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.
