Vinyl Release

Following on from last month’s Vinyl Release about brilliant records that nobody else likes but you, I bet I’m not the only one who has an album that, although you’ve played it on and off down the years, even the decades, you can’t decide whether it’s any good or not. On one occasion it may sound great. Significant even, a landmark piece. Other times it just sounds... well, rubbish.

Excess Baggage
One such record for me is Their Satanic Majesties Request, the fifth album that the Rolling Stones released in the UK. It came out in 1967, a tumultuous year for the band, and was saddled with more baggage than any work should ever be expected to bear. For one thing, The Stones claimed to hate it. Or, at least, they turned their backs on it pretty swiftly once it was done, and moved on (or back) to more familiar territory. Keith Richards called it ‘a load of s**t’, while Mick Jagger said simply that it was ‘nonsense’.

Before even playing it, you can sense Their Satanic Majesties... is in some sort of trouble. Its lenticular cover, the band dressed as wizards, was easily interpreted as a rip-off of Sgt. Pepper’s..., which was released sixth months earlier, and appeared to back up John Lennon’s put-down that wherever The Beatles went musically, The Stones trotted along dutifully behind. Others, relying on the band’s carefully manufactured reputation for meanness and rudeness, reckoned it might even be a mockery – certainly, the closing track ‘On With The Show’, with all its Victorian music hall paraphernalia, is a brazen, if utterly dreadful, Pepper put-down.

The group at Schiphol Airport in March 1966 (l-r) Bill Wyman, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts

Do The Hippie Shake
It’s probable that there’s a hint of truth in all of the above, the upshot being that Their Satanic Majesties Request is a dopey shambles if compared to what went before and came after. In short, it wasn’t The Rolling Stones that anyone wanted, not even, it seems, the band themselves.

For The Stones the album was sloppy – not good sloppy and not cocky sloppy, just slovenly – and misshapen, lacking in the brutal hooligan machismo that had propelled them to fame. It was stylistically hippie, but lacking all pretension to profundity, spiritual searching or insight which the genre implied. It just seems to don the beads, bells and kaftans and mess about. ‘I don’t think any of the songs are very good’, is how Jagger now looks back on the record. ‘It’s a sound experience, really, rather than a song experience.’

That is true enough. However, if you can disengage it from The Stones’ swaggering lineage of ‘Satisfaction’, ‘The Last Time’, ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’, etc, and pretend it’s just a piece of early psych musical ephemera like, say, Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, d’you know what? It ain’t half bad. Or literally, it is – half the songs are good and half the songs are rubbish.

Love Is All Around
Their Satanic Majesties Request is also kind of fascinating as an historical Swinging ’60s London artefact. First, though, you need to clamber past ‘Sing This All Together’, which really is a feeble rip-off of The Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’, itself one of the Fab Four’s most flaccid offerings. Jagger had been part of the retinue paraded before the cameras when ‘...Love’ debuted on the telly in an event beamed around the globe via satellite, so he really should have known better. He certainly shouldn’t have let the eight-and-a-half minute reprise ‘Sing This All Together (See What Happens)’ debacle to ever shamble into the daylight.

On the upside there’s ‘Citadel’, which sounds like a blueprint for all those fabulously raw-yet-out-there UK-influenced American garage tunes that Lenny Kaye assembled on the Nuggets compilation by the likes of The Seeds and Electric Prunes. ‘In Another Land’ is equally marshmallow-brained, the Bill Wyman vocal reverbed as was the vogue. ‘2000 Man’ is a pretty astute Kinks pastiche. Better is ‘She’s A Rainbow’ which, of course, is a total steal from Love’s magnificent ‘She Comes In Colours’ but still a great Stones singalong.

Decca promo shot of the band from 1966, taken by Jerry Schatzberg

Tickled Pink
Arguably as pertinent to this album as The Beatles was The Incredible String Band, who were wowing all and sundry at the time with their elegant hippie vibe, taking folk into incensed, exotic climes. Nothing seemed beyond their ability or comprehension and they willingly and expertly teetered on the brink of chaos but, crucially, always steered a true course. ‘The Lantern’ and ‘Gomper’ would dearly like to be them but neither quite have the nerve to loose the shackles and dispense with their ego enough to fully take flight.

As for the album’s most rewarding track, this has to be ‘2000 Light Years From Home’. This is The Pink Stones or Rolling Floyd – whichever takes your fancy – and it’s pretty much the only time the band reacquaint themselves with the weird, threatening undertow that had served them so well in the recent past.

What still puzzles more than anything else is that there’s evidence that Their Satanic Majesties Request could have been incredible. In June of ’67, in the aftermath of the drug bust, the band recorded the non-album single ‘We Love You’, accompanied by a promo film based on the Oscar Wilde libel trial of 1895. This was brilliant – sarcastic, mocking, seething.

So... the album is either an illuminating snapshot of London in full Swing, or it’s a heap of junk that, if it hadn’t been made by The Rolling Stones, isn’t worth the time of day. Or maybe it’s just a bit of both.

Priced £26.99, the 180g reissue of The Rolling Stones’ Satanic Majesties is available online at www.sisterray.co.uk

Re-Release Verdict
Recorded intermittently at London’s Olympic Studios during breaks from court appearances in the spring and summer of 1967, Their Satanic Majesties Request has been reissued this year (2024) by Decca/ABKCO on 180g black vinyl in a gatefold sleeve [7120821]. As with 2017’s LP/SACD box set [5002-1] and 2018’s Record Store Day [6730368] limited editions, this release features remastering of the album’s ten tracks (in stereo) by renowned engineer Bob Ludwig.