The trade off is they wanted something sounded over driven and saturated such as the old blues albums often had. Second .. having it textured and with all the dynamics is great ... but for a blues album .. IT would get a little slow .. a little long .. a tad drawn out. Yes, but:
First, though recorded on tape in a great room, the mix and digital conversion make it sound exactly like what young people have been listening to since the 1990s - strained-sounding, brickwalled, over-loud noise. The sound is passable on the slow songs, because there's more studio air between the instruments. But the fast songs are more headache-y than anything Butch Vig ever invented for post-Punk torture purposes. The sound they got on
Some Girls would have sufficed.
Second, I agree that one wouldn't want a blues cover album to sound too precious (and I'm grateful that the dubbed sound of a phono stylus running out its groove isn't heard). However, you can find tons of great blues albums - made on the cheap in the 1950s and 1960s by engineers and producers with no care for the artists or product - that sound less fatiguing and more inviting.
And, as I pointed out in my first point, the fact that the sound
is fatiguing makes the 12 songs - one over five minutes long, and too much covered in Rock - seem "drawn out," even at under 43 minutes' total time.
Last, the vocals-and-harmonica-on-top mix is overdone and deleterious on "I Gotta Go" - allegedly featuring Eric Clapton, but who knows, because the guitars are so subdued in the mix that Jagger might as well be backed by only bass and percussion. Compare this to any Muddy Waters or early Stones blues - the competing versions of "I Just Want to Make Love to You" will do - and you can see that aiming for the dynamics of a cheapie blues record is to aim lower than Muddy, and to make the guitars vanish as they never did on a Chess album, or on any Stones record. Don Was is nuts for letting them put this mix out. Were the engineers smarter at Regent Sound Studios, 1964?
Speaking of white boys, and white producers, the first two J. Geils Band records were recorded better, without any noticable overthinking, and they still came off like records in the blues tradition. In the case of this "one-take"
Blue and Lonesome, all the overthinking went into attempting analog authenticity within the digital aesthetic.
Is
Blue and Lonesome a good record? Yes.
Is it painful to listen to? Yes.
Jagger to the
LA Times: “That’s the essence of some of those Chess songs,” he added. “You can make counter-arguments — that Hubert Sumlin jumps out of some of those Howlin’ Wolf records. But on a lot of them you can’t discern who’s playing what or what kind of instrument it is until you really listen.
“My thinking on the mixing of it was to re-create some of those things,” he said. “You’re hearing the sound of a band; sometimes you can’t figure out if it’s Keith or Ron who’s playing the solo, or who’s playing the rhythm part. It’s not a wide stereo — it’s a very narrow stereo, and with the amount of distortion it sounds like this one ball of fire.”
Maybe a bit too much of a good thing. See illustration below:
"And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book." -- Revelation 22:19