The Rolling Stones - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1963-1964

Here's something that's a "must have" for any serious Rolling Stones fan. One problem listening to the early music of the Rolling Stones is that their studio output is just fine, but there's very little that sounds good. Bootlegs from the 1960s typically sound terrible, with lots of screaming fans drowning out the music. Even the sole official live album from the 1960s sounds bad.

Luckily, there's the BBC. They're pretty much the only place that recorded the Stones in high fidelity performing in the studio versions of their songs. Unfortunately, the band only recorded for the BBC from 1963 to 1965, but that's better than nothing. (Of course, the band appeared on TV a lot, but they either lip-synced to their records, or they were bedeviled by the screaming fans problem.)

In 2017, "On Air," a collection of the band's performances at the BBC, was officially released. It's better than nothing, but there are a number of problems with it. For one, there are two versions, but even the deluxe version is woefully incomplete. There are 32 songs on that version. I'm breaking up their BBC performances into three albums which together total 54 songs. Secondly, the songs are presented out of chronological order, and don't seem to be in any logical order at all. Third, many of the songs are in fake stereo, which doesn't sound good. Fourth, BBC DJs talk over the starts and ends of some songs. Fifth, there are many cases of two performances of the same song.

I've done by best to fix all of these problems. I broke the BBC recordings into two groups: live and studio. There's about one album's worth of songs where the band were recorded for the BBC playing in front of an audience. These are excellent recordings, far better than any other live recordings of the band from the early or mid-1960s. But still, they're not as pristine as the studio recordings. So I've put all the live ones together, on an album I'll be posting here later. There were enough remaining studio versions to make two albums of about 45 minutes each. This is the first one.

I'm presenting the songs in chronological order. I even have them in order for each different session.

I've solved the fake stereo problem by using versions of the songs from a bootleg that keeps those in mono, which is how they were intended to be. Although it's a bootleg, the sound quality is as good or better than the official release. I've marked some songs in mp3 tags as coming from the "On Air" album, but that's just to let you know which ones are on that album.

I've talked about the problem of BBC DJs talking over songs with other albums by other bands I've posted here. It's a pet peeve of mine. Luckily, it can often be fixed with some sound editing. I've fixed a bunch of songs. I've marked the more significant edits by including "Edit" in the file name. There are two of those on this album. In those cases, I patched in a section of music from elsewhere in the song. In the case of "Carol," I had to use the studio album version, because the opening riff wasn't repeated later in the song. It's not a great fit, but I figure it's acceptable. There are other songs, such as "Beautiful Delilah," where even that sort of fix isn't possible, because the intro riff doesn't appear later, and there's no other version to turn to.

But in addition to big fixes like that, I made a lot of minor fixes too. I'm not sure why, but for some reason, a lot of the songs were missing the first second or two. I'm guessing it's because BBC DJs liked to talk right up to the second the vocals began, or the song began, and sometimes they overlapped a little bit. These are were easy fixes to make. I'm surprised they didn't fix them for the official release.

I got lucky with the problem of two performances of the same song. It turns out that, in nearly every case, when there were multiple versions, one was a studio version and the other was a live version. So since I've created different albums for the studio stuff and the live stuff, that takes case of that. There are only two cases of studio performances of the same song, "Down the Road a Piece" and "Walkin' the Dog." I bent the normal chronological order, but only by a bit, so that there's one version of each on the two studio albums.

Also, speaking of duplicates, I've included some of these BBC performances on my stray tracks albums for the band, because the BBC versions are the only known versions. Specifically, there are six of them: "Roll Over Beethoven," "Memphis, Tennessee," "I'm Moving On," "Beautiful Delilah," "Ain't That Lovin' You Baby" and "Crackin' Up." I considered not including those six in these BBC Sessions albums also, but I ultimately decided to have them in both places.

Note that not all of the songs here sound fantastic. Some performances were saved by the BBC (usually by blind luck), and others were recorded by people off the radio. Some in that later category have slightly worse sound quality, especially some of the ones that remain officially unreleased. But that's only true in a relative sense. Compared to your typical Stones bootlegs and TV appearances from this era, they're much better.

UPDATE: On June 12, 2022, I updated the mp3 download file. I didn't actually add or remove any songs. However, I upgraded the sound quality of many songs. Many serious Rolling Stones fans believe that the sound quality of the band's official BBC album, "On Air," isn't that good. I've been keeping an eye on the music blog of Prof. Stoned. He found bootleg versions that sounded better than the "On Air" versions. So I've used those versions in the same cases he did.

01 Come On (Rolling Stones)
02 Memphis, Tennessee (Rolling Stones)
03 Roll Over Beethoven (Rolling Stones)
04 Don't Lie to Me (Rolling Stones)
05 Mona [I Need You Baby] (Rolling Stones)
06 Walking the Dog (Rolling Stones)
07 Bye Bye Johnny (Rolling Stones)
08 You Better Move On (Rolling Stones)
09 I Wanna Be Your Man (Rolling Stones)
10 Not Fade Away (Rolling Stones)
11 I Just Want to Make Love to You (Rolling Stones)
12 Beautiful Delilah (Rolling Stones)
13 Hi-Heeled Sneakers (Rolling Stones)
14 Carol [Edit] (Rolling Stones)
15 Down in the Bottom (Rolling Stones)
16 You Can Make It If You Try (Rolling Stones)
17 [Get Your Kicks On] Route 66 (Rolling Stones)
18 Confessin' the Blues (Rolling Stones)
19 Down the Road a Piece [Edit] (Rolling Stones)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701021/TROLLNGSTNES1963-1964_BBSessonsVolum1_atse.zip.html

Normally, I'm dead against using a black and white photo for the cover art. The Stones are so famous that there's no problem finding color photos of them from any given year. But I've made an exception in this case, because I found an actual photo of the band playing for the BBC! This photo was taken at the Playhouse Theatre in London, where many of the songs on this album were recorded, some time in 1964. I tinted it purple because I still hate black and white. ;)

NOTE: Many months after posting this album, I figured out a way to colorize the pic, so I did so.  I've left in a tinted version for those who might prefer that.