Monday, November 12, 2018

Review: 50th Anniversary Edition of Rolling Stones' 'Beggars Banquet'


The old story goes that Their Satanic Majesties Request was an unmitigated disaster and The Rolling Stones desperately needed to find their way back from a 2000 light-year remove from the earthier sounds that made them. The nice thing about Beggars Banquet is that the Stones made that restorative trek without entirely discarding the colors, instrumentation, and imaginative lyricism that made Satanic Majesties such a gas to certain fans (such as me). That increased creativity coupled with a return to the Stones’ blues/Rock & Roll roots is the key to their finest album. Take “Street Fighting Man”, a three-chord piece of uncomplicated Rock & Roll zapped to life with Indian instrumentation, a tangy combination of hi-fi and lo-fi recording techniques, and provocatively ambivalent lyrics about the band’s role on the outskirts of 1968’s revolutionary temper. Take “Sympathy for the Devil”, another three-chord simplicity that revives the frantic rhythms that added so much texture to Satanic Majesties with a sweeping, funny, frightening lyric that I contend is Rock & Roll’s very best. Take the murky drones and Mellotron of “Stray Cat Blues”, the ethereal take on the blues called “No Expectations”, the outlandish character piece “Jigsaw Puzzle”, the goony humor of “Dear Doctor”, the tapestry of shimmering strings on which “Factory Girl” lounges, and the lush and hippie-ish “Salt of the Earth”. Just as Let It Bleed and Exile on Main Street needed Beggars Banquet to establish their formats, Beggars Banquet would not exist without Their Satanic Majesties Request to serve as its artistic stepping-stone.

And so as Beggars followed Satanic 50 years ago, an anniversary edition of the 1968 album follows last year’s anniversary edition of the 1967 one now. In my review of the 50th anniversary edition of Their Satanic Majesties Request, I expressed some disappointment that there were no bonus tracks—nothing at all that was not on the original album. Since that release made it clear that bonus tracks, or even contemporaneous singles, would not be part of these reissues of sixties-era Stones albums, I won’t waste time griping about the absence of, say, a bonus single of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” b/w “Child of the Moon” in the 50th anniversary edition of Beggars Banquet. There are still some missed opportunities though. Rob Bowman’s essay was a real highlight of the 50th anniversary edition of Satanic Majesties, but there are no notes at all with the Beggars Banquet set. Since Beggars Banquet was really only mixed in stereo (its rare mono edition is a fold down), it’s no big deal that most of the album is not on the bonus 12” disc featuring the mono mix of “Sympathy for the Devil”, but there is a very unique mono mix of “Street Fighting Man” that should have been included on that piece of vinyl as well. You can’t say there was no room for it, especially considering that the disc’s B-side contains no music at all.  

However, a flexi disc with a rare Jagger interview recorded during the recording of Beggars Banquet only released in Japan is a pretty cool bonus, although it suffers from the issues of its sub-par medium. I had to force the disc down over my record player’s spindle and the stylus started skipping as it got closer to the end of the disc. As for its content, the interview is as shallow as them come but it does touch on a fun array of period topics: the Stones’ collaborations with The Beatles, the prevalence of Asian instrumentation in Western Rock, and Mother Earth, a label the Stones were considering starting but never got off the ground.

As for the main attraction, Beggars Banquet is a great album that sounds really good in its new vinyl incarnation, though the best sounding thing in the set is that mono mix of “Sympathy for the Devil” spinning at 45 RPMs. Its bass sounds particularly deep.  I also dig the packaging, which wraps the groovy, banned toilet cover in an outer sleeve featuring the less-offensive/less-interesting invitation design.

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