FEATURE:
Prodigal Sons
The Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet at Fifty-Five
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ON 6th December…
IN THIS PHOTO: The Rolling Stones in 1968/PHOTO CREDIT: David Bailey
it will be fifty-five years since The Rolling Stones released their masterful seventh (U.K.) studio album, Beggars Banquet. I have written about them recently, as they put out their excellent new album, Hackney Diamonds. If we discuss the peak of The Rolling Stones, many will put it between 1968 and 1972. They had this magnificent run of albums that began with Beggars Banquet. After 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request, a direct rip-off I think of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, luckily The Rolling Stones went in a different direction and were more individual for Beggars Banquet. Producing a hugely memorable album, I want to discuss it further as a big anniversary is approaching next month. A massive commercial success around the world, many would argue that Beggars Banquet is the best album from The Rolling Stones - maybe contentious but, when to you consider how focused and thrilling it is, it would be a fool who argues too long and hard! I will come to some features and dives into a sensational album that remains so fresh and influential to this day. Many associate the 1968 album with classics like Sympathy for the Devil though, in truth, all ten tracks are flawless. With no weak moment or dropped step, this is the band at maximum strength and ability! Such a tight album that has some of their best material on it, this was the start of a golden run. Udiscovermusic.com wrote about Beggars Banquet last year. They too noted how everything changed for The Rolling Stones with the release of their seventh studio album:
“The Rolling Stones remain rightly proud of their album Beggars Banquet, which marked a return to their more classic sound after the previous psychedelic experimentation of Their Satanic Majesties Request.
The band have said that Beggars Banquet “changed everything for The Rolling Stones,” describing it on their official website as the album that showed them reaching “their musical manhood.”
The album’s famous opening track, “Sympathy For The Devil,” was written at a time when Mick Jagger had been reading about the occult. He and Keith Richards – who jointly composed nine of the ten tracks on Beggars Banquet – initially gave the song the less shocking working title of “The Devil Is My Name.” In their powerful lyrics, the Stones imagine Satan’s appearances at crucial moments in history, and there are references to the crucifixion of Christ, the Russian Revolution, World War II, and JFK’s assassination. Musically, the song is also memorable for the piano work of master session man Nicky Hopkins.
There are also lots of brilliant guitar solos by Richards, who said that, at the time, his discovery of open five-string tuning for the recording sessions – which took place between March and July 1968, at Olympic Sound Studios, in London, and Sunset Sound, in Los Angeles – helped him improve the way he played. Richards recalled, “The tuning really reinvigorated me, it transformed my life. I had hit a kind of buffer. I just really thought I was not getting anywhere from straight concert tuning.” Richards would use the technique on later Stones hits such as “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Start Me Up.”
Interesting guest musicians are scattered throughout Beggars Banquet. Joining Stones regulars Jagger, Richards, Bill Wyman (bass), Charlie Watts (drums) and Brian Jones (guitars) were Dave Mason of Traffic, who played the Shehnai woodwind instrument on “Street Fighting Man.” The talented young guitarist Ry Cooder played mandolin on “Factory Girl,” though he was uncredited at the time.
A core bluesy feel runs through Beggars Banquet, from the Robert Johnson-inspired “No Expectations” to the murky two-minute gem “Parachute Woman,” which was recorded on a cassette player and double-tracked for effect, and which features some moody harmonica from Jagger. The seedy “Stray Cat Blues,” featuring Rocky Dijon on congas, has the hallmarks of the energetic production of former drummer Jimmy Miller.
The only song not written by Jagger and Richards was “Prodigal Son,” which had been composed by Mississippi bluesman Reverend Robert Wilkins back in 1929. Happily, Wilkins was 72 at the time the Stones paid their tribute and he enjoyed a boost from the royalties that helped fund his work as a religious minister.
Another notable aspect of the album was the portraits that the band commissioned from photographer Michael Joseph to go in the gatefold artwork. The photos, which evoke the work of Old Masters such as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, showed the group dressed in outlandish clothes that seemed to blend Swinging 60s London with Dickensian rascals. It is no surprise that Time magazine’s review of Beggars Banquet, which was released on Decca Records on December 6, 1968, described the Stones as “England’s most subversive roisterers since Fagin’s gang in Oliver Twist.”
There is, however, a poignancy to the album. Though it marked the start of a period of musical creativity and excellence for The Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet also saw the last album appearance of founder and original leader Brian Jones, who drowned seven months after the album’s release, at the age of 27.
