Rolling Stones: "Its Only Rock and Roll"

What a fun album. Coming off the heels of the rather serious "Goat's Head Soup", IOR&R is a refreshing injection of the Stones sense of humor (I mean, come on...compare "Coming Down Again" with "Short & Curlies", you'll see what I mean).

Yeah, I'm as sick of the title song as the next guy. Even "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" has been played to death (sidenote - when I first bought this in the early seventies I had no idea that this was a cover song of the Temptations. I thought it was a Jagger-Richard tune).

But there are several other songs here that are just as good."If You Can't Rock Me" is a hilarious parody of rock star ego and lust (looking at the crowd from the stage Jagger sings that there are "a thousand lips I would love to taste"...ha!).

"Time Waits For No One", a wizened contemplation of the carnage wreaked by the years ("Here he comes choppin' and reapin'...").

A lot of critics slammed "Luxury", thinking it was meant to be a straight reggae number". That's not how I hear it. Definately there's that reggae element, but it's too "chunky" and lumbering to have been intended as the real deal. The lyrics are funny, too ("All your rum I want to drink it...all your whiskey, too").

"Til The Next Time We Say Goodbye' and "If You Really Want to Be My Friend" are a couple of the band's better slow tempo songs, the former with a slight country/folk feel and the latter deeply entrenched in the style of seventies soul.

Even my least favorite songs on the album, "Dance Little Sister" and "Short & Curlies", have their charms...mainly the absurd exagerations of what the Stones have always been about. In fact, a lot of this album seems to be a well-constructed parody of the Stones' legend as "The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World". It works.

And then there's the album's closer, "Fingerprint File", in which Mick loses his battle with paranoia, aided by sinister governmental agencies and their invasive, "Big Brother" tactics ("They know my moves way ahead of time, listening to me on their satellites")...then again, the paranoia is probably justified, seeing as how it's the FBI and the SIS that are after him.

Like I said...a fun album where the Stones refuses to take themselves seriously. No doubt, on deeper levels, they have done that quite a bit in the years since. But here it's flat out in the open for any Stones fan to hear and enjoy.