The Rolling Stones’ 1967 recordings are a matter of some controversy; many critics felt that they were compromising their raw, rootsy power with trendy emulations of the Beatles, Kinks, Dylan, and psychedelic music. Approach this album with an open mind, though, and you’ll find it to be one of their strongest, most eclectic LPs, with many fine songs that remain unknown to all but Stones devotees. The lyrics are getting better (if more savage), and the arrangements more creative, on brooding near-classics like “All Sold Out,” “My Obsession,” and “Yesterday’s Papers.” “She Smiled Sweetly” shows their hidden romantic side at its best, while “Connection” is one of the record’s few slabs of conventionally driving rock.

Album Review by Richie Unterberger

AllMusic.com

The Rolling Stones finally delivered a set of all-original material with this LP, which also did much to define the group as the bad boys of rock & roll with their sneering attitude toward the world in general and the female sex in particular. The borderline misogyny could get a bit juvenile in tunes like “Stupid Girl.” But on the other hand, the group began incorporating the influences of psychedelia and Dylan into their material with classics like “Paint It Black,” an eerily insistent number one hit graced by some of the best use of sitar (played by Brian Jones) on a rock record. Other classics included the jazzy “Under My Thumb,” where Jones added exotic accents with his vibes, and the delicate Elizabethan ballad “Lady Jane,” where dulcimer can be heard. Some of the material is fairly ho-hum, to be honest, as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were still prone to inconsistent songwriting; “Goin’ Home,” an 11-minute blues jam, was remarkable more for its barrier-crashing length than its content. Look out for an obscure gem, however, in the brooding, meditative “I Am Waiting.”

Album Review by Richie Unterberger

AllMusic

Album Review by Bruce Eder, AllMusic.com
The original Animals’ American hits, including “House of the Rising Sun,” “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” “It’s My Life,” and “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” in a compilation originally released in 1966. The lineup of songs is strong, but the sound is indifferent — the British Complete Animals covers the same territory and a lot more to much greater effect, at only twice the cost with three times the music and infinitely superior sound and notes.

Album Review by Bruce Eder, AllMusic.com:
The British version of Aftermath was released earlier than its American counterpart and had several differences beyond its cover design: it runs more than ten minutes longer, despite not having “Paint It Black” on it (singles were usually kept separate from LPs in England in those days), and it has four additional songs — “Mother’s Little Helper,” which was left off the U.S. album for release as a single; “Out of Time” in its full-length five-minute-36-second version, two minutes longer than the version of the song issued in America; “Take It or Leave It,” which eventually turned up on Flowers in the U.S.; and “What to Do,” which didn’t surface in America until the release of More Hot Rocks more than six years later. Additionally, the song lineup is different, “Goin’ Home” closing side one instead of side two. And the mixes used are different from the tracks that the two versions of the album do have in common — the U.K. album and CD used a much cleaner, quieter master that had a more discreet stereo sound, with wide separation in the two channels and the bass not centered as it in the U.S. version. Thus, one gets a more vivid impression of the instruments. It’s also louder yet curiously, because of the cleaner sound, slightly less visceral in its overall impact, though the details in the playing revealed in the mixes may fascinate even casual listeners. It’s still a great album, though the difference in song lineup makes it a different record; “Mother’s Little Helper” is one of the more in-your-face drug songs of the period, as well as being a potent statement about middle-class hypocrisy and political inconsistency, and “Out of Time,” “Take It Leave It” (which had been a hit for the Searchers), and “What to Do,” if anything, add to the misogyny already on display in “Stupid Girl” and “Think,” and “Out of Time” adds to the florid sound of the album’s psychedelic component (and there’s no good reason except for a plain oversight by the powers that be for the complete version of “Out of Time” never having been released in America).

Album Review by Richie Unterberger & Bruce Eder, AllMusic.com:
A live document of the Brian Jones-era Rolling Stones sounds enticing, but the actual product is a letdown, owing to a mixture of factors, some beyond the producers’ control and other very much their doing. The sound on the original LP was lousy — which was par for the course on most mid-’60s live rock albums — and the remasterings have only improved it marginally, and for that matter not all of it’s live; a couple of old studio R&B covers were augmented by screaming fans that had obviously been overdubbed. Still, the album has its virtues as a historical document, with some extremely important caveats for anyone not old enough to recognize the inherent limitations in a live album of this vintage. The first concerns the history of this release — the Got Live if You Want It! album (not to be confused with the superior sounding but much shorter, U.K.-only extended-play single, issued in England in mid-1965) was a U.S.-only release late 1966, intended to feed a seemingly insatiable American market. As a best-of album had been issued in March 1966 and Aftermath in June of the same year, and the Stones had just come off of a major U.S. tour (which proved to be their last for over three years), another album was needed, to bridge the gap in America between the those earlier LPs, the two most recent singles — “Paint It, Black” and “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” — and the Between the Buttons album, which was not going to make it out in time for the Christmas season.