If it’s to be remembered as Jones’ final contribution, Beggars Banquet is also, in all aspects, an excellent album of bluesy rock at its potent best”.
On the album’s fiftieth anniversary – 6th December, 2018 -, SLATE argued how 1968’s most important wasn’t The Beatles’ eponymous album: it was The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet. It is understandable comparisons are made. Whilst I favour The Beatles as a piece of work, in terms of shifting narratives and defining groups, Beggars Banquet is a bolder and more important statement. An album that took The Rolling Stones to new heights:
“I give the Stones about two years,” a 20-year-old Mick Jagger remarked to an interviewer in June of 1964. Fifty-four years later, the quote has become one of the wrongest predictions in music history, as the Rolling Stones gear up to once again hit the road in 2019, adding to their legacy as rock ’n’ roll’s resident avatars of parodic longevity. In the summer of 1964, though, it would have been totally reasonable to wonder if the Stones even had two more years in them. Jagger and Keith Richards had only just recently begun writing original songs and hadn’t had an American hit yet. They were still a year away from “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” their first No. 1 in the U.S., which would kick off a run of eight Top 10 singles in less than two years. And they were four years away from Beggars Banquet, the album that would revitalize their careers and, to no small degree, alter the trajectory of a genre.
One could argue until the cows come home over what the greatest album of 1968 is: Lady Soul, Music From Big Pink, The White Album, Electric Ladyland, and Astral Weeks all deserve a place in the conversation, to name just a few. But Beggars Banquet, which turns 50 years old this week, might have been the most consequential. It was the first work to show that a rock act could reinvent itself in the face of irrelevance, the first great “comeback” album of the genre, and the earliest indication that rock ’n’ roll lives might be capable of something like second acts. At the end of a year that saw an explosion of double albums and single tracks that took up the better part of an LP side, all adorned with ever-newer forms of sonic gadgetry that promised musical corollaries to other consciousness-expanding materials of the day, it was a mostly acoustic album steeped in blues, folk, rockabilly, and other, more inscrutable influences that it felt like the band had conjured from some ragged musical beyond. It was mature, painstaking, and ferociously intelligent, all things the Stones had rarely been previously accused of being. It was, weirdly, from a band who’d spent their early years as the music’s foremost exemplars of incorrigible youth, a road map toward something like adulthood that didn’t involve quitting the road and gradually disintegrating, a route their more-famous countrymen had recently taken. The Rolling Stones are now in their sixth decade of touring behind the slogan of the “World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band.” Beggars Banquet was the first work that rendered this claim credible.
The Rolling Stones of 1968 can’t really be understood without discussing the Rolling Stones of 1967. That year, the Beatles had released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Doors had all rocketed to stardom; and the enormously successful Monterey Pop Festival and the attendant “Summer of Love” offered the strongest evidence yet that a revolution was enfolding in youth culture.
For the Rolling Stones, however, 1967 had been a year of personal turmoil and professional humiliation. In February, Jagger and Richards were ensnared in a drug bust that kept them in the glare of the British tabloids for the better part of the year. Richards began an affair with Anita Pallenberg, the ex-girlfriend of bandmate Brian Jones. (Richards and Pallenberg would remain together for more than a decade.) The once-prolific band’s productivity slowed, and given the explosion of innovation happening around them, the Rolling Stones quickly began to seem on the sidelines of history. So they did what all FOMO-afflicted midtwentysomethings do: They tried too hard. A new album finally arrived in December 1967, Their Satanic Majesties Request, an ill-advised attempt at Pepper-style psychedelia that was derided by critics and sold fewer copies than any album they’d made to date. Many wondered aloud whether the Stones were done, and who could blame them? This Jim Morrison kid was better-looking than Jagger anyway.
Then, in May 1968, the Rolling Stones returned with a new single. Produced by an American expat, Jimmy Miller, whom the Stones had enlisted after firing longtime manager Andrew Loog Oldham, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” sounded like nothing the band had ever made before. It was lean and pummeling, a churning cauldron of distorted guitar, off-kilter chord changes, shakers on the bridge, and sneering, slurred vocals. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash/ It’s a gas, gas, gas” were the only words most people could decipher, and no one knew what they meant. No matter. It went to No. 1 in the U.K. and topped out at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, kept out of the top slot by tracks like Herb Alpert’s “This Guy’s in Love With You,” Cliff Nobles & Co.’s “The Horse,” and Gary Puckett and the Union Gap’s godawful “Lady Willpower,” a fact you should feel free to mention the next time someone waxes nostalgic about what great taste everyone had in the 1960s.
