Let It Bleed The Rolling Stones Decca/London There's a convincing case to be made for The Rolling Stones' trio of albums straddling the 1960s and '70s being the most accomplished run of records in pop history. Beginning with 1968's Beggars Banquet and ending with 1971's Sticky Fingers , they chart the band's progress from psychedelic explorers to stadium-filling mega-band. Between them they contain probably 90 per cent of the Stones songs you'd include on a "best of" mixtape, Sympathy for the Devil , Street Fighting Man and Brown Sugar among them. As a distillation of the band's evolution during that period, the middle album, 1969's Let It Bleed , is pivotal. Over its nine tracks, the Stones' eighth studio album sees them transform from hit British beat band to swaggering global behemoth. It's the moment when rock'n'roll becomes rock. It boasts the last of their doom-laden psychedelic epics as well as the last recorded efforts of founder Brian Jones, and introduces us to the sleazy country-rock that would become their defining aesthetic in the new decade with a sound propelled by replacement guitarist Mick Taylor. Recorded during and after the mammoth 1969 tour of the US - the one that ended tragically at the free Altamont show where a concertgoer was stabbed to death - Let It Bleed sees the band mining the motherlode of American roots music that they'd been exposed to on the road. The starkest signpost to their future sonic trajectory is Country Honk , an acoustic rendering of one of their most enduring hits, Honky Tonk Women . Lascivious and leering, it sounds more like an outtake than a full-fledged track. But in its country-picked acoustic guitars and screechy fiddles it lays an early template for the band's feted 1972 classic Exile on Main Street . While ushering in their new sound, Let It Bleed also sees the Stones casting off their past. Jones, a victim of his own inflated ego, drug abuse and alcoholism, played minor parts in just two of the album's songs. On the epic and sprawling blues masterpiece Midnight Rambler he wasn't even allowed to pick up his guitar with which he'd dazzled the world in the band's formative years but could now barely play thanks to his chemically induced incoherence. Instead, he was given bongos duty. By the time the album was released in December, Jones was already dead, found drowned in his swimming pool in July that year, and Taylor had established himself as the band's lead guitarist. While the album is notable for the band's change in musical direction, it features a clutch of tracks more in keeping with their earlier Brit-blues epics, among them some of the Stones' most memorable moments. Gimme Shelter is their brooding, nihilistic reflection of Vietnam war-era paranoia, while You Can't Always Get What You Want marks their weary acceptance that the hippie ideal is dead. Charlie Carter
