am instantly transported back to that time.

And one of the most prominent songs was released on this day in 1973 — "Angie" by the Rolling Stones.

It was on the Stones' "Goats Head Soup" album. No other song on the album could compete with it as far as public popularity was concerned. "Angie" raced to the top of the Billboard charts; "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)," its closest competition from the album, made it to #15 the following year.

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I remember at the time there was considerable speculation about the subject of the song. Was it about David Bowie's first wife, whose name was Angela? Was it about actress Angie Dickinson? Or was it about bandmate Keith Richards' newborn daughter (whose name was Dandelion Angela)?

(Personally, whenever I heard "Angie," I thought of a beautiful classmate of mine whose name was Angela — and who inspired my earliest adolescent fantasies. Matter of fact, I still think of her when I hear it — and I have seen a few recent pictures of her on Facebook. She's still capable of inspiring fantasies — or song lyrics.)

Richards wrote nearly all of the song, and he said it was about heroin and his attempts to stop using it.

Kind of a reverse twist on the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" explanation, huh? In case you aren't familiar with it, speculation held that that title was a play on the abbreviation LSD, and it was a drug–inspired song.

John Lennon popped that balloon, though, by explaining that the title came from a piece of artwork done by his young son at school.

That's the way the '60s and early '70s were, though. Everyone was looking for hidden meanings in everything — and the speculation was almost always wrong. (That observation never fails to remind me of a line that George Carlin used when doing his disc jockey act — "In a few minutes, we'll be listening to the new John Lennon single, which, if you play it backwards at slow speed, it screws up your needle ...")

I suppose, though, like most songs, "Angie" means whatever the listener thinks it means.

Personally, I never attached any special meaning to "Angie," other than a little harmless fantasizing about my classmate Angela, but I had a friend in college who always thought of her mother when she heard it (she thought of her father, a truck driver, whenever she heard Elton John's "Rocket Man").

To each his own, I guess.

The Start of the Stones' Historic Tour

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In recent years, it has come to be regarded as one of the most successful rock 'n' roll tours of all time.

But when Sheila (one of my college buddies) and I decided to attend one of the Rolling Stones' shows in the fall of 1981, we didn't know that, of course.

We knew that we were in school in Fayetteville, Ark., and the Stones would be performing in two shows — on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 — in the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. Sheila's sister was living in the Dallas area at the time. Sheila said we could get her sister to get the tickets for us, and we could stay at her sister's house before and after the concert.

(In hindsight, the shows in Kansas City in mid–December would have been closer, but neither of us knew anyone in Kansas City and the timing would have been awkward, right around the time of final exams.)

Halloween was on a Saturday so we figured we could drive to Dallas on Friday, see the show on Saturday and drive back to Fayetteville on Sunday without missing any class.

Thus, everything was covered. And so the decision had been made.

Looking back on it all, I can only shake my head at the sheer naivete — not to mention the monumental leap of faith — it took for us to not only undertake such a whirlwind trip but to believe (hell, to practically take for granted) that it would all go smoothly.

And, for the most part, it did.

It was a great show. ZZ Top was the warmup band, and I had always wanted to see ZZ Top, anyway, but, in my eyes, getting to see ZZ Top and the Stones on the same occasion would have made the tickets cheap at twice the price — even though I was a struggling student at the time.

And I got a great T–shirt out of it — which I wore with as much pride as an Olympian wearing a medal or a veteran wearing a Purple Heart — at least until it fell apart after numerous trips through the laundry.

There were a few setbacks. It rained on Halloween. It was kind of a sporadic rain, kinda heavy at times, but it was particularly intense during the Stones' portion of the show. The speakers started to make what I always described as snap–crackle–and–pop sounds during the Stones' encore.

That made the show I saw unique — even special — but I'll get back to that.

That 1981 tour began on this day in Philadelphia. The news had reached my friends and me in Arkansas in the weeks before that day that there had been millions of advance requests for tickets. Perhaps it was an omen of things to come.

