December's Children (and Everybody's) by The Rolling Stones
December's Children (And Everybody's) is the fifth American studio album by The Rolling Stones, released in late 1965. Drawn largely from two days of sessions recorded in September to finish the British edition of Out of Our Heads and to record their new single—"Get Off Of My Cloud"—December's Children (And Everybody's) also included tracks recorded as early as 1963. Half of the songs appearing on the album were written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, as they penned strong album cuts like "I'm Free" and "The Singer Not the Song" as well as such major hits as "As Tears Go By" and "Get off of My Cloud". December's Children (And Everybody's) reached #4 in the US and went gold. Bassist Bill Wyman quotes Jagger in 1968 calling the record "[not] an album, it's just a collection of songs." Accordingly, it is only briefly detailed in his otherwise exhaustive book Rolling With the Stones. In August 2002 December's Children (And Everybody's) was reissued in a new remastered CD and SACD digipak by ABKCO Records with "Look What You've Done" being issued in stereo. The title of the album came from the band's manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. According to Jagger, it was Oldham's idea of hip, Beat poetry.
Part of loving 1976’s <i>Black and Blue</i>—and there’s a lot to love—is letting go of what you expect from The Rolling Stones. They were still a rock band, if rock was what you wanted: “Hand of Fate” could’ve been on <i>Beggars Banquet</i> and “Crazy Mama” on <i>Exile on Main St.</i> But where <i>Goats Head Soup</i> and <i>It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll</i> worked to keep continuity with the sound they developed in the late ’60s, <i>Black and Blue</i> didn’t bother trying.<br /> Jagger had moved to New York and fallen in love with funk and disco (“Hot Stuff”, “Hey Negrita”); Keith Richards with reggae (“Cherry Oh Baby”). Mick Taylor left the band and Ron Wood joined, stripping out the guitar solos and moving back towards pure rhythm. The songs were short, the grooves were long, and the performances—Jaggers’s, especially—combined sex and humour in ways they never had before. That “Hot Stuff” was the band’s first song to make the R&B charts since “19th Nervous Breakdown” 10 years earlier made sense: Not since their early albums had they sounded so connected to Black music, or so joyfully indebted to it.<br /> The critic Lester Bangs called it the “first meaningless Rolling Stones album”. An insult, of course—but it could’ve just as well been a compliment. After the relentless significance of the band’s late-’60s and early-’70s run—the politics, the violence, the cultural referenda—<i>Black and Blue</i> felt like a liberation, like fresh air. They sounded funny, weird and alive. And when they downshifted for the ballads (“Memory Motel” and the classic “Fool to Cry”), they did so with a softness that penetrated deeper than any heavy-handed approach might.
