Rolling Stones Unveil Deluxe Edition of ‘Goats Head Soup,’ With 10 Bonus Tracks and Full 1973 Concert

Jem Aswad
·3 min read

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The Rolling Stones have announced a deluxe edition of their 1973 album “Goats Head Soup,” a 4-CD boxed set with 10 unreleased tracks and a full concert from the same year. The set is due on Sept. 4.

The unreleased tracks include the long-bootlegged outtake “Criss Cross” — which you can hear now below — as well as several little-known songs like “Scarlet,” featuring Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page on guitar (interestingly, Scarlet is his daughter’s name) and Blind Faith bassist Ric Grech, and “All the Rage.” It also includes alternate versions and mixes of album tracks “100 Years Ago,” “Hide Your Love” and others. The song “Through the Lonely Nights,” released as a B-side in 1974, also features Page and seems likely to be included.

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The full editions also include “Brussels Affair,” a 15-track radio broadcast from October of 1973 that has long been one of the band’s most well-recorded and popular bootlegs and was officially released by the band in 2012.

Additionally, the CD and vinyl box sets offer the original ten-track album in 5.1 Surround Sound, Dolby Atmos and Hi-Res mixes, along with the videos for “Dancing With Mr. D,” “Silver Train” and “Angie.” An exclusive 100-page book will feature a wide array of photographs, essays by writers Ian McCann, Nick Kent and Daryl Easlea and reproductions of three tour posters from 1973.

While it spawned “Angie,” one of their all-time biggest hits, “Goats Head Soup” was a transitional album for the Stones. Keith Richards’ heroin addiction had diminished his input and the album was clearly helmed by Mick Jagger, with strong input from guitarist Mick Taylor as well as guest keyboardists Billy Preston and Nicky Hopkins, giving the album both a funkier — as on (“Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)”) and more ballad-like feel than the raunchy string of classic albums that preceded it: “Beggars Banquet,” “Let It Bleed,” “Sticky Fingers” and “Exile on Main Street.” However, it does include riff-heavy favorites like “Star Star” (a.k.a. “Starf—er”) and “Silver Train,” and the live set shows that the band had lost none of its power.

While the Stones largely spurned the boxed-set mania of the 1990s, leaving much unreleased material to bootleggers, the band has been plumbing its vaults thoroughly in recent years, releasing several concerts on their website as well as deluxe editions of “Sticky Fingers” and “Exile on Main Street” with ample bonus tracks. More complicated is the status of their pre-1970 material, which is controlled by ABKCO, the company founded by their former business manager Allen Klein. The Stones and Klein parted under uneasy circumstances and the group has left much unreleased material in the vaults — as evidenced by the “copyright dump” of unreleased material that was briefly posted on YouTube for legal reasons in the waning hours of 2019, before its copyrights expired in the European Union — although there have been many fine releases in recent years, such as the 1965 tour documentary “Charlie Is My Darling,” an expanded edition of the “Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out” live album from the 1969 tour.

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