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Bob Dylan’s Another Self Portrait (part of his endlessly revelatory “Bootleg Series”) reconsidered 1970’s Self Portrait, generally dismissed as the worst record of his career. This can even be true for a terrible album. Last year’s Prince 1999 set, though it flirted with bloat at six discs, allowed listeners to hear the various avenues he explored during the making of that breakthrough album, the roads not taken, the decisions made and experiments abandoned that led to the final release. The best box sets provide thoughtful insight into a chapter of an artist or band’s career. Ironically, though, when they play four songs in a row from Goats Head Soup midway through the set, it’s immediately evident that this material just isn’t up to the songs that surround it. Epic versions of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Midnight Rambler” are breathtaking, and the Exile on Main St. This show (which was released digitally in 2012 as part of the Stones’ “official bootleg” series) is celebrated by fans for a reason the band is absolutely on fire. The Goat’s Head Soup release is available in multiple formats-a single disc of the album given a brightened-up new mix by Giles Martin, who has overseen all the recent Beatles box sets a two-disc set with outtakes and remixes-but it’s hard to imagine anyone interested in this project who won’t end up springing for the full three-CD-plus-one-Blu-Ray “Super Deluxe” box (price tag $149.98, or $107.99 on vinyl), which includes the oft-bootlegged 1973 concert long known as Brussels Affair. In truth, a serious look at a flawed project should be more valuable than a simple confirmation that a great album is great (see last year’s Dead Man’s Pop box from the Replacements, a deep dive into the sessions that resulted in their problematic 1989 album Don’t Tell a Soul.) Extravagant, multi-disc reissues, with new mixes and hardbound books and bonus knick-knacks, are the final bastion of physical music releases that anyone (even a limited audience of superfans) might actually buy, and they’re easy to mock as desperate grabs for cash, but when they’re done well, they can help connect some of the dots in essential music history. I love this band, and believe that any of their major albums, good or bad, is important enough to re-examine in depth. None of which inherently makes the prospect of a Goats Head Soup box set any less interesting. “The sadness comes when you measure not just one album, but the whole sense they're putting across now against what they once meant.” “There is a sadness about the Stones now, because they amount to such an enormous So what?,” wrote the notorious critic Lester Bangs in Creem magazine. (L-R) Charlie Watts (drums), Keith Richards (guitar), Mick Taylor (guitar), Bill Wyman (bass) (front), Mick Jagger (vocals). The Rolling Stones with Japanese old instruments at Dynamic Studios, Kingston, Jamaica, 9th December 1973. It marked the moment the band stopped simply being the Rolling Stones and started playing the part of “The Stones.” D,” “Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker),” and “Star Star” (better known as “Starfucker,” though their label nixed that title)-are rote nibbles at the dark corners of death, sleazy sex, and urban decay that previously made the band feel genuinely dangerous. Sessions at Kingston’s reggae mecca Dynamic Sounds studio were followed by on-the-fly recordings in LA and London, resulting in the ten songs on Goats Head Soup, which Richards would later call “a marking-time album.” Guitarist Mick Taylor described it as “a weak album…a bit directionless,” while engineer Andy Johns blamed the drugs: “People were accepting things perhaps that weren't up to standard because they were a little higher than normal.”Īlmost fifty years later, the album’s strongest tracks by far remain its ballads, offering a convincing sense of the hangover the band (and the world) felt from the previous whirlwind years-“Winter,” “Coming Down Again,” and the Number One hit “Angie,” the one song here that would become a standard for the band moving forward. So when they gathered in late 1972 in Jamaica-one of the only countries that would still allow the group inside its borders-to get back to work, it’s no surprise that the Stones were exhausted and uninspired.