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5. “Wild Horses”

From Sticky Fingers

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The Stones’ hedonistic lifestyle provided the subject matter for so many of their classic songs that it’s easy to forget how well they were tuned in to the flip-side. Permeated by an exquisite sadness, “Wild Horses” is a brilliant example of the band staring unflinchingly into the abyss of sorrow waiting at the end of a relationship.

Keith Richards took care of the music and handed it over to Mick Jagger when he couldn’t straighten out the lyrics. Jagger dug deep into his drama-fraught relationship with Marianne Faithfull for the perfect words to accompany Richards’ plaintive music. The resulting lyrics are evocative without ever getting too specific, brought into focus by the chorus, which finds ultimate devotion in spite of all the pain.

Gram Parsons actually got his version on record before the Stones’ own version, which sat on the shelf for two years while the group waged a legal battle with Allan Klein. (It finally surfaced on Sticky Fingers.) Even though Parsons’ high-lonesome wail was a great delivery system for the slow ones, Jagger’s reading is the definitive one. His voice quivers with emotion in the final verses. You can tell that the song meant a great deal to him, because all of the histrionics and affectations are eliminated. The soul-baring performance is one of his finest.

The band is stellar as well, playing with admirable restraint but never straying into Dullsville. The acoustic and electric guitars complement each other beautifully and Jim Dickinson adds some tasteful piano. (Regular Stone ivory-tickler Ian Stewart begged off the session because he didn’t like to play minor chords. I wonder if he regretted that decision down the line.)

The tender chemistry between all of the song’s disparate elements is the kind of intangible quality that only true classic songs can boast. When the booze don’t make you forget the pain, you can always summon up a weeper like “Wild Horses” and wallow in it.

4. “Brown Sugar”

From Sticky Fingers

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I saw Bob Dylan in concert a few years back. When Bob plays these days he’s preaching to the choir, his fans well-aware of the master’s tendency to rearrange his classic songs almost beyond recognition and to treat his legendary lyrics as anything but sacrosanct. Sure enough, he was in the midst of a run of typically unsentimental song readings when his guitarist suddenly banged out the opening riff of “Brown Sugar.”

The crowd, which had been lulled into a pleasant stupor by Bob’s mesmeric performance, reacted as if it had been shocked by a cattle prod. The band played the song with a reverence that Bob wouldn’t dare to use for his own material, and he sang with a glee that was easy to spot even in the 24th row.

I think that evening amplified the true power of “Brown Sugar” for me, and every time I’ve heard it since, I get that same type of visceral jolt. We’ve talked so much in this countdown about the riffage of Keith Richards, and this one might be the all-time great. With all do respect to “Satisfaction” or “Start Me Up,” or any one of the classics we’ve already gone through, those staccato punches at the start of “Brown Sugar” let you know you’re in for something truly special.

Of course, the song is so much more than just that main riff (which, incidentally, disappears after the first few moments). There are more hooks in here than another band might provide in a decade. Richards and Mick Taylor churn out killer licks as if they can’t help themselves while the rhythm section of Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts unassumingly get your feet moving and adrenaline pumping. Bobby Keys sax solo is as sensual as it gets and Ian Stewart’s piano barrels through the proceedings like a house on fire. Everyone brought their A game here.

And then there are the lyrics. Really Mick could have been singing “Mary Had A Little Lamb” over that music and they still would have had a #1 hit, but he ups the ante with some of the most provocative lyrics of his career. Anyone who would get themselves into a lather about some of the song’s more controversial aspects is hearing the text and not the subtext. Mick is making a subtle statement on the nature of desire by drawing parallels between the slave trader of the first two verses and himself in the last one. The slave trader sublimates his desire through violence; Jagger, who was likely inspired to write the song by his own relationships with black women, sublimates by writing lascivious songs about it.

While brown sugar may have been a code name for heroin, I personally don’t think Jagger was doing anything more than making a cheeky reference to throw people off. “Brown Sugar” comes on as an unabashedly raunchy and ridiculously catchy concoction. Only by listening between the lines can you hear the refreshing honesty of its creator.

3. “Rocks Off”

From Exile on Main St.

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The great paradox of the Rolling Stones is how they often used the toughest and most confident music around to convey feelings of frustration and longing. Their most famous song, after all, features a swaggering riff in the service of Mick Jagger’s desperate pleas for satisfaction.

“Rocks Off” is a perfect example of this paradox, kicking off the legendary Exile on Main St. with a blast of boisterous energy that, if you don’t listen closely enough, might mislead you into thinking everything is hunky-dory in the life of Mick Jagger, Rock Star Esq. But, if you exclude his hilarious “Oh Yeah!” upon hearing Keith Richards’ Chuck Berry-in-a-Strip-Club opening riff, Jagger exudes nothing but malaise throughout the song. Not even sex with a ballerina can get this guy going.

Jagger sees his life on the road as being every bit as mundane as that of a 9-to-5 office drone. The routine is a little more crazy, but it’s a routine nonetheless: “I’m zipping through the days at lightning speed/Plug in, flush out, and fight and fuck and feed.” What is truly revealing is how Mick even envies the lows of the highs and lows: “Kick me like you’ve kicked before/I can’t even feel the pain no more.” Only in his dreams is he truly blissful, which is why the brief psychedelic bridge is so telling. He snaps back into attention for the final verse, going up an octave to harmonize with Keith on a line that has anhedonia written all over it: “The sunshine bores the daylights out of me.”

Yet through it all, the rest of the Stones tear through the song with all the vigor that their lead singer claims to lack. Charlie Watts’ charging beat never relents, and how about the performance of the sidemen? Nicky Hopkins gives some great boogie fills on the piano, while the horns, led by Jim Price’s trumpet, blast away with joyous mariachi accents. It’s all so energetic; so then why is Jagger so lethargic? Well, that’s the brilliance of “Rocks Off,” isn’t it? The depressive and the hedonist in all of us can get equal fulfillment for the price of one.

