If you want a peek into a lost world of rock n roll degeneracy and decadence, you won’t find a better glory hole than the grubby, outlandish view offered by the video for “Hey Negrita” from the Rolling Stones’ 1976 album, Black & Blue.
It’s on the band’s YouTube channel, Jagger flouncing about in some lime green Latina blouse, vocally molesting pianist Billy Preston on the breakdown, and Keith and new boy Ronnie posing about in shades, their battered guitars locking in to that song’s unspeakably brilliant, filthy, sleazy groove.
Black & Blue is not high in the canon of Great Rolling Stones albums, but it does have two things going for it – a brilliant cover, and great production. The songs aren’t too shabby either, especially given the circumstances – Richards in a seriously bad way, and the band rehearing new guitarists to take over Mick Taylor’s vacant spot.
Fifty years later, Black & Blue returns in expanded form, with a remix of the original release by Steven Wilson, a set of studio jams and outtakes, a loose n heavy live set from Earls Court, and an hour-long French TV special from the legendary Les Abbatoirs gigs in June 1976.
On the first of those nights, Keith Richards learnt of the death of his newborn son, Tara, in Switzerland. Instead of pulling the gig, he went on and played, and played for his life. Some of that footage is in the Abbatoirs film, including a searing “Fool to Cry”, and it is some of the most beautiful stage film of the band on record, rich in colours and atmosphere and with a big, powerful sound mix too.
As for the Earls Court concert, it’s a great listen, less ragged that a lot of what went on Love You Live back in 1977, and features strikingly different takes on a number of songs, including a raved-up “Street Fighting Man” and a striking, set-closing “Sympathy for the Devil”. It retains something of the cavernous sound of the venue, with plenty of bottom end, and Jagger’s singing is a lot less sloppy, from the opening assault and battery of “Honky Tonk Women” through a superb “Hey Negrita” and “You Gotta Move”.
As for the outtakes and jams, both “Shame Shame Shame” and “I Love Ladies” have new Jagger vocals, a high-energy falsetto overload on the former, and a lugubrious mix of vocals on the decidedly unreconstructed fun and games of the latter, the best of the two. What’s mystifying as that the rest of the disc is filled with jams of wavering interest, when beautiful instrumental takes of unreleased (and unfinished) songs like “Act Together”, the rock-reggae ballad “I Got a Letter” and the ragged basement garage groove of “Man Eating Woman” remain in the can. The nine-plus minutes of “Blues Jam” with Jeff Beck is one to nod out to should the right kind of wrap come your way, and “Rotterdam Jam” works until Beck starts his bat impressions. But where, pray, is the 12-minute scat-vocal take on “Hey Negrita!”, or the relentless motorik paradise of the 15-minute “Munich Hilton”?
Furthermore, neither of those outlandish, OTT promo videos – “Hot Stuff” and “Fool to Cry” joining “Hey Negrita” – make the cut here. It’s an odd exclusion, as they are peak Rolling Stones – visually as much as musically: druggy, decadent and wasted to the point of otherworldliness,
As for the original album itself, boring rock critics of the time thought it was crap, mainly for reasons that had nothing to do with the music. For a lot of fans, it’s an under-rated gem, and among the best-sounding albums of their career. So what has remixer Steven Wilson brought to the party? As he writes on his website: “My stereo remix is faithful to the original, just looking for more clarity without impacting the magic that is fundamental to the Stones’ sound.”
And clarity is what he brings. It works wonders on the likes of album opener “Hot Stuff”, which sounds like it’s had the lid taken off, and you hear a whole raft of details that reconfigure the song. Ditto with the album’s closing rocker “Crazy Mama” with its lovely layered outro. The cowboy ballad “Hand of Fate” slips more clearly into focus, while “Memory Motel”, still a regular guest on the band’s modern-day setlist, again benefits from that clarity. The one casualty is the finest cut of the record, the song that opened side two with one that audacious guitar fuelling that features in the video for “Hey Negrita”. Clarity and separation are not always virtues, and Negrita’s sleazy brilliance is compromised by being cleaned up. Even worse, it now fades in, rather than slamming through the walls with everything turned up to maximum.
It’s another welcome additional to the Stones’ own "bootleg series" but it does fall short in its studio extras, if not its bounty of live Stones. And the full set with the live shows is a big ask at around £120. As for the album itself, it probably won’t get the kind of recalibrating of its stature that Goats Head Soup got on its expanded reissue in 2020. But as the band prepares to release a new album, and perhaps tour in the new year, any focus on releasing more gems and offcuts from its extensive vaults is to be welcomes, because, as the song goes, they’re one of a kind, and we’ll feel it when they’re gone.
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