The Rolling Stones - Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out (1970/2017) [40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition] (Official Digital Download 24bit/192k)

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The Rolling Stones - Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out (1970/2017) [40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition] (Official Digital Download 24bit/192k)

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The Rolling Stones - Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones In Concert: Live From
Madison Square Garden, New York 1969 (1970/2009/2017) [40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition]
3CD Set | FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/192 kHz | Time - 108:21 minutes | 4,79 GB
3CD Set | FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/96 kHz | Time - 108:21 minutes | 2,47 GB
Studio Master, Official Digital Download | Artwork: Front cover

Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! occupies a unique place within the dread pantheon of Rolling Stones live albums, of which there are many, but virtually none a rational human being would want to listen to. It is held as the official document of the Stones onstage at their 1969 peak, before their gigs became notable largely for their decadence or ability to generate money. The most interesting thing about 1982's Still Life (American Concert) is that the tour it documented was rock's first ever to boast corporate sponsorship, from a cheap cologne called Jovan Musk. If you can't really imagine the Beatles heading out on a tour sponsored by Blue Stratos, then here was early evidence of the Stones' redoubtable refusal to let dignity get in the way of making cash.

Accordingly, in the latest round of Stones reissues, Get Yer Ya Ya's Out! has been afforded a lavish treatment denied, say, Flashpoint, a 1991 live album whose big selling points are a guest appearance from Eric Clapton and a new song called, alas, Sex Drive. It now comes as the album expanded to three CDs, one devoted to support acts BB King and Ike and Tina Turner. The latter's set hails from a juncture in Tina Turner's career when her USP was to imbue every song with the suggestion that she was about to drop the microphone and furnish someone with the filthiest sexual experience of their life. Here, Otis Redding's wracked I've Been Loving You Too Long suddenly becomes a song about impossibly dirty sex. So does the Beatles' countercultural exhortation Come Together. You suspect that if she'd chosen to essay David Bowie's The Laughing Gnome, she'd have made that sound like it was about impossibly dirty sex as well.

She sounds like a tough act to follow, and so it proved. If you've never heard Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!, but you're aware of its reputation – a contemporary Rolling Stone review proclaimed it "the best rock concert ever put on record" – it's hard not to feel deflated. There are certainly great things here, among them the slashing, chaotic Jumping Jack Flash, a version of Live With Me that positively seethes with evil, and one of Mick Jagger's between-song announcements, during which he repeatedly yells "we're awl-RIGHT!" in exactly the same manner as Neil Kinnock once did, with disastrous results, at a Labour rally in Sheffield.

But equally, there are moments when you're evidently no more listening to the best rock concert ever put on record than you are the Massed Bands of the Coldstream Guards: the bafflingly popular serial-killer-themed Midnight Rambler plods on and on as if the murderer despatched his victims by boring them to death, while Sympathy for the Devil arrives utterly devoid of Satanic menace. There's something horribly lackadaisical about its jaunty chug, the guitar solo extended but denuded of its violent sting: an air of "this'll do", which it clearly did. As evidenced by the sound of a wall-eyed girl in the crowd crying "play Paint It Black, you devils", the Stones' audience had moved from screaming at the band to doing something more damaging: worshipping them as superhuman.

It's hard to keep your standards up when people will accept pretty much anything from you, hence the reviews Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! received in the teeth of its audibly uneven quality. For every raw and thrilling Street Fighting Man, there's a bloated disaster like Stray Cat Blues. Whether you feel a song about having it off with an underage girl is a cheerily licentious reminder of an age before Political Correctness Went Mad, or a revolting bulletin from an era when rock contained enough casual misogyny to make a gangsta rap album's lyrics look like the United Nations Convention On the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, it's hard to deny the song's power – at least in its studio incarnation on Beggars Banquet. That version resembles the stuff from which parental nightmares are made: a moneyed, arrogant, impossibly beautiful rock star pinging your pubescent daughter's knicker elastic. Here, however, it lumbers painfully by, like a middle-aged park flasher trying to catch up with a group of schoolgirls in order to wave his balls at them.

Indeed, what Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! sounds most like is the 60s waning before your very ears. There are flashes of greatness, but the white-knuckle innovation of 1965-67 has audibly gone, replaced by complacent jamming. The opening announcement of "the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world" smacks not of the thrillingly overheated fairground barking of pop earlier in the decade, but of the smug triumphalism that would ultimately provoke punk. It certainly captured a moment: just not the one its adherents think.