Townswoman Citizen Mom, inspired by the taunting of Rock Town Hall's anti-Ron Wood stance, decided to defend the band's Tattoo You album. For fear of being excomunicated from the Halls of Rock, Citizen Mom originally published this piece in econoculture.com. After reassurances that any stance is worth taking on Rock Town Hall, she decided to come forward and share her views with us. For this, we thank you!

Journey with me, if you will, back to a time not so long ago – a time when The Rolling Stones were still a viable rock band, before they just started sending the fossilized remains out on tour every few years. Before Keith Richards had shit growing out of his hair, before Jerry Hall finally threw Mick out for good, before they had daughters tall and gorgeous enough to be the kind of women their fathers would date.

During that dusky time, between when the sun set on disco and rose on “Thriller” and hair metal, even a bunch of castoff tracks from previous Stones albums, slapped together with a few new numbers so the band could have something to promote on an upcoming world tour, could kick ass.

That time, my friends, was 1981, and the album was Tattoo You, also known as the Last Great Rolling Stones Record and the band’s last full-length release to hit #1 on the American charts. It’s pretty well buried under the mountain of undeserved rockist scorn, but there are some damn fine songs lurking between “Start Me Up” and “Waiting On a Friend,” the two wildly successful singles that bookend the album.

Still, the snitch keep snitchin’ and the bitches keep bitchin’, and when I pitched this piece to Econo, the response I got back from my editor went like this: “I dare you to defend that crap album. ‘Waiting on a Friend’ is great. But the rest -- ugh. Do we really need to hear ‘Start Me Up’ ever again?”

Yeah, we’ve all heard “Start Me Up” a million times, but should its Awesome '80s ubiquity doom the entire album? I blame this on that friggin’ bodysuit -- you know what I’m talking about:

Follow up:

Most of the songs were written and originally recorded for the sessions that became Goat’s Head Soup, Black and Blue, and Emotional Rescue, so all you who revile Tattoo You for being an “'80s album” are way off. In fact, the album is more a time capsule of the ‘70s: “Waiting on a Friend”, for example, was recorded to be part of Goat’s Head Soup, and features guitar work by Mick Taylor – so you Ron Wood haters can just settle down.

[Note to Viacom: This is what you get for attempting to remove the Stones' video for the one song on this album that even those too-cool-for-school regarding this album will agree is great.]

Let’s be honest: This is probably the last time Mick could pull off Rock God With Smokin’Bod, white sweatpants notwithstanding. Remember also that the Tattoo You Tour – and the football pants/knee pads combo Mick rocked onstage – went down in history as some of the biggest concerts of that decade.

The slow-boiler “Slave”, far and away the best song here, had been recorded in 1975, during the sessions for Black and Blue, and probably would have improved that album greatly had it been included. Long and limber, it is very much a song of that time, with Billy Preston playing organ, Sonny Rollins doing an explosive sax solo and Pete Townshend lending some backing vocals. There isn’t much in the way of lyrics, but Jagger’s howling refrain of “Don’t wanna be your slave” pretty much says it all. All of that, atop one of those low, growling guitar lines that instantly says Keith Richards, and it makes for fierce, sweaty, and emotional stuff.

This being a Stones album, many of the songs are about women; the travails of life with a Rock Wife are very much on our boys’ minds -- even the album art speaks to this, with its illustration of a devil's cloven hoof clad in a stiletto heel. The women on Tattoo You are greedy, concerned with status and clutching at success. “Tops,” originally written and recorded in 1972, can’t be about anyone but Bianca, who became the first future ex-Mrs. Mick Jagger in May 1971: "I'll be your partner/Show you the steps/With me behind you tasting/of the sweet wine of success/Cause I'll take you to the top, baby."

And on “Neighbors,” one of the two songs written specifically for Tattoo You, we find the Glimmer Twins dealing with the strains of marriage and fatherhood: "Ladies, have I got crazies/Screaming young babies/No peace and no quiet/I got TVs, saxophone playing/Groaning and straining/With the trouble and strife."

Sad for him, I know, but surely the million the Stones grossed on that tour helped ease the burden a bit. Unfortunately, this was also about the time that Rolling Stones concerts morphed irrevocably from rock concerts to stadium events, with all the cascading balloons and waving lighters that entails.

Since then, the Stones have become the (somewhat) living embodiment of what happened when the ‘60s rock got old. The Jagger-Richards union hit its infamous mid-life crisis in the ‘80s, after Tattoo You, beginning an artistically fallow period from which the Rolling Stones have never really recovered. The song “Black Limousine” – a patchwork quilt of a blues number recorded over various sessions between 1973 and 1981 – seems to speak to that a bit:

“We used to shine, shine, shine, shine
Say what a pair, say what a team
We used to ride, ride, ride, ride
In a long black limousine
Those dreams are gone baby
Locked away and never seen
Well now look at your face now baby
Look at you and look at me”

Listening to Tattoo You now is a bit like breaking out a family album, one that showed the last happy times before the dysfunction took hold. In some ways, the entire album is a symptom of that approaching dark period – barely original, leaning on the past, trying to find a safe way into the future, but resembling the good times enough that you don’t mind taking a long look back.