Album Review: Goats Head Soup [Deluxe Edition] by The Rolling Stones

In the period spanning 1968's Beggars Banquet to 1972's Exile on Main Street, the Rolling Stones' title of "World's Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band" was less a boastful marketing slogan and more of a plainly self-evident job description. If the Stones started out as rambunctious kids with a press-hyped bad-boy image, by the turn of the '70s, the band had acquired a truly sinister aura, the kind of malevolence that had amassed rap sheets, body counts, and iconoclastic admirers eager to feed off their black magic. Not only had the Stones outlasted their rivals in The Beatles, they had become a band that could seemingly do no wrong, even when they were doing things that were very wrong.

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At the tail end of 1972, The Rolling Stones decamped to Jamaica to make the follow up to their monster Exile on Main St. album from the year before. Still tax exiles from Britain, they were partly avoiding coming home and partly looking for new inspiration. The resultant album, Goats Head Soup, has been retrospectively viewed as something of a clunker in the Stones catalog, not reaching near the artistic heights of the albums that preceded it (1971’s Sticky Fingers and the aforementioned Exile).

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Goats Head Soup may seem an unlikely candidate to receive a deluxe makeover. Only sporadically represented in the Stones' live shows, their 11th album has long been seen as curtailing the golden run that started with Beggars Banquet, created under duress after internal problems besieged the band; mainly heroin tightening its grip on Keith Richards, producer Jimmy Miller and engineer Andy Johns. As Miller carved swastikas in the mixing desk, Richards prowled a zone where the most important next hit was aimed at his arm rather than the charts.

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