‘When fact becomes legend, print the legend’ – The Rolling Stones’ pivotal album, Beggar’s Banquet.

Unlike their closest rivals, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones hadn’t served an apprenticeship in a red-light district in Germany before becoming famous, although doing so would have probably suited Keith Richards at least.  It happened for The Stones relatively quickly and painlessly but they had to do their growing up in an unsympathetic spotlight.

Although their manager, the flash and brash Andrew Loog Oldham, was still young, he had learned his trade at the sharp end of the music industry and understood marketing.  He intuited what Brian Epstein was doing for The Beatles by presenting them in a way that would be acceptable to the British media establishment and realised that doing similar was not going to work for The Rolling Stones.  Everybody was trying to copy the Epstein method anyway, and nobody was going to overthrow The Beatles – not on their own turf anyway.  Oldham recognised an opportunity when he saw it:  Why not present The Stones as the anti-Beatles?  This famously worked ended up like a dream, of course, but it also wreaked havoc upon on the psyche of the musicians involved and had other disastrous results.  Although the public thought The Beatles were all sweetness and light, this was of course nonsense, and The Rolling Stones weren’t the uncouth thugs they were made out to be either.

However, when caricatures are what people want they often get them and The Rolling Stones sometimes obliged.  No more so than in the case of Brian Jones, who unfortunately possessed the most fragile psyche of the band and had never been comfortable with the Stones-as-thugs assignation.  Despite not being a songwriter like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Brian Jones was the original driving force of The Stones and the most creative in terms of musicianship.  Many of the band’s most famous early singles were distinguished by Jones’ ability to play virtually any musical instrument he came across.  His insatiable desire to explore different musical styles helped the band to weave its way through the rapidly evolving musical landscape of the 1960s.  By 1968, however, Jones was virtually unrecognisable as the great musician he had been and would never recover.  He died in 1969 shortly after being fired from the band he had not only founded, but named too.

One can only speculate on what Brian Jones’ true problems were.  He was the most middle-class and cultured of The Stones but had a nasty habit of impregnating a succession of girlfriends before abandoning them (he had even done this while still at school) and seemed to delight in testing people’s friendships to the limits.  Nevertheless, people who knew him sometimes describe him as sensitive and ultimately ‘a nice guy’.  It certainly sounds as if there were warring personality traits within him and these could only have been compounded by the fact that Jones – again testing things to their limits – insisted on consuming more alcohol than any other Stone and drinking more too.  Nowadays his addictive personality might be seen as symptomatic of bi-polarity but back then he was left to continue self-medicating in an ultimately self-destructive fashion.

The Stones’ 1967 output had been pretty much Brian Jones’ last hurrah, remarkable considering the events of the year.

‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’ was his tour-de-force, featuring more examples of his diverse musicianship than any other Stones album to date, but it had been poorly received by the critics and dismissed as a Pepper rip-off.  Opinions on the album have been revised over the ensuing decades and it has come to be highly regarded and even paid tribute to by later musicians (The Brian Jonestown Massacre regarded it so highly they even recorded a whole album as a homage), but back then the short shrift it was given was yet another blow to Jones’ already battered ego.

Jones had been particularly damaged by 1967’s drug-busts but he wasn’t the only one.  Mick Jagger was presented as Public Enemy Number One and Keith Richards even faced a severe jail-sentence for a short time and the photos of him outside the courts reveal how distraught he really was, despite his celebrated and brave ‘petty morals’ quote.  Let’s not forget how young The Rolling Stones still were and how under siege they must have felt, and for what…  really?  They were only too aware of how hypocritical the establishment were being, since they had often encountered them in less formal and stage-mannered environments.  It was inevitable perhaps then that The Rolling Stones’ music would take on an altogether darker hue and that – what had once been a mostly manufactured image – would start to become more of a reality, even if Brian Jones would eventually disappear completely.

