For the first installment of Track by Track, I’ve chosen The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, probably the most controversial and misunderstood album the guys ever released. Largely dismissed as a misguided Sgt. Pepper’s rip-off that betrayed The Stones’ blues and basic Rock & Roll reputation, Their Satanic Majesties Request is undeniably symptomatic of Mick Jagger’s yen for trend-hopping, yet I personally find it to be a far more intriguing and complex album than Pepper. As we’ll see, there is still a great deal of blues and basic Rock & Roll beneath the Mellotrons, strings, horns, synthesizers, sitars, bells, and whistles of Their Satanic Majesties Request, and The Stones hardly relinquished their trademark nihilism in favor of flower-power platitudes. Rather they cagily adapted their established sound to psychedelia, injecting bluesy elements into the Moroccan-influenced jams, vaudevillian larks, space rock excursions, and baroque ballads that dominate the album. Not everything is completely successful, but it’s all interesting and greatly deserving of reassessment by any listener who isn’t too blinkered to accept The Stones attempting anything other than unadorned blues and Rock & Roll.
Today The Rolling Stones tend to speak of Their Satanic Majesties Request through embarrassed smirks, justifying it by saying that no one can work outside of the zeitgeist (Dylan didn’t seem to have a problem with that, though). But had the album not received such a pitiless critical drubbing you can bet your ass that the band would have embraced it with greater enthusiasm. Instead they all seem to have a rather ambivalent relationship with Satanic. In 1972, Mick Jagger told the New Musical Express, “At the time I kinda liked the album, and then I went through a period when I really hated it. Now I find that it’s good to listen to.” Just two years later, he would say, “I’m rather fond of that album, and I wouldn’t mind doing something like that again.” In the interim, 1973's Goat’s Head Soup contained a track called “Can You Hear the Music”, which sounds like a relic from the Satanic days. “Continental Drift”, from 1989’s Steel Wheels could also be interpreted as a tribute to this maligned oddity, and the subsequent “Urban Jungle” tour featured the first ever live performance of a Satanic Majesties number: “2000 Light Years from Home”. In 1995, Jagger told Rolling Stone, “It's a sound experience, really, rather than a song experience. There’s two good songs on it: ‘She's a Rainbow’ and ‘2000 Light Years From Home.’ The rest of them are nonsense.” At other times he unconvincingly suggested it was actually a comedy album.
Keith Richards basically shared Jagger’s opinion that most of the album was crap, while tossing in “Citadel” among the good tracks. Jagger and Charlie Watts at least admitted it was fun to make (and it sounds like it was). Other members of the band, particularly Bill Wyman and unofficial Stone Ian Stewart, have been less equivocal about their dislike of the album, yet it has enjoyed something of a critical reassessment in recent years, Kurt Loder labeling it “unjustly underestimated” in 2002 and the All Music Guide calling it “unfairly undervalued” in its four-star review. I, for one, rate Their Satanic Majesties Request as my personal favorite Rolling Stones album, even though I’ll admit that Beggars Banquet (which places many of the themes and a good deal of the instrumentation of Satanic in a less otherworldly environment) is their best. Their Satanic Majesties Request solidified both my love of psychedelia and my love of The Rolling Stones, and while I’m a fan of most phases of the band’s career, none fascinate me like that fleeting period when they donned a bunch of goofy Merlin hats, cranked up their sitars and Mellotrons, and conjured the most exotic, most spellbinding music of their seemingly endless career.
(Instead of embedding audio clips, which slows down this site considerably, I’ve included links to the appropriate clips instead).
Their Satanic Majesties Request by The Rolling Stones
Originally released December 8, 1967 on Decca Records
Produced by The Rolling Stones
Track 1: Sing This All Together
