ROLLING STONES - BLUE and LONESOME 2016.
On April 7th, 1962, three young Englishmen obsessed with American blues met for the first time, at the Ealing Jazz Club in London. Two of them – singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards from an aspiring combo, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys – were attending a performance by the local blues scene’s leading troupe, Blues Incorporated, led by guitarist Alexis Korner. The third man, guitarist Brian Jones, was playing with Korner’s group, under the pseudonym Elmo Lewis. Three months later, on July 12th, Jagger, Richards and Jones made their live debut as the Rollin’ Stones at the Marquee Club, with bassist Dick Taylor, later of the Pretty Things, and pianist Ian Stewart, who would become the Stones’ devoted road manager and true-blues conscience.
Recorded in just three days with co-producer Don Was at British Grove Studios in the London suburb of Richmond – almost spitting distance from the site of the Crawdaddy Club, where the Stones played a life-changing 1963 residency – Blue and Lonesome is the band’s first all-covers studio release since the 1964 U.K. EP The Rolling Stones, and the Stones’ first pure, straight blues record ever. It is also the working lineup of the world’s biggest blues band – with Wood in his 41st year as the new boy and bassist Darryl Jones as Watts’ co-anchor since 1993 – doing what comes naturally in a dozen songs mostly associated with sweet home Chicago: Reed, Howlin’ Wolf, singer-guitarist Magic Sam and especially harp master Little Walter, with four of his Fifties and Sixties singles here.
Blue and Lonesome is not a record of mere returning, a look back at how it all started. The Stones were already big time when some of these songs were released by the originators including Howlin’ Wolf’s 1966 threat “Commit a Crime” and Magic Sam’s defining version of “All of Your Love” on his 1967 landmark, West Side Soul. In fact, the younger Stones couldn’t have tackled Jimmy Reed’s 1957 lament “Little Rain” like the slow, advancing storm here. Watts comes in like stoic resignation, on brushed snare, under rolling clouds of guitar; Jagger fires lightning streaks of harp. It’s barely a song – six lines of determined yearning and time running out. But it is dense with lesson, a reflection of the grip and wisdom that, for every bluesman, only comes with miles and age.
Review by DAVID FRICKE editor at the Rolling Stone magazine.