Plays of Our Lives: The Rolling Stones - "Emotional Rescue" (1980)

David Cantwell on his favorite Rolling Stones album

Every so often, we’ll talk about an album that has played a particularly important role at some point in our lives. For Rolling Stones Week, David talks about why he values Emotional Rescue.

Emotional Rescue is my favorite Rolling Stones album. Not coincidentally, it was my first Stones album.

That’s not technically true. I’d picked up a copy of Some Girls on cassette a year or so earlier—at Camelot Records, a 45-minute drive from where we lived on a literal rural route between Harrisonville and Peculiar, MO. Back home, though, that brand-new copy of Some Girls was how I discovered my already iffy cassette player had broken for good. I never even got it to play as far as Charlie Watts’ kickdrum kickoff to “Miss You.”

“Miss You” is why I’d bought it. I’d heard the single on the radio, constantly it seemed. The lyrics were fun to sing along with, albeit more for the rhythm than their sense. I liked the record’s breakdown two thirds of the way through and could already join in with Mick’s “I’ve been walkin’ Central Park…” spiel before I bought my never-played cassette. (His “Puerto Rican girls” only reminded me of watching West Side Story, one of my mom’s favorites, on TV.). Most of all, I loved “Miss You” because of the beat. To describe it in terms out of my reach at the time, I was drawn to Charlie Watts’ steady snare-drum thwack and to Bill Wyman’s bubbling bass. To put it another way, which I most definitely did understand back then, I loved it because it was disco.

My small group of high school music friends and I had been arguing about “Miss You” for a while over just that point. They hated it because it was disco. I loved it and said so but was adamant that it couldn’t possibly be disco. It was the Stones!

I was confused.

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Emotional Rescue came out in 1980, about a month after I graduated from high school. (I bought it at the Walmart there in town—on vinyl!) By then, I’d been hearing the Stones for years, of course. Radio station KY-102, our FM AOR behemoth out of Kansas City to the north, had schooled us well on early Stones’ singles like “Satisfaction,” “Get Off My Cloud,” and the rest. Later, when I finally spent time with Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers in college, I realized KY had been exposing us, as well, to the entireties of those albums, one classic album track at a time. I liked all that music. I liked the Stones. What straight white boy, in my place and time, disliked the Rolling Stones?

Still, I’d never connected to their music as mine in some vague way. They were important artists, I understood—the record reviews I’d begun reading now and then, as well as KY’s DJs and even some of my teachers, said so all the time. But I experienced them as entertainers, not artists. As with authenticity v. artificiality, I now reject that binary. But acts can lean into one or the other as part of a persona that puts off or appeals, and in my youthful encounters, the Stones didn’t draw me in as deeply as a striving working-class rocker like Bruce Springsteen did, or like another of my KY favorites, Bob Seger. The Stones didn’t come off to me as particularly clever or smart in any way that appealed to my budding adolescent sense that smart was something I wanted to be, a la Elvis Costello, a new kind of act that KY also played. The Stones didn’t strike me as fun fabulists, either, like Styx or Queen, and they didn’t even seem particularly rebellious to me, as the Clash most definitely did. (No way KY played them, not yet, but I’d had the good sense to swipe Give ‘em Enough Rope from the Harrisonville radio station where I worked senior year.).

I didn’t get Jagger at all. I remember laughing hysterically once when my best friend Paul observed, as we listened to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” play on the radio in his Pinto station wagon, “Mick Jagger has never been unsatisfied in his life!”

But this new disco version of the Stones on “Miss You”? I liked that a lot.   

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For our senior skip day at Harrisonville High, a bunch of us packed into several pickups and sedans and drove an hour or so up the highway to the offices of KY-102. This was a year after the Disco Demolition Night in Chicago and, like many AOR stations of that era, 102 was committed to “disco sucks.” Indeed, that’s why we’d driven all the way to the station’s parking lot that morning: To be sworn into KY-102’s anti-disco “Rock ‘n Roll Army.”

Again, I liked disco. I’d bought the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack with my own money and, until I’d switched to AOR from Top 40 a couple of years earlier, my favorite-ever act had been the proto-disco O’Jays. One earlier cassette that I‘d bought, and managed to play successfully, was the Village People’s Macho Man, for God’s sake. In my place and time, though, boys were not so supposed to like disco. I understand now that the hatred of disco was bound up with maintaining rigid gender roles, with a fear of homosexuality and that the animosity even connected to a kind of class betrayal, considering the music’s black working-class origins. But I had to learn all that. What I comprehended immediately, in that moment, was simply that it wasn’t cool. Disco sucked. So would I if I liked it. Because I didn’t want to miss the party, I went along for the ride.

