We turn now to let it bleed an album that in many ways continues on from what we saw in beggars banquet from a year earlier. So in many ways beggars banquet, Let it Bleed almost sort of like volume one, volume two, in many kinds of ways. This album, Let it Bleed, recorded, in various bits and pieces from February through November of 1969. Mostly at Olympic Studios, with Glyn Johns as an engineer. Produced by Jimmy Miller, as is the Stones became their sort of way of working, they would then, when they had all their tracks together go to Los Angeles and do some mixing. And then sometimes they would do some overdubs and things like that as they were finishing the tunes off. But they would sort of get everything really in pretty good shape by the time they left Olympic. And so they went to Sunset, Recorders and Elektra Studios in L.A., in L.A. and finished the album off. I would say that amid strong roots elements, many songs continued to be musically and lyrically ambitious,and again I come back to that topic of musical ambition as I did in the previous video as something we want to keep an eye out for. Also we've also been keeping track of the cover art, on these records, and, you know, exactly how the cover art engages the content, and, look with Beggar's Banquet we talked about the cover that was rejected that was the the bathroom, the toilet with all the stuff written on the walls and how intricate that was and how it referred to songs that were, in you know, on the album in this kind of thing. Well now the cover art continues that conceptual approach of past albums, but the bit of, kind of irreverence and and kind of, maybe a bit of, sort of, shock value. It's a, it's a cover if you, if you haven't looked at it, the image is very easy to find on the internet. It's a design by a fellow the name of Robert Brownjohn. And it's a, it has, it's really sort of based on the idea of the old kind of record changer for LPs, where you'd have a turntable at the bottom and you'd have a spindle. And on the top of that spindle you'd be able to stack a bunch of records. And what would happen is the first one would come down and it would play. And when it was done, the tonearm would come back, and the spindle would drop the next record, and you could listen to that one. And it was sort of like the early days of being able to have a kind of a playlist. You could also do it with singles, but with albums, you get to play it for a lot longer. So if you want to hear music for two hours, you'd put four or five albums up on one of these spindles. So that's kind of what they've got going on there. So when you look at that picture, of course there's a record and a tonearm on the bottle, on, on the bottom, but on the spindle there you've got from top to bottom a cake, a tire, a pizza, a clock, a tape can, and all of that on a plate, [LAUGH] which are all sort of sitting waiting to fall down on the changer. So Interesting. Our, our students in the UK might be interested in knowing that the cake part of this album cover was created by a woman by the name of Delia Smith, who as I understand it, being an American, I don't know this for sure, but, here's what I hear, is that she's a very famous, sort of celebrant television chef in the UK. So there's a bit of chef trivia for you as it as it related to The Rolling Stones. Well, what does this, what does this concept add up to? I mean it's kind of a funny, aort of modern art kind of picture, but what does it really say? Well, I would say that maybe that all those images together, the cake, the tire, the pizza, the clock, the tape can, the plate, all of those have something to do, with maybe life in a band. All of that kind of things, you know, there are celebrations, cake, on the road tire, fast food pizza, clock, you gotta be some place all the time, tape can, recording, all these kinds of things are part of being a, in a band, or, on the road, or maybe as a celebrity. All of these kinds of things fitted together. I think that, it's possible to posit a general theme, although it doesn't go through all the songs, but it's a general theme of bleeding. Let it bleed. bleeding, I think is suggested by some of the songs. And this bleeding can be something like, actual blood in the streets. It can be, people draining one another or sucking somebody dry. You know, taking all the energy or exploiting, various kinds of ways of using the metaphor of bleeding. And so I, when we come to the close up and we talk about the lyrics, I'll put emphasis on that, and say, you know, that that to a certain extent, this is not a concept album, but certainly the Let It Bleed title, is appropriate for the collection of songs in general that are on this record. Now having already said that about how appropriate Let It Bleed is, let me just acknowledge that there were two other titles that were considered for this record. One of them was called Auto-Changer which is what, what you would call one of those record spindles that I just described. And another one. I don't know how long and how seriously they considered this title, but it was Hard Knocks and Durty Sox. So I gotta say, I think they made the right choice when the decided on Let It Bleed. When we think about this album, remember that Brian is on the way out and Mick Taylor is on the way in. One thing that we can say is that Keith Richards plays most of the guitars on the album. And so Mick Taylor appears on the song "Country Honk" and "LIve with Me" and "Honky Tonk Woman" which is not on the album but part of this era. And Brian, can be heard playing congas on Midnight Rambler, and autoharp, autoharp, on You Got the Silver. But those are really, relatively minor appearances, appearances for those two guys. Mick Taylor, on Sticky Fingers, will be much more, a part of this situation, the band, the band situation that he is, in this record. So anyway, mostly layers of Keith Richards guitars. So the album Let It Bleed, as I said before released of November of 69 in the US going to number three December of 69 in the UK, going to number one. Like the others produced by Jimmy Miller. And recorded at Olympic, as I said. also at