Probably the laziest album ever made demands probably, in the fullness of time, the laziest of reviews. That's a challenge. Clearly the drugs do work, they mean you get everybody else to do the work. The only Stones who seem to exist on Black and Blue are those not in the band, Carl Perkins, Ron Wood, and Billy Preston, and they are all hopeful of graduation to another line or two. Such bare arsed coke snorting delusion is sometimes refreshing to hear. It starts with unredeamingly awful disco (Hot Stuff), bad, unlistenable reggae (Cherry Oh Baby) and moves to Memory Motel, which is good C&W, if you can cope with Keef's worst vocal line of all time 'She gotta mind of her own.....and she wears it well....urrrgh...she's a one of a kind....bla bla mighty fine rubbish'. Fucking dreadful Keef (and I don't say that often) lets thank your son Marlon for driving you all the way to the studio with his head barely peering above the steering wheel across international borders for that. It doesn't get any better; Ronnie does 'Hey Nagrita' which has limited balls, Billy Preston does Melody that left them in the bathroom. If you are not coked out of your mind by this stage you will simply find it amusing, otherwise you will think it's ground breaking the Stones can be so experimental and see the potential for Some Girls. Flash will be sincere with Fool to Cry, and then they will all rock together with Crazy Mama which is at best unmentionable shit.
Of course I have left out 'Hand of Fate' the great harbinger of things to come, the big cloud on the horizon, and a girl called Emma, I think she was a girl called Emma, we were on a camping holiday in Benodet, she lent against the jukebox of the clubhouse, it played 'Hand of Fate'. She was something else. I said I'd walk to Scotland to see her. I've loved that song ever since, and that's also why I think David Lee Roth's lyrics to 'Jump' are so marvelous, it's just she was up against the record machine, not me.
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