Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out Released:

Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out in depth

The Rolling Stones hit some serious social/legal problems in the mid-sixties that prevented them from touring the United States. By the time these problems had been resolved through the departure of Brian Jones and the arrival of Mick Taylor, a great deal had changed for The Rolling Stones, as it had for music and youth culture in general.

The scale of the music business had grown. 'Pop', popular music, was no longer just a teenybopper craze, but a wider phenomenon incorporating 'serious' musical and philosophical ideas. (Cue the stroking of hairy chins all over university campuses everywhere.) It was also worth a whole lot more more money, since it reached an older, wealthier audience, both on record and in live performance.

The Rolling Stones had moved on since July 1966 too. From the wry, bouncy, blues-based, inventive pop tunes of Aftermath, they had journeyed through the Between The Buttons, Their Satanic Majesties Request and Beggars Banquet to arrive at Let It Bleed. Listen to those four records in order to understand what a transformation had taken place.

And then listen to Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out.

There is a tension in these performances that's best summed up in the difference between songs like Jumpin' Jack Flash, Midnight Rambler and Sympathy For The Devil - which explore and express, with furious and gleeful gusto, the darker side of life - and simple expressions of life and love like Carol and I'm Free.

Older, wiser, meaner, leaner and far more powerful, The Rolling Stones moved into the the 1969 American Tour with purpose, focus, a certain menace, and a night's worth of amazing new songs.

Effectively, The Stones had become - as road manager Sam Cutler realised in the way he introduced them - The Greatest Rock 'N' Roll Band In The World.

That this is true - or as true it can ever be in a world full of great rock 'n' roll bands - is evident on Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out, which Lester Bangs, writing in Rolling Stone magazine, called 'the best rock concert ever put on record'.

The recent re-release of the deluxe 40th Anniversary edition has re-excited interest in what is undoubtedly an important event in the history of recorded music, as well as The Rolling Stones. The inclusion of previously unreleased sets from opening acts like Ike and Tina Turner, and B.B. King; and of DVD footage by Albert & David Maysles; fills out the experience of what it was like to attend a Rolling Stones concert at the end of the '60s.