Jumpin' Jack Flash
No Expectations
'You Got The Silver' is the first song to be entirely carried by a Keith Richards vocal. It's a tender love ballad, no doubt inspired by Keith's new love affair with Anita Pallenberg, Brian's ex-girlfriend. As ever, his raw vocals lack the richness and power typical of a Jagger performance, but there's something poignant and real about his delivery.
The track also marks one of the final appearances of Brian Jones, who plays autoharp here. He had by now burnt up his creative energies in an orgy of drug use, boozing and fear. So the person who arrived at Olympic Studios occasionally in rock star finery was but a glamorous, empty husk of what was once brian Jones. As far as the rest of the Stones were concerned, he needn't have bothered coming at all.
"There were sessions where it was getting very, very ropey with Brian," says Chkiantz. So bad, in fact, that even when Brian gathered enough energy and interest to show up for a session, he often wasn't even plugged in by the band. "After that things went slowly downhill. By Let It Bleed they were trying to keep him out of sessions," Chkiantz adds. "And when he came it was just dreadful. The trouble is that you never knew if he was going to come up with a good one or not. It's true that at times nobody bothered to plug him in. But I don't think it was a consistent policy. It must have been pretty desperate for all of them."
RUBY TUESDAY
"That's a wonderful song," Jagger told Jann Wenner in 1995. "It's just a nice melody, really. And a lovely lyric. Neither of which I wrote, but i always enjoy singing it." Brian Jones blows a charming flute melody, blending into a rich, pur pop sound of a coustic guitar, piano and acoustic bass. Jagger sings with charming softness of a mysterious girl who warns him to "Catch your dreams before they slip away!"
The song began as an instrumental collaboration between Richards and Jones, making 'Ruby Tuesday' one song that apparently deserved a co-writing credit for Brian Jones - a first. "He was a gas," Richards said of Jones. "He was a cat who could play any instrument." Yet when the single was released in January 1967, it was credited to Jagger/Richards.
PAINT IT, BLACK
Behold a new vision for a new age, and for the rock and roll band best suited to document its bleaker moments. Mick Jagger sings here of turning the world BLACK to soothe his own shattered soul in the aftermath of some unspeakable loss. The words are Jagger's, the music Richards', but the success of 'Paint It, Black' owes much to the presence of Brian Jones, who adds a Turkish vibe to the proceedings via excited sitar passages. Jones hadn't mastered the unwieldy instrument overnight, but he had figured out how to make sounds that connected with the dark rhythms the Stones were now exploring. In television performances of the song, Jones was a focal point, sitting cross-legged and balancing the sitar on his lap. The blond bluesboy who had worshipped Elmore James and Muddy Waters (virtually to the exclusion of anything else) was now transformed into a pop adventurer. It was a role well-suited to Jones, who flourished as a member of the Stones in the mid-sixties, even as band control had gone to the Glimmer Twins. His mastery of an ever-widening range of instruments, from marimbas to the Mellotron, would have secured him an important role with the band into the future, if drugs and paranoia hadn't done him in.