I really love this song – it’s one you don’t hear much about any more.  It was such an odd selection as a single and the video’s pretty bizarre, although it has the same vibe as “Undercover of the Night”.  Undercover isn’t one of my favorite Stones albums, but I really like this as a departure from their usual stuff.

Both of these are from their 2007 concert in Austin, Texas. I’ve got the concert on DVD but I ran across these yesterday and was reminded of how great they are. Both of these – especially Keith Richards covering Buddy Holly – come out of left field, something you wouldn’t expect from the Rolling Stones at this point in their career. As far as I’m concerned they knocked both of them out of the park and are the highlights of that concert.

Obviously this odd release coincides with the release of Richards’ autobiography Life, which arrived at the McKeon household this week and is now in the reading queue behind Gravity’s Rainbow, The Stand, Chris Jericho’s book, and possibly Dave Mustaine’s.  Essentially this is a best-of compilation of the two studio albums and one live album by his side project The X-Pensive Winos, with an odd bonus track, the one minute and change song “Hurricane.”  Again, I realize this was put out as a cash grab for the book, but was anyone really demanding this?

As a best-of compilation, it’s fine, including the singles from the studio albums and some of the better tracks along with live versions of Keith’s Rolling Stones songs.  If you wanted an overview of his solo career this would do it and you wouldn’t necessarily need to hunt out the full albums themselves, except the live one which I love.  “Hurricane” is something interesting to listen to one or two times but I can’t see myself interested in it beyond that.  It’s a solo acoustic piece that doesn’t really go anywhere within its confines.

Back in 2007 Rhino put out a Mick Jagger solo compilation that was really nice, a combination of tracks from his studio albums and a fair amount of hard to find stuff like “Dancing in the Streets” with David Bowie and “Checkin’ Up On My Baby” with the Red Devils.  I don’t know how much of this sort of thing is available for Keith Richards but ideally this release would have been more like that.  At the very least I would have liked “Run Run Rudolph” on it.