The Stones followed up their least-original-titled first album with a cleverly-named sophomore release for the American market with 12 X 5, released in the latter days of 1964. (Meanwhile, the British market had to endure a far more boringly titled Rolling Stones No. 2 that had almost nothing in common with this album except for the cover.) Being an early Stones album, it's still more covers than original stuff, and even among the originals "Nanker Phelge" represents about as much as the embryonic Jagger/Richards partnership here. While some are more jams than songs ("2120 South Michigan Avenue") or fairly primitive stabs at songwriting ("Congratulations"), others show clever synthesis of their bread-and-butter covers ("Grown Up Wrong"). However, this early in the game, it's probably better to have more covers anyway because the Stones were still just so good at bashing them out, fast and powerful. The only one the seems a little awkward, being more of pop provenance than R&B or blues, is "Under the Boardwalk". "Time Is On My Side" and "It's All Over Now" are veritable classics in the Stones' repertoire, however.
12 X 5 is one of three albums that had no proper UK counterpart (the others being Rolling Stones Now! and December's Children). As indicated often before, the early Stones catalog confuses the $%^& out of me. Every album through Between the Buttons is either a UK or US album, many sharing the same title with different tracks, and frequently sporting different mixes. As is well-known from the Beatles mono mix analyses, many early British artists mixed in mono for the UK and stereo for the US. When the re-releases hit for the Rolling Stones catalog, some titles like Aftermath appeared in both forms, while others omitted the UK versions. Although I would need complicating graphing software to be sure, I think at the end of the day the 5 UK albums and 7 US albums fairly well cover everything except maybe the earliest singles.
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