Rolling Stones Mine Hackney Diamonds

Is That A Good Thing? It's Okay

There are traditions when the Rolling Stones that must be honored, even as the band is in its 61st year.

There is the glamorous announcement event. This year's featured the core of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, singer and guitarist, and guitarist Ron Wood, formerly of the Faces and formally a Rolling Stone since 1976.

In the old days, they might have donned pith helmets and safari gear, riding elephants through the jewelry department of Harrods, the upper crust London department store.

This year's fanfare was more restrained: A red carpet outside the Hackney Empire theater in London, where inside Jagger, Richards, and Wood sat for an interview for Jimmy Fallon and played the video for the first single, "Angry," according to a Setember 6, 2023 report by Katie Spencer of Sky News, who referred to the titled lead singer as "Sir Mick."

"Hackney Diamonds" is London slang for broken glass, Hackney being a rough East London area, once belonging to Cockney-accented crooks. Hackney diamonds are the shards left behind in the act of burglary, smashing a car or shop window. The title made me hope that the regaled, very arch, Rolling Stones wit remains intact as the band continues in its 61st year. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Meanwhile, back in the states. . . the night before Friday's release of Hackney Diamonds, the Stones performed the requisite private gig for about 600 celebrities and scenesters and music execs at a New York club, most of whom were not yet born when the Stones' formed: Jagger and Richards and the late Brian Jones (died 1969); the recently departed (2021) master drummer Charlie Watts; and the bassist Bill Wyman, now 86, who yet lives but left the band in 1993.

Hackney Diamonds is the first album of new Rolling Stones material since A Bigger Bang in 2005. Blue and Lonesome, an album of blues covers featuring a little much Little Walter for my taste, came out in 2016, perhaps a few decades later than it might have required to raise it to "event" status.

One lagniappe on the new album is the closing song, Muddy Waters' "Rolling Stone Blues," from which the band took its name, and perhaps signifies the end of the band's studio era.

The producer Andrew Watt, known in the business as watt (lower case), does an excellent job keeping the sound focused, with a pleasant spaciousness--a sea change, really, from the Stones' early emphasis on density--which also made me realize the importance of mixing engineer Serban Ghenea in creating a comfortable environment for these new songs to inhibit.

Watt, another success story from Long Island's Great Neck North High School, already has a producer of the year (non-classical) Grammy Award bestowed in 2021. In the last few years, his credits include Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, Dua Lipa, Ed Sheeran, Ozzy Osbourne, Elton John, and Post Malone.

He not only produces Hackney Diamonds, he co-writes a number of songs with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. This suggests something about the uniformity of the recorded music industry today. The Rolling Stones are no longer outliers, the sulking but brilliant outsiders they portrayed through their first dozen years during which their passports to greatness were stamped. If anything, the Rolling Stones are now show business eminences. They remain, with supplemental musicians such as drummer Steve Jordan, such a reliable touring attraction that they had become the World's Greatest Rolling Stones Tribute Band.

Jagger and Richards know their songs since Some Girls in 1978 have not been uniformly worthy of their youthful canon, reason alone not to have released an album of new songs for 18 years. It is good that Jagger and Richards, who at the turn of the millennium I thought of as one of the greatest songwriting teams of the 20th century, asked young Andrew Watt for help: I mean, this couple has been married so long and near divorce so often they could fill dozens of seasons of a reality TV show. Producers need to be prepared to come to the emotional rescue of fickle stars.

The Jagger / Richards team has struggled to reach or match past glories for many decades. This issue has not been resolved, and mostly it's a matter of persona. Jagger, as the voice of the band, is now 80 years old. He has lived the life of an aristocrat for at least the last 50.

The album opens with the song "Angry," which begets the question, "what is there to be angry about?" unless the song is about war, disease, famine income inequality, environmental disaster...something topical. The words are driven by the riff: a new Rolling Stones album, under the Magna Carta, must begin with a knock your rocks off riff: "Angry" seems a distant cousin to "Start Me Up," shared DNA, but secondary. There are new mechanisms for measuring the value of a song, or rather, very old ones: money. Bill Gates is said to have personally asked Mick Jagger how much it would cost to use "Start Me Up" as a theme for Microsoft's launch of Windows 95. Jagger said $3 million. Gates took out his wallet, perhaps figuring he got off cheap.

The video suggests the girl might be angry that none of the Stones took her to the Hollywood High School prom. It's a little vanilla.

There's another shaking Stones rocker here: "Live by the Sword." As soon as I heard the title, and Jagger sing the first line, I thought: please don't rhyme the way a lazy songwriter would rhyme the next line. The young hungry Jagger-Richards team, if they were on a roll, might have written: "If you live by the sword/ You better have the last word." Something to let you know they were toying with clichés, so it would sound fresh to the ear.

But no. Of course the next line of "You Live by the Sword," is "you're gonna die by the sword." What follows is litany of rough, less knee-jerk accusatory lines: "If you're looking for love, don't go running to me" is the last line of the second verse before the chorus, "I'm gonna treat you right/I'm gonna treat you good." Makes no sense.

Yet this is the song that features Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman, the most minimal and basic Stones lineup, with the addition of Elton John taking the old Nicky Hopkins role on piano. So kudos for that.

There's a song called "Dreamy Skies." The Rolling Stones should never do a song called "Dreamy Skies." A Bon Jovi B-side, at best.

"Dreamy Skies" is about getting away from the pressure of the modern world, "the wind and the wilderness call." Can you see the wind and the wilderness calling Mick Jagger? Maybe in 1967, when the cops were hounding them, but now? "I'll be chopping up wood." Isn't that what personal trainers are for? What about getting away from "small town chatter and know it alls."? I'm not convinced he experiences any of that. How many houses does Jagger have, how secluded and inaccessible are they? Plenty of both. I know, this isn't autobiography, but Jagger is not a great actor, as both Performance and Ned Kelly proved. His greatest character is Mick Jagger. (That's why his Performance performance was pretty good, he was playing a version of himself.)

What's really good here? "Tell Me Straight" sounds like a Keith song from Talk is Cheap. "Bite My Head Off" is so old Rolling Stones that is transcends old Rolling Stones, and with Paul McCartney on bass, aggressive as any he's ever been spotlighted for, manages to make this a prototype Ramones song. Well played, my friends, well played.

I like the visit to a kind of memory motel in "Whole Wide World," the guitars brash as the singer recalls "the flat in Fulham, the smell of sex and gas."

The long gospel tour de force, "Sweet Sounds of Heaven," is fine. Stevie Wonder plays various pianos. The generational desperation conveyed by the great Merry Clayton in "Gimme Shelter" is supplanted by Lady Gaga's alternating lines with Jagger, showing the enormity of her range, rattling the cage, ending with the message, "Let the old still believe they are young." Amen to that.