It opens with an acoustic rendition of Greensleeves, a track presumably recorded around the same time as Love is Blue and intended as a pop chart possibility rather than an album track.
The side also includes Beck's Bolero, recorded before the rest of the album (we need a B-side for the single territory) and tends to support the use what we've got on hand to fill out the album hypothesis. Not that there's anything wrong with the track itself, a bolero rhythm with cascading guitars and a thunderous play-out, forty-two years later it's still one of my all-time favourites.
In between those two there's Rock My Plimsoul, a Beck/Stewart original that's a straightforward twelve-bar, albeit a twelve bar sung by a great vocalist with a bloody good guitarist working in call and response tandem.
Again supporting the fill it out on Side Two theorem, Blues De Luxe is a live exposition of a group of old blues themes with some classy interplay between Stewart and Beck. At a touch under eight minutes some might question the length (I don't). Nice piano from Nicky Hopkins in there too.
But the killer punch is still to come. I Ain't Superstitious is the old Willie Dixon/Howlin' Wolf number worked over and pummelled, along with the listener, into submission. A swaggering vocal from Stewart, an abundance of wah-wah action from Beck working around the stop-start riff, a mini-drum-solo and a further flurry of wah-wah and we're done. Magnificent.
If you take the album, drop out Greensleeves and Beck's Bolero and play the rest in sequence, you've got, arguably, the equivalent of a well-balanced live set. A heavy introduction through Shapes of Things and Let Me Love You, a slight breather for Morning Dew, back to full-on for You Shook Me, then the mid-set slowdown through Ol' Man River. Back into rockin' mode for Rock My Plimsoul, a vocal/guitar showcase on Blues De Luxe and a stomping finish with I Ain't Superstitious.
Cop that, young Harry!