Let It Bleed - The Rolling Stones (1969)

I can’t infodump about the Stones like I have about Dylan, Coltrane, and the Beatles. I’m not anti-Stones, but they’re one of the few big acts of the past that I never really got hyperfixated on.

They had a run of great albums in the 60s and 70s. This one isn’t the start of that run, but it is the first one that was made substantially without Brian Jones, the original mastermind behind the band. I’ve written about why Jones was the most interesting Stone to me, but he had worn out his welcome in the band by this point and would be dead from “musician’s disease” before this record was released.

They’d been a blues band from the start, always with the trappings of the British Invasion. Here they started leaning fully out of the psychedelic pop sound that had marked UK blues bands. Instead they started to go for the bluesy, no-nonsense rock sound that would make them so prominent over the next decades.

Gimme Shelter and Let It Bleed were staples of the band’s live set for the rest of their history, and are the standouts here.

They hadn’t completely gotten the ornate psych sound out of their systems, as witnessed by the closer, You Can’t Always Get What You Want. It’s reductive to say that the Stones were “just a blues band” after this, but I see this album as an inflection point, and this song as the end of an era of grandiose ambition for the band.