The result was Got Live if You Want It!, which was intended to be recorded at a concert at Royal Albert Hall on September 23, 1966, the Stones’ first live appearance in England in over a year. The problem was, as was memorably stated by a writer in Rolling Stone magazine a few years later, the Stones in those days didn’t play concerts — they played riots, and that was precisely what happened at Royal Albert Hall, as several hundred fans charged the stage, overwhelming the band before they’d gotten through the opening number, “Paint It, Black.” The scene was captured in the footage later used in the promotional film for “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” What was left of the show, once order was restored, was taped, along with at least two other shows on that tour over the next week or so; and it should also be remembered that in those days the group seldom played for more than 30 to 40 minutes, and sometimes less than that, much like the Beatles in concert. And the audience noise, much as it was with the Beatles, was overwhelming in the days before stacks of Marshall amps became routine in a band’s equipment — indeed, at some shows, at certain moments, only the tempo of Charlie Watts’ drumming could tell you which song the group was doing, and the band members couldn’t hear much more than the crowd — matters such as tuning instruments and precise playing, even down to the most routine changes, became exercises in futility. Add to that the limitations of live recording, and the inevitable sound leakages and other problems, and one can see how this album was easier to conceive than to actually bring off successfully. When all of the tapes were assembled, the producers were left with about 28 minutes of material that was usable to varying degrees, and even that was somewhat wishful thinking by the standards of the day. (Apart from the Kinks’ Live at Kelvin Hall [aka The Live Kinks], few groups or record labels in 1967 had the courage to release a concert album that sounded like the real article.) And here, someone — the Stones’ producer, London Records, whoever — started fiddling around, twirling knobs, changing balances, and making the stuff supposedly sound “better,” and bringing in a couple of studio tracks, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and “Fortune Teller,” and laying on some crowd noise to bring the show up to an acceptable length for an LP.

The result is the Rolling Stones album that has undergone more changes than any other in its various incarnations. First, there was the original LP version and the mix it featured, which left out most of the introduction and virtually any between-song talk by Mick Jagger; his voice was brought up and the rest of the band sounds somewhat suppressed; one channel of the stereo version had Jagger’s voice isolated and amplified to ridiculous prominence, while the other channel had a relatively “flat” and realistic balance on the concert material. In fact, if you took the latter channel and bumped it onto both channels of an open-reel tape, the result was a short but pretty good live performance. In the mid-’80s, ABKCO Records took control of the Stones’ library and went back to the original source tapes for the Got Live if You Want It! CD, re-editing the material in consultation with producer Andrew Oldham, improving the mixes on several of the songs, including “The Last Time,” “Time Is on My Side,” and “19th Nervous Breakdown,” and also giving a fuller account of Long John Baldry’s introduction. That was a step in the right direction and improved the record somewhat. Then, in 2002, came the SACD hybrid remastering of the album for a new CD edition, which is likely to be the last word in improvement on this album. The balances are finally realistic, in terms of Jagger’s voice and the rest of the band — Bill Wyman’s bass work and Charlie Watts’ drumming are consistently rewarding, and Keith Richards and Brian Jones have their moments, as well, though not as consistently. The performances were done, after all, under what were, at best, siege conditions, with little opportunity for finesse or nuance.