I still have my membership card:

I am not proud of any of this.

It feels as if I spent most of that last summer before college up in my bedroom, listening to KY or listening to albums, or in one or another of my friends’ cars doing the same things, driving around aimlessly till all hours of the night, just waiting. We’d drink High Life ponies and crank Damn the Torpedoes and Darkness on the Edge of Town, Pretenders or Boston or Fear of Music, Back in Black (out that July—one friend blew out his speakers to it!) or You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can’t Tuna Fish… We could have danced to all of this music, but that was not how we used it and not how we ever saw anyone else using it back then either.

At home, I played Emotional Rescue on repeat—a secret I kept from my friends. A silly secret, I know. Sometimes I’d study the set’s thermographic photo album cover (and similarly styled portraits on the included-with-purchase poster), but mostly I’d study on the music, headphones up loud. And dance.

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Emotional Rescue remains the Stones’ record I turn to most often. It’s a dance album, most of all, and while I have come to treasure so much of the Stones’ catalog through the decades (Beggars’ Banquet, not a dance record at all, is another fave), ER helped me figure out I enjoy the Stones most when they’re in dance-band mode. The album’s lead cut, after all, is called “Dance (Pt. 1).” It shares its similar snare-drum disco thwack and bubbling bass with “Miss You,” but leans into its title imperative by more-or-less eliminating any Mick-driven narrative.

The rest of the album might as well be called “Dance (Pt’s 2-10).” Even “All about You,” the aching Keith Richards ballad that closes the album (about the end of his long relationship, I learned much later, with Anita Pallenberg) sways and swoons to a groove that invites slow dancing—in a way, notice, that so many Stones ballads seem almost determined to resist.

The racing, randy “Summer Romance” finds Mick going on about some schoolgirl he’s trying to break it off with (let’s just assume she’s in college, not high school, okay?), but I ceased paying attention to the story years ago. Now the cut’s just a vehicle for the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Dance Band, Charlie Watts in particular, especially those little sprung-rhythm stutter steps he drops into each line.  When people say Watts is rock’s best drummer, I think immediately of “Let Me Go” and especially “She’s So Cold,” which are like monuments to his simple, driven, swinging timekeeping. “He’s So Cool” is more like it. (Mick, meanwhile, sings he’s “so hot for her but she’s so cold,” while I’d say he’s so hot for her because she’s so cold is more like it.) On “Down in the Hole,” a slow standard blues, Watts waits so long to come in you think maybe he's leafing through an old issue of GQ and playing at the same time.

The horny reggae of “Send It to Me” (Where Mick parodies his offensive “Some Girls” by rhyming a bunch of eastern European women?), and the Tex-Mex horns on the politically muddled “Indian Girl” (for the love of God, Mick, stop hounding this poor orphan!), and the new wave bounce of “Where the Boys Go”… I love the sounds and danceable beats all through. “Emotional Rescue” itself may be my favorite track of all. Mick sings the title track in a falsetto so preposterous that even he figures it’d be a good idea to drop it unannounced two-thirds through. But the beat—Watts on that sustained high-hat note and Wyman’s bass line always put me in mind, for a quick second, of “Philadelphia Freedom”—is irresistible. As the late critic Robert Palmer noted, it has “a cocky, utterly original rhythmic lilt that’s part reggae, part funk, part straight-ahead rock & roll. Charlie Watts calls the rhythm ‘half-reggae’…” It’s “only” disco, but I like it.

****

When Emotional Rescue was released, I was too self-conscious and emotionally stunted to enjoy dance-focused music, whatever it was called, but I see now how important it was for me. Up in my room, it helped keep that part of me alive when I was too immature to embrace it. Aesthetically, it prepped me for all the dance musics I’d be diving into dead ahead as an undergrad—which, for me at least, turned out to be a very different place and time, actual dance clubs included. Prince and Michael Jackson and Madonna, most obviously, and along with most everyone else, but also the English Beat and ABC, X and XTC, the S.O.S. Band and Steel Pulse, plus Afrika Bambaataa and an entire hip hop world, just to scratch the surface and with everything from New Jack, western swing and line dancing still on the way.

That larger world started for me, I see more clearly now than ever, with the help of the Rolling Stones. I admit that where the Stones have been concerned, I haven’t always wanted what I got. But after four decades of listening, I know for sure that Emotional Rescue gave me exactly what I needed.

…

Previously on Rolling Stones Week:

-”Turn Yer Ya-Yas Up” - Cantwell and Hughes on some favorite Stones covers

-Charles Hughes on 25 great Stones deep cuts

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