‘Beggar’s Banquet’ was the first album to establish The Rolling Stones formula and where the legend overtook reality.  There is a very real chance that this couldn’t happen with Brian Jones still a functioning member of the band, since his talent was too mercurial.  ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ is very much a Keith Richards album, despite the remarkable tracks Mick Jagger also wrote for it.  This was the first album Richards used his famous open-tunings on and in doing this he revitalised and energised the whole Stones sound.  ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ brought them back to their earthy rhythm and blues roots but with far more oomph and chutzpah.  Despite some occasional forays into the blues, ‘Beggar’s’ is very much a rock album, there is no psychedelia on it, no perceptible nods to hippiedom at all.  This is a band that has finally found its own home turf and is about to settle on it.  In many ways, ‘Beggar’s’ is The Stones’ blueprint for the rest of their career and they have rarely deviated from it; they may have occasionally added funk, disco and reggae but always as a flirtation, never a full-blown affair.

The album kicks off with one of the best-known songs The Stones ever recorded, ‘Sympathy For The Devil’.  The recording of it was documented by Jean Luc Godard in his film, ‘One Plus One’ and this reveals that Jagger presented it to the band as a folk song.  If it had remained as such it might not have had the impact that it did, despite the sinister lyrics.  It’s hard not to read the song as the ultimate Fuck You to the British Establishment, with their ‘petty morals’ and self-righteous hypocrisy.  How Keith Richards came to suggest setting the song to a samba beat has never been fully explained but it was a remarkable idea and gave the song its hypnotic, menacing effect.   The band would never do anything like this again. The lead guitar’s vicious, spit-venom tone is also remarkable and impossible to replicate.  It stand out among Richards’ guitar solos since the phrasing on it seems off kilter and thoroughly nasty.  Rumours have abounded ever since that this was a Jimmy Page guitar-solo (he probably started it) but – at least as I’m concerned – this is a Keith Richards solo through-and-through.  ‘Sympathy’ is the Stones at their most imaginative, it is laden with percussion, doo-wop gone-mad backing vocals, a magnificent Nicky Hopkins piano and one of Jaggers’ best vocal performances.  Nobody could ever sing this song as well as Jagger and make it so believable.

I should point out here that this was the first album with their ideal producer, Jimmy Miller.  Most of the band’s previous albums had been marred by the frankly awful production supplied by Oldham, who for some reason imagined himself as Britain’s answer to Phil Spector (he wasn’t).  A undeniably brilliant publicist but a terrible record producer.

The next track, ‘No Expectations’, features one of the last contributions Brian Jones ever made and, unusually for him by this point, it was on slide-guitar (dobro?).  This is also an unforgettable track, it has a liquidity to the sound that conjures up images of water-lilies.  Nicky Hopkins minimal, tasteful piano is another bonus and Jagger’s vocal is one of his finest.

Dear Doctor is an entertaining example of The Stones’ comical country songs.  Although the band had always had a definite appreciation for the genre (High and Dry on Aftermath for example) they didn’t really start to take it seriously until Gram Parsons began his friendly brainwashing of Keith.  ‘Dear Doctor’ certainly isn’t in the same league as ‘Wild Horses’, for instance – it was more likely to have been inspired by watching an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies’ than George Jones.

I’ve always liked ‘Parachute Woman’ even though it often remains overlooked when discussing ‘Beggar’s’.  Its bluesy stomp is combined with the blurry echo of the vocal is darkly atmospheric and rhythmically it anticipates glam.  It also highlights another one of the features of ‘Beggar’s’; it is largely acoustic guitar driven apart from a pretty minimalistic electric guitar solo, which later in the track shares the spotlight with Jagger’s moaning harmonica.  But never before was an acoustic guitar used to greater rock ‘n’ roll effect than on ‘Beggar’s Banquet’; the power in it is unequalled.  My almost life-long fascination with the guitar sound on this album lead me to purchasing my most expensive guitar; a Gibson Hummingbird, but nobody makes that guitar sound like Keith Richards did on this album.

