Can’t You Hear Me Knocking. The Rolling Stones. 1971. Rolling Stones Records.

The most seductively aggressive guitar riff in the rock and roll songbook. Prior to Sticky Fingers, The Rolling Stones had spent its last two records perfecting those in-studio commercial qualities that ultimately revealed the depth of its genius for levering the tension of American blues onto contemporaneous rock. By this time in its career, the Stones were in command of a musical language exclusive to its talents, its influences drawn in part from the razor sharp contradictions run rampant across the American landscape which they experienced while on tour here, and the gallows humor from this country’s high density concentration of borderline personalities. Unlike the Beatles, who, professionally, could only intellectualize their American influences, the Stones took their investigations of the Yank psyche much further, absorbing them on a cellular level—Keith Richards became the world’s most famous junkie. Another source of excitement you hear in these records is the band’s finite but fecund sense of discovery, essential to its creative dynamic from the very beginning, when they taught themselves how to listen for the secrets of the blues experience with every drop of the needle, every new chord formation. Critical to the success of Can’t You Hear Me Knocking is the impromptu improvisation that closes the song, and another striking example of how effortlessly the band had come to mastering its incoming American influences, which also included country & western, soul, and gospel. The song’s finale’s major players, percussionist Rocky Dijon, saxophonist Bobby Keys, and Mick Taylor, perform a relaxed, muted response to the sexually galvanizing first half, starting with a serpentine staccato riff by Keys that essays with pitch perfect dynamism the argument for the instrument’s continued hallowed place in rock and roll. The exchange of musical ideas passed among the trio offered a welcome glimpse of what drove the Stones when they weren’t marketing themselves as the glamorously louche masters of the London abyss that cracked open shortly before Brian Jones’ death. After the Stones themselves became the keepers of the secret, they had it in them to continue parsing it out over a few more records before megawealth prevented them from ever again accessing their muse in its natural habitat, the seediest USA barrooms and bordellos. A commitment to rock and roll always meant investing in the lives of the working poor; reducing yourself to a skeletal essence, and following, not market dictates, but the demands of your instincts while remaking reality until its extraneous waste is beneath you. This may require a lot of drug use.


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