The Rolling Stones
December's Children

THE REVIEW

"The Stones would never have the audacity to release such a horror in Great Britain".

With this ironic comment, Keith Richard welcomes the release of "December's Children", in the last months of 1965. Yet the guitarist's laconic comment still seems exaggerated today. Released only for the US market on the heels of the enormous success of "Out Of Our Heads", at first glance, "December's Children" may appear as a disjointed and contradictory compilation made up of tracks that could seem like a collection of unreleased songs from the aforementioned album. Fortunately, the reality is quite different.

From the wonderful cover photo, which uses the same image as the British edition of "Out Of Our Heads" and features the Rolling Stones in the depths of some seedy street in the States, the album exudes aromas made of chiaroscuro that do not conceal the personalities and musical and cultural intentions of the group. The Stones, on the covers of their early albums, have always placed great importance on iconography, always relying on dark and somber colors. It is also for this reason that "December's Children" proves to be a complete, fascinating, and extremely attractive work.

The Stones know well that rock'n'roll was born and belongs to the street. Its spirit lives there and pulses right from the initial "She Said Yeah", a proto-punk incendiary bomb capable of capturing the total pandemonium of a Stones concert of the era, thanks to a totally unleashed Keith Richard. It is swiftly followed by the very famous "Get Off Of My Cloud", a gracefully vulgar extension of the youthful disorientation already expressed in "Satisfaction" and the live versions of "I'm Moving On", a rather ordinary slide guitar exercise with a touch of harmonica and the explosion of "Route 66" in which the group hits the throttle, making Keith Richard explode into a surprising solo.

The most sexist side of the band comes to the fore through Mick Jagger with the cover of Chuck Berry's "Talkin' About You" to which the Stones change the rhythmic structure, emphasizing the lyrics and making it sensual and explicit. The more accessible side of the group, however, emerges in the pleading simplicity of Arthur Alexander's "You Better Move On", in the moving, sweet, famous "As Tears Go By", originally written for Marianne Faithfull, and in the almost Beatles-like beat ballads "The Singer Not The Song", "Gotta Get Away", and "Blue Turns To Grey".

Of course, the blues roots are evident in the delightful "Look What You Done" and the social cry of the beautiful "I'm Free". "December's Children" is this and much more. The album, in fact, has the great merit of giving the listener a perfect image of the Stones' musical world, made not only of a series of brilliant reinterpretations, riffs, and blues rhythms but also of a new way of perceiving reality by a generation that, at the time, was already struggling to find satisfaction.

Unfortunately, they don't release records like this anymore.