So, here we are at the end of this mini series. It's been a joy to shed a little more light on these neglected platters. Listening note: almost forgot this as it's become so much the norm for me. All three of these albums were heard for this writing in their hi resolution digital masters made available on the 2002 SACDs. To date, this the fullest and best format I've used to listen to this music. Sorry if you thought the photos used for illustrations I've put up here but I'm just not a fan of vinyl.
The first thing to deal with here is the charge that this one was a carbon copy of Sgt Pepper. Actually, I won't yet. I'll end with that.
This one was started just after the previous one was released in February 1967 but it didn't appear until December of that year. Between times there were drug busts, trials, setbacks, bloated social lives that found their way into the cogs and gears of the band's machinery. Andrew Loog Oldham, himself a force of barely controlled chaos, gave up in disgust and walked out of the studio and the band as a whole. Ruddlerless and wasted, the band somehow got this out. For decades Satanic Majesties has been regarded as a failure that should have gone unreleased, the year 1967 serving as a period of trial from which they emerged as the progenitors of the BIG FOUR. With that in mind you could also see the album as the rock bottom from which they rose to greatness. Me? I like it enough to leave on because the worst tracks are still interesting and the best are sensational.
Another reason this album is considered an annoyance is the notion that acid wasn't the Stones' drug and that the smoke and the speed of the first few could give way to the coke and the smack of the BIG FOUR and we'd all be happy. It's a kind of detour into shallow faddism before the band could find its feet and place in history. I think it was a record plagued by administrative ill health which yet revealed inspiration and delight. Again, this is one I can just leave on once it's playing. That's the album test passed for me.
The Stones made it to the end of their worst year of the 60s with a statement that felt like it had taken some knocks. They yet had the time for some good jokes and spectacular setpieces. The single that this album is closest to is the double whammy of We Love You and Dandelion. The first is related to the drug busts and trials that almost closed the shop for good. It is big and as dark as the prison corridor where it audibly begins. A quick piano figure rolls over a cliff to a huge expanse of accusation and relief. A heavy backing grinds and thunders below some ethereal harmonies that are audibly aided by Lennon and McCartney. Dandelion is sheer joy, jumping about on a spring day in a field in sheer drunkening freedom as harpsichords and Beach Boy vocal shimmers proclaim the return of the sun. Nothing but light and beauty, there. And then, much later, came the album.
But it's good. It's good because the Stones sound like they're having fun with the subcultural pretensions at the same time as fulfilling them. It's also good because this is a Stones track but it sounds like Stockhausen's demo tapes. It's serious but not at serious as Pepper. It's fun and more fun than Pepper. And it sounds good.
Citadel. Without a gap Keith hammers a gigantic barre chord riff from his painted Les Paul Custom through tremolo with the intensity knob on ten. E-A-D-E. Then the whole band bashes into the song. Jagger, almost as buried as he was in 19th Nervous Breakdown or Standing in the Shadow lopes over the beautiful noise of it, talking about landing in New York like a crusader. The flags fly dollar bills. The shiny metal cars move through woods of steel and glass. Oh, Candy and Cathy, hope you both are well. Please come see me in the Citadel. An imaginative take on modern travel when you're destination is an expensive hotel room filled with Babylon. A reed instrument whines a luscious line through the metal of the verse chords, adding something oddly epic. The girl's names in the chorus are punctuated by the piercing ring like an anvil or closely mic-ed finger bells. The solo barre chords that play through once before each verse at one point miss a chord. It's probably editing but someone left it in. It sounds like the song is too powerful for itself and has to recover and get back on its feet. No one ever seems to mention this number but it's one of the fiercest and most infectious rock songs the band ever recorded.
In Another Land. A brittle harpsichord and descending cello figure strides boldly before relaxing and we get not Jagger but Bill Wyman singing through Keith's tremolo amp from Citadel about wandering around an acid trip as the sounds of fairyland roll out before him. This is one of those songs that have their own colour palettes with the vermillions, golds and blues of the cover art moving across it like air paint. The melody is really lovely for all of Wyman's evident lack of confidence singing it. The chorus bashes in with a gang of strong vocalists (including Jagger and an audible-once-you-know-he's-there Steve Marriot). Wyman's lead vocal while hitting the notes with ease is a little too Ees Lunnon to really convince but that works for me as an installed flaw. I wish Mick had sung it but it offers variety and the textures are too pleasant to dislike it because he didn't. Delicious.
