Hot Rocks 1964-1971 Released: December 20, 1971

Hot Rocks 1964-1971 in depth

When The Rolling Stones moved on from Allen Klein's ABKCO Records to form their own label, the catalogue to date stayed with ABCKO, who promptly put out Hot Rocks as a record of the achievement the Stones left behind. This was obviously an astute commercial move, as Hot Rocks has become the best-selling Stones album of all time; but to see Hot Rocks purely as a cynical exercise in rights exploitation is to miss the point entirely.

As is known, despite the fantastic array of extra-curricular fables associated with the band, the music is what it is, and what it always has been all about with The Rolling Stones. And Hot Rocks is a remarkable monument to the magnificence of the band in its first incarnations.

From Time Is On My Side - and who can fail to wonder at the awesome prescience of that title, given what has followed? - to Wild Horses, every song on this album is a certified classic. It's not even debatable.

Pick a number between 1 and 21 at random. 17 comes up on the imaginary die, and what do we have here? Gimme Shelter, the first track off Let It Bleed, probably THE end of the sixties anthem, a phenomenal, eerie, hopeful, threatening masterpiece. Merry Clayton's wild, witchy wailing co-lead vocal, recorded in LA, reaches across the ocean to match and even exceed Jagger's London- recorded yowling imprecations perfectly: war, it's just a shot away; love, it's just a kiss away. That was the choice the sixties kids faced right there on the cusp of 1970, on a record released 32 days before the end of the decade, and seven days before Meredith Hunter was murdered by Hell's Angels at Altamont as The Rolling Stones played Under My Thumb.

Another number: the random number generator throws up 15, Sympathy For The Devil, almost a sister song to Gimme Shelter, a high-tempo, rhythmically exuberant exploration of the evil that men do and why civilisation might be the response to barbarity. Come on! Who else was trying musical ideas like this in the mainstream, let alone proposing such a profoundly heretical philosophical solution to an age-old flaw in the theological system? Compare and contrast the speculative confidence of the instruction "If you meet me [Lucifer] have some courtesy, have some sympathy, have some taste' with the hoo hah surrounding John Lennon's relatively downbeat, innocent and accurate suggestion that The Beatles were bigger than Jesus four years earlier. When it came to redesigning the spiritual and moral structure of society, The Rolling Stones were in a completely different league.

A final spin of the wheel gives us number 20, Brown Sugar. 'All the nasty subjects in one go', as Mick remarked. (He later tried to deny all knowledge, saying 'God knows what I’m on about on that song'.) '...a rocker so compelling that it discourages exegesis' suggested critic Robert Christgau. Laying aside the subject matter - slavery, rape, prostitution, sadism, cunnilingus, heroin - ; and pausing only to admire the wonderfully deadpan lyrical aside 'Lady of the house wondering where it's going to stop' ('it' being the noisy nightly S/M orgies involving her domestic 'staff' and her husband); just listen to the music. It doesn't even matter what the song's about, just check those riffs, that beat, that ecstatic moan of 'Aaah, come on...', the whoops and howls and cries of Yeah in the outro. The song's about sex alright, but so is all R 'n' B, and this is the very finest blues rock available to humanity. Turn it up loud, open the windows and let it rip.

Play the game yourself. Pick a number, play the tune and marvel. Or, failing that, stick it on at Track One and enjoy one of the greatest musical rides from 1964 to 1971 you will ever take.