STONES SOUP

DAVE THOMPSON LOOKS THROUGH ALL THE INGREDIENTS OF THE ROLLING STONES ALBUM GOATS HEAD SOUP IN ITS REI SSUED BOX SET, AND FINDS EVERY LITTLE SPICE THAT’S IMPORTANT.

Goats Head Soup was, and remains, the first Rolling Stones album to truly divide the critics. On the one hand, there were those listeners who applauded the wide-open spaces that the band left within their typically tightly constructed rockers, and the ease with which they changed moods and momentum.

On the other, there were those who bemoaned the equal ease with which they abandoned the bad-boy rocking of their greatest recent hits. Nothing in the soup could hold an iconographical candle to “Brown Sugar” or “Tumbling Dice”; not even a closing number whose original title was deemed so obscene that the record company couldn’t even bear to print it.

But slide from side three of Exile on Main St. to side one of Goats Head Soup (“Dancing With Mr. D,” “100 Years Ago,” “Heartbreaker”), and the seam is barely noticeable. It was not the Stones who were losing their grip, it was the gripers who were losing the Stones.

Besides, the Stones still knew what they were doing, from a British point of view at least, and for all their tax-dodging shenanigans, the Stones were still a British band at heart. And maybe that was another part of the problem.

Through the 1960s, Britain had led the world in rock and roll. Into the 1970s, however, America was reasserting itself. And suddenly those quaint English preoccupations, with other pop stars’ wives (“Angie,” allegedly an ode to the then-current Mrs. David Bowie); with the carnal preoccupations of a rocker on the road (“Star Star”); with the gun-toting craziness of the American way of life (“Heartbreaker”), weren’t quite so quaint anymore. Not when there was the likes of Grand Funk Railroad to give it to you in a language you understood.