Flowers Released: June 26, 1967

Flowers in depth

There are times when something as simple and as straightforward as a hastily-compiled LP for a crucial foreign market can become, somehow, bigger, more than just the sum of its parts. The release of Flowers in the mid-summer of 1967 was definitely one of those times.

It was only meant to be a collection of songs that had been issued as UK singles or had been left off the US versions of the Aftermath and Between The Buttons LPs. A previously unreleased version of Smokey Robinson and Ronnie White’s My Girl had been recorded in Los Angeles way back in May 1965 – a date that must have, already, seemed like a lifetime ago.

Sittin’ On A Fence, an entirely acoustic tribute to rejecting the conformity of marriage and mortgage, dates from December 1965 and had been a minor hit for a very minor UK duo called Twice As Much in the summer of 1966. Ride On, Baby, with Stu on piano and Jack Nitzsche on harpsichord dates from the same session. A version by Chris Farlowe (who had, of course, had his biggest hit with another Flowers track, the Jagger / Richards composition Out Of Time) reached a fairly unimpressive number 31 in October 1966. Take It Or Leave It had been an underwhelming almost-hit for The Searchers that same year as well as appearing on Aftermath.

So a brief glance at the track-listing doesn’t fill you with confidence, a fact which makes the album’s impact all the more surprising, because what Flowers really does is gather together a lot of threads that showcased what a brilliantly diverse group this really was, while also signposting a few places they would visit sometimes years down the road.

There was Back Street Girl, which patched together the sort of stinging lyrical putdown of an unworthy hanger-on that the band were becoming justly famous for, with a forlornly simple acoustic musical track that wouldn’t sound out of place on, say, Goats Head Soup. Sung from the position an anointed boy king (“Please take the favours I grant, curtsey and look nonchalant just for me…”), there was no malice here, just a sense of delicious entitlement, an emotion that made the song all the more chilling as it politely points all the person’s social failings.
“Please don’t ring on the phone,” Jagger sings, “Your manners are never quite right.” Later, in case any doubt remains, he nails it completely, “Don’t try to ride on my horse, you’re rather common of course”.

Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow? had never been on an LP before. Sure, it sounds thin and boxy, like the band was playing in a room adjacent to the one in which the mics were actually turned on; but it has all the desire for change and the blatant forward motion of 19th Nervous Breakdown or Get Off Of My Cloud.

Mother’s Little Helper, lifted from the Aftermath album, found a band who were beginning to really inhabit their own world, one where everyone else’s laws and beliefs, their hang-ups and hypocrisies seemed very odd, old-fashioned, utterly out of place. Please Go Home – recorded in Los Angeles a year before release – takes an edge-of-chaos Bo Diddley beat and rubs it up against echo-box vocals and a whistling Theremin – it skirts complete breakdown before finally resolving and it’s a thrilling pop artefact.

Then there are the monster hits. Ruby Tuesday, which began life known as Track 8 during a London session in November 1966, is pitch-perfect mid-60s orchestral pop, romantic enough to care, aloof enough to move on. At the opposite end of the scale there’s Let’s Spend The Night Together, a joyous burst of free-spirited, almost innocent lasciviousness (“We could have fun just grooving around!”). There was no darkness here, only a limitless sense of possibility.

Flowers was a bit of a bodge, an attempt to bring people up to speed, off-load a few unheard pieces and milk the fanbase for a few quid; and it did all those things remarkably well. But it also brought enough material together to show the Stones’ growth and progression, their vision even. Flowers gave you a really good idea of what this band was all about. Of course, six months later they’d release Their Satanic Majesties Request, so, in truth, no one actually knew anything other than that chapter one was definitely over.

As for chapter two? Well, on this evidence, absolutely anything at all might happen next. And as history relates, quite a lot of it did.