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64 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Expensive? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely., 24 Jun 2004
With so many Rolling Stones compilations now on the market, it must be difficult to know where to start. Well, it all depends on what you are after. Allow me to illustrate. If you want a concise package of their best material from their best era, then go for Hot Rocks. If you're after an overview of their entire career, then it's Forty Licks all the way. However, if you want a comprehensive anthology of the Stones' evolution from blues wannabes to world superstars, then they don't come much better than this.Strange as it seems in this day and age, the Stones were essentially a singles band up until around 1968. In those days, a-sides were how a band was defined. But the b-sides were important as well, and people used to actually listen to them, unlike now. Here, we get all of their early singles - a-sides and b-sides - gathered together back to back onto 3 discs. So, whilst we get all the usual suspects, like Not Fade Away, Satisfaction and Get Off My Cloud, we are also treated to such early gems as Little By Little, Off The Hook and The Spider And The Fly. Along with Paint It Black and Mother's Little Helper, we also get Long Long While and We Love You. Absolutely Superb! The only place where this collection falters is, wait for it, around 1968, when the Stones - indeed the world - became less interested in singles and more into albums. Hence the album track Gimme Shelter does not qualify for a place here, whereas b-sides Surprise Surprise and Try A Little Harder do. Hmm, shame. Still, the compilers have used the opportunity to gather up some half decent loose material from that time, such as Jiving Sister Fanny and Mick Jagger's Memo From Turner, so bravo for doing that! All of which makes this an indispensable collection - five stars!
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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Expensive but packed with memories..., 8 Jan 2004
For those seeking a cross section of the Stones' best early period work this album is of limited value, missing - as it does - key tracks from their first albums. For those seeking a compilation of early period "Greatest Hits" it's a fairly expensive luxury. So... why 4 stars?
Easy... if you were living in London when "Come On" was released, if you went to your local record store and played it and it's marvellous "B" side - "I Want To Be Loved" - on your mono, low-fi record player over and over again, if you went back to the store and bought single after single as they were released and put both sides through the same repeat play process, if you still have them in your attic in a lovingly scratched, wholly unplayable state or if you've lost them over the years... then this is all you could ask for. "B" sides were important then and, with a group like the Rolling Stones you played them, sometimes as much as the "A" sides. Disc One contains all the "B" side classics: "I Want To Be Loved", "Stoned", "Little By Little", "Good Times, Bad Times", "Off The Hook", "Play With Fire" etc. And, while the "B" sides on CD Two and Three are more patchy and less relevant, the A sides on these two CD's are a pretty comprehensive "Greatest Hits" collection in their own right. So, if you were there and you want to be there again, then CD One is an indispensable memory bank: play it straight through and you can almost hear the 45's dropping down from the multidisk arm. And if you weren't, well this is what it was like!
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83 of 93 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Acquire With Caution, 25 Feb 2005
The Singles Collection first came out in 1989, in vinyl, cassette and CD editions, and was re-issued in 1995. Its purpose was to collect the singles released on the Stones' American and British labels London and Decca, and present them in order of their release. It is a set that compiles itself. The EPs The Rolling Stones, 5 By 5 and Got Live If You Want It were not included. It contained many botched edits and the UK album version of Time Is On My Side instead of the single.
This re-issue corrects many of the faults of the earlier releases, including Time Is On My Side, and claims to contain the original single masters. It has been mastered using Sony's high quality Direct Stream Digital process, whilst the track listing has not changed, and the artwork and liner notes are as close to the original release as possible. "The original sleeve artwork and liner notes have been retained," Steve Rosenthal, the archive co-ordinator for the Stones' back-catalogue project, said on its release. "We've not added anything - if things are misspelled, that's because that's the way they were done at the time." Indeed, many of the recording dates and other information appear to be questionable.
The singles collections such as Big Hits (High Tide And Green Grass), Through The Past Darkly, Hot Rocks, More Hot Rocks are said to feature true stereo recordings 'where appropriate'. "They have artistic integrity and deserve to come out for historical purposes," said Jody Klein, the restoration producer, who is the son of Allen Klein, the Stones' former manager and president of ABKCO, which now controls the Decca/London years.
The majority of The Rolling Stones Singles Collection, including all of the first two discs, is in mono (for reasons of authenticity, one would hope), as per the original release of each single, but the sound quality and definition would be hard to better.
Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing In The Shadow? and Mother's Little Helper appear at slightly faster speeds in this series of re-issues as it was found that previous tape masters were slow due to a production fault. This is also true of the three titles that appear on Beggar's Banquet.
Sometimes, when stereo and alternative mono mixes were prepared, further overdubbing and other differences were introduced. Where album versions differ from the singles, such as with Brown Sugar, Street Fighting Man and Tell Me (You're Coming Back), the correct single version should have been used.There are examples however where this has been fudged.
The single mix of Brown Sugar was not quite the same as the one included on Sticky Fingers and the 45 was variously available in mono and stereo in different regions and/or pressings. The version here appears to be a stereo mix of the single, thankfully. Similarly, Street Fighting Man appeared on the US single in a unique mono mix with a triple-tracked lead vocal, and this is the version here.
Tell Me (You're Coming Back) originally appeared in the UK on the debut album The Rolling Stones where it was over 4 minutes long and had a raggedy ending where it just stopped instead of fading out. Some later issues corrected this and had a fade ending at around 3:47. It wasn't on the US version of the album but was released instead as a single in an edited version which omitted the instrumental break and the chorus that follows, running at around 2:50. This is the version that should be here, but instead the fade-out album version has been used.
The Under-Assistant West Coast Promotion Man is apparently the Out Of Our Heads version, not the US B-side with its "uncensored" lyric. Ruby Tuesday is not the single mix, which had an extra Mick Jagger vocal overdub on the chorus, but is the version first found on Between The Buttons in the US, although it has unfortunately been mixed down to mono. It thus lacks both authenticity and the benefits of stereo sound. This may also be true of Heart Of Stone, although I do not have the stereo mix to compare it with. It would be interesting to know if the Singles Boxes that were subsequently released corrected any of these errors.
For the UK, on the first CD, all but seven of the 25-tracks did not appear on original Rolling Stones albums (though they may have been anthologised elsewhere), and three were unreleased at the time. On the second disc there are 12 UK non-album tracks out of 20, including Sad Day, which didn't get a UK release until over seven years later. This is therefore a set worthy of consideration for a buyer who has or intends to have some original albums in their British versions. Of course, many more singles were included on their American LPs, making this set less good value.
Things go slightly awry on the less essential third CD. Firstly, Street Fighting Man is included without one of its British B-sides (Everybody Needs Somebody To Love), breaking the album concept. It's other B-side, Surprise, Surprise is of interest as it is an early example of a Jagger/Richards composition, recorded in September 1964. They evidently didn't care too much for it and donated it to a charity compilation LP called Fourteen (Lulu and her Luvvers made a more impassioned version of it and put it on a B-side the following year).
Then Honky Tonk Women breaks ranks and bursts into full stereo from the first cowbell, whereas the original single was mono, like its B-side, the short version of You Can't Always Get What You Want, as presented here. The same stereo version of Honky Tonk Women can be found on the SACD issue of Through The Past Darkly.
After that, Mick Jagger's solo single Memo From Turner turns up, from the film Performance. This does not involve any other Stones apart from Keith, who co-wrote it, and again it is in the unauthentic stereo album mix. The rest of disc 3 is entirely stereo but by this time singles that played in stereo were becoming commonplace.
Brown Sugar follows, but this is the single that launched their own record label, Rolling Stones Records and also introduced the Sticky Fingers album. Neither it nor its US follow up, Wild Horses, belong here as they were not released on London or Decca. Their B-sides - Bitch, Let It Rock (Live At Leeds)(otherwise unavailable, except in Spain) and Sway (an alternative version) - all recorded during the same period as Sticky Fingers, are not included, so suddenly the whole collection again lacks internal consistency.
After this, no more Rolling Stones Records are included, but releases which their old labels London and Decca continued to release throughout the seventies, without the Stones' approval, fill the rest of the third disc, including some publishers demos Mick and Keith put together in the sixties (all of which can be found on Metamorphosis).
The collection ends with Sympathy For The Devil, the version from Beggar's Banquet, which apparently turned up in 1976, on the flip of a re-issue of Honky Tonk Women. It's a great track, but not one that the Stones ever wanted on a single. Without these final tracks, starting with Memo From Turner, and with errors corrected, the collection would have made a superb and cogent double CD. With the missing EPs included instead it would have been a wonderful box set. As it is, it is still a valuable but imperfectly realised round-up
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