That tour smashed attendance records in many places, including Philadelphia's JFK Stadium, which was demolished nearly 20 years ago. A little more than a month into it, the New York Times wrote that the tour was "expected to be the most profitable in the history of rock 'n' roll."

Well, the tour drew approximately 3 million people to 50 shows in 29 cities, and I heard that the Stones' profits from the tour, which was designed to promote the just–released "Tattoo You," exceeded $20 million so I can only conclude that the Times was right about that — at least in 1981.

(I don't keep up with these things the way I once did, but, surely, at least one tour has matched or bettered it in three decades — and perhaps the answer is so obvious that I should know it, but I don't. Maybe U2, with its astonishingly popular tours, has broken many of the records the Stones set in 1981. Perhaps Paul McCartney did. Possibly someone whose name does not occur to me at the moment.

(But, in 1981, the Stones were the undisputed champs.)

After 30 years, I can't tell you every song that was played or the order in which they were played on the day I saw the Stones. It was Halloween, and many of the concert goers came dressed in costumes. Some were quite elaborate — I remember a Darth Vader and a Grim Reaper in my immediate vicinity — and they grabbed my attention at times.

Certain songs stand out in my memory, such as "Under My Thumb," "Honky Tonk Women," "Sympathy for the Devil," "Street Fighting Man" and the Stones' latest hit, "Start Me Up."

The next year, I bought the album that was made from tracks recorded during the tour, but it included several songs that I couldn't remember then from the show I saw, much less today — such as "Let's Spend the Night Together" and "Time Is On My Side."

There was one song on that album that I know wasn't played at the show I saw — "Satisfaction." I've heard that it was the grand finale of every other show on the tour, and, fittingly, it was the last track on the album.

But in Dallas on Halloween, it was raining so hard that the people in charge decided it was too dangerous to go on — and so the show was stopped before the Stones could play "Satisfaction."

That made the Halloween show unique on that tour.

There was no dramatic announcement. There was no apology for shortchanging the fans who had been standing in a rather cold Texas rain for hours. I don't remember the last song the Stones played that day, but I do remember that the Stones seemed a bit surprised to be told to wrap things up. Clearly, whatever song they had played was not intended to be the last one.

Besides, we hadn't heard "Satisfaction" yet.

That was still in the future on this day in 1981. The Stones' tour was under way — and, from what I heard at the time, it got off to a rousing start in Philly.

Sticky Fingers

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If you feel like the Rolling Stones have been around forever, you aren't alone. A lot of us feel that way.

I saw the Stones perform in concert when I was in college — and they had been around so long by that time that much of their show consisted of songs that were already designated as "golden oldies."

Don't get me wrong. It was a good show, one of the best I have ever seen in person. But the Stones clearly were a nostalgia trip by that time.

You had to go back about a generation to find someone who could remember — vividly — when the Stones were new, a testosterone–enhanced version of the Beatles.

They built that image with a list of songs that seems, in hindsight, to have been destined for greatness, for inclusion among the all–time greats — "Satisfaction," "Sympathy For The Devil," "Gimme Shelter," "You Can't Always Get What You Want," "Honky Tonk Women" and others, of course.

When I saw them, they were still cranking out hits (that hasn't changed although the Stones' pace definitely has slowed in recent years), but there was no doubt that the Stones were a relic from another era. There were people in the crowd that day who were my age, but there were also people who were 20 or even 30 years older. Even then, the Stones had a remarkable reach that spanned generations.

I can only imagine what kind of age range is drawn to a Stones show these days — everything from 6 to 60 and beyond, I suppose.

Well, whatever the size of the crowd that may come to see a Stones show these days, the Stones have earned the attention — in no small part because of an album they released 40 years ago today, "Sticky Fingers."

It was the Stones' first studio album since "Let It Bleed," the album they had been promoting on their late 1969 tour, just before the deadly free concert at Altamont. That event seemed to disrupt, at least momentarily, the Stones' momentum. The only album they released between Altamont in 1969 and this day in 1971 was a recording of live tracks.