2000 Man. It wasn't until this was on cd that I realised the snoring that seemed to start it off on the LP was actually the last bit of the previous track. It makes sense but I still like the whimsy of putting the snores there (with a little bit of Gomper in the background). I liked to think it was Brian, again adding something unusual. Now I have to think it was Bill.
A lovely folksy figure on a bright acoustic plays the initial melody. Jagger supplies the tune when the guitar has finished with it. It's the year 2000 and the narrator is detached and confused, controlled by the technology that surrounds him before the song kicks into the Oh, Daddy chant with a middle 8 buried in there somewhere about youth and age. Despite the small melodic payback in this larger section there's plenty to ride on including a compelling guitar chug beneath a rich organ wash instead of a solo. We end on the original tune, grander, sadder, as the sustain 4th figure travels further away into the galaxy beyond the fade.
Sing This All Together (See What Happens). Flutes on the mellotron remind us of the intro to Strawberry Fields Forever before. Someone coughs. People talk and laugh in the background. "Where's that joint?" asks someone and we jump into more DI guitars playing the brass riff of the opening number. More clinky percussion and mellotron and we begin to understand that this is pretty much all we're going to get out of this track, jammy guitars and sound effects. It's like the dream that Aftermath's Going Home would have if songs themselves could dream. Jagger frequently shrieks and screams like a higher primate the way he would a year later on Sympathy for the Devil. Tempos and time signatures change because they can. Chants fade in and out. Wordless vocals, ecstatic or murmured appear and vanish. The brass section is still being paid so they hang around and blare now and then. If you leave it on and relax it works fine as a soundscape. If you are waiting for the snatch of chorus at the end you are going to be driven to fury. And, yes, there is a Sgt Pepper joke just before the the oscilattor and shortwave woooooos kick in for the fade. I shouldn't but I really like this track
She's a Rainbow. A carny shouts over the crowd to spin a wheel. A quick fade and the piano figure starts, hesitant at first but soon straight into a gorgeous foretelling of the vocal melody with arpeggios played in the higher register. If you've already noticed how strong the keyboard playing on this album is you already have felt the benefit of adding session maestro Nicky Hopkins into the mix. The first of many collaborations with the band, his work brings light to the entire piece. Here more than anywhere else. Once the initial theme is established Charlie kicks the band into the pounding verse about a girl who comes in colours all around. Acid and sex in constant collision. With the sparkling high piano, glittering strings from future Led Zep bassist John Paul Jones, the odd little girl harmonies in the backing vocals and the barely contained stream of consciousness inspired lyric this song is like the best boiled lolly you've ever had, near fatally sweet but almost sexually tangy at the same time. The Beach Boys might have sounded richer and more ethereal but their music never smells of anything to me. If you know the particular aroma you can sniff here it will make you smile.
The Lantern. Ominous distant bells. High Leslied organ and acoustic guitar playing a blues figure. A shimmer of electric guitar through tremolo. Hopkins' piano almost like cocktail jazz beneath. Jagger's clear but soft voice emerges from a cloud of octave and fifth harmonies for each line.
The story is out of Tennyson, Lefanu or Poe. Lovers make a pact that whoever dies first contacts the other from beyond the grave. He asks her to bear light for him to see her, whether awake or asleep. The block harmony of the word "please" shimmers like a chandelier. Both spooky and warming and expertly mixing blues tonality with classical orchestration (a beautiful soft figure on the horns stands in for the first few lines of the last verse as the lady appears) and romantic narrative poetry. No one ever seems to remember this song in the back catalogue. They are ripping themselves off if they skip it, though.
Gomper. Organ. Tremolo flutes, tablas, an electric 12 string and sitar in tandem. The props room ws empty while this one was being recorded. Vocal harmonies from some distant clime describe a scene of flowers by a lake. A beautiful woman swims to the shore and dries off in the sun. The jamming takes over and eventually finishes. Sounds like pseudy porridge but it's actually quite beautiful. If anything or anyone else comes to mind here it is not the Beatles but the Pink Floyd of Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Not a rip off, just simliar territory.
2000 Light Years from Home. I like all of this album but it is dominated by three indestructible numbers: Citadel, She's a Rainbow and this one. Citadel reshot a modern city as though seen by someone from ancient history. She's a Rainbow mixed its psychedelia with the sex all too often left out of the monastic weirdness more typical of the sub genre. 2000 Light Years adds a kind of whispered horror to the romance of space travel, a kind of journey that Moebius might illustrate or Jodorowski direct (part of the team at the centre of a failed attempt on Dune, in fact).