When Beggars Banquet arrived in December, it was easy to assume it would continue this move into dark aggression. The album’s lead single, “Street Fighting Man,” released in the States in August, had boasted a sleeve featuring a graphic image of police brutality that had caused it to be quickly removed from shelves, and the song was widely banned from radio play in the wake of the unrest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
But instead, Beggars Banquet arrived with the most diverse, searching, and deceptively ambitious collection of music the Stones had ever made. It found the group straying down the corridors of country and folk on tracks like “No Expectations,” “Dear Doctor,” and “Jigsaw Puzzle.” By 1968, Brian Jones was already withdrawing from the band, his alienation fueled by creative disillusionment and substance abuse. On Beggars Banquet, the last album the Stones released during his lifetime, Jones plays guitar on only four of the album’s 10 tracks.
The Rolling Stones are now in their sixth decade of touring behind the slogan of the “World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band.” Beggars Banquet was the first work that rendered this claim credible.
Jones’ creeping divestment opened the door for Richards to more fully assume the role of the band’s creative conscience. Richards’ soul is all over Beggars: riff-obsessed, compulsively rhythmic, and exquisitely musical. The same guy who plays the heavens-rattling acoustic guitar that opens “Street Fighting Man” plays the Jamerson-ian bass line on “Sympathy for the Devil.” He plays the electric guitars that sound like actual cats on “Stray Cat Blues”—all of them—and even croaks the opening lines of “Salt of the Earth,” the album’s closer, which might be the most convincing attempt at “political” songwriting in the Stones’ catalog.
Richards’ guitar solo on “Sympathy” is one of the most celebrated in history, and for good reason. It’s perhaps the first truly inimitable instrumental moment on any Stones record, its funky, squawking audacity carrying traces of Hubert Sumlin and Scotty Moore but filtered through an utterly unique musical mind. It’s fitting that it arrives less than three minutes into the album’s first track, as Beggars Banquet was also the first Stones record that sounded like it couldn’t have been made by anyone else in the world—not the Delta and Chicago bluesmen that the Stones worshipped, not the R&B virtuosi of Stax and Muscle Shoals, and certainly not the Beatles, whose shadow had loomed over the group since 1963.
Jagger had always been a good lyricist, as earlier hits like “19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Get Off of My Cloud,” and “Satisfaction” demonstrated, but Beggars found him in new territory altogether. The refrains from tracks like “Sympathy” and “Street Fighting Man” are so engrained in the cultural consciousness that it’s almost impossible to imagine them as being new: “Pleased to meet you/ hope you guess my name,” “but what can a poor boy do/ ’cept to sing for a rock and roll band?” But the writing in the verses is where it’s really at: “I watched with glee while your kings and queens/ fought for 10 decades over the gods they made.” Or the Martha and the Vandellas shoutout in the second line of “Street Fighting Man,” “ ’cause summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street,” and the perversely reverent sneer on that one-word change”.
I will come to some reviews soon. As it turned fifty in 2018, there was a lot of interest. Although not quite as an important an anniversary, the fact Beggars Banquet is fifty-five soon is quite significant. Albumism were among those who provided their perspective on Beggars Banquet back in 2018:
“Beggars Banquet became the Stones’ attempt to reconnect with their roots. The vast majority of the album is decidedly blue collar, with the group repurposing blues riffs and styles and making them conform to the Stones’ style. However, the album features not only two of the Stones’ best and most beloved songs, but also two of the best and most beloved Rock songs in history.
Beggars Banquet’s release was delayed for six months due to the album’s cover art. The original artwork pictured the top half of a dilapidated toilet in a bathroom located in a Southern California Porsche dealership, the walls of the stall adorned with the scrawls of Jagger and Richards. Apparently, representatives from the Stones’ label found the sight of the toilet offensive and they refused to distribute the album with that version of the cover.
The fact that the cover was a source of such controversy now seems bizarre. It’s hard to believe that a photo of the top half of toilet would be considered grounds for shelving the album, considering what was going on in the world in 1968. Eventually, the band and the label settled on a new cover, resembling a wedding invitation. And regardless, the album’s two biggest hits were pretty controversial in their own right.
