If I Look Hard Enough Into The Setting Sun

Sometimes after chasing various flights of musical fantasy, exploring tedious and exciting microgenres (‘is it Bulgarian ethno-glam mariachi for dinner again tonight, dear?’), you just need to get down to the sweaty bones of it all.

Tonight I have been spinning and a’ grooving to Rolling Stones Big Hits (High Tide And Green Grass), a wonderful jolt of early Stones – you get to watch them grow meaner and darker of demeanour in real time.

I have no patience for all the myriad differences between the Stones US and UK discography, although December’s Children is a cracking LP title* and so my copy is the decidedly superior UK version.

I mean just look at the cover! Brian Jones looking fabulously surly with a bandaged hand and garish suit, Jagger toughing it out in a rather groovy jacket, but best of all is Wyman and Watts’ superb ‘taches; what more do you fucking need? its infinitely better than the lakeside pic US copies used**.

Incidentally, I love the fact that out of 14 tracks on Big Hits, only 3 were included on their studio LPs; one of which was yet to be released until the month after Big Hits was. Value for money.

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This LP rips open its stays with the wonderfully titled ‘Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow?’. I have always loved the feel of total abandonment and chaos in this track, it is a great exemplar of the entropy Andrew Loog Oldham’s production injected into the 1966 Stones. The guitars rage, horns swell and every single element of the song sneers at you.

That ‘Paint It Black’ follows is just world beating. The nihilism and menace of this cut is still incredible. Soundtrack folks wheel it out for an instant reference to the Vietnam War but for me its a much more sexually specific nasty hustle, this isn’t someone mourning a loss of innocence in foreign climes, this is a man who has to turn away from pretty girls ‘until that feeling goes’. It just thrills me.

Skipping ‘It’s All Over Now’ for totally arbitrary reasons^, ‘The Last Time’ has thrilled me since my folks put it on a compilation of their Stones singles for me when I was about 10. It’s the opening line, ‘I’ve told you once and I’ve told you twice’ and that guitar hook.

Atmospheric, danceable and historical as they are, ‘Not Fade Away’ and ‘Come On’ are lightweights in this company, they’re great but … note their Ramones-like running times of 1:47 and 1:48.

Kicking off side 2 of Big Hits with ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ is a statement and a half. It’s difficult to actually listen to a song this famous, I mean you hear it a lot but that isn’t the same thing. That beat is brilliant, nobody mentions that, Wyman’s playing is also really melodic and cool too.

How do you evaluate an LP that then just chucks ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ at you, as though it was no big deal and just the sort of thing that albums do all the time?! Such a righteous antisocial din. Throw in ’19th Nervous Breakdown’ with its spiralling digs at spoiled rich chicks and all needles are really in the red, all manner of Wyman-abetted Oldham chaos going on to great affect.

I actually have time for Jagger’s amusingly mannered ‘As Tears Go By’, his slightly camp delivery reeking of best behaviour and Sunday lunch at your girlfriend’s parents house. On the other hand ‘Lady Jane’ is a cod medieval horror that should have been shot, drowned, stabbed, burned, obliterated with a morning star and then buried face-down in a lead-lined casket at an unmarked location. Word up.

Big Hits glides on home with two covers ‘Time Is On My Side’ and ‘Little Red Rooster’, the latter still sounds poised and potent, to this day the only blues track to have topped the UK singles charts. I had no idea until tonight that ‘Time Is On My Side’ was a cover, it fits the swaggering cuddly sexism of the Stones so well, I absolutely love it, I can’t help it.

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I just adore Big Hits as an album, apart from the bit where I have to raise the needle at the end of ’19th …’ and put it down again on ‘Time Is …’. That it ends with ‘Little Red Rooster’ seems now something of a pointer towards Brian Jones’ marginalisation and the death of his vision for his Rollin’ Stones. The Jagger/Richards rock was really starting to roll downhill now, Jones and his Chicago blues only so much moss on the underside.

So much of everything I love about rock stems from these seismic tunes. The swagger, the sneery disregard for your petty morals, the appeal to the loins^^ of the record buyers and the wedge between generations. Sign me up!

In true 2025 fashion though I have to deplore the frequently and increasingly misogynistic tendencies of the Stones in this period. Yes I know it was an amplification of the Blues stance but as a band they seemed to genuinely revel in the put downs and occasional cruelty of it all. It doesn’t sit easily with me, but I am capable of (and am conscious of having the privilege of choosing to) turning the critical part of my brain down while I listen and groove along.

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My copy of Big Hits (High Tide And Green Grass) is a 1975 stereo repress with the poster insert, instead of a booklet stapled into the gatefold – basically some very cool pics of some radically cool looking chaps. Sadly the rhythm sections ‘taches don’t make a reappearance.

1276 Down.

*big bracket fan though I am, I think the (And Everybody’s) is poop and I choose to ignore it. You’re welcome to that top rock analysis, right there.

**where the US record company got it right was the inclusion of ‘Play With Fire’, a grievous omission from my copy.

^the same ones that make me skip ‘Heart Of Stone’, although that’s a much lesser cut.

^^not a word I get to type often enough.