Playing Favorites: “No Expectations” - The Rolling Stones (1968)
The songs I explore in my Playing Favorites essays appear on an irregular basis, and I write them whenever the mood strikes me. If that’s okay with you, then we’re both happy. (Previously I explored “Tennessee River Runs Low” by The Secret Sisters.)
These Playing Favorites songs are not necessarily what I consider “the greatest” of all time but the ones that speak to me. Maybe some of the same ones speak to you.
When he toured Europe in the early 1960s, bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson1 said regarding his backing bands, “Those British boys want to play the blues real bad, and they do.” Williamson was probably not referring to the Stones, but more likely the Yardbirds or the Animals. Maybe the fans of those British bands knew little or nothing about the blues acts that inspired them, but anyone picking up Beggars Banquet in 1968 instantly realized that something had happened since the earlier Stones records, a direction that was neither pop nor psychedelic, but rather a return to the blues.
On the album, “No Expectations” follows “Sympathy for the Devil,” two songs that seem worlds apart. Brian Jones delivers some spectacular Mississippi Delta blues slide guitar playing (arguably some of his best work) on “No Expectations,” making you wonder if he’d spent a few months with Charley Patton or Robert Johnson in Mississippi Delta towns like Clarksdale or Greenwood. Keith Richards quietly strums his acoustic, and Mick Jagger delivers a subdued, reflective vocal. Only 25 at the time, Jagger may not have traveled the same hard roads as many veteran bluesmen, but that works to his advantage. Jagger’s protagonist sounds like he’s experiencing devastating heartbreak for the first time and isn’t quite sure what his life will look like tomorrow. Maybe you can relate. I know I can.
Yet the song belongs to Jones. His guitar makes you feel as if you’re stranded on the loneliest dirt road on the planet with no hope of getting picked up by a passing vehicle. The dirt is so pervasive you can feel it under your tongue. Waves of heat threaten to turn your body into jelly, matching the state of your soul.
“That was the last time I remember Brian really being involved in something that was really worth doing,” Jagger reflected in 1995 in a Rolling Stone interview. Shortly after the release of Beggars Banquet, Brian Jones was found dead in his swimming pool. The song, written by Jagger and Richards, could be seen as a regretful look at life and love on the road or perhaps as Jones’s epitaph.
The slide guitar brings the song in line not only with the rest of the blues-based album but also with the band’s own blues roots. Aside from Jones’s slide work, the song’s chord structure and lyrics are quite simple. Yet there’s more going on. Nicky Hopkins (who played keyboards on several of the Stones recordings, possibly the band’s most unsung collaborator) enters after the third verse with an unobtrusive middle-register piano, changing the mood to something more refined and tasteful, yet laced with melancholy. Hopkins stays in the middle register for the next two verses, then closes the song in the upper register with notes so delicate they sound like a cool stream of water trickling over rocks. The way this elegant piano line contrasts with Jones’s pain-filled slide elevates the tune to something truly unforgettable.
And then we have the lyrics, reflective of a Robert Johnson-like type of blues, reminding us that this is the song of a young man who’s seen hardship and heartbreak far beyond his scant years. The loneliness, isolation, and resignation are almost numbing in the way they’ve seeped into the singer’s DNA. I’ve always loved the way the narrator’s pleas have moved from being taken away on a train – a long-standing blues metaphor – to a plane, a more immediate way of travel, yet the lines are delivered in a leisurely manner. It’s almost as if it makes no difference whether he’s leaving by train, plane, or rocket: the pain will never leave him. Maybe we can all relate.
“No Expectations” appears on the album Beggars Banquet and was also released as a B-side to the single “Street Fighting Man” in the U.S.
Williamson is more accurately known as Sonny Boy Williamson II, aka Alex or Aleck Miller (1912-1965), not to be confused with Sonny Boy Williamson I, aka John Lee Curtis (1914-1948)