The album’s other towering anthem, “Street Fighting Man,” was also the source of controversy. Anyone who’s picked up a history book knows that 1968 was a tumultuous time for citizens of the world. The globe was gripped with civil unrest, with prominent leaders being assassinated, the streets filled with young people protesting unjust wars and civil injustices. With “Street Fighting Man,” Jagger takes the perspective of one of these young men, fed up with half measures, advocating for armed revolution against the corrupt government system. The powerful summer rock anthem was apparently inspired by the experiences of radical activist Tariq Ali at a London protest against the Vietnam War. In an interview with Jann Wenner for Rolling Stone in 1995, Jagger revealed that the song was also inspired by the massive May 1968 protests and riots in the Left Bank of Paris.
Beyond the two singles, the Stones spend much of Beggars Banquet honoring their Blues influences. “No Expectations” is one of their more quietly beautiful songs, a slow, acoustic, and at times subtle meditation on heartbreak. The song is anchored by Jones’ exquisite performance on acoustic slide guitar, one of Jones’ final contributions to the group. Beggars Banquet was the last full album he recorded with the Stones before his death; he appeared on a few songs on Let It Bleed, which was released after he drowned.
Other songs on Beggars Banquet are steeped in Blues traditions. “Prodigal Son” is a straightforward cover of a Reverend Robert Wilkens song, appropriately filled with Biblical imagery as Jagger deepens his vocal tone, accompanied by Richards on guitar and Jones on harmonica. “Parachute Woman” is a ribald Blues song, loaded with extremely unsubtle sexual innuendo. Dirty Blues songs are a staple in the genre, and with “Parachute Woman,” the Stones follow in the footsteps of Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man” or Muddy Waters’ “Bus Driver.” In fact, Jagger’s requests for the titular woman to “land on me tonight” or “blow me out” are relatively tame in comparison.
The album comes to a close with “Salt of the Earth,” the Stones’ dedication to the working class. The song opens with a verse by Keith Richards, who had rarely sung lead vocals for the group at that point. The Rolling Stones are refreshingly honest in their reverence towards the “common foot soldier.” They’re genuine in their admiration for those “humble of birth,” but they also acknowledge that they, as rock idols, don’t share a lot in common with the “rag taggy people.” The group recognizes the sacrifices made by the “lowly of birth” without trivializing their pain, but attempting to draw a false parallel with their travails as musicians. The song ends with a rousing chorus by the Watts Street Gospel Choir and a piano solo by Hopkins. The use of a full-on gospel choir makes this song a prelude of sorts to “You Can’t Always Get Want You Want,” another of their most iconic songs.
The Stones followed up Beggars Banquet by closing out the ’60s and opening the ’70s on an extremely high note, following it up with Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, the live Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out, and Exile On Main Street, all included among the true jewels in their discography. And while each is a unique entity, during this period the Stones stuck with the ethos of using their blues rock roots as their foundation.
The Stones would go on to make other missteps throughout their career, but these later entries can be seen as the cost of doing business when a group starts getting long in the tooth. Time has made these lesser releases fall away in perspective, and albums like Beggars Banquet remain to define the group’s legacy”.
I am going to come to some straight reviews. The BBC wrote about Beggars Banquet in 2007. They noted how the 1968 album turned The Rolling Stones into the greatest Rock and Roll band in the world. Definitely a towering achievement that turned the band from legends into untouchable gods. You can hear so many albums since that directly nod to Beggars Banquet. Artists that owe a debt to The Rolling Stones’ masterpiece:
“The album that set the template for The Rolling Stones as we know them today, Beggars Banquet was an exercise in getting back to basics after the redundant excesses of their previous album, 1967's psychedelic Their Satanic Majesties Request.
Working for the first time with American producer Jimmy Miller, the Stones are here at their sharpest. Keith Richards reclaimed responsibility for the group after a troubled year, recording several basic tracks at home on cassette; hence the gloriously wonky backings on several cuts.
However, Beggars Banquet sometimes struggles to meet the standard set by Sympathy for the Devil, its opening track. From its shimmeringly effective piano, bass and conga introduction, its marriage of highly sensual music and provocative lyrics has to be one of the greatest in rock.
