Their Satanic Majesties Request Released: December 8, 1967

Their Satanic Majesties Request in depth

Imagine sitting down to hear this record for the first time. You last immersed yourself in a whole new Stones album 10 months ago, when you took Between The Buttons home. There were Dylan influences and some whimsical English psychedelia, but it songs like My Obsession and Miss Amanda Jones anchored it with a recognisably Rolling Stones sound. You knew where you were.

But when you put the needle to the groove of Their Satanic Majesties Request , something odd occurred. Something very odd indeed. You were greeted by a piano playing outside of the normal pentatonic scale, and were then hit by a sliding wall of brass. You checked the spinning label – had some jester put an Ornette Coleman record in your Stones’ sleeve for a laugh? But then a massed choir of voices kicked in, led by Mick Jagger and with John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s among them; and it was clear this really was The Stones - just a Stones unlike any sort of Stones you had ever heard before, or ever would again.

Some people like to put forward the proposition that Their Satanic Majesties Request is some sort of huge psychedelic joke, a weak-chinned cousin to The Beatles’ super-buff Sgt Pepper. If it is, then it’s one that is still not only pretty funny, but, on occasion, extremely charming too. It might go on a bit, it might try and get away with the same punch line two or three times; it might crib shamelessly from the cultural world that inspired it and which it reflects; but, if you can’t find pleasure in at least half of Their Satanic Majesties Request then, really, you’re taking the whole thing way too seriously.

Consider, for example, Gomper. As records of their time go, this is in the premier league:
“By the lake with lily flowers,” Jagger sings over Brian Jones’ sitar and Mellotron, “Wile away the evening hours…”
You know how this is going to go already, don’t you? Flattened, Pink Floyd-like harmonies, a wildly-wafting flute (also Jones), some chuck-it-in-when-you-like tabla from Watts, a guitar line that sounds like a hungry mouse begging for a peanut. The words drop away at 1:43, the track goes on, building ever higher and more portentous for another three and a half minutes. It is elegant and clever and stupid and self-indulgent, all at the same time – entirely Gomeperdelic, in fact, the authentic ’67 sound – or one of them anyway.

If you have a problem with “silly” you’ll be in trouble here. In Another Land is Bill Wyman’s stab at psychedelic other-worldliness – and Wyman, chap that he undoubtedly is, is one of the least psychedelic men of all time. Think of it as Piper At The Gates Of Yawn (the snoring at the end is his, but it may also be yours). Citadel has a tumultuous great churn of a riff driving it, but it’s one interrupted by sonar blips and backwards guitar noodling, both of which conspire to derail it.

Then there’s the eight plus minutes of the second version Sing This All Together which is a freeform(less) jam. It’s experimental and forward-looking, certainly. But is it any good? No, not really. It’s not freaky enough for a proper freak out, nor tuneful enough to have any sort of retro appeal.

2000 Man imagines the turn of the century and the changes that will follow – “I am having an affair with a random computer,” Jagger sings – but it relies on two not really very amazing ideas where one great one would have sufficed. On With The Show – posh accent and all – repositions Yellow Submarine’s graceful Victoriana in a theatre setting, but it’s not somewhere you’d want to visit more than once.

But then, for all that carping, there are some moments of absolute colossal genius too. She’s A Rainbow positively reverberates with joy – Nicky Hopkins’ piano dancing around the piece, his music-box arpeggios tickling up against John Paul Jones’ skittish strings.

And 2000 Light Years From Home is powerful and magical and dark and genuinely futuristic. That syncopated riff over those choppy strings? That’s trip-hop 25 years ahead of the curve. This is a vision of the bleakest ends of space written two years before man even reached the moon, while the lyrics cast you out further and further, you’re 100, then 600, then 2000 light years away.

Legend has it Mick wrote the words during the night he spent incarcerated in Brixton gaol on drugs charges at the end of June, in the middle of the Summer Of Love so beloved of sixties apologists and fantasists. (Its alternative title is, of course, the Summer Of Drugs). Having been nabbed with four amphetamine tablets, Mick Jagger was about to metamorphose from archetypal pampered and privileged pop princeling into a symbolic Counter Cultural butterfly that the Establishment would attempt to break upon the wheel of the legal system. The party was already over, had the beautiful young things but known it; and perhaps in this song Mick Jagger is among the first to acknowledge that what goes up must come down, and that there were some serious bills in the post for those who had spent so much time getting high. It was an unpopular view at the time, doubtless; but a realistic one for anyone locked behind bars on a trumped up possession charge. “It’s so very lonely,” indeed.

Is Their Satanic Majesties Request as bad as some people say? Definitely not. Does it teeter on the edge of unlistenability at times? Oh yes, more than once. Does it wear its heart on its (wizard’s) sleeve? Absolutely, sometimes ruinously so. Is it a messy, trippy, fucked-up, high-as-a-kite, pop-royalty-in-residence anomaly? Yes, yes it is; and it deserves just a little bit more love, if only for that.