Rolling Stones Five by Five

Graced with cover art of a grotesque gorilla sporting the Stones' trademark leering lips, GRRR! doesn't quite have the classy veneer usually associated with a 50th anniversary collection. Frankly, that's a good sign for the Rolling Stones: they're celebrating their half-century together but refusing to take themselves too seriously, even when they're assembling a mammoth retrospective that's available in three different incarnations…

If it feels as if Honk treads familiar ground, it's because it does. Arriving seven years after the career-spanning Grrr! – a compilation available in a variety of iterations, all spanning from the earliest years to the 2010s – Honk focuses squarely on the music the Rolling Stones made after leaving London/Decca, a catalog that now resides with Abkco. In other words, its ground zero is "Brown Sugar," a staple that arrives just after "Start Me Up" kicks off the double-disc set. Such sequencing indicates how Honk bounces through the years, letting the '70s sit next to the '80s, finding space for latter-day songs that only showed up on previous greatest-hits albums (there have been five since 1984), and shining the spotlight on such excellent latter-day cuts as "Rough Justice."…

Sucking In the Seventies - This is an odd compilation that deserves recognition above most others due to it’s unique qualities. With the exception of Shattered and Mannish Boy (live), not one of the eight (8) remaining selections are found in their original form. There are a total of five previously-released selections that were edited by almost as much as two minutes, including Time Waits for No One [running at 4:25] and Hot Stuff [3:30.] The set does offer the b-side Everything Is Turning to Gold, the 12-inch promo-only b-side If I Was A Dancer (Dance pt. 2), as well as a song completely unique to this title, When the Whip Comes Down (live.) By the time compact discs came into play, this album already had it’s run and most consumers were no longer interested until Virgin Records announced that it would discontinue production in 1992. Virgin would finally lay plans to re-introduce this particular title into the market in April of 2005. Providing some solace to collectors for over a decade, three of the edited song versions did re-appear in the 1993 CD compilation Jump Back as well as the 2002 set Forty Licks. It offers radio-friendly versions of some otherwise long selections but the editing was broad and unnecessary offering nothing new or exciting to them.

To be indelicate about the matter: what exactly makes Big Cocksucker Blues different than plain old Cocksucker Blues, the legendary rarely-seen film of the Rolling Stones' 1972 tour? Well, while the original Cocksucker Blues has frequently been bootlegged since the pre-DVD era, this Big Cocksucker Blues has that 95-minute film and well over an hour of extras. The extra footage, you should know, does not contain Cocksucker Blues outtakes, but does offer a good amount of rare clips from 1967-1974 that should interest any hardcore fan of the Stones during this era…