Although my collection of early Rolling Stones records in the
Pierce Memorial Archives isn’t as vast as I’d like it to be, I seem
to remember it took the lads a few albums to settle down their
manic sound and create a more polished tone. What’s interesting is
that their counterparts, The Pretty Things, had it down by the time
of their second release,
Get The Picture?.
After the controlled panic that was their debut album, Phil May
and crew (less drummer Vivian Prince, who was out of the band by
the time this album was recorded) seemed to have gotten a lot of
the manic energy that made up
The Pretty Things out of their system. Now, they could hone
their musical skills and work on an album that would blow their
previous work out of the water.
In one sense, they did;
Get The Picture? is a much better album than its
predecessor. I don’t mean to suggest that May, Dick Taylor and crew
didn’t take the recording of their first album seriously, but it
did have the atmosphere that made it sound like kids being turned
loose in a candy store. This album, on the other hand, is much more
cohesive, and flows a lot better.
The opening track alone, “You Don’t Believe Me”, is proof enough
of this new-found focus. The band sounds tighter than they had to
this point, and May’s vocals are actually more powerful this time
around. Tracks like “Rainin’ In My Heart,” “London Town,” “Midnight
To Six Man” and the title track all re-emphasize the suspicion that
The Pretty Things should have been a bigger success than they were,
at least in the United States.
Get The Picture? has one major problem with it, though – and
it’s a complaint I had with the first volume in this re-released
set. The liner notes, while giving a lot of the band’s history
around this time, fail to tell me what I really want to know: which
tracks were on the original release, which are bonus tracks added
to the re-release, what was the band’s lineup at this time. I have
to sludge through stories that, often, I am not interested in in
order to find information about the band’s lineup – and by that
time, I’m no longer interested in finding out. The liner notes to
this release needed to have more concise information.
And, like the self-titled re-release,
Get The Picture? seems to try to put too much Pretty Things
into your hands in too short a time frame. After a while, it seems
like 18 tracks (even though they’re no monsters time-wise) is a lot
to listen to, and it seemed like it took forever to get through
portions of this disc. I’m all for inclusion of bonus materials,
but sometimes it does seem like overkill.
If you have a multimedia computer,
Get The Picture? includes a portion that you can watch on
your system. I just haven’t gotten the chance to view it yet (hey,
it’s hard when you have to decide between CD extras and Super Mario
World).
Get The Picture? is an album that suggests that The Pretty
Things did get the picture, and they created an album that was a
major improvement over their first effort.
