Jump Back: The Best of The Rolling Stones (1971-1993) (1993)
1.Start Me Up
2.Brown Sugar
3.Harlem Shuffle
4.It's Only Rock 'N Roll (But I Like It)
5.Mixed Emotions
6.Angie
7.Tumbling Dice
8.Fool to Cry
9.Rock and a Hard Place
10.Miss You
11.Hot Stuff
12.Emotional Rescue
13.Respectable
14.Beast of Burden
15.Waiting on a Friend
16.Wild Horses
17.Bitch
18.Undercover of the Night
Jump Back was one of those compilations that probably looked better on paper than it ended up sounding through the speakers. Released at a time when the band’s ‘classic rock’ legacy had already been cemented, it was clearly aimed at the casual fan—those who wanted a handy dose of seventies and eighties Stones in one place. And to be fair, it mostly delivers. Mostly.
The packaging states the set covers the period from 1971 to 1993. Technically, yes—but it’s worth pointing out that there’s no material here from after 1989, so the “1993” part is really just the release date talking. That’s not the biggest issue, though. That would be the track selection. There’s some odd shuffling here. For a band with as deep a catalogue as this one, it’s baffling to see some of the more iconic hits left off, while a few second-tier tracks inexplicably make the cut.
You also get some overlap with Hot Rocks, which this compilation was presumably designed to follow. Both Brown Sugar and Wild Horses show up here, despite already being locked in stone on the earlier anthology. That overlap muddies the waters a bit, and makes you wonder whether the compilers were simply playing it safe.
That said, Jump Back isn’t a bad listen. The material from Sticky Fingers onward is, for the most part, strong, and there’s enough variety to showcase the band’s evolution through the decades—though perhaps a little too much emphasis is placed on the later years. It’s a missed opportunity, in the end. A few different choices and this could have been the definitive look at the Stones’ post-1970 era. Instead, it’s just a pretty good one.
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