Sunset and Elektra. With all of these Jimmy Miller produced Stone's tunes, you really want to listen for percussion, because Jimmy Miller, himself, a drummer. It really, this is really the time when percussion really starts to, to really drive the rhythmic flow and the rhythmic groove of a lot of these tunes. Let's just go down the contents of the record. Talk a little bit about each song, especially what kind of stylistic elements are involved with all of it. And then many of these songs we'll come back and talk about in the next video which is a song close up. We'll have a chance to sort of deal with them in a little bit more detail. That's exactly what we'll do with the first song on the record Gimme Shelter. It's a song that I think shows kind of a gospel influence, especially in the inclusion of a woman by the name of Merry Clayton, on vocals. Merry Clayton as a, as an interesting history in R and B. We'll talk about that when we, when we do the close up. I just want to point out Gimme Shelter and a continuation of the kind of gospel influence that we've seen before. That one recorded in February and March of' 69. And then again later in the year in October and November. The second song is" Love in Vain". A Robert Johnson song, Robert Johnson, the old the, the Delta Blues guitars that was so so admired by blues. By blues fans his they, they, they cover Love in Vain. This was recorded in co, in, in, in Olympic only, early in the year, February, March of 1969. Again, the blues cover thing. We saw that before in Beggar's Banquet, and we'll see that again as we go forward in Exile of Main Street, the idea of covering old acoustic blues, gospel kinds of tunes like that. So that fits in with that. Something that was kind of missing before before Beggar's Banquet album, things like Satanic Majesties and some of the other ones, we didn't see that as much. Country Honk the early version of Honky Tonk Woman Honky Tonk Women. That, that song, Honky Tonk Women, the, the Country Honk version that we have in this album is the way they originally wanted to do the song, although the version we have is not the original version. They went back and did it in this Country version after they'd racked it up to do the Honky Tonk Women version of the song. But what you hear from Country Honk, is, is this obvious country influence, which again is going to come back again on every record. This strong country influence. And we can track that way back into the earliest days of the band, as well recorded in May, June-July, and then October-November of 1969. Interesting features having Byron Berline, on fiddle. So when you hear the fiddle playing that's Byron Berline, sitting in with the group. Live with Me. Guitar-Driven Blue-Rock. I would say for that one, recorded in May and October-November of 1969. Let It Bleed recorded in the Summer of 1969, June and July. That tune has a bit of a kind of folk Americana kind of feel to it. kind of like what the band were doing with music from Big Pink. I think that's maybe the closest sort of stylistic connection there. There's a certain amount of jug-band, kind of, American, tradition there. And a bit of sing-a-long as well. We'll talk about Let It Bleed in more detail, in just a minute, in the next video. And Midnight Rambler I'll, I'll talk a, a lot about the live influence on this, but the way in which the tune goes in from the middle section that kind of, you know, stretches things out and then gets real quiet and slow, and then works back up again. They kind of do all that in the studio. And that probably comes out of, the kind of soul shows that they may have seen or heard about, where singers, kind of, work out these, these, kind of, whole bits they do around songs to, kind of, make them more dramatic in live performance. But they make it a studio, version. Again, this one recorded February, March, May, and then October-November, of 1969. You can see how many times they come back to these tunes as they're working on them now, right. They get, get started and they come back to it. To it, and they get started, and they come back, that kind of thing. You got the silver. Probably influenced mostly by Dillon, and maybe Acoustic Blues, features Keith Richards on a lead vocal. That one recorded, that's one of the earliest ones recorded, February 1969, recorded at Olympic. Monkey man. An interesting tune for the Stones. By the way that vibes part, you hear, that's Bill Wyman the base player, playing the vibes on that. Anyways, recorded April, and then June, July, then October, November 1969. That intro is really kind of symphonic in the way that it starts out with that kind of mysterious chords arpeggios kinds of things, and then of course it gets sort of more guitar driven, rock as it sort, as it goes through the tune. Lots of, sort of, Mick Jagger sort of vocalizing and screaming, that kind of thing. But then the middle section of the tune is really another one of these kinds of instrumental rhythm, middle sections that's kind of almost symphonic in its kind of scope. The kind of thing that, you'll hear a lot more of ten years later with something like Boston's "More Than A Feeling." You go into this middle section, it's really kind of a worked out, kind of a, a thing with, with a slide guitar in this case. And then finally. The song You Can't Always Get What You Want which in many ways is, is, is another kind of ballad. Another kind of acoustic ballad, but in this case it's dressed up a full band including a full classical choir, and a French horn solo at the very beginning. We'll talk about that one in more detail. So that gives us a, kind of, overview of all the different styles, and again, the, the breadth and variety of styles, but for us, it's connecting it back and seeing that most of what's happening here is an extension of things we've already talked about. There's a lot of continuity going back several albums with these songs. So let's take, in the next video, a little bit of time to, to take a closer look at some of these songs. We'll talk about. Honky Tonk Women, You Can't Always Get What You Want, Gimme Shelter, Let It Bleed, and Midnight Rambler.
