Beautifully Mediocre - Volume II

Beautifully Mediocre is a feature dedicated to the idea that sometimes a record that only has one or two good tracks on it deserves some credit. Let's face it, the majority of records have zero good tracks, so one or two is better than what most bands can pull off.

The Rolling Stones
Goats Head Soup
1973










The first thing that we must do in this case is establish that the word 'mediocre' is a relative term. It's also not really a term that I would personally use to describe this album; it's more of the general consensus among most critics, including those of its day and many of them now. 1973's Goats Head Soup was the Rolling Stones follow-up release to the epic Exile on Main Street, which was released the previous year. Like Exile, it was panned by many critics when it came out. Unlike Exile, it is not slobbered all over by critics today. Some critics half-praise it as a sort of experimental funky record, while most give it a great big "meh". I have searched high and low and I can't seem to find anyone who agrees with me about what this album really is: yet another damn fine record by the World's Greatest Rock n' Roll Band.

Goats was recorded at Dynamic Sound Studio in Kingston, Jamaica beginning in late 1972. Why Jamaica? Apparently, because Jamaica was one of the few countries that would actually allow Keith Richards on its soil. This is the last Stones record produced by Jimmy Miller, who I think did a fantastic job on all of their albums, and the last one to feature Mick Taylor on all of its tracks (he left the band during the recording of It's Only Rock n' Roll, though he appeared on most of the songs on it). Its sound is all over the place, but in a much more chaotic way than Exile, which has a much more consistent flow. Fortunately, this is Rock n' Roll, and sometimes a little chaos is just what the doctor ordered.

Side 1 starts out effectively with "Dancing with Mr. D"; a classic Stones groove accentuated by Mick Taylor's slide guitar, and some brilliant clavinet work by Billy Preston. Mick Taylor is without a doubt, the best musician to ever be in the Stones, and his playing is front and center on this record. Maybe this was by design, maybe it just happened that way because everybody else was phoning it in, or maybe it was out of necessity because Keith was too fucked up to play half the time. Whatever the reason, it doesn't really matter. Taylor's leads and slide work on this record are the work of a technical genius with enough soul to make it sound like the Stones. Taylor's other highlights include his stellar usage of a wah-wah pedal on the album's two best tracks: "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)" and my personal favorite "100 Years Ago".

The #1 hit "Angie" was this record's biggest commercial success, though I've never cared much for it. The rather obscure "Winter", however, is probably my favorite of all the Stones' ballads, even though it seems like filler on this record. I guess when you reach the level that these guys did in the early 70's, even your jab is going to be more powerful than most bands' uppercut. "Silver Train" and "Hide Your Love" are two more songs that sound like they were probably written in a matter of minutes, but still sound good. The whole thing builds up to a fantastic finish, closing out with the utterly perverse "Star Star", a song most people know by its original title "Starfucker". All I'm going to say about that song is that only Jagger could sing a lyric such as "Ali McGraw got mad at you, for givin' head to Steve McQueen" and not sound like a total jerkoff. If even someone as great as Lennon had sung that, it would have sounded about as sincere as a Poison song. Mick's sexual exploits are as legendary as the Loch Ness Monster; so much so that a 40-year-old rumor still circulates today about him getting caught eating a Mars bar out of Marianne Faithfull's box during a 1967 drug raid at Keith's estate. When Snopes.com is debunking the legends of your libido 40 years after a completely false rumor started, you can be as vulgar as you want and I'm not going to criticize you for it sounding inauthentic.

Goats Head Soup is not bulletproof. There are a couple of stinkers on this record, for sure. The penultimate track, "Can You Hear the Music", sounds like a pretty pointless experimentation with bizarre sounds and instruments, and it clocks in at an egregious five and half minutes. The obligatory 'let's let Keith sing one' track is "Coming Down Again", which is the probably the worst of its kind in the Stones discography, certainly out of everything up to and including Tattoo You. But two crummy songs out of ten isn't bad, that's an 80% success rate. Styx II also came out in 1973, and 100 per cent of that sucks.

I'm unable to find any record of Rolling Stone Magazine's original review of Goats. Their 1994 re-review of it begins: "History has proven it unwise to jump to conclusions about Rolling Stones albums", which leads me to believe they shit all over it and are trying to hide the evidence of such. That sounds like classic RS revisionist history to me; they do it all the time. Those jagbags over at Pitchfork didn't even include it in their top 100 albums of the 1970's. I guess they were too busy print-fellating Bowie to give Goats a listen. It must either be that or they were so mesmerized listening to The Monks, Kraftwerk and Can, all of whom have multiple entries on that list to the Stones' one. Not to take anything away from any of those artists, each one is very significant, but if a publication is making a list of great albums of a decade, nothing screams 'Trying Too Hard to be Relevant' than overloading said list with experimental German stuff at the expense of the Rock n' Roll band that owned the fucking decade. I guess the German tie-in (Neu! also made the list, incidentally) could also mean that the wankers at Rich Dork are actually Nazis. Either way, I'd like to punch them all in the face.

The review at All Music Guide, a source with which I rarely have any kind of beef, at least gives a decent rationale for giving it only three-and-a-half stars. In it, Stephen Thomas Erlewind, who I think is an excellent reviewer states: "This is where the Stones' image began to eclipse their accomplishments, as Mick ascended to jet-setting celebrity and Keith slowly sunk deeper into addiction, and it's possible hearing them moving in both directions on Goats Head Soup, at times in the same song." He makes a pretty good point, but this is Rock n' Roll, and quite frankly I think Keith shooting entire opium fields into his arm and Mick banging super models just kind of adds to the mystique.

The best part about Goats Head Soup is the fact that you're probably not burned out on it. Besides "Angie", there's not really anything on this record that receives any significant airplay. I mean, I can still hear "Brown Sugar" every day and not get sick of it, but I know it's not like that for everyone else. This album has a few real gems, and they're gems that you haven't heard very many times, or possibly not at all. The radio will not ruin this album for you, the way it might have ruined nearly all of Sticky Fingers. The only way this album will get played out is if you play it over and over. I've had it in heavy rotation for the last couple of years, and I'm still not sick of it.

So what have we learned? We've learned that Goats Head Soup is a damn fine album that a lot of critics have treated with indifference. We've also learned that I'm a long winded Rolling Stones fan. Most importantly, we've learned that the writers at Pitchfork are pretentious dickheads who are possibly nazis. Jesus, I feel like I just wrote a Hardy Boys novel.