Morning Commute Soundtrack: The Rolling Stones

I fall in and out of love with the Rolling Stones every few years. There’s no doubting their status as a great rock’n'roll band, but to call them the greatest rock’n'roll band in the world is up to the listener’s respective tastes. I still maintain that The Who are the better band, as they put out consistently better music in the ’70s, but they were more selective with their releases, every two or three years, instead of one album every year, like the Stones. It’d be impossible to dispute their run from Beggars Banquet through Exile On Main Street, however; before 1968, they were a pretty great R&B band, but whenever they stepped outside the box, they were almost consistently raked across the coals and accused of ripping off the Beatles.

Their Satanic Majesties Request is an album that has gotten a lot of shit over the years, a good deal of it from the band members themselves. Compared against Sgt. Pepper, it’s obvious that the Beatles were going to win that one, but Satanic Majesties is a good, if overcooked, experiment in drugged-out psychedelia. I have a soft spot for the album, because it was one of the first Stones albums I listened to after becoming a fan in high school, and a lot of the songs still hold up well all these years later. ‘She’s A Rainbow’ is my favorite on the album, because it captures a childlike innocence of falling in love for the first time without the wink-and-a-nod attitude that most Stones songs have, nor does it have the treacly, super-saturated saccharine of love songs like ‘Angie’ or ‘Fool To Cry’. It’s a perfect counterpart to ‘Ruby Tuesday’, but ‘She’s A Rainbow’ is lovely in its naivety, and it’s impossible to believe that the Stones were on the cusp of some of their raunchiest material when listening to this little gem.

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