Released in August of 1973, the album began in Jamaica the year before. No longer was the band functioning as a cohesive unit … with Jagger taking on most of the infantile lyrics, sounding brain-dead weary and bloated, as if they tossed this release out there as an easy way to earn a dollar. Oddly, Stones’ fans didn’t seem to care with the album reaching number 1, and for this reviewer, signified the coming of ever less relevant Stones recordings. Goats Head Soup marked the end of the psychedelic trip, the end of attitudes acquired from the 60’s, almost as if this band of pranksters, who had delivered to us such magnificent albums as Let It Bleed, and Beggars Banquet where on the verge of releasing Some Girls and ushering in an entirely new audience to their shows, shows and music that were now more about being stars than being about great chords, super riffs, and laced with a unintelligence that was keeping pace with the mindlessness of things related to pop culture, tabloid news, and cocaine, the band now seemed that they had little they needed or wanted to prove. Though seriously, when a band rides around all day in their own private limos, what do they have to write about, other than trying to make the menusha of billion dollar lives sound interesting.
Bill Wyman’s influence was less and less evident here and over the coming years. Of course Charlie nailed his drums with proficiency and excellence, though it was staggeringly shocking to see that most of the songs had been written over the last two to three years, and were over-dubbed and re-recorded by producer Jim Miller and the new kid Mick Taylor, no doubt accounting for the album lacking a genuine Rolling Stones feel.
And then there’s the album cover, a cover depicting Jagger veiled and marble-eyed with ruby red lips, as if a porcelain doll, peering though a crevice that suggestively implies that of a woman’s vagina. Of course this indicates Jagger’s state of mind, that he is all things to all women with this embarrassing imaged nonsense being the most self-aggrandizing bit he’s ever implied. But this was the beginning of the 70’s, and there was more strangeness than the world ever imagined to come, and no one had to hold their breath waiting.
