Their Satanic Majesties Request - Rolling Stones (The)

...has been locked deep in their cellar, neglected and forgotten. But not any more. I went down to that cellar, burning torch in hand, and I heaved the massive iron door wide open to let in the light. And what I found there was shocking. I found the missing link in the evolution of that first family; I found my very own rock and roll Bigfoot (actually, I was just leafing through a pile of CDs, but a touch of Gothic can never hurt any story).
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...dark and dangerous alternative to their biggest rivals, the Beatles. The Stones also saw their first completely-self-penned album, _Aftermath_, go to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic in the summer of that year. The band could do no wrong, and what should have happened was that those pop stars of 66 went to sleep and emerged fully-formed two years later as the rock stars that would subsequently reign supreme.

But ... more

Every family has secrets. Some of those secrets are just small embarrassments that are quietly hidden away from public view until the flush fades; but others... are dark, and few come darker than the one held by that crinkly-but-venerable first family of rock, the Rolling Stones. For more than forty years a monster child has been locked deep in their cellar, neglected and forgotten. But not any more. I went down to that cellar, burning torch in hand, and I heaved the massive iron door wide open to let in the light. And what I found there was shocking. I found the missing link in the evolution of that first family; I found my very own rock and roll Bigfoot (actually, I was just leafing through a pile of CDs, but a touch of Gothic can never hurt any story).

In the long (very long) history of the Rolling Stones there was a period in the 1960s that now doesn't quite fit into the band's otherwise seamless story. The Rolling Stones of 1966 had, after a three-year climb, reached a plateau of success. They were uber-cool pop stars, feted wherever they went and seen as the dark and dangerous alternative to their biggest rivals, the Beatles. The Stones also saw their first completely-self-penned album, Aftermath, go to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic in the summer of that year. The band could do no wrong, and what should have happened was that those pop stars of 66 went to sleep and emerged fully-formed two years later as the rock stars that would subsequently reign supreme.

But the transformation proved to be clumsy and difficult, and it stretched out over a very turbulent year. 1967 for the Rolling Stones was a year of drug taking and drug busts, hedonism and public vilification in the tabloids, and for band founding-member Brian Jones it was the beginning of the end. It was also a year when the Stones flirted briefly with the musical genre of that moment, psychedelia. The result of that flirtation was a weird album of fairy-tale tunes that during its production had the working title of Cosmic Christmas. It was then decided to call it Her Satanic Majesty Requests and Requires, but the Stones' record company, Decca, objected, guessing that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II might not be too pleased with such a title. So on its release (Dec 1967) the album was given the more gender-neutral title of Their Satanic Majesties Request.

The album shone briefly in the sun (it sold very well) before being mauled by enough critics to ensure that it was buried out of sight. It was seen by many to be little more than an attempt to imitate the Beatles' classic, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, although that criticism was unfair as the two albums were wholly different beasts. The fact was, though, that when the Rolling Stones quickly went on to perfect their "greatest rock and roll band in the world" image in 1968 and 69 with the release of the seminal albums, Beggars Banquet and Let it Bleed respectively, Satanic Majesties was regarded as something of an embarrassment and locked away to gather dust.

Yet the album has always had its admirers, and when we look back on it now we can see that despite its moments of florid indulgence it was quite a pioneering work. Whilst the Stones quickly ditched the electronic 'cosmic' approach in favour of pared-down blues-inspired rock, many other bands went further down the experimental route and 'prog rock' would be their ultimate destination. The experimentations with the then all-new studio techniques of synthesisers, sound sampling and tape splicing that gave Satanic Majesties its distinctive flavour were extremely well done and no doubt provided inspiration for later musicians. It's well to remember also that the electronic tools available to musicians at that time were still very primitive, which makes the smooth electro backgrounds on most of the songs on the album all the more impressive.

Satanic Majesties was produced by the Stones themselves over the space of several months. The production was somewhat chaotic, with band members (and others) contributing parts haphazardly and often individually, but the roles played by some key contributors, in particular ace session-man Nicky Hopkins, ensured that the finished product was adequately assembled. Perhaps what damaged the album's reputation more than anything was not the music so much as the Day-Glo cover art (see photos) that so tied the album down to a particular time and place and made it stand out as anachronistic when the brief psychedelic moment passed. In the cover photo the band members look like extras from The Wizard of Oz, and the total cost of the cover art was reputed to be in excess of $25000, a considerable sum in those days (there were no fancy software packages back then, just scissors and glue).

There are ten songs on Satanic Majesties (all bar one were written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards), six of which are good and four of which are horribly of their time. It would be as well to get the bad ones out of the way first. The Lantern and Gomper are both dreamy indulgent efforts, with lyrics that call to mind the gaudy-but-memorable paintings of the Victorian Pre-Raphaelites. Lines such as "Your cloak it is a spirit shroud" and "On the glassy lake she's riding" conjure up the image of the Lady of Shalott, a favourite subject for those Victorian Bohemians. Both songs are just a little too sickly and overblown to dwell on. Sing This All Together is a song split in two (the two segments began and ended the first side of the original vinyl record). The first segment, a happy-clappy 'let's all fly to India' sing-along, is bearable due to its short length, but the second, an eight-minute tuneless jam, is turgid and a complete waste of a good eight minutes. It should be said that the lyrics throughout Satanic Majesties are all, predictably, a little 'out there' and make little sense. Yet we should also remember that this musical curry was originally intended to be served with a side order of mind-altering relishes, and 'out there' was where we were meant to go!

