Flowers (1967)


 
1.Ruby Tuesday 2.Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadow? 3.Let's Spend the Night Together 4.Lady Jane 5.Out of Time 6.My Girl 7.Backstreet Girl 8.Please Go Home 9.Mother's Little Helper 10.Take It or Leave It 11.Ride On Baby 12.Sittin' on a Fence

 

Im sure there's a story behind this record. I don't claim to be a historian of this band's career. What I do know is that, with English groups anyway, there was a lot of confusion with albums being released in the sixties on both sides of the continent. There always seemed to be different albums released on one side than what was released on the other, and, through the magic of compilations, if you were lucky, there could be releases that would make sure the dedicated follower was taken care of in the "completion" department.

Flowers is just such a record. This is almost a "catch all" album. Since their latest release, Between the Buttons had two songs swapped on its American release, this album seems to make amends by featuring all four of the juxtaposed songs. In other words, whichever version of Between the Buttons you had, you were getting a repeat of two songs. Of course, all four of these songs are outstanding. The "newer" ones (if you had the American version of Between the Buttons) were the distortion heavy rocker Please Go Home and the touching, sober Backstreet Girl that featured the Stones at their most sympathetic and tender (yes, the bad boys did have hearts).

Two other great songs that may have been a little hard to acquire were Mother's Little Helper and Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing in the Shadow? There are a few other scattered tracks that sound like "old" Stones (which strangely, after umpteen albums was only about three years ago) such as Take it or Leave It and Out of Time. They only manage to be too much out of character once on the cover of My Girl (I've heard this by a bazillion other groups, and, well, they all sound better at this type of song than the Stones). Oh, and, for some reason they also feature the song Lady Jane again, which is o.k. since most were unfamiliar and it was a great song to begin with.

For the most part, the band's releases would be autonomous from this point in their career forward, and one didn't have to worry about what "version" of the album they had if they were wanting certain songs.


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