The album is both an offshoot of and a counterpoint to the Stones' elaborate, long-running Voodoo Lounge world tour. An expensively produced Voodoo Lounge CD-ROM (to be reviewed next month) has been released concurrently with Stripped, which is itself an "Enhanced CD" with video, liner notes and photos. The Stones, of course, were also the first (major) band to broadcast a concert over the Net—new technology has given their career energy and impetus, more than thirty years on.

It's not technology that makes Stripped such a strong album, though—it's the music, in all its original r&b and honky-tonk glory. These performances were recorded in club venues during the recent tour or in the studio; the intention from the beginning was to put together a more intimate acoustical collection in the midst of the Voodoo Lounge stadium extravaganzas. But although the idea behind the album was mapped out in advance, Stripped is wonderfully spontaneous and alive. There are 14 songs collected here and not a weak one in the bunch.

Apart from the taut, sharply etched performance of "Street Fighting Man" that opens the album, the disc's 75 minutes of music consist mainly of slower, blues-oriented numbers from the Stones' great middle period (with a few surprises thrown in). The terrific cover of Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" is one of the album's high points, but the material from Sticky Fingers, Let It Bleed and Exile On Main Street is equally potent; "Wild Horses," "Love in Vain," "Shine a Light" and "Sweet Virginia" are all at least as effective as the originals. Best of all, perhaps, are obscure genre classics like "The Spider and the Fly" and "Little Baby," which present the Stones stripped to bare essentials—lean, mean and with a directness and clarity that make the years fall away.

The CD is so good that its CD-ROM-based multimedia components seem almost redundant. But this is one of the first "Enhanced CDs"; presumably, as the format gains in popularity, the other media elements will come to seem better integrated. Produced by L.A.-based i-trax, the Stripped "enhancements" include album covers, lyrics, brief interviews with each of the band members and short video clips, including an abbreviated version of "Like a Rolling Stone." The material plays flawlessly on the Macintosh; Windows users, as usual, report trouble.

(Reviewed December 18, 1995)