2. “Moonlight Mile”

From Sticky Fingers

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A song which began with the inauspicious title “The Japanese Thing” has no right developing into such a stone-cold classic as “Moonlight Mile.” And yet, nursed into being by its creator and some simpatico fellow players, it does just that, ending up where it was always meant to be, as the closing song on the Rolling Stones’ marvelous meditation on excess and the regret that follows, Sticky Fingers.

When they think of the Stones, I would venture a bet that most people don’t think of their lyrics. That’s just the nature of the band, of course, that the muscle of the guitars tends to overwhelm most everything else. But Mick Jagger’s lyrics, always underrated anyway, reach new levels of rock poetry on this track. With efficient strokes, he paints a broad picture of alienation and loneliness, of someone surrounded by everything but what he truly wants and needs, the arms of the one that he loves. The small talk of acquaintances, or maybe even the roar of the crowd, becomes “The sound of strangers sending nothing to my mind.” He notes the unfamiliarity of a strange city by saying, “I am sleeping under strange, strange skies.” “In the window, there’s a face you know,” he notes. Is the face that of his lover? Is it his own? Does he recognize it? It’s all deliciously surreal. But he promises a return to his love with a heartrending dedication: “I am just living to be lying by your side.”

What’s so special about this track is the way that Jagger and his bandmates realize the delicate flower they have and they treat it as such, with the kind of playing that only enhances its beauty rather than trampling it. Jagger plays the hypnotic acoustic riff that sets the tone. Jim Price, usually on trumpet for the band, plays some disjointed and yet perfectly-placed piano. The strings, arranged my Paul Buckmaster, sweep the listener along. Even Keith Richards deserves some credit for staying off this track; the open spaces his absence leaves behind in the song mirror the distance between the narrator and his beloved. Best of all is Charlie Watts; his drumming on this track is nothing short of superhuman, all rumbling toms that are always approaching but never quite get there.

This is the rare song about life on the road in a rock band that isn’t indulgent and can actually resonate with an average listener who doesn’t know an amp from an apricot. When Jagger screams out “I’m coming home” at song’s end, we want to believe in the happy reunion, even while knowing he is, and will always be, “just about a moonlight mile down the road.”

1. “Memory Motel”

From Black and Blue

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I think that we’ve all stayed at the Memory Motel at one time or another. No, not the real Memory Motel in Long Island, a place where the Rolling Stones frequented in the 70’s (and apparently pissed off the locals). I mean the symbolic Memory Motel, the metaphysical Memory Motel (say that three times fast). The Memory Motel in our heads, in our hearts, in our dreams, in our pasts. The place where the jukebox always plays tearjerkers like “Wild Horses,” where the rooms are vacant, even the one in which you’re staying, the place where the ones who got away check out the moment before you arrive. It’s a place like that needs a tribute, and the Rolling Stones provide it in their finest moment of the 1970’s.

How odd that “Memory Motel” would stand above all of those other brilliant songs. After all, it comes on an album, Black and Blue, that was basically just an excuse for the band to find a new guitarist. The one they picked, Ronnie Wood, only provides back-up vocals on this song, while the band’s legendary lead guitarist, Keith Richards, doesn’t play the axe but plays, of all things, electric piano. It’s a ballad from the balls-out rockers, and it rolls on an epic seven minutes, longer than just about any three of their 60’s smashes put together.

And yet, it’s perfection, right from Mick Jagger’s endearingly methodical opening chords on concert piano. The melody is winningly wistful, and everyone who pitches in on the track is excellent. Especially fine is Harvey Mandel’s complementary electric guitar and the backing chorus, featuring Wood, Richards, and Billy Preston. Their harmonies with Jagger are melancholy magic, and their “sha-la-las” are convincing enough to make me think that there was a great doo-wop band in there somewhere.

Jagger sings the song as though he were sitting at the barstool of the titular establishment, crying in his beer to a stranger. The speculation that the girl in the song was based on Carly Simon (what with her “curved” features and guitar-playing) is irrelevant to the enjoyment of the song. What matters is that she represents a great sadness, a missed opportunity. Jagger makes his choice to go on the road rather than staying with this muse of his, and he never forgives himself for it.

Once he establishes this in the first verse, the girl is largely absent from the rest of the verses, and Mick is left with his self-recriminations. The travelogue he recites is interrupted by his emotions bubbling to the fore: “Across in Texas is the Rose of San Antone/I keep on a feeling that’s gnawing in my bones.”

In between the verses, Richards chimes in with some approving lines. If he’s Mick’s sounding board, he’s only making it tougher on his friend by speaking the truth instead of telling him what he wants to hear. “She got a mind of her own,” he sings, probably in contrast to the mindless horde of groupies that the Glimmer Twins were used to seeing.

Things get even more pitiable in the final verse: “I hit the bottle and hit the sack and cried.” At the very least, Jagger is not left alone to wallow for long, because his rowdy friends (most likely led by a certain guitarist) come “busting down the door.” But the sad refrain is most telling of all: “You’re just a memory of a love that used to mean so much to me.” The fact that it doesn’t mean that much to him anymore could be read a few ways. Maybe he’s in serious denial. Or maybe he’s just become numb to such feelings, so jaded is he by his itinerant life. That possibility might be the saddest notion in the entire song.

That refrain keeps going on and on, stopped only when Keith makes one final, damning observation: “Well, she’s one of a kind.” We’ve all come across those types in our lives, although usually we’re too damn blind to see it. That’s why we all need the Memory Motel once in a while, where we can only hope that the house band is a fraction as good as the Rolling Stones.

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