The one element that does come through consistently is the excitement and sheer kinetic energy generated by the band. The older songs come off the best — though one is glad that they do “Lady Jane,” the dulcimer-dominated piece comes off in this setting a lot like “Yesterday” did when the Beatles did that in concert; audiences shriek and scream over a quiet, reflective song that really doesn’t merit that response, and the result as a live performance is off-kilter; the group’s rendition of their then-current single, “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” is a bit chaotic, although it does give the band a chance to show what Keith Richards’ critique of the studio version’s burying of the rhythm section was all about — he and Brian Jones do their best to compensate for the lack of overdubbed brass stabs. The only real disappointment is the finale, “Satisfaction,” which comes off as quick, ragged, and chaotic — it was impossible to interlock the guitars the way the group’s sound needed, and it has no real ending, which is why it’s faded down. The album is a lot more uneven than the much shorter EP of the same name (available on Singles 1963-1965), but it is now at least a fairly honest document of what rock & roll concerts in the mid-’60s were like. Ironically, Got Live if You Want It! wasn’t released in England until more than a decade later and, in the interim, in 1971, Decca Records took some of its tracks, jumbled them up with some cuts off the 1969 concert album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, and combined them under the misleading title Gimme Shelter, as though it were the soundtrack to that movie (despite a disclaimer on the back), and generally infuriated fans on both sides of the Atlantic in the process.

The first hits compilation of the Rolling Stones is still one of the most potent collections of singles that one can find. Listening to it in 1966 or today, one can understand how, almost prematurely for the 1960s — as most of the material here dates from 1964 or 1965 — the Stones set themselves up as the decade’s most visible rock & roll rebels. The defiant, in-your-face fuzztone riff and sexually frustrated lyrics of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and the frenetic pounding punk anthem “Get Off of My Cloud” are highlights of a 12-song set that has no weak points, only peaks — the louder-than-life rhythm guitars on “It’s All Over Now” and “The Last Time,” the wailing R&B of “Time Is on My Side,” the balladry, folk, and soul style of “As Tears Go By” and “Tell Me,” and all of the rest make for a body of work that’s still amazing to hear decades after the fact. Appearing as it did in the late winter of 1966, this collection completely missed the group’s drift into psychedelia, and it has since been supplanted by Hot Rocks and More Hot Rocks, but Big Hits is still the most concentrated dose of the early Stones at their most accessible that is to be had, short of simply playing their first five U.S. albums. The artwork and photography were pretty cool too, and the original LP had one of rock’s early classic gatefold album designs.

Album Review by Bruce Eder, AllMusic.com:

The usual assumption is that the British-issued Rolling Stones albums of the mid-’60s are, like the Beatles’ British LPs of the same era, more accurate representations of the group and its work than their American equivalents; the latter were tailored to the U.S. market and usually had singles that had been recorded and released separately added to their programming. The reality, however, is that the group’s British LPs were almost as much of a hodgepodge, but just devised differently. The U.K. version of Out of Our Heads actually came out later than its American counterpart by about a month and opens with the roaring, frenetic “She Said Yeah” rather than the soulful slowie “Mercy Mercy” (which follows it here). In place of “Satisfaction” and “The Last Time,” listeners get “Oh Baby (We Got a Good Thing Going)” from five months earlier, “Heart of Stone” (which had already appeared in America on The Rolling Stones Now!), and “I’m Free” and “Talkin’ ‘Bout You,” which would turn up in America on December’s Children. To add to the confusion, the Gerard Mankowitz black-and-white cover shot (depicting the band looking as threatening as it ever would in this early phase of its history) used here would turn up in America three months later, also on the December’s Children LP. The record is somewhat slapped together, but is superior to either of the American albums that it overlaps in balance. It’s all good, solid, first-rate rock & roll and R&B, with a certain developing sophistication on songs like “I’m Free,” and it flows better without any AM radio-oriented, riff-driven singles like “Satisfaction,” “The Last Time,” or “Get Off of My Cloud,” or novelty numbers like “As Tears Go By” to break it up.

Album Review by Bruce Eder, AllMusic.com:

Album Review by Richie Unterberger, AllMusic.com:
Although their third American album was patched together (in the usual British Invasion tradition) from a variety of sources, it’s their best early R&B-oriented effort. Most of the Stones’ early albums suffer from three or four very weak cuts; Now! is almost uniformly strong start-to-finish, the emphasis on some of their blackest material. The covers of “Down Home Girl,” Bo Diddley’s vibrating “Mona,” Otis Redding’s “Pain in My Heart,” and Barbara Lynn’s “Oh Baby” are all among the group’s best R&B interpretations. The best gem is “Little Red Rooster,” a pure blues with wonderful slide guitar from Brian Jones (and a number one single in Britain, although it was only an album track in the U.S.). As songwriters, Jagger and Richards are still struggling, but they come up with one of their first winners (and an American Top 20 hit) with the yearning, soulful “Heart of Stone.”