The Rolling Stones: Beggars Banquet - 1968

   

After the ill-advised and uncharacteristic venture into psychedelia that was 1967's Their Satanic Majesties Request, The Rolling Stones were in dire need of a re-discovery or reassertion, whatever the case may be, of both their image and their musical roots. 

They needed to get away from the counterfeit feelings of "community" and hippy love for all that they seemed to have drifted into, almost unwittingly. Musically, they needed to forget about matching The Beatles, forget psychedelia and get back to their blues rock roots. They did exactly that with this, one of the "big four" albums that straddled the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies - Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street. Blending blues rock with nods to early delta blues and Americana-style country music they adopted their "bad boys of rock" personae once more and became the band parents didn't want the children liking, the band that was indeed the spawn of the devil. 

That old devil thing was never given greater significance than in the album's dramatic, iconic opener, Sympathy For the Devil - a menacing, intoxicating mephistophelean brew of mesmeric voodoo-influenced percussion, searing Keith Richards guitar, insistent "woo-ooh"  backing vocals and one of Mick Jagger's best ever sneering vocals. An absolute Stones classic. I can never hear it too many times, it sounds great every time, really. It was also really ground-breaking in 1968 as well - all that danger, sleaze and decadence. 

From here on it was pretty much blues to the fore with the stark, bass and slide guitar-driven No Expectations, with its plaintive, bluesy vocal and laid-back, dusty blues sound. It was The Stones at their most authentic, blues-wise.  

 

Dear Doctor was a bit more upbeat, but it was still very much "blues" in its ambience - acoustic guitar again and a wailing harmonica in the background and Jagger leering away in his best cod-US accent. The Stones were cementing themselves solidly now as blues rockers, no messing around with songs about space travel, Eastern mysticism or British music hall pastiches. 

This "new Stones" would see them through another five decades and counting. Richards was responsible for a lot of this blues influence, particularly as the group's other real blues aficionado, Brian Jones, became an increasingly infrequent visitor to the sessions, due to his burgeoning drug abuse. Richards took on much of Jones' workload and it became arguably his finest set of contributions to a Stones album, and that is saying something. As for Jones, producer Jimmy Miller had this to say - "....and the others, particularly Mick and Keith, would often say to me, 'Just tell him to piss off and get the hell out of here'...". How sad that it had come to this.

In Parachute Woman we had a chugging, solid blues rocker with some superb guitar and another great, slightly slurred vocal - the bluesy Stones really were back - and how. Jagger sings it as "paar-shoot wohmmain". 

 

The lengthy Jigsaw Puzzle began with some excellent slide guitar, a bassy vibe, rocking piano and lyrics that were decidedly influenced by Bob Dylan's Desolation Row - "here comes the Bishop's daughter..". The Dylan influence is also there in Jagger's vocal delivery and it is more rocky than the previous three definitely blues numbers.

Street Fighting Man was an ideal anthem for the turbulent summer of 1968, which saw students rioting in the streets and fighting running battles with police, particularly in Paris. The song takes Martha Reeves & The Vandellas' Dancing In The Street and paraphrases its title and meaning into something darker. Musically, it gives us the first truly great guitar "riff intro" since (possibly) Get Off My Cloud or Under My Thumb and Jagger's affected vocal - "my name is called disturBOWANCE ....what can a poh-wa bo-way do, sep' play in a rogh-roll bai-yand?". Great stuff. As a ten year old boy who had always preferred The Stones to those milksop Beatles, this was music to my young ears. This was how I wanted my Stones to sound, even then. 

The Delta blues was well and truly back again with the acoustic blues of Prodigal Son, a rambling, thumping blues about feeding swine and killing the fatted calf. Elton John reprised that particular imagery on his 1973 song Bennie And The Jets - "we're gonna kill the fatted calf tonight", or something like that. Anyway, I digress. After three years of treading lightweight sixties water, The Stones were made for this sort of material as the sixties came to an uncertain end. 

The menace and parental disapproval returned on Stray Cat Blues, about it being "no hanging matter, no capital crime"  to have sex with a fifteen year old. Different times indeed. The Stones were nicely re-revealing themselves as rude, haughty, arrogant and rough-edged and one feels the music scene needed them to be like that. Musically, the song ends with a great piece of Richards guitar similar to that used in Sympathy For The Devil.

Factory Girl is a lively, acoustic guitar and percussion piece of country-style rock. Rather than aping The Beatles as they had foolishly tried to do on some of Satanic Majesties, The Stones were very much in The Band of The Basement Tapes territory now, although the music still had their own unique stamp on it.  

 

Salt Of The Earth was an anthem to the honest working class which is a little bit incongruous from The Stones, to be honest, but it is a pretty good slow rocker with a lazy singalong gospel-style chorus. It was somewhat incongruously covered in the early seventies by reggae singer Dandy Livingstone. 

1968 would prove to be the beginning of The Rolling Stones' best four years. This album heralded it perfectly.