What jumps out immediately is how hard it is. How in your face. How they've taken a tune and added their unmistakeable style and panache. The opener She Said Yeah is a full on call to arms, blasting out of the speakers and into the senses. The guitars are hard and the tempo is fast and Jagger sounds like a young punk starting out on his road to rock and roll domination, setting the template for generations to come. For all those rock and roll troubadours destined to bash guitars, basses and drums in garages and bedrooms across the planet.
The tunes that follow are of the same quality. Mercy Mercy has a tougher feel than other versions I've heard and the melody is so infectious you'll wake up with it buzzing around your head. The same goes for Hitch Hike, Sam Cooke's Good Times (a Mad Men outro if ever I heard one), Oh Baby (We Got A Good Thing Going) and the rest. Then there's the Nanker Phelge (the pseudonym they used in the mid sixties for a band composition) tune The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man, a dig at the attempt to chaperone the Stones on an early tour of the States, and three Jagger/Richards tunes Gotta Get Away, Heart Of Stone and the finale, a prime example of an early Glimmer Twins classic.
I'm Free promotes the sentiment that defined the decade and, for free spirits everywhere, those that came afterwards as well. It was covered admirably by The Soup Dragons in the early nineties. But the original's still the greatest in my view.
A great set of tunes. Indicates where they came from, capturing them perfectly as they were in this early developmental stage of their career. Strongly recommended if you want to dig into the archives. Put the needle on the record and listen to the sound of 65.