Jigsaw Puzzle is Jagger at his Dylanesque and like most Stones songs of this period begins at a relative funky crawl but picks up speed as it goes on.  The bass is magnificent on this track, as are the drums but the most prominent feature of it is Keith Richards’ layered guitars; one acoustic strum, a simple but effective slide guitar riff and an overdriven Les Paul feeding back in the distance (or is that Brian Jones doing something odd with a mellotron?).  Mick snarls away throughout the song and the overwhelming feeling one gets is that this is a band who imagine they are fighting for their lives against the world and after 1967’s events it hard not to sympathise.  The song here may be relatively slight, but the performance is beyond reproach.

1968 was a difficult year for everybody though; lots of civil unrest, riots, Robert Kennedy’s assassination coming close of the heels of Martin Luther King’s and the Vietnam war at its hottest.  The Rolling Stones couldn’t let this go without comment and so ‘Street Fighting Man’ enters the fray.  ‘Sympathy’ could also be perceived as contemporary social comment but on this track it is far more literal.  Musically it is an echo of their latest hot single, ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ and like that song it is acoustic guitar driven.  This is meanest sounding acoustic guitar ever heard though; it explodes like a Molotov cocktail.  According to legend, Keith achieved this unique sound by placing a microphone in the sound hole of his Gibson Hummingbird overloading a cassette recorder.  Charlie Watt’s drums were recorded at the same time and they are utterly magnificent as usual, his snare drum cracking like a whip.  Both were overdubbed in a more conventional way later, but that raw, fuzzy original cassette version remains in the mix.  Melodically Keith designed the song to sound reminiscent of a police siren but it also owes a huge debt to Martha Reeves & The Vandella’s hit ‘Dancing In The Street’ (which is even quoted in the lyrics).  The effect of this is that it is one the first songs to acknowledge that popular music’s age of innocence was now over, at least as far as The Rolling Stones were concerned.

The Beatles had also recorded a song inspired by what was happening in the world in 1968, ‘Revolution’.  That also featured a guitar that was saturated in tape distortion, but in their case it was the electric variety (John Lennon’s  Epiphone Casino plugged directly into a channel on the mixing-desk).  Both songs chickened out of any form of personal involvement though; John Lennon’s was seemingly critical of those engaged in civil unrest, witheringly addressing people who carry ‘pictures of Chairman Mao’ and ‘have minds that hate’.  Lennon, by this time of course, was advocating peace and love and his chosen method of protest was the arts.  Lennon even recorded the vocal while lying down in the studio – how passive can you get?  The Rolling Stones, however, were far too cynical to ever engage in political debate, although unlike Lennon Jagger had actually attended a rally (with Tariq Ali).  Nevertheless, the only advice ‘Street Fighting Man’ offers is that poor boys should sing for rock ‘n’ roll bands and that rioting ‘can’t provide solutions’.  It’s the music that does the most talking though and ‘Street Fighting Man’ sounds and feels incendiary.  It is also the last Rolling Stones track to feature Brian Jones playing Eastern instruments (the sitar and tamboura) both of which breath fire onto the track.  The shehnai (an Indian double-reeded oboe) at the end of track was played by Traffic’s Dave Mason and here it erupts from the speakers like an air-raid siren.  Nothing is out of place on this track.

The next track on ‘Beggar’s’ is much more low-key and a folk-blues cover.  It’s probably the least remarkable effort on the album but the biblical imagery suits its dark palate.  Jagger’s vocal is quite mannered, however and this is quite off-putting.  The harmonica sounds like it was played by Brian Jones but I’m not sure about that – it might have been performed by Jagger (Jones had after all taught him how to play the instrument).  Once again, this track features a fine Keith Richards performance on acoustic guitar.  On any other album this track would stand out but here it comes across as filler.

