The Rolling Stones: Ranking The Albums Best To Worst

16. It's Only Rock N' Roll

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smdPXeQc7Oo Date Of Original Release: 1975 Key Tracks: It's Only Rock N' Roll (But I Like It), Time Waits For No One, Ain't Too Proud To Beg In which the Stones find themselves past their relevance as countercultural spokesmen in the apathetic 70's, but are still capable of producing solid records. 'Time Waits For No One" is a rare example of vulnerability, and "It's Only Rock N' Roll" is as good a mission statement as any band ever produced. "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" as a cover is perhaps a little too on-the-nose, but the band are clearly having fun here and the atmosphere is joyous. The rest of the 70's however, would not be as great for the Stones. This album stands as their last classic album of the era and would become the standard bearer for measuring the worth of future Stones releases ("Is it at least as good as "It's Only Rock N' Roll?"" every Stones fan asks themselves upon seeing a new album).

15. December's Children (And Everybody's)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKKaVwmbZN0 Date Of Original Release: 1965 Key Tracks: Get Off My Cloud, I'm Free, As Tears Go By By this point the Stones had established themselves as the antithesis of the cuddly, parent-friendly Beatles: dark and threatening on "Get Off Of My Cloud" had never been seen from a pop group before. This is less an album than a random assortment of tracks selected for the US market, again filled with random covers (Hank Snow, Chuck Berry) but any album that contains both the landmark "Cloud" and the joyous "I'm Free" is pretty inescapably great. The back cover features some fairly pretentious poetry by Andrew Oldham (" In this world where minds have overtaken reason and thought is potential treason, the only message about this new ellpee is let's all live to enjoy it"). Sadly, in a few short years the Stones would be minus Jones, but on this record he shines with vitality, as do the other Stones.