Goats Head Soup by The Rolling Stones

Goats Head Soup, the Rolling Stones' eleventh studio album, slithered out on Rolling Stones Records on 31 August 1973, and like Exile on Main St. before it, it was cooked up far from home. The band were tax exiles by then, so the work got done in Jamaica and the United States, and Jimmy Miller, the producer at the heart of their great run since Beggars Banquet in 1968, was behind the desk for the last time.

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Mick Taylor and Charlie Watts play on nearly everything, though Richards sits out "Winter"; Bill Wyman turns up on just three of the ten tracks. The usual pals crowd the room too: Bobby Keys on sax, Billy Preston on organ, Nicky Hopkins and Ian Stewart on piano. What comes out is murky and humid, the old swagger slowed to a sultry crawl, with funk seeping into the blues rock. "Angie" is the weeper, and it went all the way to number one as a single in America, while "Dancing With Mr. D" and "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Heartbreaker" bring the menace back.

It topped the charts in Britain and America, but the reviews were mixed, and for years it was filed away as the moment the Stones' golden streak began to slip. Time has been kinder. Giles Martin remixed it for a 2020 reissue, and that version put it back at number one in the UK.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.