Songoftheday 12/14/16 - The fields of Eden are full of trash, and if we beg and we borrow and steal we'll never get it back...
from the album Steel Wheels (1989)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #23 (three weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 8
Today's song of the day comes from the Rolling Stones, who were still chugging along in the 80s, landing a top-10 pop hit in the U.S. with the lead single from their 1989 album Steel Wheels, "Mixed Emotions". After the rock radio promoted the rollicking "Sad Sad Sad" climbed to #14 on that chart, the follow-up pop radio single from the set would be the rhythm guitar crunch of "Rock and a Hard Place". Written and produced by the bands leaders Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, aka "the Glimmer Twins", the single had vague lyrical references to war and poverty in the time of the first Iraq conflict...
"Rock and a Hard Place" reached the American pop top-40 in December of 1989, and so far it's been their most recent hit at that level. The song spent five weeks at #1 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart. Internationally, the single went to #23 in the Netherlands, but was a minor hit in the band's native UK at #63.
From the Steel Wheels album, the track "Terrifying" reached #8 on the Mainstream Rock chart, before a third "pop" single, the downtempo "Almost Hear Me Sigh", gave the Stones their third #1 rock hit from the record, while going to #50 on the Hot 100 (it'll be an upcoming "robbed hit"). They successfully toured behind the album in 1989 and 1990, with the resulting Flashpoint live album arising from the shows. A studio cut tacked on, "Highwire", topped the Rock chart and went to #57 pop in 1991. They continued to record studio albums through the 90s, with rock radio still showing love, up till 1997's "Anybody Seen My Baby?", from Bridges To Babylon, which held at #3 for six weeks. In 2005, the band scored their most recent top-40 hit in Britain, "Rain Fall Down" (#33). In the States, their last time so far on the pop Hot 100 came with a remix of their classic "Sympathy For The Devil", which snuck in at #97 in 2003. Most recently, the band released a self-proclaimed blues album, Blue & Lonesome, and single "Just Your Fool" has become a minor hit on the Triple-A (adult album alternative) format.
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Here's the band on tour in 1990 performing the song in Tokyo...
...and a more fluid take from a later show in the tour in 1991...
....and yet another show in Brazil in 1995...
Finally, one of the "dance mixes" that made the 12" single done by Don Was...
Up tomorrow: Woman of the Year 2016 has some daddy issues.
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