Backwards piano chords loom from darkness. Someone plays the piano strings like a cembalo, randomly, dissonantly as more backwards chords fly in gravity-free. A muted picked bass plays a chunky statement of the tonality. A rude knocking from the drums, slipstream ride cymbal and it's take off as Jagger breathes the progress in a very economical lyric. Mellotron strings shimmer like the speeding starfield. We keep getting further away. Between 600 and 1000 light years there is an instrumental break with a guitar so distorted its chords are beyond identification. They discharge rather than play like bursts of rocket fuel. A shimmer of echo tail passes from one side to the next like a comet. We land somewhere and everything rests (the mellotron sighs to a stop). A radio whine or a theremin wails out of control while the bass riff from the start gets things working again and we're off again on Bell flight 14 for a rendezvous on Aldeberan with its green desert sand. Now we're 2000 Light Years from home which means we are never going back. The vocals are further away, stronger but reverbed and down in the mix. The announcement, made a few times is followed by more of the creepy struck piano strings, warped distorted guitar bends, accents on the toms and a dissipating mellotron. Whatever the narrator now sees is wondrous and terrifying. A quiet waft of echo tail crosses the stereo image and fades like the dying signal.
On With the Show. A doorman informs what I always see as a bowler hatted city worker of the delights in the club. "Yes sir, they're naked and they dance." A cool jazzy riff from Keith's Les Paul and Jagger is the MC, welcoming the audience through a megaphone. A breakdown returns to the sinister classicalism of the verse but with Jagger in full voice, a lot closer, assuring the patrons that if they get too pissed during the naughty show and are beyond paying for the delights beyond closing time that the club will look after the cab. Then it's back to the MC with the megaphone. The tone is niether satirical nor judgemental here. Rather, there is an opportunity taken with the kind of London club of the song's physical setting. If Back Street Girl was a kitchen sink movie then this one was made by Hammer. It might even be a goodbye to the club scene that now, beyond its youth had become a closed meat market or more understandably for these men in their mid twenties, boring and predictable. The song ends but the piano keeps up the boogie woogie until it too, has to shut its covers and leave. End.
So, is this an ersatz Sgt Pepper? Yes and no. Mostly no.
Remember that outside of what the teen mags would have their readership believe the Beatles and the Stones were friends. They were the closest in fame levels and the only ones who could release anything and get it close to number one if not at the very top. And camped on the twin mountains of the height of 60s rock fame they almost only heard each other. "So who are you getting do your cover? Michael Cooper? We'll give him a go, too, then." They went to the same parties and recording sessions (which could be the same thing) and shared everything they could. Beyond touring, they formed the most exclusive club in the cultural world, a kind of pop culture Illuminati. If one did something the other was going to have a taste, too.
Nik Cohn had this relation perfectly. While the Beatles were perceived to balance each other out from the motherable Ringo to the ascerbic John the Stones didn't balance they were nasty heavy, shook off the matching suits and glared at their audiences. If you take Sgt Pepper with its Good Morning Good Morning to add sour to its Lovely Rita then you can expect Satanic Majesties to follow the dissonant opening number (featuring John and Paul on rowdy, un-fabslike backing vocals) with its even weirder formless reprise at the end of the side. If the Lantern was long so was the chirpy jam with a mini song in it that came straight after. Sgt Pepper was the Beatles 1967 album. Satanic Majesties was the Stones'. That's really it. The Beatles put a doll in a Stones fan jumper. The Stones imposed tiny copies of the Beatles from the Pepper gatefold in the decor and costumes of the SM cover.
But there's something else. If you play both albums together you might get the impression that you are listening to the apex of the summer of love's pop music. The real picture is that the groundswell of newer and younger acts had made it to their own studios and staged their own psychedelic happenings by the truckload. From the accessible like the Move or Syd's Pink Floyd to the obscure, avant garde and dangerous from the realm where being a force in the local underground scene and being a local star could be indistinguishable. The Captain Beefhearts, Arthur Browns or even the rapidly rising Jimi Hendrix were assuming the centre of the performing world that the two at the top of the oligarchy were directly threatened by. The rivalry felt at the top of the mountain didn't just go horizontally and the response to it had more panic than magisterial confidence.
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