Let It Bleed

Released on November 28, 1969, Let It Bleed is the eighth British and tenth American studio album by The Rolling Stones, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest rock albums ever made. Recorded primarily at Olympic Sound Studios in London with producer Jimmy Miller and engineer Glyn Johns, it arrived at one of the most turbulent moments in modern history.^[1]

The album was shaped by chaos within and beyond the band. Founding member Brian Jones, whose addiction and erratic behavior had made him impossible to work with, appears on only two tracks. He was fired from the band in June 1969 and died in his swimming pool on July 3rd of that year. Mick Taylor had only just joined as his replacement.^[1]

The world outside was equally unstable. The Vietnam War ground on, anti-war protests roiled American campuses, and the Manson Family murders in August 1969 shattered the last illusions of the Summer of Love. Mick Jagger has described the album's tone: it is apocalypse; the whole record is like that.^[1]

The record opens with Gimme Shelter and closes with You Can't Always Get What You Want, framing the entire arc of the 1960s between a cry of existential terror and a resigned, choir-backed elegy. In between are some of the band's most celebrated performances: the menacing Midnight Rambler, the blues sorrow of Love in Vain, and the raw title track. The album reached No. 1 in the UK and No. 3 in the US. Just days after its UK release, the Altamont Free Concert made its apocalyptic opener feel prophetic.^[1]

The album's roots actually stretch back to the previous record: three of its songs, Midnight Rambler, You Can't Always Get What You Want, and You Got the Silver, were first tracked during the spring 1968 sessions for Beggars Banquet. The remaining six were recorded between February and October 1969 with the help of an unusually deep bench of guest musicians, including slide guitarist Ry Cooder, pianist and arranger Leon Russell, and fiddle player Byron Berline, who is said to have recorded his overdubs standing on a Los Angeles street, leaning against a parked limousine and using its horn as his cue to start playing.^[2]

Reaction at the time was more divided than history now remembers. Rolling Stone magazine mocked the cover art as the worst the band had produced since their Flowers compilation, even as critic Greil Marcus called the record one the Stones would never surpass. That split verdict has long since resolved in the album's favor, and Let It Bleed is now routinely ranked among the greatest rock records ever made.^[2]