The lyrics still have the power to chill and many legends have arisen concerning its recording, such as pluralising the name Kennedy when news of Bobby Kennedy's death came through on 6th June during the sessions and the way the song's trademark "woo woos" came from nowhere, led by Anita Pallenberg from the control booth. With this track, the Stones' demonic reputation was sealed.
There is much to enjoy. Street Fighting Man conflated Jagger's imaginary hard-done-by blues man momentarily confused and out of step with the political climate of 1968. The self-referencing and mocking Jig-Saw Puzzle is a treat; Factory Girl is folky and pastoral; Salt of the Earth, made poignant by its performance in the Rock'n'Roll Circus film, closes the album.
Preceded by the single Jumping Jack Flash, Beggars Banquet established the Stones as 'The Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band in the World'”.
IN THIS PHOTO: The Rolling Stones Through the Past, Darkly cover, 1968/PHOTO CREDIT: Ethan Russell
I will end with Rolling Stone assessing The Rolling Stones. Jon Landau provided an extensive look at Beggars Banquet. I have included a lot of it. Few reviews have gone as dee!. As it was written when the album came out, I guess there was this excitement and freshness hearing an album like Beggars Banquet – something you don’t feel as much in retrospective reviews:
“In many ways 1968 has turned into another one of those blues revival years. The Stones were into that when it was still verboten to show up at Newport with an electric guitar. It wasn’t until five years after they recorded “King Bee” that Slim Harpo finally made it into a white rock club. Happily, even back then, the Stones never got bogged down in the puritanism that mars so many of the English blues bands. They were from the beginning a rock and roll blues band. They may have mimicked Harpo note for note, Keith Richards may have played a straight Chuck Berry bag for three-quarters of their first album, but it always wound up sounding like rock and roll: loud, metallic, and trebly. The Stones were the first band to say, “Up against the wall, motherfucker,” and they said it with class.
Since that beginning the Stones have tried their hands at a lot of things: arrogance, satire, social commentary, “psychedelia,” lewdness, love songs, you name it. Each phase seemed to flow naturally from the one that preceded it and none of their phases ever really changed their identity as a band. In every album but one it seemed to me that they managed to feel the pulse of what was happening now and what was about to happen. For example, “Satisfaction,” that classic of the rock and roll age, both expressed the feelings of a moment and foreshadowed what was about to unfold: the elevation of rock and roll to the primary cultural means of communication among the young. There we were in the early summer of 1965 with folk music dead and nothing really exciting going on. And then there were the Stones sneering at the emptiness of what so many people saw all around them, not telling you to do anything about it, but letting you know that they feel it too. The music, with its incessant, repetitious, pounding guitar and drums, and that tension filled voice, was so permeated with violence that just listening to it was cathartic.
And the Stones live. If the violence of their music was cathartic, how to describe their concerts? I saw them several times during their early American tours, most memorably in Lynn, Massachussetts, in the spring of 1966. The Stones had their usual major dates lined up on their itinerary and the Lynn gig was not one of them. Lynn is a suburb of Boston and they must have decided to do a quickie number for less than their usual fee in order to fill in an open night. The concert was held in an open air football field that held 10,000 people. It rained that evening, a steady drizzle, and when they finally came on there was a lot of tension and movement.
On Beggar’s Banquet the Stones try to come to terms with violence more explicitly than before and in so doing are forced to take up the subject of politics. The result is the most sophisticated and meaningful statement we can expect to hear concerning the two themes — violence and politics — that will probably dominate the rock of 1969.
Beggar’s Banquet is not a polemic or manifesto. It doesn’t advocate anything. It is a reflection of what goes on at the Stones house, with a few pictures of the house itself thrown in for good measure. Part of what that house looks like has to do with what it’s surrounded by and the most startling songs on the album are the ones that deal with the Stones environment: “Salt of the Earth,” “Street Fighting Man,” and “Sympathy for the Devil.” Each is characterized lyrically by a schizoid ambiguity. The Stones are cognizant of the explosions of youthful energy that are going on all around them. They recognize the violence inherent in these struggles. They see them as movements for fundamental change and are deeply sympathetic. Yet they are too cynical to really go along themselves. After all, they are rock and roll musicians, not politicians, and London is such a “sleepy town.”
