Aftermath by The Rolling Stones
Aftermath, released April 1966 by Decca Records, is the fourth British studio album by the Rolling Stones. It was released in the United States in June 1966 by London Records as their sixth American album. The album is considered an artistic breakthrough for the band, being the first full-length release to consist entirely of Mick Jagger/Keith Richards compositions. Brian Jones played a variety of instruments not usually associated with rock music—including sitar on "Paint It, Black" and "Mother's Little Helper", the Appalachian dulcimer on "Lady Jane" and "I Am Waiting", the marimbas (African xylophone) on "Under My Thumb" and "Out of Time", harmonica on "High and Dry" and "Goin' Home", as well as guitar and keyboards. Much of the music was still rooted in Chicago electric blues. It was the first Rolling Stones album to be recorded entirely in the US, at the RCA Studios in California, and their first album released in true stereo. In August 2002 both editions of Aftermath were reissued in a new remastered CD and SACD digipak by ABKCO Records, with the UK version containing an otherwise unavailable stereo mix of "Mother's Little Helper".
The week The Rolling Stones released <i>Aftermath</i> in the US, the band touched down in New York for a month-long tour starting in the industrial city of Lynn, Massachusetts. They were measurably famous now: chart success, big advances, new cars, country houses. As it rained, the fans in Lynn were tear-gassed by cops as they rushed the stage. When asked at a press conference a couple of days earlier what the difference was between the Beatles and the Stones, an irritated Mick Jagger said that one band had five people and the other had four, but the scene in Lynn—replicated a handful of times throughout the tour—pointed towards a fundamental difference: The Beatles talked about revolution, and the Stones seemed to revel in personifying it.<br /> Like The Beatles’ <i> Revolver</i>, The Beach Boys’ <i>Pet Sounds</i>, and Bob Dylan’s <i>Blonde on Blonde</i> (all released in mid-1966), <i>Aftermath</i> was an evolutionary step not only in the band’s development, but in the vocabulary of rock music in general. Brian Jones had all but given up on the guitar, turning instead to exoticisms like the dulcimer, marimba, koto and sitar—textures that gave the band’s sound a new dimension, sublimating the physicality of rock and blues for something tenser and more introspective, as on “Paint It Black” and “I Am Waiting”.<br /> And where The Beatles and contemporaries like The Kinks invoked their Britishness as something chipper and quaint, the Stones of <i>Aftermath</i> took on an almost gothic cast, projecting castellated worlds where moody princes stared out their windows to “Under My Thumb” and “Lady Jane”, stewing in their juices. In the absence of love, the bitter man turns to power. Before 1965, the band was, in some ways, just a new branch on an old tree. With <i>Aftermath</i>, they put down roots.