Among the overblown contributions, however, are a few very interesting and enjoyable songs. Citadel is a thunderous and slightly-chaotic thrash, with a pleasing mix of reverby guitar-riff, wild drum-beat and mellotron background (a mellotron was a device that could squeeze a melody out of pre-recorded sounds by way of a keyboard). The song became something of a Stones mini-classic, though it has never been played live. We then get an oddity: bassist Bill Wyman's sole credited contribution to the Stones' canon. In Another Land apparently came about after Wyman turned up for a cancelled session and began to play around in the studio. It's an oddball song for sure, but it's surprisingly good in an eerie sort of way and contains a clever lyric. Nicky Hopkins played harpsichord (and very well) and Steve Marriott of the Small Faces provided acoustic guitar and mellotron. Everyone else who was seemingly in the vicinity at the time contributed to the lively chorus.

2000 Man is probably the tightest and most accomplished song on the album. It was also a song free from outside influence, containing only contributions from the five band-members, although troubled guitarist Brian Jones was content simply to play the organ; he had given up guitar by this point and would soon decide to give up everything else as well. Satanic Majesties was the last Stones album in which Jones played any meaningful role. The song itself begins with just acoustic guitar and a staccato drumbeat but soon moves into a lively and rich-sounding chorus. Like with most other songs on the album, the instruments here are laid on a little too thickly but the overall result is not without its pleasures (this song is played in its entirety in Wes Anderson's 1996 film debut, Bottle Rocket).

She's a Rainbow is a light and airy song that will actually be familiar to many owing to its having featured in a couple of recent TV ads. The song is psychedelia at its most corny and conjures up images of sky-clad flower-children skipping through summer meadows in search of elves. A memorable piano-track is backed up by mellotron and strings - the latter were arranged by session-man John Paul Jones, who would soon ascend to the rock stratosphere as a member of Led Zeppelin - and layered vocal backing-tracks make this song memorable if only because they are so sweet. The album ends with On With the Show, a light-hearted whimsical piece in which vocalist Jagger plays the role of compère at a seedy Soho hostess club, welcoming the equally-seedy clientele: "Please pour another glass in time to watch the cabaret, your wife will never know that you're not really working late." The song is backed by the obligatory mellotron and is yet another enjoyable (if surreal) song.

I've left one particular track till last because I feel it deserves a special mention. 2000 Light Years From Home is the second last track on the album and it is (or was) a veritable classic of its genre. It's an overblown cosmic slice of nonsense that still, believe it or not, sounds fantastic. A jarring and slightly-sinister opening, consisting of plucked piano strings and reversed tapes, gives way to a hypnotic guitar-riff that repeats all through the song. This is backed by eerie mellotron and spacey synthesiser, with the whole pudding being topped off by a sci-fi vocal: "We're setting off with soft explosion, bound for a star with fiery oceans." This song is a wonderful and ridiculous delight and is probably comparable in style and context to early Pink Floyd; Astronomy Domine was a contemporary Floyd song that now springs to mind.

So there we have it: the album that dared not speak its name. Their Satanic Majesties Request was an oddity that briefly reared its head before being trampled underfoot by the radical student mob intent more on earthly revolution than cosmic exploration. Yet forty-two years after its release the album is now a historical oddity and for that reason we can happily view it without giving consideration to fashion and context; we can now simply enjoy it for what it is: a gaudy and surreal 1960s experiment with sound. And because so much of that stone-age electro experimentation still sounds good, the album is still worth a listen.

The Rolling Stones never took the exercise seriously for one moment, because the band's heart was never beholden to psychedelia. Satanic Majesties was simply a bit of fun, no more, no less. It was a way of filling in time between the legal troubles faced by three of the Stones that year. That is why the po-faced critics of the time missed the point when they chose to compare it (unfavourably) with Sgt. Pepper. The latter was a studied exercise whereas the components of Satanic Majesties were hastily fabricated as and when they were needed. Some of those components fitted and others didn't. The fact that so many did was simple testament to how adaptable the band was.

No sooner was Satanic Majesties in the can than the Stones began to plan and record their next album (without Brian Jones). The fact that that next album bore as much resemblance to its predecessor as chalk does to cheese was simple proof that the Rolling Stones' Technicolor dalliance of 1967 had been just that, a dalliance. Released almost exactly a year after Satanic Majesties, Beggars Banquet was where the Rolling Stones truly found their voice. It was an album of sublime quality and invention, an album of Stray Cat Blues and Sympathy for the Devil, an album where the Stones woke up and realised that they were rock and roll superstars and that the last eighteen months had simply been a dream. But what a dream it had been.

* Available on CD or as mp3 download.
 

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