(That live album, by the way, was a great album. For many years, it was widely considered to be the best concert album ever made — and you can still find people who will tell you that.)

There were lots of great Stones albums and singles coming out in those days. In fact, if I had to name the most productive five–year period that the Stones have ever had, I would have to pick 1968 to 1972, which included the releases of four of their best studio albums — "Beggars Banquet," "Let It Bleed," "Sticky Fingers" and "Exile on Main Street."

(Those four were, in my opinion, flawless, although some might argue that nearly every album the Stones released until about the mid–1970s was flawless or nearly so, and the same probably could be said of the albums that followed "Exile" — "Goats Head Soup" and "It's Only Rock 'n' Roll.")

But "Sticky Fingers" was the first to be released on the Stones' very own, newly created recording label, and it featured a rather risque (for the time) album cover showing a jeans–clad, presumably male figure from the waist down with an actual zipper.

In spite of the controversy that I do remember erupting around me when that record was released, I don't remember being overly influenced by album cover art at that time. I was just starting to appreciate the popular music of the day, and I tended to think of an album in terms of which songs it contained, not its theme or message.

There were two great singles on "Sticky Fingers." A lot of people would tell you that "Brown Sugar" was the best, and there's good reason for saying that. It was certainly more commercially successful. It reached #1 on the charts, and it was more of an up–tempo song, the kind of a song that the Stones have always done so well.

But I always felt drawn more to "Wild Horses."

I don't know why that is. Could be several reasons for it, I guess. I was raised in the South, and "Wild Horses" had more of a country sound to it than anything else the Stones had done up to that time. I wasn't exactly a fan of country music when I was growing up, but it was familiar to me.

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But the thing about "Wild Horses," you see, is that it is really more of a ballad, in my view — and that means that people can adapt it to fit their personal styles.

So many people have done so already — including Susan Boyle, who soared to worldwide fame after her appearance on "Britain's Got Talent" a couple of years ago.

Both songs have been standards on Stones tours for years now.

A Satisfying Single

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Five and a half years ago, Rolling Stone named it the #2 greatest rock 'n' roll song of all time.

Considering that nothing has been recorded and released since that time that could even remotely be considered a threat to it, I have to assume that the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" is still the second–greatest song in Rolling Stone's opinion, second only to Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," which was released the following month.

Oh, did I mention that today is the 45th anniversary of the commercial release of "Satisfaction?" It became the first — and perhaps the greatest — #1 hit in the Stones' storied career.

I guess a lot of songs could be said to be Vietnam era songs, but "Satisfaction" seemed to grab the unofficial title when it was prominently used in the 1979 film "Apocalypse Now."

I've wondered which song the individual Stones would pick as representative of the Vietnam era. I'm inclined to doubt that Keith Richards would name "Satisfaction." He didn't seem to think there was anything special about it. The song's famous, distinctive guitar riff wasn't unique in the Stones' repertoire, he insisted, saying that "there is only one song — it's just the variations you come up with."

I have heard — although I've never been able to prove — that Mick Jagger once said he would rather be dead than still singing "Satisfaction" when he was 40. Maybe he did, but he seemed to come to appreciate the role the song played in his success. It was "the song that really made The Rolling Stones," he said, "changed us from just another band into a huge, monster band."

Over the years, it has become such a favorite of Rolling Stones audiences that it practically takes an act of God to prevent the Stones from playing it in their concerts. But I was present once when the Stones didn't play it — even though Jagger was not yet 40.

It was a rainy Halloween weekend in Dallas, and a friend of mine and I had obtained tickets to a Stones show in the Cotton Bowl. It had become routine for the Stones to play "Satisfaction" as their final song at the shows on their North American tour. But, on that occasion, it was raining so much and the speakers were making snap, crackle and pop sounds — and someone, perhaps someone in the band, perhaps someone in the offstage entourage, decided it wasn't safe to continue.

It was the only show on the tour that did not have "Satisfaction" as its finale.

I was disappointed that I never got to hear the Stones play "Satisfaction."

But I was pleased that its absence made the show I saw unique.