The Rolling Stones Top 75 Countdown (#39-34)

Today I'll present 6 Rolling Stones' songs that occupy positions 39-34 in our countdown. They're also the last songs that I've graded with 18/20. Starting tomorrow, the songs will be carrying a 19/20 grade, or an A- if you will.

At #39, here's Fingerprint File: it's the closing track from the Rolling Stones' 1974 album It's Only Rock 'n Roll. The Stones delved into Watergate-era paranoia on this post-Sly Stone funk workout, in which Jagger sings about "some little jerk in the FBI" with a stack of papers on him "six feet high." It was cut during their last sessions with Taylor, who played bass while Wyman switched over to synthesizer; Taylor laid down what may be the only bass solo on a Stones song.

At #38, we have a great rocker, to be listened to at maximum volume: Can't You Hear Me Knocking is part of my favorite Stones' album, Sticky Fingers (1971). In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine listed it at #25 on its list of "The 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time."

Taylor's elegance and power are on full display in Can't You Hear Me Knocking. It's the Stones' greatest guitar extravaganza – brutal but wide-open and a rare moment of on-the-record, long-form jamming from a band that rarely indulged in sprawling musical explorations popular during the early Seventies. Maybe it isn't surprising, then, that the recording came about almost entirely by chance. The first third of the song is an elemental blues rocker rooted in a vintage fist-in-your-chops Richards riff and a funky, tight-coiled groove from Watts and Wyman. The extended instrumental section that comes in at the 2:40 mark happened because the band thought the song was over: "Toward the end of the song, I just felt like carrying on playing," Taylor recalled later. "Everybody was putting their instruments down, but the tape was still rolling, and it sounded good, so everybody quickly picked up their instruments again and carried on playing. It just happened, and it was a one-take thing." The results feature Taylor at his most fluid, playing Latin-tinged lines that wrap around Richards' bracing staccato shots. Saxophonist Bobby Keys adds a blues-wailing solo. "He was a very fluent, melodic player . . . and it gave me something to follow, to bang off," Jagger said of Taylor.

At #37, we find 2000 Light Years from Home. It is found on the 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request. Upon its release, the album and its music was criticized as derivative of the psychedelic work of the Beatles. It wasn't one of their best albums, but it contained a couple of killer tracks: one of those is the track in question.

While other bands were singing about the joys of tripping through outer space, the Stones were already looking on the dark side. This song is a psychedelic nightmare, capturing the desolation ("It's sooo very lonely") of feeling lost in the cosmos, as Jones' Mellotron casts an ominous spell.

At #36, here's one of their classic tracks: 19th Nervous Breakdown was released as a single in early 1966 and made #2 on both the US and UK charts.

A lyrical breakthrough, with references to drugs and therapy, 19th Nervous Breakdown showed the Stones could pack sharp social criticism into headlong Rock & Roll. Jagger came up with the title phrase after five weeks of an exhausting US. tour. He spun it into lyrics about the trendy neurosis of posh London girls, sung over jagged Bo Diddley-style riffing. As the song fades out, Wyman uncorks a wild dive-bombing bass sound that ups the sense of harried intensity.

At #35 is a song that was originally titled Starf*cker, until label owner Ahmet Ertegun stepped in. The name was changed to Star Star. It appeared on the Stones' 1973 album Goats Head Soup. The song gained notoriety not only for explicit lyrics alluding to sex acts involving fruit (among other things) but also for controversial mentions of such celebrities as John Wayne and Steve McQueen. It was released about nine months after Carly Simon's affair with Jagger and the release of the song, "You're So Vain". Simon, who was by now married to fellow singer-songwriter James Taylor, had moved to Hollywood, which is mentioned in the lyrics of Star Star.

It became even more infamous during the 1975 tour, when a 20-foot-tall penis was inflated alongside Jagger as he sang it. The line about "givin' head to Steve McQueen" had to be vetted with the actor, who was quite flattered.

The single made #7 in Switzerland, #16 in the Netherlands and #32 in Germany.

Finally for today, the song at #34. It is Emotional Rescue, the lead single from the same-titled album (1980). In the studio one night, Jagger improvised an outrageous falsetto-disco goof at the electric piano, backed by Wood on bass and Watts on drums. The resulting track stretches out near the six-minute mark, with Jagger making up his arched-eyebrow sex monologue as he goes along. The Stones decided to release it as a single – whereupon it became a big international hit. (#3 in the US, #5 in the Netherlands, #8 in Australia, #9 in the UK and Austria, #11 in Switzerland, #15 in Germany and France, and #16 in Belgium and New Zealand.

To close off for today, since AFHI likes his quizzes, here's one. There's a famous song from one of the greatest and most popular hard rocking bands of the 80s and 90s that begins with a monologue from an iconic Oscar-winning movie of the 60s. I'd like, if you may, the name of the song, the band and the movie. I'll give it a couple of days before I reveal the answer. Have fun!