After their dance rock classic 'Screamadelica in 1990), Primal Scream followed it up with 'Give Out But Don't Give Up', a double album with a William Egglestone photograph of an electric confederate flag reflected in water on the front cover and a photo of Funkadelic's Eddie Hazel on the back. Which was kind of all you needed to know about what was in the grooves. Chief Screamer Bobby Gillespie's intention was to pay homage to the idealised decadence and authenticity commonly associated with a core of key bands from the early to mid seventies. And if the cover wasn't enough, the avid music spotter could probably pin down the musical influences from the song titles alone - 'Jailbird', '(I'm Gonna) Cry Myself Blind', 'Big Jet Plane', 'Struttin', 'Sad And Blue', 'Funky Jam' - it's a studious roll call of left field electric Americana, of rock songs bathed in the pathos of country, juiced up with libido and testosterone, fed on a diet of drugs and Jack Daniels and then rubbed in the dirt on the ground, but not to the point that it becomes unrecognisable and unsingalongable (step forward Captain Beefheart). The album was not a success.
"I met a gin soaked barroom queen in Memphis" - to modern ears, 'Honky Tonk Women' can sound as much a parody/homage to all this as Primal Scream's does, but in 1969 this was something new(ish). So much so that the template the Stones laid down on 'Honky Tonk Women' is one that has been slavishly traced by innumerable acts since, all keen to tap into a source to inform their ideal for what a rock band should be - sex and drugs and rock and roll troubadours high on flamboyance yet mired in sleaze - without having to bother going back to the source and all that blues/R&B nonsense.*
The famous Jimmy Miller cowbells and Charlie's slo-mo drum thud intro give way to a guitar riff that, in less than three seconds, plugs in, warms up and snaps out its wares, making 'Honky Tonk Women' sound like the first unrehearsed take of a brand new song improvised on the spot, unsure of where it's going but enough hesitancy in getting there to let Jagger sing the gaps with the transatlantic drawl he'd perfected in interviews - Jagger once found no satisfaction in consumerist America, but he finds it now in spades in the southern Gothic mythos of a Byrds-go-country-then-back-to-electric vibe. Tight but loose, I believe it's called.
'Honky Tonk Women's distillation of influences heralded a new genre that was to have legs far beyond its own inherent worth - The Faces, Aerosmith, Guns & Roses etc all made a decent fist in their wake, virtually every west coast eighties hair metal band did not. And the band itself weren't immune either - 'Honky Tonk Women' can now be seen as the birthplace of the band that the Stones would become in the seventies and beyond, a three dimensional tag of music and image that would come to define and wear them down to the one dimension of cardboard cut-outs of the band they once were long after they'd tried to outgrow it. But by itself, 'Honky Tonk Women' is a superb single.
* I don't think I've explained myself very well here - I had in mind an artcile on Oasis from the nineties (which I can't for the life of me source) that said (something like) "John Lennon was influenced by music hall, Chuck Berry, surrealism, Elvis Presley, dada, Lewis Carrol, Eddie Cochran, Picasso, Edward Lear, Bob Dylan, skiffle etc etc. Noel Gallagher is influenced by John Lennon."
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