On Air

Author: Jernej Vene

Artist: Rolling Stones, The
Label: Interscope Records
Release: 2017
Runtime: 48:54
Rating: 4/5

Few bands have lasted as long as The Rolling Stones. Let’s leave aside the question of whether they’re still together for the money or not. The album Blue And Lonesome was a return to the roots for the old geezers, or rather granddads, and its success caught them off guard, so there’s reportedly even a follow-up in the works. Until then, the first compilation of their early appearances on British national radio BBC will do just fine. The Rolling Stones first appeared on British TV on August 23, 1963, on the show Ready Steady Go with the song Come on. Well, the radio came calling too, inviting them onto Saturday club, Yeah! Yeah!, Blues In Rhythm, The Joe Loss Pop Show and Top Gear, which of course had nothing to do with the later car show.

The batch of recordings is impressive, showing a young, at times slightly cocky band on its way to fame. The BBC has always been strict and dedicated about documenting a moment in time. With the considerable resources it has had at its disposal over the decades, that wasn’t exactly hard. The harder part was picking who to record. The Stones were invited onto the radio often and were diligently taped. On Air collects recordings from 1963 to 1965, and besides the single-disc version there’s also a double CD, which will be even closer to fans’ hearts, since it brings a whopping thirty-two tracks.

The band’s musical progress shows mostly in how they present their own material, since early on they loved playing covers of American rock and blues classics. Even today they admit that this was a much-needed school and that they learned a lot from those writers. That approach matters today too, except that plenty of people, despite a huge hunger to learn, drown in the sea of everything that’s out there. The source material was recorded in mono and stereo, and at Abbey Road studios the recordings were taken apart into individual channels with new software, rebuilt from scratch, cleaned of noise, and given a fresh, balanced mix.

The members of The Rolling Stones were sometimes invited to the BBC at the last minute or in the middle of packed schedules, which was a big ask for a rising young crew. So some versions of the songs are quite different from the studio ones, recorded in a single take, since the rule of thumb was that a recording was meant for one, two at most, plays on the radio. That’s why some tracks are noticeably livelier than their studio versions. Fans back then heard them maybe in passing or with one ear, and today, of course, missing a radio show is no problem for anyone interested. It’s all on the internet, since technology makes that easy for us. The Rolling Stones, like other bands of the time, naturally jumped at every chance to play for the huge audience on the other side of the airwaves. On Air will especially delight all the fans of the late Brian Jones, who truly shone on these recordings alongside Keith Richards. As you can hear, he especially enjoyed reworking classics like Come On and High Heel Sneakers. Mick Jagger proved himself a skilled interpreter of the blues tradition, and you can already see him as the young, unbridled heartbreaker. A few times he showed up as an inspired harmonica player, enriching the originals with a few extra lines, or getting a bit cheeky with his devoted amateur blowing into that beautiful instrument.

If there’s one small gripe, it’s that the songs aren’t in chronological order, which in my view would be the whole point of a collection like this. Over the course of the whole musical journey, many people struggle to connect with Mick Jagger and his way of singing, since plenty say he does a lot of mugging in his delivery. You won’t find that on On Air; back then, as a promising young man, he was still finding his voice, so his singing is pure as morning dew.

Line-up

Mick Jagger – vocals, harmonica

Keith Richards – guitar

Brian Jones – guitar

Bill Wyman – bass

Charlie Watts – drums

Production

Lewis Jones

Track list