The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones, Now! (1965)

 

  1.Everybody Needs Somebody to Love
  2.Down Home Girl
  3.You Can't Catch Me
  4.Heart of Stone
  5.What a Shame
  6.Mona (I Need You Baby)
  7.Down the Road a Piece
  8.Off the Hook
  9.Pain in My Heart
 10.Oh Baby (We Got a Good Thing Goin')
 11.Little Red Rooster
 12.Surprise, Surprise
  

The third full-length Rolling Stones album—and the second to bear the group’s name in the title—felt more like a continuation than a progression. Not that there was anything wrong with that. In fact, it plays so consistently that it might be their most cohesive early record. But by the time this one hit shelves in early 1965, the band had settled into a familiar formula: a collection of mostly blues and R&B covers interspersed with a few emerging originals. It worked, and nobody in 1965 was exactly clamoring for reinvention from their rock and roll heroes.

What sets The Rolling Stones, Now! apart is how seamless the blend is between the borrowed material and the Jagger/Richards compositions. It's actually tough to tell which songs are covers and which aren't unless you're already familiar with the originals. The band was still in deep love with the blues, and this might be the bluesiest set they ever laid to tape. Lyrically, we’re still in the realm of food metaphors and down-and-dirty one-liners—kisses tasting like pork and beans, talk of bacon grease, and so on. But it all fits the raw charm of the record.

There aren’t many "standout" tracks here because, frankly, the whole thing moves as one solid listen. Still, a few favorites inevitably emerge. Chuck Berry’s You Can’t Catch Me and Down the Road Apiece are both tight and energetic, while the cover of Bo Diddley’s Mona (I Need You Baby) practically hums with urgency. For a bit of color, there’s the grooving instrumental 2120 South Michigan Avenue and a take on Time Is on My Side—which, despite being a cover of Irma Thomas, most still wrongly assume to be a Stones original.

If there’s a drawback here, it’s that The Rolling Stones, Now! doesn’t sound dramatically different from the albums that came just before or after. By this point, the band had released three albums in less than a year, each hovering around 30 minutes. For the modern listener, these early Stones records might be best enjoyed as a combined collection rather than as individual albums. It does hold up remarkably well, however. It may not have introduced anything radically new, but what it did, it did extremely well.

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