There’s something full circle about The Rolling Stones’ Blue & Lonesome covers album.
Ignoring the glossy and generic Hackney Diamonds flubbing their discography seven years later, but the 23rd studio effort stands as a perfect bookend to the Stones. The last to feature founding drummer Charlie Watts, there’s a sense throughout of disregarding whatever legacy has been tacked on to the band, retreating into a boyhood genesis before fame and fortune, when they were all just kids orbiting London, enamoured with that magic blues blowing across the Atlantic.
It’s a famous piece of Stones lore, but the blues was what first fired Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ adult kinship. Celebrated half-erroneously with a blue plaque implying the formation of the band there and then, but the old Wentworth Primary School friends indeed bumped into each other at Dartford train station’s platform two, Richards spotting a teenage Jagger with a Muddy Waters record tucked under his arm, among many others that sparked a life-long professional marriage.
2016’s Blue & Lonesome in many ways stands as a spiritual successor to the Stones’ 1964 LP debut. While just kept from being a pure covers record with the two ‘Nanker Phelge’ credited cuts, the two albums with a half a century between them share an urgent scrappiness, both recorded in a short string of studio sessions, and both wholly or majority indebted to the blues canon of old.
Sitting in their exhaustive body of work as the ultimate blues love letter, we take a look at the five cuts from Blue & Lonesome that outshine even their original creators.
Five The Rolling Stones covers that are better than the originals:
‘Just Like I Treat You’
Perhaps the Stones’ generally argued favourite bluesmen, Howlin’ Wolf’s dragged up, Delta rough and ready blues bludgeon feels coated with a blue collar bristle that likely fascinated the teen Stones when forming under Brian Jones’ captaincy. While written by the ever-reliable Willie Dixon, it’s Wolf’s that stands as the essential rendition of the blues canon.
Before the Stones, that is. Having scored an early hit with his ‘Little Red Rooster’, the Stones take a stab at his ‘Just Like I Treat You’ and elevate the cut to a rollicking kick that’s fuelled with an infectious energy born out of their sheer, collective life-long fandom.
‘Just Your Fool’
One listen to Little Walter’s Chicago take on ‘Just Your Fool’ almost stands as an archetypal blues template. Itself a cover of Buddy Johnson’s big band jump original from seven years prior, Walter’s take pulls the number closer to the rustic dirt, all harmonica squark and infectious R&B flair marking a distinct character in the blues tradition.
The Stones step up to their own cut with ease. Capturing the ramshackle, slapdash hang of the whole number, Jagger manages to tap into ‘Just Your Fool’s immortal spirit by similarly wielding a deft harmonica break throughout the self-deprecating love song’s shotgun swirl.
‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’
For most, Otis Rush’s twelve-bar blues roar about adulterous romance would be first encountered on Led Zeppelin’s eponymous LP debut. A tough act to follow, but armed with an authoritative experience of marital infidelity and routine unfaithfulness, the Stones spike their ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’ with an anchorage in the same rough and ready reality as Rush and writer Willie Dixon first drew from in 1956.
Everybody’s on fine form, Chuck Leavell and Matt Clifford respective Hammond organ and Wurlitzer pianos all shuffling together with aptly pained skulk, and it’s never a bad idea to rope in Eric Clapton’s soloing chops over the Chicago blues classic, Clapton pouring his love in the song via his yelping guitar soar.
‘Hoo Doo Blues’
The Stones have always had a penchant for the Southern states’ musical sediments, the ‘68-’72 album run full of rootsy country and swamp drawls like ‘Dear Doctor’ or ‘I Just Want to See His Face’ shining with authentic mine from the Americana’s rich, earthy songbook.
Leaning into the unmistakable twang of Louisiana mud, a reach for Lightnin’ Slim’s 1957 stomper ‘Hoo Doo Blues’ evokes some of the Stones’ old alchemy from Let It Bleed or Sticky Fingers, a snapshot of just how fantastic the gang are when simply let loose in a room to jam with undimmed, electric synergy.
‘All of Your Love’
There’s nothing like the eternal flame of carnal longing to awaken a performer’s soul, especially in the blues. Covering a relative latecomer of the Chicago blues, the Stones’ lift of Magic Sam’s 1957 debut single ‘All Your Love’, later adding an “of” on the rerecord that appears on West Side Soul a decade later, an audacious grapple of the number’s simple, raw strut yet teeming power would serve as biting far more than a lesser band could chew.
Thankfully, it’s the Stones we’re talking about here. All firing on full form, especially Richards’ effortless rhythm stroll, the heart of the rendition is Jagger’s howling yelp, adding a vivacious energy to the cut far beyond his then 70-odd years.
