• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (18)

November 7, 2019 by Terry Teachout

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.

18. The Rolling Stones, Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert (London)

It happens that I’ve never bought a copy of Rolling Stone. It wasn’t sold at any of the newsstands in or near Smalltown, U.S.A., when I was growing up. I did, however, profit from its exceptionally well-written record reviews, at least the ones that made it into The Rolling Stone Record Review, a mass-market paperback that came out in 1971. I bought The Rolling Stone Record Review not long after it was published and read it until the glue dried up and the pages fell out, something that had never before happened to me. Not at all surprisingly, it exerted a powerful and continuing influence on me for many years thereafter.

As I wrote in this space back in 2015:

Some of the reviews reprinted therein were so strikingly written that I can still quote them…It was my Bible of hipness, a vade mecum of all that was most serious about rock, and it was a long time before I dared to break away from its seemingly apodictic judgments and start trusting my own ears.

The first one that caused me to go right out and buy a record was Lester Bangs’ review of Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out, the Rolling Stones’ second live album, which came out in 1970 and which Bangs described in The Rolling Stone Record Review as “an unfettered delight….Where most live efforts seem almost embarrassing in their posturings and excesses, and even The Who Live at Leeds held tinges of the Art Statement, Ya-Ya’s at its best just rocks and socks you right out of your chair. You can not only love it for what it is, you can like it for what it isn’t.”

I needed that kind of push, because the Rolling Stones, huge though they were, had somehow managed to sneak past me. I didn’t see them on The Ed Sullivan Show, and I can’t remember hearing any of their early hit singles, not even “Honky Tonk Women,” played on the radio in Smalltown, U.S.A.. Nor had I heard a rock album with that kind of savage punch. Individual tracks, yes—the White Album contains some pulverizingly hard rockers, and the single version of “Revolution” is as hot as anything on Ya-Ya’s—but at that point I didn’t really think of rock in terms of “looseness, energy and general right-on shagginess,” as Lester Bangs put it.

Ya-Ya’s, “Midnight Rambler” in particular, changed my tune. It was right around the time that I bought that explosive album that my father generously bought me a Fender bass and a Bassman 10 amplifier. Whenever the house was empty, I plugged it in, cranked the volume up to eleven and played along with the Stones. On one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, I played so loud that the bathroom cabinet popped open and its contents fell into the sink.

I now prefer other kinds of rock, including the Stones’ studio albums from the same period and (sorry, Lester) Live at Leeds. But I still think that Ya-Ya’s is a pretty damn wonderful record, raunchy and fierce to a fault, and I will always be indebted to Lester Bangs and The Rolling Stone Record Review for inspiring me to buy it.

(To be continued)

*  *  *

From Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out, the Rolling Stones play “Midnight Rambler” at Madison Square Garden in 1969. The band consists of Mick Jagger on lead vocals and harmonica, Keith Richards and Mick Taylor on guitar, Bill Wyman on bass, and Charlie Watts on drums:

A filmed performance of the same song, played live at London’s Marquee Club two years later:

*  *  *

To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

To read about album #7, go here.

To read about album #8, go here.

To read about album #9, go here.

To read about album #10, go here.

To read about album #11, go here.

To read about album #12, go here.

To read about album #13, go here.

To read about album #14, go here.

To read about album #15, go here.

To read about album #16, go here.

To read about album #17, go here.

Filed Under: main

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

November 2019
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
252627282930  
« Oct   Dec »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Terry Teachout, 65
  • Gripping musical melodrama
  • Replay: Somerset Maugham in 1965
  • Almanac: Somerset Maugham on sentimentality
  • Snapshot: Richard Strauss conducts Till Eulenspiegel

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in