The Rolling Stones
Metamorphosis

THE REVIEW

There are things that make you feel old. Not because they remind you of the passage of time, bygone eras, or things like that. They make you feel old because they are things for grouchy and boring old men. And old people often are like this: I notice it as time goes by, and the elderly themselves notice it. I know well that when I retire (around 2052), I'll be grumpy and complain a lot. A bit like my old uncle, but without a photo of the Duce on the bedside table.

You become an old grouch when you start responding to young people like this:

Q: "Hey grandpa, I've never heard of this Rolling Stones album, is it one of the worst?"

A: "What do you mean worst: it's an album of outtakes and demos. And there are bands out there that would pay gold to create such a worthy album of outtakes! Gold!"

I challenge anyone who is not Vittorio Sgarbi to claim that this is not a grumpy response. The point is that often the old people are right, even if they're too grumpy to convince you. And the more time passes, the more you realize you're starting to think like them. Like me, who at twenty-six began to think like my uncle on many things. The point is that he started having these old-man thoughts at fifty-six, before I was born. Let's clarify: I think like him on many things, but not all: he uses a photo of Balbo & De Bono & De Vecchi & Bianchi as a bookmark, I use one of Jagger & Richards & Jones & Watts & Wyman.

Metamorphosis is an album by the Rolling Stones released in 1975. Here there are two considerations to make.

A: The Rolling Stones were already starting to be considered old grouches.

B: Less time passed from the Duce's death to this album than from this album to today.

An LP released between two albums, It's Only Rock 'n Roll and Black and Blue, which convinced many but thrilled few. A compilation containing songs discarded from other albums and alternative versions of well-known songs. So there's great room for the three categories of complainers par excellence:

The old man: "Ah, the devil's music!"

The Serious Journalist: "Probable lack of ideas materializing in a banal commercial move that could represent the omens of..."

The jerk who comments on everything on the internet did not respond because, thank God, he didn't exist yet in 1975.

A person not inclined to complain by default would instead give more space to another reasoning: let's take things for what they are. Which is clearly one of those simple pub philosophy maxims valid for all occasions. But if the pub were a place of error and disturbance, I wouldn't spend my afternoons there squandering my wealth on red wine and gin tonic among the elderly. And by taking things for what they are, we realize that Metamorphosis is such a nice, lovely album. Nice enough not to be out of place among the best second/third-tier Stones albums, so grandpa was really right when he said many bands would give a kidney to create an album of unreleased tracks this good. And never mind if, as is inevitable, the versions contained here of already known songs are often a bit tacky, with their additions of choirs, strings, and female voices. But everyone sometimes needs to hum beach-boyishly I’d Much Rather Be with the Boys, to listen to an Out of Time with the same base as Chris Farlowe's original, to hear a Heart of Stone with Jimmy Page on guitar (so they say, and I trust them), or to recover discarded tracks from LP masterpieces I won't even name.

It's things like this that convince me that even when I'm eighty, white and wrinkled like Keith Richards, I'll still love the Rolling Stones. And I will continue not to want photos of fascist quadriumvirates in my house. Even if I'll reach Keith Richards' age with twice the ailments and one-fifth of the drugs. But you can't have everything in life, yet there are albums of outtakes like Metamorphosis and I'm not complaining.