4 Rolling Stones Albums That Start and Finish With a Bang

The Rolling Stones have endured several different transformations in their long career. Their lineup has changed, and their sound has changed. Regardless of all that, they keep coming up with brilliant albums.

We looked through their catalog for four albums that started and ended with fantastic songs. And we found more than four, quite frankly. But we narrowed it down to this quartet anyway.

‘Beggars Banquet’

After the Stones drifted a bit too far from their blues-rock comfort zone in the mid-60s, they refocused on life’s grit and grime on Beggars Banquet. (The non-album single “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” started them down this path.) They immediately set the tone on the 1968 album by embracing their dark side on “Sympathy For The Devil”. That track showed they could still innovate in the studio while still coming out sounding sufficiently Stones-y. On the other end of the record, they leavened the mood a bit with “Salt Of The Earth”. The song features Nicky Hopkins’ thrilling, gospel-drenched piano work and some bracingly honest lyrics by Mick Jagger about him feeling distant from the masses who adore him.

‘Let It Bleed’

The Stones were in flux during the making of Let It Bleed. Brian Jones’ struggles with drugs and drink mostly left him on the outside looking in during the recording process. They had hired Mick Taylor, but he only had the chance to contribute to a couple of songs. Somehow, they came away with a record that solidified all the gains made on Beggars Banquet. With album opener “Gimme Shelter”, The Stones looked right through the peace-and-love generation and saw terror and mayhem. In its own way, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” does the same thing, albeit with a child’s choir joining and with the band suggesting there’s consolation in settling for less than Utopia.

‘Some Girls’

Because Keith Richards found himself preoccupied with legal problems, Mick Jagger largely took the ball and ran with it on Some Girls. As such, he deserves the credit for the urban influences on the record, influences that are felt the most on the album’s bookends. Although some fans balked at the disco vibes of “Miss You”, it’s quite impressive how seamlessly the band slid out onto the dance floor without coughing up their identity in the process. “Shattered”, the album’s closing number, features a jagged groove that takes the listener far from the clubs to the seedier back streets of New York City. Jagger presides over the Big Apple, maggots and all, with a sleazy sneer.

‘Tattoo You’

The Stones got away with Tattoo You, people praising it wildly at the time as their best album in years. In reality, the album was no more than a glorified collection of, to use the term coined by their peers The Who, odds and sods. Luckily, the quality of those leftovers outshone the best stuff that most other bands might have mustered. That includes “Start Me Up”, which seems genetically predisposed to being an album opener. The album closes on a much more introspective note, Jagger working his falsetto over Nicky Hopkins’ tinkling piano and Sonny Rollins’ emotive saxophone on “Waiting On A Friend”. Its beauty convinced us that things were all friendly and swell at a rocky time in group history.

(Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns)