Undercover - Rolling Stones (1983)
I’ve never really been a big fan of the Rolling Stones. It’s not that I hate them or anything, but the most formative years of my music listening (maybe 1985 to 1988) didn’t really feature much new material from the band to get excited about. I also missed them on the subsequent “classic rock” phase I went through, where I sometimes listened to older artists just because it was a list of albums I could memorize and orgainze and … oh, also I sometimes really liked the music. This is what neurodivergence looked like in a teenager in the 80s. My point is that some people who really like the band might find a reason to really like this release, but I didn’t have any of that attachment.
When you look in the context of this early 80s sea change in pop music that I’m talking about, you can see the Rolling Stones struggling as much as any artists of the 60s and 70s to find relevance in a rapidly shifting landscape.
The band’s two creative forces, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, were apparently at odds about how to proceed. Jagger wanted to sound more like the younger bands that were making waves with sharp, punchy sounds and shiny production, while Richards wanted to stick to what he knew and play the bluesy rock they were famous for. This growing feud between the two would be a major reason for that gap in recording I mentioned in the second half of the decade.
For this album that did get recorded, the results are pretty mixed.
Roughly half the tunes (the ones where Jagger got his way) embrace all the new things. There doesn’t seem to be much detail on reggae great Sly Dunbar’s contribution to Undercover (Of The Night). God bless the immaculate backbeat of Charlie Watts, but it ain’t Charlie driving this track. Duran Duran producer Nile Rogers should probably have sued over how much Too Much Blood rips him off. Overall, this half of the album lets those new influences take over, and the band sound like guests on their own tracks.
The other half (apparently the ones Richards won on) are otherwise pretty good classic Stones tunes with modern reverb and compression and multitracking bolted on as an afterthought. She Was Hot is a brighter treatement of Honky Tonk Women. Pretty Beat Up is an otherwise 70s Stones tune until peak-80s saxophonist David Sanborn comes in.
I’m sure fans of the band find stuff they like on this release. None of it is bad, but it points up how tricky the transition could be from the vacuum tube warmth of the 70s to the brittle cathode ray picture of the 80s.
