Aftermath Released: April 15, 1966

Aftermath, The Stones' fourth studio album, was made and released in the immediate wake of a three year period of touring and recording that ended with five consecutive UK number one singles.

Who's on Aftermath

  • Brian Jones

    Guitars, sitar, keyboards, accordion, trumpet, saxophone, backing vocals

  • Mick Jagger

    Lead and backing vocals, acoustic guitar and harmonica.

  • Bill Wyman

    Bass Guitar, Backing Vocals, Keyboards

  • Keith Richards

    Guitar, lead and backing vocals, electric and acoustic guitar
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Aftermath in depth

Aftermath is a musical departure from The Rolling Stones Mark One. The R 'N' B roots are still clearly audible, and even prevalent.

But the Beatles- and Dylan-influenced pop hooks and riffs that typify the mass-market mid-sixties sound (and feature so strongly on The Stones' later hit singles) play a bigger part on Aftermath than on any previous Stones recording or - bar Between The Buttons - any later collection.

This still isn’t the final version of the Greatest Rock 'N' Roll Band in the World, which still lay still three years in the future, with the psychedelic-turned-turned-street fightin' late sixties still to be negotiated. Aftermath is the sound of a band in transition.

Brian Jones would not be part of that band, but his work here is some of his finest. In response to the lighter emphasis on his beloved blues, Jones' move from slide guitar specialist to general instrumentalist – emphasis on mentalist – makes for an entirely new aural texture and soundscape.

The results are striking, and brilliant. From the menacing sitar riff that introduces Paint It Black, to the marimbas of Under My Thumb, to the dulcimer on Lady Jane, Aftermath is suffused with sounds far more various and experimental than anything The Stones had yet released.

“Our previous sessions have always been rush jobs. This time we were able to relax a little, take our time.”

Keith Richards, 1965

The lyrics show a sharpened sense of the contemporary.

The pseudo-medieval/baroque balladry of Lady Jane – one of Mick Jagger’s finer studio performances, and an amusing, if slightly twee venture into the olde Englishe folk idiom - evokes the velveteen whimsy of Swinging London on a sunny afternoon in 1966.

Paint It Black is an extraordinary song for its time, a paean to dark, nihilistic depression on the cusp of the summer of love. 19th Nervous Breakdown, a close cousin to this track, had been a number two US single a few weeks previously and would have fitted into the unnerving world of Aftermath perfectly.

Along with Between The Buttons, and possibly Their Satanic Majesties Request, Aftermath might be said to be part of The Rolling Stones' 'problem period', on the model of Shakespeare's problem plays: hard to classify except by their dissimilarity to the rest of the ouevre.

Aftermath is not the apprentice/journeyman tribute work of the rhythm and blues purists nor the rock and roll rebels of The Rolling Stones' earliest years. Neither is it the sound of the full-on guitar blues/rock band the Stones became from Beggars Banquet onwards. Aftermath is, in fact, the sound of a band of musicians responding to the times in which they're living: expressing and reflecting and distorting new ideas abroad in the air, including the fashion for observational and thoughtful songs about what it was like to be young, rich, famous, sexed-up and on drugs in the middle of the weirdest decade ever.

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