The Pretty Things: Rage Before Beauty : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The Pretty Things
Snapper Music, 1999

The Pretty Things
Get The Picture?
Snapper Music, 1999

They were anything but pretty. Same goes for their life story. The Pretty Things' long run of raw deals, mad antics (notably including a plane set on fire in midair), breakups and reunions is a model lesson in career suicide. But the Pretties, still kicking with their '66 lineup intact, are fuck-you proof that endurance has its privileges.

For one thing, the Pretties are around to see their first two albums, 1965's The Pretty Things and Get the Picture?, get a proper U.S. release (plump with bonus tracks). Founded by singer Phil May and guitarist Dick Taylor, an original Rolling Stone, the Pretties were real howlin' wolves in a Britain overrun with Beatle-y dandies and Muddy Waters wanna-be's. The Pretty Things packs the band's lock-up-your-daughters-and-liquor-cabinets stage charm into tightly wound Bo Diddley covers (including the group's namesake, "Pretty Thing") and white-R&B bullets like "Don't Bring Me Down" and "Get Yourself Home." Get the Picture? is even better, a hooligan stew of scarred folk rock ("You Don't Believe Me"), roughneck soul (Slim Harpo's "Rainin' in My Heart") and fuzz-box snort ("Get the Picture?," "£.S.D"). It's the American garage-rock revolt in a nutshell, except the Pretties got there first.

After the '67 strings-laden mess Emotions, the band made a remarkable series of albums, none of them truly appreciated in their time: the psych-pop song cycles S.F. Sorrow (1968) and Parachute (1970), the pastoral roots rocker Freeway Madness (1973), the glam crackers Silk Torpedo (1974) and Savage Eye (1975). With typical recklessness, the Pretties try to pull all those changes together on the new . . . Rage Before Beauty, with mixed but often superlative results. Skip the ill-fitting covers of "Eve of Destruction" and "Mony Mony"; the band also overplays its epic-ballad hand in spots. But on "Everlasting Flame," the Pretties update the acid-soaked moxie of Sorrow without stretch marks; "Passion of Love," with its crisp vocal harmonies and blues-thug underpinnings, sounds like a hot-dog Torpedo outtake. And in "Vivian Prince," a tribute to their original, lunatic drummer, the Pretties revisit the Bo Diddley beat and recount old war stories the same way they lived 'em - with verve and pride, without apology. Some things never change, thank God. (RS 809)

DAVID FRICKE