The Rolling Stones - We Love You - Non-Album Tracks (1966-1967)

A couple of days ago, I posted an album that resulted when I split a Guess Who album I'd previously posted in two. A couple of days ago, I did the same thing with a Jefferson Airplane album. Today, it's happening again, this time with a Rolling Stones album. In 2018, I had posted a bunch of these songs on the stray tracks album "Flowers," which was only loosely based on the official album of that name. I've created a new version of that album, putting most of the 1966 songs it. Meanwhile, this is for the late 1966 and 1967 songs, as the band radically (though temporarily) switched its style from R&B to psychedelia.

I hadn't planned on creating this album. But a few days ago, a remarkable new Rolling Stones bootleg emerged. You can read about it here:

Treasure trove of 50 unreleased Rolling Stones songs mysteriously emerges online (the-sun.com)

I considered posting the whole thing here, but I've decided against it, because I noticed a few other similar sites had it and then quickly took it down. I presume they got takedown notices, and I want to avoid those. Instead, I'm going to pick the worthy songs from it and add them to my stray tracks albums. I also plan on posting more of those albums soon, especially since most of the songs from this new bootleg date from the 1980s and 1990s.

That said, the new bootleg contains one song dating all the way back to 1967, and it's a good one. "She's Doing Her Thing" had previously been bootlegged, but only as an instrumental, and this newly emerged version is fully fleshed out with vocals. There are rumors that the person who posted the new bootleg has more coming soon. This song gives hope that they have access to 1960s material. That would be great, because there has been very little previously unreleased 1960s material released due to continued disputes between the band and their record company from that era.

Anyway, I was going to put "She's Doing Her Thing" on my "Flowers" collection, but when I did I saw it was over an hour long, which was really long for a 1960s album. I went looking around to see if there were any more songs from that time that I'd missed. To my surprise, I found a couple. One is a bluesy instrumental called "Gold Painted Fingernails." 

Another is a very unusual instrumental for the band. According to Nico Zentgraf's authoritative Rolling Stones website called "The Complete Works of the Rolling Stones," this song is called "Pieces, Part 1 to 5." I couldn't find any other mentions of this name, so I'm using that name for now. The band recorded it in five separate sections, which may explain why it's called "Pieces." I found a version where someone had edited all the sections together. I cut out a middle section that I didn't like. The final result is a real gem, in my opinion, and is just as neat of a rare find as "She's Doing Her Thing."

On top of that, there is yet another unreleased song here, "Get Yourself Together." And curiously, this also contains an instrumental, "Title 5," that was released as a bonus track for "Exile on Main Street," even though the song was recorded in 1967 and seemingly has nothing to do with that 1972 album. (I suspect that has to do with the previously mentioned troubles between the band and their 1960s record company. I'm guessing they liked "Title 5" and wanted to release it, so they pretended as if it was from the early 1970s and thus out of reach of that 1960s record company.)

Up till now, I've discovered the rare and unusual songs on this album. But really, the meat of the album are the well known ones. In my opinion, this contains five classics with "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow," "Let's Spend the Night Together," "Ruby Tuesday," "We Love You," and "Dandelion." But the other songs are solid too. In my opinion, had this actually been an album the band released in the 1960s, it would be considered one of their best.

This album is 39 minutes long. That doesn't include the bonus track, "It's All Over Now." The band had a big hit with it in 1964. But I'm including it because they came up with a totally different arrangement for it for a TV show appearance in early 1967. They prerecorded the backing track a few days earlier, then sang live vocals to it in front of a cheering audience. It's only a bonus track because unfortunately the sound quality isn't that good.

01 Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow (Rolling Stones)
02 Who's Driving Your Plane (Rolling Stones)
03 Get Yourself Together [I Can See It] (Rolling Stones)
04 Gold Painted Fingernails [Instrumental] (Rolling Stones)
05 Let's Spend the Night Together (Rolling Stones)
06 Ruby Tuesday (Rolling Stones)
07 Title 5 [Instrumental] (Rolling Stones)
08 If You Let Me (Rolling Stones)
09 We Love You (Rolling Stones)
10 Dandelion (Rolling Stones)
11 She's Doing Her Thing (Rolling Stones)
12 Pieces, Parts 1 to 5 [Instrumental] [Edit] (Rolling Stones)

It's All Over Now [1967 Version] (Rolling Stones)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701039/TROLLNGSTNES1966-1967_WeLovYu_atse.zip.html

Since I decided to name this album "We Love You," I searched the Internet for covers of the single with that name. I've often found that using single covers for albums help provide authentic period flavor to the art. I found a good one, but a big chunk of it was filled with a boring black and white background pattern. And I found another one that had a good photo of the band, but was surrounded with some boring artwork. So I combined them, putting the band photo over most of the black and white pattern.

I did one more thing. The band photo had them sitting in front of some really awful curtains. They looked like the curtains of somebody's old fashioned grandmother, totally out of sync with their psychedelic fashions of the time. So, using Photoshop, I edited out the curtains and replaced them with a dark forest. I'm not sure why I picked a forest, but it just popped into my head as the thing to do, and I like how it turned out.