The album Aftermath is usually thought of by scholars and critics of the Rolling Stones to be a really crucial album in the group's development. Now, probably most in, in the most important way because all the songs on the record, and there are two versions an American version and a UK version, but if you take all the both the versions can collect all the songs together 15 tracks in all. They're all songs written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, we haven't seen that yet. As we've been looking across the first four albums that precede this, we've seen more and more originals, sort of making their way in or onto these albums. And, of course, more and more singles and B-sides being original material, but we haven't yet had an album that's been dominated completely by Jagger and Retros Original. So that's, that's really kind of an important point of arrival for the group. This album is recorded at RCA, during those December 1965 sessions and also during the March 1966 sessions. Released in the UK in April, but as I said in the last video, not released in the United States until June. The song, the, the album in fact could have been released earlier in the United States. But there's a crazy story that the Rolling Stones had an idea that some of the songs on this record would be on an album. kind of, almost kind of, I don't know if it was like a concept album or what they had in mind here called, Could You Walk on the Water. [LAUGH] And, well I guess, you know, the walking on the water part maybe had too many kind of religious overtones and with the Stones being seen as rebellious it possibly could have been seen that they were you know, making fun of organized religion. Now, that didn't work out so well for John Lennon in 1966, so it turns out that maybe the record company was on to something here. So instead of bringing out the album, the Stones had wanted to bring out called Could You Walk On The Water they brought out their Big Hits album, High Tides And Green Grass. So they brought out the compilation in the first half of the year. And then Stones adding more tracks to the Aftermath album. Brought it out as Aftermath in June of, of 1966. As we listen to this record, we can hear that the instrumentation becomes more adventurous. And as I've said a couple of times during these lectures, really it's Brian Jones, he's not the only one thinking about adventurous things to do with the music. I mean, don't forget recording in RCA in Hollywood. You're recording with people who've been doing all of those big Los Angeles productions. And who has recorded in in Los Angeles? Brian Wilson with the Beach Boys, and, and Phil Spector. And so there's, there's a lot of kind of combinations of sound and playing around in the studio, especially with regard to Brian Wilson. So this idea of experimenting in the studio is certainly not something the Rolling Stones dreamed up or Brian Jones dreamed up. But, Brian Jones was the, the musical guy in the group who could try all these different kinds of instruments. And so they make it on to the songs and make them very, very ambitious and adventurous musically. As I said before, 15 tracks on this record. The UK version has got 14 tracks on it, and the American version of the album has got 11 tracks on it. Four of the songs out of those 15 are released only on the UK version and one is released only on the US version. So as we have done before, we're going to think of Aftermath as being kind of a combination of both the UK and the US editions because they're really are all really pretty much part of the same project. Just brought out slightly differently in each country. So, as we said before number one album in the UK, number two album in the US produced by Andrew Oldham. Andrew Oldham's days as producer are kind of numbered at this point. he'll, he'll produ, also produce Between the Buttons, but after that he doesn't produce too much more for the Rolling Stones and there's a separation between Andrew and the band as we said before. Recorded on RCA, which means that these tracks were engineered by Dave Hassinger, who after this album is not going to have a whole lot more influence on the Rolling Stone sound as they move away from the RCA studios to Olympic. But here probably the sort of greatest moment for the Rolling Stones, Dave Hassinger, those RCA studios, they've got it all together here and this is sort of the point of arrival here. Now as I go through the songs that are on this album Aftermath, I want to take note of a couple of things as we go. I want to ask the question. We've got a band here who, for four albums, were doing lots and lots of cover versions. And we, at the end of last week we kind of list, listed out a bunch of styles that they had, that they had sort of used styles of music that they had covered. So there were, of course, obviously blues because that's a big part of the group's origins in the British blues scene. But also country, and gospel, and R&B, and pop. Lot of different kinds of styles. So now, what we want to do is, as musicologists, we want to think, well, as these guys were learning their craft, they were