BBC 6 Music Documentary
Beggars Banquet - Rolling Stones
23 & 24 July 2012
320K
Beggars Banquet is the seventh British and ninth American studio album by the English rock band The Rolling Stones. It was released in December 1968 by Decca Records in the United Kingdom and London Records in the United States. The album was a return to roots rock for the band following the psychedelic pop of their 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request.
Glyn Johns, the album's recording engineer and longtime collaborator of the band, said that Beggars Banquet signaled "the Rolling Stones' coming of age ... I think that the material was far better than anything they'd ever done before. The whole mood of the record was far stronger to me musically." Producer Jimmy Miller described guitarist Keith Richards as "a real workhorse" while recording the album, mostly due to the infrequent presence of Brian Jones. When he did show up at the sessions, Jones behaved erratically due to his drug use and emotional problems. Miller said that Jones would "show up occasionally when he was in the mood to play, and he could never really be relied on:
When he would show up at a session—let's say he had just bought a sitar that day, he'd feel like playing it, so he'd look in his calendar to see if the Stones were in. Now he may have missed the previous four sessions. We'd be doing let's say, a blues thing. He'd walk in with a sitar, which was totally irrelevant to what we were doing, an want to play it. I used to try to accommodate him. I would isolate him, put him in a booth and not record him onto any tract that we really needed. And the others, particularly Mich and Keith, would often say to me, 'Just tell him to piss off and get the hell out of here'.
Jones played slide guitar on the songs "No Expectations", "Parachute Woman", and "Jig-Saw Puzzle", and both the sitar and tamboura on "Street Fighting Man". The lively basic track of "Street Fighting Man" was recorded on a cassette deck at Richards' house, where he played acoustic guitar and Charlie Watts played on a toy drum kit. Richards and Mick Jagger were mistakenly credited as writers on "Prodigal Son", a cover of Robert Wilkins's Biblical blues song of the same name.
Release and promotion
On 7 June 1968, a photoshoot for the album, with photographer Michael Joseph, was held at Sarum Chase, a mansion in London. Previously unseen images from the shoot were exhibited at the Blink Gallery in London in November and December 2008.[4] The album's original cover art, depicting a bathroom wall covered with graffiti, was rejected by the band's record company, and their unsuccessful dispute delayed the album's release for months.
On 10–11 December 1968 the band filmed a television extravaganza entitled The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus featuring John Lennon, Eric Clapton, The Who, Jethro Tull, and Marianne Faithfull among the musical guests. One of the original aims of the project was to promote Beggars Banquet, but the film was shelved by the Rolling Stones until 1996, when it was finally released officially.
Critics considered the LP as a return to form. It was also a clear commercial success, reaching No. 3 in the UK and No. 5 in the US (on the way to eventual platinum status).[citation needed] The political correctness of "Street Fighting Man", particularly the ambivalent lyrics "What can a poor boy do/'Cept sing in a rock and roll band", sparked intense debate in the underground media.
In a retrospective review for eMusic, music critic Ben Fong-Torres called Beggars Banquet "an album flush with masterful and growling instant classics", and said that it "responds more to the chaos of '68 and to themselves than to any fellow artists ... the mood is one of dissolution and resignation, in the guise of a voice of an ambivalent authority." Colin Larkin, writing in the Encyclopedia of Popular Music (2006), viewed it as "a return to strength" which included "the socio-political 'Street Fighting Man' and the brilliantly macabre 'Sympathy for the Devil', in which Jagger's seductive vocal was backed by hypnotic Afro-rhythms and dervish yelps."[9] Larry Katz of the Boston Herald called Beggars Banquet "both a return to basics and leap forward." In his review for Rolling Stone magazine, Anthony DeCurtis said that the album was "filled with distinctive and original touches", and remarked on its legacy:
For the album, the Stones had gone to great lengths to toughen their sound and banish the haze of psychedelia, and in doing so, they launched a five-year period in which they would produce their very greatest records.
According to Martin C. Strong, Beggars Banquet was the first album in "a staggering burst of creativity" in a five-year period that ultimately comprised four of the best rock albums of all time. In 2003, the album was ranked number 57 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In the same year the TV network VH1 named Beggars Banquet the 67th greatest album of all time. The album is also featured in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
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