Grrr! (2012)


 


Disc One
  1. Come On
  2. Fade Away
  3. It's All Over Now
  4. Little Red Rooster
  5. The Last Time
  6. (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction
  7. Time is On My Side
  8. Get Off My Cloud
  9. Heart of Stone
  10.19th Nervous Breakdown
  11.As Tears Go By
  12.Paint it Black
  13.Under My Thumb
  14.Have You Seen Your Mother Baby,
     Standing in the Shadow?
  15.Ruby Tuesday
  16.Let's Spend the Night Together
  17.We Love You

Disc Two
  1. Jumpin' Jack Flash
  2. Honky Tonk Women
  3. Sympathy for the Devil
  4. You Can't Always Get What You Want
  5. Gimme Shelter
  6. Street Fighting Man
  7. Wild Horses
  8. She's a Rainbow
  9. Brown Sugar
  10.Happy
  11.Tumbling Dice
  12.Angie
  13.Rocks Off
  14.Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)
  15.It's Only Rock 'n' Roll (But I Like It)
  16.Fool to Cry

Disc Three
  1. Miss You
  2. Respectable
  3. Beast of Burden
  4. Emotional Rescue
  5. Start Me Up
  6. Waiting on a Friend
  7. Undercover of the Night
  8. She Was Hot
  9. Streets of Love
  10.Harlem Shuffle
  11.Mixed Emotions
  12.Highwire
  13.Love is Strong
  14.Anybody Seen My Baby?
  15.Don't Stop
  16.Doom and Gloom
  17.One More Shot

 

When I first came across Grrr!, I must admit my reaction was far from enthusiastic. The packaging, the track list, even the title—it all seemed like a slightly bloated rerun of Forty Licks, which had already offered a reasonably comprehensive retrospective only a few years earlier. Same premise, different wrapping: a multi-disc collection featuring the hits, and—just to sweeten the deal—a couple of new tracks. Was there really any need?

Well, closer inspection offered a few small surprises. For one, this time it was a triple-disc affair. Not forty songs, but fifty. A slight upgrade, at least on paper. In execution, though? A mixed result.

Yes, there’s more material here. And yes, it’s spread across a wider span of the band’s career. The sequencing is loosely chronological (though not religiously so), which does help the flow. But when you're offering fifty songs, there really is no excuse for leaving out so many of the band’s minor hits. Instead, we get odd choices—songs that may have historical interest, but do little to satisfy the casual listener or completist. Worse still, the two newly recorded numbers—while not bad by any means—don’t exactly scream “essential.”

Most baffling of all is the running time. With the capacity of each CD barely pushed to the limit, it would have been easy to include an additional five or six tracks per disc—maybe more. And just when you think the story can’t get stranger, there’s the “deluxe” 5-CD version, which features eighty tracks in total. That version, curiously, includes more songs on each of the three “standard” discs than this release. It’s hard to understand the logic. Or rather, it’s all too easy to understand it: marketing, pure and simple.

In other words—why settle for a definitive compilation when you can sell three slightly different ones?

And if that wasn’t enough, certain countries released a “budget” two-disc version featuring just forty tracks—essentially a stripped-down clone of Forty Licks. One begins to wonder if there’s a dartboard at the record label headquarters marked with numbers, formats, and price points.

So where does that leave us? Grrr! isn’t a bad compilation. Far from it. For anyone lacking a solid Stones anthology, this more than does the trick. But given the opportunity to produce the ultimate career-spanning collection, what we got instead was a commercially calculated compromise. The music’s still there, but the curation feels careless. It could—and should—have been so much more.


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