Rolling Stones, The Sucking In The Seventies Label: Virgin Records Number of Discs: 1

Content:

Disc 1 (Playtime: 42:20 )

1. Shattered ( 3:45 )
2. Everything Is Turning To Gold (previously unreleased) ( 4:06 )
3. Hot Stuff (edited) ( 3:30 )
4. Time Waits For No One ( 4:25 )
5. Fool To Cry (edited) ( 4:06 )
6. Mannish Boy (edited) ( 4:37 )
7. When The Whip Comes Down (previously unreleased live version) ( 4:24 )
8. If I Was A Dancer (Dance Pt. 2) (for promotion only) ( 5:50 )
9. Crazy Mama (edited) ( 4:06 )
10. Beast Of Burden (edited) ( 3:31 )

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Notes:

Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine There's a certain smarmy charm in the Rolling Stones titling a compilation of their work from the second half of the '70s Sucking in the 70s - it seems a tacit admission that neither the decade or the music they made in the '70s was all that good, something that many critics and fans dismayed by the group's infatuation with glitzy disco and tabloid grime would no doubt argue. It is indeed true that the Stones, led by the ever-fashionable Mick Jagger, descended into a world sleaze, one seemingly far removed from the dangerous blues-rockers of the '60s, who were concerned enough about their blues credibility that they brought Howlin' Wolf on to a teen-oriented British TV program. That incarnation of the Rolling Stones was a distant memory at the end of the '70s, when the group was freely dabbling with disco, reggae, never-ending elastic grooves and pumping up their sound with punchy horns and slick backing vocalists. Sometimes this resulted in great music, as in the terrific 1978 masterwork Some Girls, which took on disco, punk and new wave in equal measure, while retaining the signature Stones feel. Sometimes, the group would stumble, as they did on the uneven but intermittently entertaining 1976 LP Black and Blue (heavy on reggae and jams) and 1980's Emotional Rescue (heavy on disco and dance). Those three albums are more or less covered on Sucking in the 70s, an unwieldy collection of hits, outtakes, live cuts and album tracks that plays fast and loose with the timeline (it reaches back to 1974 for "Time Waits for No One," a year that was covered on their previous comp, Made in the Shade), while not including anything but outtakes from Emotional Rescue, and managing to overlook their biggest hit of the second half of the '70s - 1978's "Miss You," the biggest and best disco track they ever did. This doesn't come close to compiling all their best songs from the second half of the '70s - for instance, the monumental "Hand of Fate," easily the greatest song on Black and Blue, isn't here - but the amazing thing is that Sucking in the 70s captures the garish decadence and ennui of the band better than the proper albums from this period. Not that this is a better record than Some Girls, which had the same sense of trash but also a true sense of hunger and menace underpinning the restless music, but it is better than either Black and Blue or Emotional Rescue, since it gleefully emphasizes their tawdry disco moves while illustrating that the band could either be deliciously tacky in concert (the version of "Mannish Boy," pulsating on a gaudy clavinet, shows how bloated the Stones were in the mid-'70s, but the passage of time has made that rather ingratiating) or as muscular and mean as they were at their peak (a previously unreleased version of "When the Whip Comes Down," which tears by at a vicious pace). On the surface, the studio outtakes of "Everything Is Turning to Gold" and "If I Was a Dancer" (which is merely the