CONFESSIN' THE BLUES
1. Down The Road Apiece
2. I Can't Be Satisfied
3. Confessin' The Blues
4. Empty Heart
5. Don't You Lie To Me
6. What A Shame
7. Time Is On My Side
8. It's All Over Now
9. Look What You've Done
10. If You Need Me
11. 2120 South Michigan Avenue
12. Around And Around
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Hiya! This is Confessin' The Blues, an album recorded in 1964 by some young, sloppy Rolling Stones at the legendary Chess Studios (located at 2120 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago; interestingly, the Nation Of Islam's famous leader Elijah Muhammad lived down the street at 6116 for a while). To properly describe the importance of Chess, I'm going to quote some passages from Martin Chilton's well-written piece about those sessions, published on January 15, 2025 on Udiscovermusic.com; "'The Rolling Stones No.2': Mick And Keith's Love Letter To Chess Records."
The studios were regarded as the home of Chicago blues and the place where the Rolling Stones' heroes, such as Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry, had cut much of the music that had inspired them in the first place [indeed, their name was taken from a Muddy Waters track] . . . Bass guitarist Bill Wyman said he could still remember his bandmates' looks of disbelief when Waters came out to help them with their bags . . . "We thought we'd died and gone to heaven," said [lead guitarist] Keith Richards . . . "The blues stars were gentlemen and so interested in what we were doing... you figure you're gonna walk in and they'd think, Snooty little English guys and a couple of hit records. Not at all. I got the chance to sit around with Muddy Waters and Bobby Womack, and they just wanted to share ideas. And you were expecting, 'Oh, English kids making money out of me,' and it could well have happened. But they wanted to know how we were doing it, and why we wanted to do it." . . . [As well,] the Chess musicians were pleased to get royalties from the versions by the young English musicians . . . [as, in the words of Allen Toussaint, the Rolling Stones] would know how to roll my song all the way to the bank."
The Rolling Stones' debut album from 1964. The North American version
removed a track, tacked a song onto the beginning, and overlaid a pile of
promo text onto the cover. Apparently the band really had to fight their
label to get a textless cover on the original European release.
Indeed, the makeup of songs on Confessin' The Blues is quite telling of the musicians that they were spending time with at the studio; "I Can't Be Satisfied" and "Look What You've Done" are Muddy Waters originals; "Down The Road Apiece," "Confessin' The Blues," and "Don't You Lie To Me" had each been covered by Chuck Berry, who himself wrote "Around And Around;" Bobby Womack's "It's All Over Now" became the Stones' first #1 hit in their home country; also, "Time Is On My Side" had just been covered by Irma Thomas, and "If You Need Me" was a Wilson Pickett song covered by Solomon Burke. The difference is made up by two tracks composed by members of the band, "Empty Heart" and the instrumental "2120 South Michigan Avenue," and one early Jagger/Richards composition called "What A Shame." It must be noted that the Stones' cover of "Don't You Lie To Me" had the "You" dropped from the title upon its release, which I decided to reinstate to make it clear what song they're covering.
What separates this album from the rest of their projects is that while they were making it, they were in dialogue with, receiving tips, and generally learning from some of the African American musicians whose music they so adored. While much of their early career was spent recording versions of these tracks that many people deemed to be "plastic soul" (the Beatles' Rubber Soul is a play on that label), Confessin' The Blues is undoubtedly, directly as a result of that dialogue, the least plastic-y that they ever recorded, at least during this early stage of their career. In the words of Sly Stone (from his autobiography), "you have to live the blues to sing about the blues," and I don't mean to say that this band, mostly made up of privileged university dropouts, had suddenly lived lives of intense hardship, but the artistic influence of their African American idols lends a degree more of authenticity to their sound than is otherwise present, generally speaking.
The Rolling Stones No.2, their second European album. The cover photo
was overlaid with text on the band's second North American album, 12x5,
which was more or less a cross between this album and the EP.
The cover art that I chose to use is that of the Five By Five EP, which was released two months after the Chess sessions in June 1964 and was made up of five of the songs tracked there. Like their first two official European albums, the cover is a textless band photo, but this one has a background that's blue instead of black (which is partly why I chose "Confessin' The Blues" as the title track). The different colour palette also reflects a big change in sonics compared to nearly all of their other recordings from this era; their usual low-fidelity near-garage rock mono sound is polished into lush, high-fidelity stereo by the steady hands of the in-house Chess team. It was an excellent studio with a very hi-fi sound, complete with two echo chambers that lend a lot to its' distinctive sound: compare this Stones number to this Muddy Waters one to hear it. Anyways, this is resultingly their first and only full-stereo album up until 1966's Aftermath (the recording of which began the December prior), but the balance of instrument and vocal volumes is much better on Confessin' The Blues than on Aftermath. In fact, these stereo mixes are so good that they didn't even bother to mix the tracks to mono, as they did for pretty much every song up until 1968. All tracks have been sourced from the excellent 2002 remasters, bar four. "Empty Heart," "Confessin' The Blues," and "Around And Around" had tape startup issues, so I have used versions with subtle remastering done by Prof Stoned which have that problem corrected. As well, the song "Don't You Lie To Me" was released much later on than all of the others, and when it was its stereo mix was for some reason significantly narrowed. I went with Prof Stoned's remaster of the original wide mix from a nice-sounding bootleg to keep the track in line with everything else on the album, sonically speaking.
Like many of their contemporaries, substantially different albums were released in Europe and North America in the '60s. Unlike these contemporaries, however, it was the band themselves (as well as their management) who compiled both versions of their catalogue, meaning that they are both equally artistically authentic (unlike, say, the Beatles' North American albums, which were mostly assembled by U.S. label executives by slicing and dicing the band-approved British releases). The end result of this dual authenticity is that neither the European nor the North American catalogue has been picked over the other as the "official" one, resulting in a horrid mess that does absolutely no service to the music itself. There are albums with similar names but dissimilar songs. There are albums with similar songs but dissimilar names. Some songs are only on a European album, some songs are only on a North American album, some songs are on both, and some songs are on neither. Even today, when the Stones put out new albums, the publications still have to say that it's their 27th album in the U.S. and 25th in the U.K., or whatever.
The original North American edition of Out Of Our Heads (1965).
So, if nobody else is going to sort this mess out, I figured it had to be me. After much thought (several years' worth, actually), I decided to handpick a few of the official albums from each catalogue, ones without song overlap. I then set myself the task of assembling the rest of their songs into albums that fill the gaps between those official releases, collecting every song in the process. The official albums I chose are these: The Rolling Stones (1964, U.K.), Out Of Our Heads (1965, U.S.), Aftermath (1966, U.K.), and Between The Buttons (1967, U.K., but recorded 1966), and Confessin' The Blues is the first installment in this gap-filling series with the goal of creating a definitive (not to mention more cohesive and simply better-assembled) early Rolling Stones discography. So, all in all, I hope you enjoy it: happy listening!
