The Rolling Stones’ music has always exuded rock and roll bravado. Even if they were overly influenced by The Beatles on some of their early records, their bad-boy attitude to classics like ‘Satisfaction’ provided the ideal counterpoint to what Lennon and McCartney were producing in Liverpool. While they would eventually develop into blues-rock troubadours, not everything was ideal, and Keith Richards was among the first to express dissatisfaction with the direction they took on Emotional Rescue.
But, again, I want to be charitable with this account of The Stones’ career. It’s not Exile on Main Street or even Between the Buttons, but hearing them try to While Richards delivers a decent performance on the album’s conclusion, ‘All About You’, much of the record is considerably too meandering for a Stones endeavor. Sure, they could jam whenever they wanted, but several of the tunes seem like they were brainstorming ideas and didn’t know when to tell the producer to stop recording.
The title track on the album, however, is one of the best grooves that they would lay down in the 1980s. With embarrassments like Undercover and Dirty Work on the horizon, seeing them dig into something soulful and making it work calls back to the days when they were playing old-school R&B in London clubs before they had a cent to Still, this was not the Stones fans were used to seeing back then. This was Jagger’s attempt to shoehorn them into the new sounds of the period, and while ‘Emotional Rescue’ is an excellent example of this, it is far from replacing ‘Gimme Shelter’ as one of their best songs.
