If fate had taken a different turn, Black and Blue might have been the first Rolling Stones album to feature Cork’s sorcerer of the Stratocaster, Rory Gallagher. Instead, the job of replacing Mick Taylor went to Ron Wood, later to become a sometime resident of north Co Kildare.
Wood made his debut as a Stone on this transitional record from 1976, which found the band struggling to maintain relevance amid the punk revolution, a musical atomic bomb that many of their peers never fully recovered from.
Wood’s presence on Black and Blue is barely noticeable, and fans may wonder how much more memorable the LP might have been had it featured Gallagher instead of the former Faces member. We’ll never know, as the Leeside prodigy had little interest in being an adjunct to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and opted to tour Japan rather than stay for further auditions in Amsterdam in January 1975.
It’s one of classic rock’s great sliding-door moments. Joining the Stones would have elevated Gallagher to another level of fame. Might his presence have also prevented the group’s decline into the 1980s and beyond?
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What is certain is that Black and Blue is far from the abomination it was perceived to be in 1976. The album was panned as the death rattle of a band spiralling towards irrelevance. Jagger, at the ridiculously decrepit age of 32, was deemed too old to continue as a rock star. The consensus was that he should be quietly led away from the mic stand and provided with his pipe and slippers.
This new box set, which includes out-takes and live cuts, challenges this consensus, however, revealing Black and Blue to be an underrated chapter in the Stones’ history. It captures them at a point of transition and uncharacteristic vulnerability. No longer at the centre of the zeitgeist, they sound unsure of themselves but have yet to become their own cover band, the grim fate that would await in the decade to follow.
Jagger was, by all accounts, determined to keep the Stones moving forward and exploring new sounds. Not all of these experiments pay off. There are moments when Black and Blue lurches towards toe-curling and embarrassing – though it is to the credit of all involved that it never goes over the cliff edge.
The restless ghost of Jumpin’ Jack Flash haunts Hot Stuff, the album’s boogie-woogie opening track, yet the tune has a bloody-minded determination to leave a lasting impression, and this it does by trundling ever onwards, well past the five-minute mark.
The idea that bigger – or, at least longer – is better recurs across the record. One of the most effective examples is the seven-minute-plus blues ballad Memory Motel, which draws on a failed relationship that Jagger had with a fan on Long Island.
It would, of course, be unbecoming of a rock’n’roll bad boy to have regrets about a romance that got away. Yet Jagger allows himself an interlude of melancholy as he sifts through the ashes of a love that he knows his stardom made impossible (“I hit the bottle and hit the sack and cried”).
Not everything has aged so well. The cod-reggae jam Cherry Oh Baby would have surely sounded atrocious even at the time. (Jagger seems to be doing his worst Bob Marley impersonation.) Then there’s the funk workout Hey Negrita, and its lyrics about a man haggling with a sex worker. They say to write what you know. With luck that isn’t the dynamic here.
As is standard for luxury reissues, this new Black and Blue is packed with bonus material, including material laid down with Jeff Beck (whom they auditioned alongside Gallagher) and a cover of Shirley & Company’s 1974 disco hit Shame, Shame, Shame. The original recordings have been spruced up by the prog musician Steven Wilson, fresh from his work on the reissue of Pink Floyd’s Live from Pompeii.
That record is a stark masterpiece, whereas Black and Blue is the Stones at their sleaziest and most musically larcenous. In other words it’s Jagger and Richards firing on all cylinders. Although Black and Blue is no classic, it is one of their last essential moments before they transmuted into the money-generating hit machine that has been with us ever since.
