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
There’s probably a fascinating story behind the release of Flowers, but I won’t pretend to be an expert on the behind-the-scenes logistics of every Rolling Stones release. What I do know is that, back in the sixties, it wasn’t uncommon for British bands to have completely different album lineups depending on which side of the Atlantic you were on. The U.K. would get one version, the U.S. another, and if you were a devoted fan trying to keep up, you often had to resort to compilation albums just to plug in the missing holes.
Flowers is exactly that kind of record—a catch-all release aimed squarely at the completists. Released in 1967, it was essentially an effort to round up a handful of tracks that hadn’t yet found a proper home in the U.S. Following Between the Buttons, which had two major tracklist differences between its British and American pressings, this one attempts to tidy things up. Depending on which version of Between the Buttons you owned, you were guaranteed to get at least a couple of repeats here. Luckily, all four of the key tracks in question are solid. The best of the “newer” additions (if you had the U.S. version of Between the Buttons) are the dirty, riff-heavy Please Go Home and the surprisingly delicate Backstreet Girl—proof that even the so-called bad boys of rock could pull off sincerity when they felt like it.
A couple of other key tracks show up that might have been difficult for American listeners to find in one place: Mother’s Little Helper and the amphetamine-fueled Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing in the Shadow?—both welcome additions. There’s also a handful of more traditional Stones numbers like Take It or Leave It and Out of Time, which still feel fresh even if they’re beginning to sound a little retro by this point—funny, considering they were only a couple of years old at the time.
There is one misstep here: a cover of My Girl. I’m not sure whose idea this was, but it doesn’t land. This kind of syrupy Motown tune might have worked better for a band with more finesse in this lane. Unfortunately, the Stones weren’t that band. Still, it’s a rare clunker in an otherwise solid collection. For some reason, Lady Jane pops up again here too. No complaints. It’s a beautiful song and likely still unfamiliar to many casual fans at the time. Besides, better to have too much Lady Jane than not enough.
After this release, things began to stabilize. The band’s albums would finally start to align internationally, and fans wouldn’t have to keep track of “which version” they had just to ensure they weren’t missing anything. But for its time, Flowers does exactly what it set out to do—and it does it well.
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