They make it perfectly clear that they are sickened by contemporary society. But it is not their role to tell people what to do. Instead, they use their musical abilities like a seismograph to record the intensity of feelings, the violence, that is so prevalent now. From the beginning they themselves have been exponents of emotional violence and it’s hard to imagine any group more suited to voicing the feelings of discontent we all share in these most violent of times. Wherever they wind up themselves, they are writing songs of revolution because they are giving powerful expression to the feelings that are causing it.
The words are beautiful. Notice how Jagger emphasizes them: “Ev-ry where I hear the sound of charg-ing, march-ing peo-ple.” The Stones obviously revel in the images of charging people: they’ve sure seen enough of them at their concerts. But they are too mature and too realistic to fall into the trap of slogans and easy answers. All they can really do is sing in a rock and roll band.
“Sympathy for the Devil” rounds out the group of ambiguous, socially aware songs. To me, it is the most distinguished song and performance of the year. Lyrically, it is a striking picture of a world gone mad. Cops are criminals. Saints are sinners. God is the devil. Whoever is on top makes whoever is beneath him the enemy; actually, it is always the men on top who are the enemy. Those who claim righteousness for themselves are only interested in perpetuating their own power. Those they vilify are really the righteous ones, until they achieve power for themselves. Then they imitate their predecessors and the process repeats itself through history. The narrator, Lucifer, was there when “Jesus Christ had his moment of doubt, of pain.” He was there when “the blitzkreig raged and the bodies stank.” And he lays “traps for troubadors who get killed before they reach Bombay.” And who is telling us all this? A man of wealth and taste. Sounds like what a lot of people would like to become.
The music is brilliant. The cut opens with just the percussion—a sort of syncopated Bo Diddley, precisely the kind of thing Watts excells at. Then they add Nicky Hopkins’ rhythm piano, perfectly understated. Wyman’s simple bass line matches Watts syncopation perfectly. Throughout the cut he adds color to the basic rhythm pattern by throwing in some very pretty, loopy bass lines. After two verses of Jagger’s singing, the background voices add that ultra simple “oo-oo” accompaniment which continues to grow for the duration of the cut. By the time they reach the end, they sound like a plane taking off, accelerating at an inexorable pace until it finally reaches its normal flight speed, at which point it levels itself off.
Beggar’s Banquet is a complete album. While it does not attempt Sgt. Pepper-type unity it manages to touch all the bases. It derives its central motive and mood from the theme of “revolution” but isn’t limited to that. Over at the Stones house there’s plenty of room for groupies, doctors, jigsaw puzzles, factory girls, and broken hearts as well. Yet even these subjects are colored by the impact of “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man.” Beggar’s Banquet ought to convince us all that the Stones are right. By putting all these different themes on the same album the Stones are trying to tell us that they all belong together. They do.
The art work in this album is quite nice. The center spread is a particularly appealing depiction of the Stones acting out the album’s title. However, it continues to grate on me that the cover of the album is not what the Stones intended, and that the Stones were forced to abandon the one they had originally intended to use by London Records. The idea that a record company executive should have the right to tell the Stones what is a suitable cover for their album is an outrage. It is typical of the Stones that they held out against the new cover for quite a while and then gave in. It just wasn’t worth the continued hassle. Nonetheless, giving in doesn’t solve the problem. As long as record companies are run by businessmen, artists will never achieve full control over how their art is presented to their public. There has been too much glib talk lately about the power of musicians. Unless musicians organize themselves more effectively, and unless journalists give them all the support they can, things like this will happen again and again. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech but it doesn’t forbid a record company from censoring the artists it controls via an exclusive recording contract.
The next time New York’s East Side revolutionary contingent wants to shake somebody up (besides Bill Graham), why don’t they head uptown to London Records? I’m sure the President of London Records could use the education”.
On 6th December, the phenomenal Beggars Banquet turns fifty-five. With The Rolling Stones perhaps nearing the end of their recording career – many feel Hackney Diamonds is their farewell -, they can look back at albums like Beggars Banquet with immense pride. Such a game-changing and wonderful album that was this revelation from a band who, in 1967, were consciously chasing The Beatles and doing pastiche replication of their iconic album covers and concepts. Stepping into different territory in 1968, The Rolling Stones almost fought against a misstep like Their Satanic Majesties Request. Dispending Psychedelia and what they considered to be popular and appropriate for 1967 (The Summer of Love), Beggars Banquet is a tough, pulsating and swaggering statement of intent from the Stones. Beggars Banquet is the type of album that thrills the…
BONES and soul.