covering sometimes covering very closely all these songs by other artists. As they do their original songs now, can we somehow see the influence of those other cover versions they've done? In other words, can we see the RnB influence? Can we see the influence of people like Odor Shredding or, or Muddy Waters or people like that or gospel. So, can we see that in their actual music, and not just because somebody in an interview says, oh, yeah I was very influenced by this. No, I mean in the actual music, can we hear it? If we didn't know there was an influence, would we notice it anyway. This kind of thing. And so as I go through each song, I'll suggest some, some ways in which I think each of these songs may have been influenced by other styles that they have already covered. By the way, by saying this, I don't mean that the Rolling Stones' music is derivative or weaker because of these influences. What I mean to do is to make connections to show that, that in many ways, they model their own music on music that they loved and had already played. And this is, in, in the history of music I went back through jazz and classical music going back hundreds of years. A very typical way in which young artists learn their craft. We call it modeling or model composition. You use the, the, the example of some great piece or, or some piece that you really liked before the comp, they came before you, and you modeled your own work on it. And if that's happening here, we ought to be able to see those influence finger points or fingerprints on each of these pieces. So that's what I mean. So as we go through please bear that in mind. The first of the tracks that we'll, and some of these tracks we'll get back to in the song closer. Paint it Black, a song that only appeared on the US version of Aftermath. Features the sitar. It's got a kind of Indian tinged verse. And we'll talk a little bit about that when we get to the song close up. Mother's Little Helper has got a kind of Leslie Guitar sound. It almost seems like a kind of blend between country music and ethnic minor music. It almost seems like, Mother's Little Helper almost seems like it could be some kind of a Eastern European or Russian kind of folk song in a certain kind of way with the, the sort of angular little guitar line on the top there. So, there, there we see a little bit of a kind of an ethnic influence that we had, maybe haven't seen so much in the cover stuff. The sitar in Paint it Black kind of refers to some of the ways in which things are going psychedelic, remember there had been Norwegian wood with the Beatles and the sitar and George Harrison on the sitar. The Kinks were fooling around with, with something that, that would end up being called raga rock. So that's, that's all part of the kind of contemporary thing. The song Stupid Girl has got a hint of surf, maybe American garage rock, Farfisa, I think Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Kingsmen, that kind of thing. Ah,Lady Jane is very, very much got a classical influence, which is not new to the Rolling Stones, think of As Tears Go By. But also uses the dulcimer. So you've got Brian Jones on the dulcimer for that one. Lady Jane is an interesting one because it really tries to be almost like a kind of a Shakespearean kind of love song. Check out the lyrics on that, and the way that Mick tries to do a kind of a Shakespearean kind of thing. Having to do, maybe, with Henry VIII or something, I'm not quite sure. Under My Thumb, we'll talk about that one in a closeup. The vibraphone in there, that's very interesting in terms of the the influence there. Doncha Bother Me, pretty clearly a blues number, and we've seen plenty of blues in the Rolling Stones repertoire. This, well here they are, writing their own. The song Goin' Home, on the Aftermath album, is interesting. As a song it's kind of a cross between blues, country and kind of old time music. But it goes on for over 10 minutes. It's kind of a what, I think what they would have called a rave up. Or a kind of extended tune where they just kind of jam out the ending. And it gives us a sense of maybe what those, what those nights at the Crawdaddy Club might have been like when they were stretching out a lot of the songs that we're used to hearing in the two or three minute versions. Maybe they were stretching those tunes out. So we get a bit of that on the song Goin' Home. This idea of stretching out instrumentally, we're going to come back to after Brian Jones has left the group and Mick Taylor enters the group. And the kind of stretching out they'll do then is going to be much more about virtuosity and instrumental mastery. Here, this one, this, this, the way they stretch out Goin' Home probably has a lot more to do with just kind of creating a kind of a party atmosphere. And there's, there's not a lot of sort of fantastic or virtuosic soloing going on here. The song Flight 505 reminds me of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. It seems to me that's, that's what they're modeling there. High and Dry seems like a kind of a mix of country, country and blues, maybe a kind of a country blues kind of