Things I Will Keep #18: THE ROLLING STONES, Their Satanic Majesties Request

The Rolling Stones
Their Satanic Majesties Request
1967, London Records

I guess that I can understand why the longtime members of the Rolling Stones look back on this album with all the fondness that one might remember a case of food-poisoning. Despite their history of drugs and decadence and how the mere mention of their name conjures up fleshy images of the over-the-top rock star lifestyle, they ARE professionals. At least today, when they’ve cleaned up, fart through silk, blow their noses with $100 bills and play for huge crowds at the Palmolive Dish Soap Arena and the Speed Stick Deodorant Ampitheatre, where people pay three-figure sums (or more) for tickets to NOT hear shambling, lysergic drug-bombs such as “Sing This All Together” or “Gomper”.

With the exception of hit “She’s a Rainbow”, Mick ‘n’ Keith no doubt don’t want to bother with these songs today, either. Beyond a few moments, this album isn’t really them. It was a product of 1967 and if you were an English rock band then maybe you HAD to react to psychedelia in some way. Like the smell of strong pot from a fat joint, it was in the air.

You could ignore it and instead change with the times by indulging in concept albums like The Kinks and The Who did (and ignoring something is a reaction in its own way).

Or you could follow the purple flashing lights and trail of flower petals and embrace the acid and that’s what The Stones did. For one lost, crazy half a year or so, at least.

The result was out of character, strange and controversial. Decades later, Mick Jagger called it “nonsense”. Keith Richards called it “a load of crap”. It’s one of the few Stones albums of the time from which Martin Scorsese hasn’t licensed songs for his movies.

But, fuck me, it’s my favorite. I love it. As far as I’m concerned, any happy home needs a copy of Their Satanic Majesties Request. 

Back in the early 90s, when I was 15 or so and just beginning to ruin my life with an obsession with music, everything that I read about this album said that it was bad. Or, at best, it was inessential, second-rate Stones and only people who had more money than I had to spend on music should bother with it.

So, I didn’t.

I didn’t hear it until about ’97 or ’98, when I bought my first turntable and then lost my mind in the used vinyl bins. Nowadays, even common secondhand records get so expensive that you need some real money to put together a great collection. Once upon a time though, vinyl was the bargain-hunter’s choice. Depending on where you went back then (used bookstores were my haunts), classic Rolling Stones LPs could be had for about $4 a pop or less, which was the perfect price for a nice boy like me to finally get Satanic.

My first impression about this album was that it rocked. Even the stoned wandering was fun and engrossing. Put on your headphones and slip into another world.

My second impression was that it wasn’t the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band rip-off that I’d heard it was. Yes, Satanic brings exotic instruments and sound clips and an increased British flavor that went against the Stones’ bluesy schtick , but this album has the freakier soul.

The Beatles’ record, which I also love, sounds like showtunes. Paul McCartney wants kids and grandmas and the milkman to like it. They make LSD sound like candy or a walk in the sunshine.

By contrast, The Stones here give in to noise and drones and “bad trip” vibes. When your head detaches from your body and floats up above, the experience isn’t always great. Lucy In the Sky isn’t always your friend. Or, as Jagger puts it in one of this album’s highlights, “It’s so very lonely/ You’re 2,000 light years from home”.

Now, yes, it is the sound of a band who are in a rudderless phase. The story behind it goes that The Stones’ relations with their manager/record producer Andrew Loog Oldham were troubled. Mick Jagger has flat-out said that this album was intended to annoy him. According to their contract with Oldham, he had to pay for their studio costs so they ran up big bills here fucking around with dulcimers and theremins and mellotrons and spacey grooves until Oldham just up and quit.

In the end, they went without a producer for this one. They did it themselves. According to bassist Bill Wyman (who also scored a rare songwriting credit here with the terrific “In Another Land”), the recording sessions were a mess. Nobody knew who was going to show up and when they did, it was with an entourage.

SOMEBODY must have been in their right mind though, because how else does a band cough up a perfect pop song like “2000 Man” (later memorably covered by Kiss)?

And how does a bone-breaking rocker like “Citadel”, my favorite here (and later memorably covered by Redd Kross), happen when everybody’s just half-assing it?

That scenario in which rock stars show up in the studio and just knock some shit around, barely caring, and it turns out great never sits well with me. I don’t buy it. I don’t think it’s that easy.

I think that once upon a time the band cared about this album. They might have been cocky. They might have been a little out of their minds, but they didn’t just pass gas into the microphones.

I think they worked hard and then got bad reviews and then explained it all as just fucking around. Jagger and Richards had so many songs in them. They could throw these away and move on (best I can tell, they’ve never even played “Citadel” live! Whatdafuck?)

They could dismiss this album as a party gone off the rails because that’s what it sounds like. I’ve never been to a party that felt like Sgt. Pepper, but I have been to parties that felt like Their Satanic Majesties Request. Not everything is perfect all of the time. Not every interaction has a point. Nobody is sober.

When I put on this album today, I get into the party. I enjoy the party.

When Jagger and Richards recall this album, I guess all that they remember is the hangover the next day.