I mentioned yesterday that the Rolling Stones were fed by American music - rock and roll, r&b and the blues - and that they returned the favour by breathing life into each of them. (In fact a strong case could be made that American music was treated with more reverence and scholarship by English bands in the sixties than by their American counterparts.) But I didn't mention the relationship that the Stones had with country music, and how many of their greatest songs were from the genre. And it's not a coincidence that their classic period - from 1968 to 1972, when they released four straight masterpieces (Beggars' Banquet, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street) - was also the time during which they were most involved with country, both in terms of composition and the integration of its rhythms and sounds into their rock and roll. Consider this list: "Factory Girl", "Salt of the Earth", "Dear Doctor", "Country Honk", "You Got the Silver", "Dead Flowers", "Wild Horses", "Sweet Virginia", "Torn and Frayed". And then there's my favourite Stones country song, "Faraway Eyes" from 1978's Some Girls, with its beautifully sung chorus, its unforgettable truck-driving narrator and his girl with "well, you know what kinda eyes she got": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDnZBvCetQM

It may sound somewhat strange, but one of the greatest things about the Rolling Stones is that their music doesn't always work. By that I mean that their musical concept, based as it is on the idea of freedom - which for them has always been embodied by an imaginative America, and particularly the sound of its blues, r&b and rock and roll - has a poly-rhythmic, open quality that is unpredictable in terms of results. But this is a good thing: at their best, their multi-faceted rhythms are awesomely compelling, and even when they aren't, the music is still very interesting. They understand that it's possible to over-rehearse rock and roll music, and that one of its most powerful qualities is that some moments will come once and never again. For an example, here is one of their greatest songs - "Gimme Shelter" - which has an intro that has never sounded exactly like the one on the recorded version (from 1969's Let it Bleed), whether played by them or anyone else, a second time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhBpUJcpiCg&feature=related