thing. Out of Time. That is a fantastic pop song that was also covered by Chris Farrow. And I'll tell you, it shows that Mick and Kieth could really write a brill building style hit. I'm a little amazed that they did their own version of it, because they tended to keep those kind of songs away from the group. But, standing by itself and aside from the Rolling Stones it's a fantastic piece of pop songwriting, I think, only my opinion, I suppose. This song It's Not Easy is kind of a Chuck Berry song. Chuck Berry maybe meets soul kind of thing. I Am Waiting, is it kind of an acous, acoustic folk, or folk-rock of, kind of track. Take It Or Leave It, which only appeared on the UK version of the record. I don't know. Seems to me like it could be kind of Beatles influenced perhaps. The song Think seems like it could be influenced maybe by Otis Redding. And the song, What To Do, seems like it's a kind of a soul number that might have been recorded by somebody like The Coasters or The Drifters. So as I went through all 15 of those tracks, you saw that there was both an emphasis on the instrumentation and sort of bringing in new sounds into the group. Different ways of, of, of interpreting the whole rock pop idea sonically. And also, you can see a lot of the influences from things that we've talked about before working their way into these all original Jagger Richards tunes. Before we move on to the song closer, let me just say a word or two about these other two records that were released in 1966. Now, Big Hits, High Tide and Green Grass, that one we already talked about as being the, the compilation that the that the label in the US brought out instead of the early version of Aftermath, Could You Walk on Water. And so we talked a bit about that, but the interesting thing about that album is there's a British release of Big Hits High Tide and Green Grass, which is released late in 1966, in November of 1966, goes to number four in the UK and its got a slightly different track list, tunes that, that what do we have here? Five different tunes that were only, only appeared on the UK version of it. And so of course, time, a considerable amount of time had passed, six months or so, between the March and and November releases there. And so it was seen wise to include some other things on the UK version, but just to be aware, there are two pretty different versions of that compilation. But both of them are really compilation records and not new studio work for the, for the group. And then there's Got It Live If You Want It. We've already said a bit about that one, too. The US version, which is a full LP as opposed to the UK version, which was just an EP was released in December of 1966 in the US. Only goes to number six in the charts. Again in time for, in time for the Christmas market. It's drawn mostly from live shows from October of 1966. And so this is sort of the, the set they had been doing. And so it was recorded up while they were in Europe and, and brought out in the United States. The song time on my, Time Is On My Side and I'm Alright are go back to March of 1965 so those recordings not quite part of the same set from October of 66. What I find is interesting is that there are actually two songs on that Got it Live if you Want It that were recorded in the IBC Studios in October of 1966. Like, in the studio, recorded live in the studio, that they went, then they went back and added audience overdubs [LAUGH]. They like recorded the thing in the studio because, I guess, they wanted the songs to be rem, they didn't have the right live recording, whatever. There were mistakes or not the right sound. So they recorded on this. And you can really tell. I mean, you can really tell it's, it's a much cleaner sound. And all this kind of thing. And then they sort of put all the bullfight cheers and all that kind of thing on it to make it seem like it was live. So there's a little bit of sleight of hand going on with those two tunes. They're not really live. Live in the studio. I suppose they're kind of live. But they sound much less like the live recordings than the songs around them. Now there are there is one song I'm Alright, which is which is from the UK version of this record. So there, these two records, the EP in the UK and the LP from the US only share one record, one song between the two of them. And two of the songs that are on the US version were recorded live in the studio with audience sounds dubbed in. The Rolling Stones, as I reminded you last week, have pretty much disowned both these live records. They don't even think of them as really official Rolling Stones live records. They probably, in their mind, fall in the category of just product we got out because that's what we thought we were suppose to do. We had to deliver product. They really considered getting your yaya's out to be their first real live album, bonafide live album. So, just keep that in mind as we move ahead, all right. But let's look at some of these songs now in a little bit more detail. Next video we'll do a song closeup and we'll look at 19th Nervous Breakdown, Paint It Black, Mother's Little Helper, and Under My Thumb.
