The Rolling Stones
No. 2

This vintage UK Decca mono pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records cannot even BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

The Real Sound of the Real Tapes

The best word I could use to sum up both the sound and the music on this record is "honest." If you want to hear how early Rolling Stones records sound when they sound right, this is the ticket. This is the real sound of the early, early Stones.

Probably what any modern engineer would want to do to the album would only end up making it worse. It is what it is and that’s good enough for us. Since the tapes are now nearly 60 years old, no reissue will sound remotely as good as this one.

Some tracks do sound quite a bit better than others, recorded as they were in three different locations (including Chess studios) by two different engineers (Ron Malo and Dave Hassinger).

The Stones wanted their stuff to sound like the old Blues albums they grew up on and revered, and with that sound in mind you can't argue that they didn't succeed here.

What The Best Sides Of The Stones's Second Album Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl import pressings like this one offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1965
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with the guitars and drums having the correct sound for this kind of recording
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional space of the studio

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we listed above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

What We're Listening For On Early Albums By The Rolling Stones

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful originals.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Side One

• Everybody Needs Somebody to Love
• Down Home Girl
• You Can't Catch Me
• Time Is on My Side
• What a Shame
• Grown Up Wrong

Side Two

• Down the Road a Piece
• Under the Boardwalk
• I Can't Be Satisfied
• Pain in My Heart
• Off the Hook
• Susie Q

AMG 4 1/2 Star Rave Review

The group's second British album actually appeared after their second U.S. LP, mostly owing to the fact that the British rock & roll audience wasn't focused on the long-player as a medium (singles and EPs were the driving force of the business in England then.

It uses the same David Bailey cover shot that had graced the U.S.-issued 12 X 5 album two and a half months earlier, but only four songs -- "Under the Boardwalk," "Suzie Q," "Grown Up Wrong," and "Time Is on My Side" -- overlap on the two albums.

Rather, Rolling Stones No. 2 offered seven songs that weren't to make it out in America until four months later on The Rolling Stones Now!, and they're all solid numbers: "Off the Hook," "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love," "Down Home Girl," "You Can't Catch Me," "What a Shame," "Pain in My Heart," and "Down the Road Apiece," plus one of the group's best blues covers, their version of Muddy Waters' "I Can't Be Satisfied," which wasn't released in America until 1973 and features some killer slide playing by Brian Jones.

The U.K. LP also had the advantage of only being released in mono, so there are no "rechanneled stereo" copies with which to concern oneself.