29/8/17 - The Rolling Stones - Their Satanic Majesties Request - 1967/2017 - John Lennon On The Stones As Copyists Of Beatles Ideas

Album Of The Day

The most polarizing Stones album of all, despite its melodic, fun-filled Psychedelia. It’s mostly criticised for jumping on the Psychedelic bandwagon and ripping off the Beatles after Sgt. Pepper. I guess you’re never allowed to rip off your contemporaries but you are allowed to rip off your heroes as both The Stones and The Beatles did on their early albums. I’d see this more as a tribute like Hendrix playing the title track from Sgt Pepper’s at a live show in London a week after its release, with The Beatles in the audience.

In the end none of this matters because originality is one thing, quality another, opinion subjective. The songs are still good, aren’t they? Perhaps they just wanted to get away from repeating themselves, attempting the same trick over and over again as most bands do – The Beatles of course didn’t do that.

With the summer holidays almost over, this lovely looking package for this controversial album appeals as one of the first Christmas presents of 2017 – I for one will happily add this to my collection. Hold on for the flood of new albums as the silly season approaches. If you haven’t heard this record, you’ll wonder what all the fuss is about as it simply sounds like one of those records from the sixties. But what this ‘transitional’ album did was lead The Stones away from their early incarnation, beginning with their first album in 1964 and ending with Between The Buttons in 1967. It made them reassess and took them to arguably their greatest run of records – Beggars Banquet (1968), Let It Bleed (1969), Exile On Main Street (1971), Sticky Fingers (1972) and Goats Head Soup (1973) – included if not just for Angie.

Below is the promo video for the new release and a short audio, only two minutes of John Lennon adding his opinion to it all. I won’t be talking about the songs on this album – you should know all about them already, plus I’ve added some links to the In Deep Music Archive two years hence where I connect the album more closely to The Pink Floyd rather than The Beatles. One last thing, I wonder whether the idea for the Satanic Majesties’ 3D cover might have worked for a 3D Sgt. Pepper’s?