12 x 5 Released: October 17, 1964

12 x 5 in depth

12 x 5 is The Rolling Stones’ ‘difficult second album’. After the huge success of their eponymous UK debut, and its promising US twin, England’s Newest Hitmakers, the pressure was on to capitalize on the opportunity, especially in the States, by rolling out another hit album as quickly as possible.

Being still largely a covers band at this point, this wasn’t as big a challenge as it might have been for The Rolling Stones. There were plenty of great songs already out there that just had to be chosen and played. On the other hand, the Jagger/Richards songwriting team was looking to grow and increase the quantity of self-penned material recorded by the band.

This they achieved: where England’s Newest Hitmakers contained a single Jagger/Richards number, along with two Nanker Phelge (group) compositions, while, 12 x 5 contains three Jagger/Richards tracks and another two NP songs. Before and between these originals – some of which are promising, some workmanlike – The Stones cover a couple of stone classics and have some fun with a few lesser-known tracks.

First the classics. Norman Meade’s Time Is On My Side is a Rolling Stones staple, and has been since they first laid it down in the Chess studios in June, 1964. This (brooding, gospel organ intro) version is not the most famous (plaintive, plucked guitar intro), which wasn’t recorded until November; but it is, crucially, the one that became their first top ten US hit in October 1964. (On the back of it, 12 x 5 went on to outsell its predecessor, reaching number three and staying in the US album charts for 38 weeks.) The yowling, insistent Jagger vocal – check the spoken middle section 1.18 especially, ‘Go ahead, baby…” – is perfectly balanced by a bustling rhythm section (ignoring Jagger’s occasionally mistimed tambourine beats) Stu’s foreboding keyboards and the increasingly adept intertwined guitars of Jones and Richards.

Around And Around, the Chuck Berry track that opens the record, also has claims to greatness in the Stones canon. This energetic, good-natured take on the old favourite puts something uniquely English and value additive in to Berry’s original - it's more than just a tribute. By contrast, Jay McShann and Walter Brown’s Confessin’ The Blues is here an authentic, straightforward white British R ‘n’ B cover - also unmistakably The Stones and, equally unmistakably, a study piece, rather than a standout.

On the other hand, It’s All Over Now, the Bobby and Shirley Womack-penned Valentinos hit, is full of jangling, twanging star quality from the first bars. A bit country, a lot of blues, this is a swaggering, swinging slice of guitar pop that, under the direction of Chess chief engineer, Ron Malo, delivers the authentic sound and mood of black American music played by white British boys. Why that worked and works so well is anyone’s guess, but it did (and still does), becoming The Stones’ first UK number one, and reaching 26 on the US Billboard chart.

The covers of Resnick and Young’s Under The Boardwalk and the Bateman and Pickett song If You Need Me are pleasant enough, without being particularly noteworthy, and the version of Dale Hawkins’ Susie Q, is mainly notable for Brian Jones’ rambunctious, spoiling-for-a-fight guitar solos.

The Stones’ own numbers are a mixed bag, but begin to show some of the promise that they would go on to fulfil. Empty Heart, credited to Nanker Phelge, is a noisy, urgent, brilliant, but effectively unfinished musical idea. It’s not a song – it’s a jam. The hissing drums, wailing harmonica, jumping keyboards, duelling guitars and moaning harmonized vocals really come together in the middle of the song, and you want it to go on and do something – a middle eight, a repeated refrain, a trick restart – something, anything – but it doesn’t. They just keep on whooping and wailing and hollering - pause for a bit - and then do it again until it fades out. It’s great while it lasts but it doesn’t last long and it doesn’t go anywhere. Shame – there’s a touch of something rare and fabulous here, reminiscent, almost of the first few bars of the MC5’s Kick Out The Jams, just after Rob Tyner shouts “Motherfuckers!”

2120 South Michigan Avenue is another circular ride round the neighborhood, this particular neighborhood being the Chess Studios, whose postal address the song celebrates. It’s pleasant enough, certainly demonstrating some musical chops and with a bit more build than Empty Heart, but a lot less bite, and once again, you end up where you started – which is not a bad place to be by any means.

The first Jagger/Richards track, Good Times, Bad Times hints at a past and future that wouldn’t find full expression in their work until the end of the sixties. It’s a gentle, country-tinged blues, slight in itself, but full of craft and love, as a song and a performance. Congratulations, the second of the three Jagger/Richards composition on 12 x 5, is a moody, sub-Beatlesesque, inoffensive but slightly aimless period piece – what passed for boy band music in 1964. Grown Up Wrong, the third, is a less tuneful, more sprightly and interesting excursion into the region where the blues meets mod/pop – the kind of tune the Small Faces would later claim as their own.

So that’s 12 x 5 – a record any band of musicians would be proud of today – although it would be extremely odd, in fact impossible, to make a record that sounds like this today. Given that it’s generally considered to be a rapid-release makeweight in the Stones canon, put out fast to catch the pop wave before it passed, 12 x 5 points toward the tsunami-sized future of The Rolling Stones quite clearly, still bears repeated listening, and not only for its historical interest.