Around And Around

Good clean vinyl with the cover showing shelf wear and creasing.

A compilation of sorts issued in Germany for no apparent reason. It's mostly songs from their 1964-album 12x5, and some singles and EP-tracks from the same year, making it not unsimilar to an early 1960s US-version of their albums, I guess. Apparently, this was meant for mid-1970s-Stones-Fans that somehow never had gotten a hold of the early stuff. Okay. This is all jolly good, but you've got it already – though I admit that having this is better than having to go out collecting the singles and EP-tracks one by one, so this is on the good sides of clean-up compilations.

And come on now: The Stones doing Lennon/McCartney's "I Wanna Be Your Man", it's just mind-blowing. You get what's great about both groups. The Stones turn what was a hysterical and ultra-catchy dance number into something you'd have to label as proto-punk (if labelling is your thing). Not bothering with any kind of exposition, they just dig into the riff from the first second on, transformed into a bass-heavy, distorted, twangy hulk of a chord that remains funnily stubborn for the hole 105 seconds that the song lasts. It sounds like an old grumpy car. Just before the barbwire solo (played as if they had to pay for the studio time), Mick tries to find a way how to finish the first stanza. John and Paul did a trademark ringing and precise two-voiced harmony on the line "I wanna be your maaaa-aaan..." before adding the wildness with "yaaaaah"-screams. Mick couldn't do a two-voiced harmony by himself. So he opts to just throw the "Maaaa-aaan"-part at you with an almost cartoonish attitude that seems to say "THERE you have it!!", distorting his voice as if he was a schoolgirl bleh-ing her older brother. You can literally hear the tongue sticking out. Also, whereas John and Paul perfectly build up the "I wanna be your man"-line (4 times in a row) to a perfect climax, Mick sounds plain bored the first three times around - until he gets to bleh on the fourth "Maaa-AAAAAAN". Pure gold.

On a historical footnote, note that mentioned Lennon/McCartney-track was first released by the Stones.