Welcome to THE MUSIC OF The Rolling Stones, 1962-1974, Week 3 of the course which I've entitled, The Music Matures. And we're going to spend time talking about the year 1966 in the group's career in music. And then we're going to go a little bit into the first couple of months of 1967 this week. As you recall from our discussion last week, the Rolling Stones had a kind of a breakthrough here in the United States in 1965 with that succession of three singles The Last Time, I Can't Get No Satisfaction, and then Hey You, Get Off Of My Cloud. Those three singles really sort of put them over the top, made them a top act in the US. Of course they'd already been having tremendous success going back to 1964 in the UK. So by the end of 1965, the group is in fantastic shape. In the fall of that year they'd released Out of Our Heads and then December's Children in December. And so, as we pick up the story, the Rolling Stones in 1966 are really a top international pop act. What I want to emphasize this week is how at this time, their music really begins to mature and become increasingly ambitious, musically. As fact, we're going to talk almost entirely about nothing but original music by the group. So, the cover versions are pretty much gone. Both big albums and the singles that we'll talk about, Aftermath and Between the Buttons, feature no cover songs at all. All of the songs are by Jagger and Richards. So, that's kind of a new arrival, and that's what I mean by maturing. Now, not so much depending on other people's music to kind of fill out the album track. But having lots of music that Mick and Keith feel good about having the Stones record. And so I think that we'll also see that the instrumentation continues to explore new sounds and combinations, techniques in the recording studio. A lot of this really is the influence of Brian Jones, who it seems, during this period of the group's recording career, seems to be playing a different instrument on every track. And it seems like there's no instrument that he can't play. And so he plays a really big role, sometimes not acknowledged as much as the sort of leadership roles of Mick Jagger and Keith Richardson in this time. But a very important figure as the music continues to sort of explore new grounds. And try to become increasingly authentic in the sense that we usually mean in rock music as breaking new ground, trying new things, not doing the same thing over and over again. Another thing we'll see this year in 1966 is the album comes to be seen as a kind of a coherent whole. Up to this point, all these, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, all the pop groups were really sort of thinking about producing singles. And then albums were an extra kind of thing you did if people liked your singles so much they'd be willing to buy an album. But no one was really banking on album sales. The transition to album oriented rock really doesn't happen until the second half of the 60s. And in fact, what's happening now in 1966 is kind of part of that. When you start to see albums from the Beatles like Revolver and the Beach Boys like Pet Sounds. And then, of course like Sgt Pepper, everything that follows after that. Then it starts to be the album that's the important thing and the singles that are most, in some ways, sort of an after thought for rock, for rock and roll musicians, anyways. The pop market tends to be dominated by singles. Well, we're starting to see that happening in The Rolling Stones's music as well. Bassist Bill Wyman says, for example, that the album Between the Buttons, is the first album where they really thought about the balance of songs on the album to create a kid of a coherent whole. As opposed to just recording up a bunch of stuff, putting it on the record and trying to sequence it in a pleasing kind of order. So the rise of the album as a coherent whole for The Rolling Stones. We'll also see that so much of the recording that has been going on in the RCA Studios in Hollywood starts to move by the end of the year, by the fall of 1966 to Olympic Studios. And that means that engineer Glyn Johns re-enters the picture. Now you may remember me mentioning Glyn Johns who was actually sort of the first recording engineer the Rolling Stones had. Back in the early days, they kind of had to get out of a contract with him. So Andrew Lou Goldham and Eric Easing could sign them, or make a deal with Decca for Rolling Stones recordings. So, Glyn Johns returns to the picture, we're going to see a lot of him and his recordings for the next few albums. We end our story this week with the early 1967 the release of Between the Buttons and the drug bust that happens at Keith Richard's house involving Keith, Marianne Faithfull and Mick Jagger. This ends up in a court case that's very much apart of 1967 and what goes on with the group there. And so, well save the whole court case and how that affects their music after Between the Buttons for next week's discussion of Their Satanic Majesties and what follows. But for now, we really want to say that coming up to that point, when that drug bust occurs there's a kind of a crisis in the group. And, in many ways, they kind of don't know what the way forward is. By that time, Andrew Luke Oldham is kind of separating from the group. And so there's a real kind of change going on in Rolling Stones. So we'll end this week at that particular point and pick the story up again next week, when we get there. So the two big albums this week are going to be Aftermath and Between the Buttons. So before we get on to talking about Aftermath and some of the music that's associated with that period, let's, in the next video, do a little sort of review of 1966, a kind of overview to get a sense of the overall events, the releases, the touring, the recording that went on for The Rolling Stones in 1966.