‘Stray Cat Blues’ is the Stones at their least politically correct, featuring as it does Jagger’s boastful musings about sex with underage groupies.  On the ‘Beggar’s’ version of the song the girl in question is ‘15 years old’ but he often lowered the age to 13 during live performances to cause as much as much offence as possible – an example of this can be heard on the Stones’ live album released in 1970, ‘Get Yer Ya-Yas Out’.  Musically the Beggars’ is excellent and it features far more electric guitar than any other track on the album – a cranked up, ear-piercing Gibson Les Paul (which actually does sound reminiscent of a spiteful stray cat).  The vocal is again a sterling performance.  Jagger by 1968 was a fully formed and self-assured rock singer – he was more than that, he was archetypal rock star.  Every rock singer who followed him from this point owed him a huge debt, both vocally and stylistically.  This is Jagger at his wildest – even he wouldn’t have been capable of this kind of performance a year earlier.  ‘Stray Cat Blues’ ultimately becomes a jam at the end, but unlike other bands who were recording long-ass guitar solos and so on, The Stones were more about the groove and that is what this track becomes before it draws to a close.  It takes a pretty fascinating route though.

Mick Jagger has since been dismissive about ‘Factory Girl’ but I find the track interesting, although I didn’t used to like it.  It was inspired by Edie Sedgwick according to some critics, but they always say that.  The Stones brought in some outsiders to play on the track again, the most audible being Ric Grech from Family on fiddle and Rocky Dijon on congas.  Charlie Watts played some distinctive table on this while Richards stuck with his acoustic guitar.  The mandolin on ‘Factory Girl’ used to annoy me because it simply follows the vocal melody, the consequence of which makes the Jaggers’ voice sound peculiar and indistinct.  I’ve since got over that, however.  It’s just not one of his best vocals, again it sounds far too mannered.  Regarding the mandolin, most sources indicate that this was not actually one at all – in fact, it was the mandolin setting on a mellotron played by one of three possible people.  Personally though, I think it was a mandolin, mainly because I can hear some notes picked on it at the beginning of the track.  Furthermore, I think Jones played it, because it has his unorthodox stamp all over the performance – but what do I know?  He was in a bad state at the time.  The end result is one of the Stones’ weirdest and rootsiest tracks, but Jagger should have made more effort with the vocal.

Which leads us to the final track, ‘Salt Of The Earth’.  This song’s biggest inspiration seems to have been gospel and it even features The Watts Street Gospel Choir at the end of it.  This track notably features a Keith Richards vocal performance for one of the verses and it is a good example of how well he could sing when on form.  Jagger sings extremely well on this track too and the performance sounds heartfelt even if the lyrics are a trifle odd (more about that later). ‘Salt Of The Earth’ is again dominated by Richards’ acoustic track and he also overdubbed some simple electric slide playing.  Nicky Hopkins contributed some high octane piano (his playing is – to me – one of the key musical elements of Beggar’s, since it all over the album, thus makes up part of its appeal).  All of the band are on form of this track, Charlie Watts’ drums are typically elegant, pushing the dynamics of the song appropriately and Bill Wyman’s bass is tasteful.  The lyrics on ‘Salt Of The Earth’ are odd and need to put into context.

The Rolling Stones always had a strange attitude to what they perceived as the ‘straight’ world.  This is evidenced by their much documented term ‘Ernies’ for the men they encountered in London cafes when they were a struggling band.  ‘Ernies’ were the people who called them long-haired layabouts and worse, while lecturing them about getting a proper job and arguing for the virtues of hard work.  The Stones hated ‘Ernies’; it was a derogatory term.  Brian Jones didn’t even like Bill Wyman, referring to him as ‘a bit of an Ernie’ – he only accepted him into band because he had two amplifiers and transport.    So perhaps the sentiments of ‘Salt Of The Earth’ were designed to put this right, but if that was indeed the case, referring to a ‘faceless crowd’ and ‘they don’t look real to me’ seems a bit at odds with it.  The Stones may have discovered a grudging respect for working people to a fashion, but it didn’t go too far.  The overall feeling I get from the track is how alienated The Rolling Stones felt at this point.  The Stone may have found their authentic musical voice with ‘Beggar’s’ but they still seemed like people who were unsure about where they fitted in the world at large.  Being so notorious at such an early age was obviously difficult for them.

This is why I find ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ such a fascinating album.  It captures The Rolling Stones at a time that they felt most under siege, wounded, but at the height of their powers.