1968 at 50: BEGGAR'S BANQUET - THE ROLLING STONES

The way it's told, this is the one where they broke from the bubble of the Beatles, the true Stones emerged, purged from their flunked leap at psychedelia, as the finally formed Greatest Rock n Roll Band in the World. This was the first of the big four that would forever define expectations of them. This and Let it Bleed and Altamont made them the meanest rock supermen on the globe. But there are problems with this story.

First, The Stones did benefit from the Beatles but they began and continued as themselves with records that the fabs would never have made like Satisfaction, 19th Nervous Breakdown or Jumping Jack Flash. It's not about capability here, it's about motive and will. Beggar's Banquet isn't a band taking the blue pill and soaring into their real selves, it's an album of developing musicians and writers restablishing what is important to them and letting go.

And think about it, most of these songs are dominated by acoustic guitar. Some recent commentary has suggested the influenced of The Band but I'm not interested in them enough to want to find out. What I hear is a mature approach to what was present on the first Stones album but now feels both relaxed and confident. It's not the first Stones album. It's the next. But it's also brilliant and tuckloads of fun.

It begins in what would have sounded primeval back in the year. Jungle percussion and the shrieks of a preverbal people. Suddenly there's a piano and a Mick Jagger introducing himself as a man of wealth and taste who then tells his tale of influencing the development of the human race from a long long year ago to shout out "who killed the Kennedys?" The chorus hopes you guessed his name but it's in the title of Sympathy for the Devil.

The progress of this one from a gentle folk strum to the frenetic and freaky anthem it became is documented in a film by Jean Luc Godard called variously One Plus One and Sympathy for the Devil. Damned and misunderstood, the movie's mix of fictional urban guerillas and the real Rolling Stones annoys both the politically active and fans of the band. That's kind of intentional but it's a lot less deep than many who whinge about it claim. All you need to do is watch: various street level would-be revolutionaries go through increasingly detached and meaningless military style training to the commands recorded on a tape, or, from the right, dictate from an already printed dogma book, an aloof Eve Democracy is interviewed while strolling through a wood, giving replies that are either cryptic or feather light. And so on. Meanwhile, a super group who don't really need to get out of bed in the morning work tirelessly on their new cultural bombshell taking it to heights of power it was nowhere near at the beginning. Urban guerillas with nothing to lose tread water while the supposedly idle rock stars work in concert to fashion something new: what is wrong with this picture?

This is not part of the song as heard on the album but it's cool knowing about it. One of the greatest album-openers has a disruptive movie that bears witness to its gestation. Could stop there, really.

But then you'd miss out on the poignant No Expectations which could reflect on many things the band members were going through but, featuring some sublime slide work from the soon to be doomed Brian Jones, I'll give it to the member who really wasn't going to pass through there again.

Dear Doctor is the kind of country twanger that Jagger used to self-consciously lampoon with lots of yeps and whoops. That happens here, too, but everyone's in on it and it's played with such conviction that it's hard to resist singing the harmony or laughing. Parachute Woman takes a tough acoustic blues figure and a guitary vocal tone, lets what will become Keith Richards' signature hot clean lead snake through it and a lyric that pushes sexual innuendo so far that the attempt could only be called tokenistic. Jigsaw Puzzle adds a Dylanesque whimsy to the same kind of acoustic electric interplay and takes the dramatic low end slide from Brian Jones (a lot meaner than No Expectations) and augments it with a screaming high note in the key line of the chorus which sounds epic. The side ends with the bad trip falling into a kind of controlled cacophony that is altogether beautiful. In vinyl terms the side is two long songs with smaller pieces between and a sense of zero surface space wasted.

Side two begins with one of Keith's cassette figures where an acoustic is fed through a cassette player and overdriven to sound like something that is neither electric or acoustic. Add Jones on both sitar and droning tamboura and a giant spacey drum that might be a tom or a snare without the snare. The I-VI chord figure breaks for a chorus that both extends and opposes it. The fade out intensifies with drones on the tamboura and a shennai and a raga like figure on the piano. It's hard to hear where the power is coming from as the vocal is so distant and the guitars not electric and turned up to "stadium". The truth is that the wholeness of the unit is pushing forth in a way that already announced itself on the previous side but is here offered in concentrated form. This is the model of Rolling Stones rock singles for the next few years and will be regarded as the Stones sound, eclipsing the half decade of earnest labour before it.

The next song is a blues done as nakedly as the band would ever do. Jagger is probably erring on the side of vocal impression but it is a sincere take. Keith Richards' guitar is spidery and full by turns. There's some band history in the way here, though, and it's superficially unpleasant. The white invitation cover art credits the song to Jagger and Richards. This was the record company's intervention. The original (the toilet with graffiti) had the song correctly as by The Rev. Robert Wilkins but this didn't make it on to the song list. The problem is that the white cover was the official one for decades until the '90s cd rerelease reinstated the credit. This has apparently been rectified as far as royalties go but for any fan who took up the band's own enthusiastic recommendations of their influences it might have felt like the most contemptuous betrayal. The second aspect of the record company's clumsiness is that the substituted cover art with its dominance of white created exactly the opposite impression the band had intended: instead of a decidedly Stones-like taunt it looked like more Beatles copying.

Stray Cat Blues starts with some teasing electric licks and some strange vocalising from Jagger. When it breaks into its loping groove with weighty piano and feline guitar scratches it's clear what the intro referred to. In an album of consolidation points for the band's image this song flashes more strongly than most. It's about groupies, young groupies. The age of fifteen is mentioned. "It ain't no capital crime" moans Jagger. Maybe not but it's a lyric no one would get away with today. I listen to the businesslike groove and the delicious guitar tone and pretend the words are in another language. I know that's wrong.

Factory Girl is a more sincere country number than the one on the first side. A boy waits for his girl who works at the factory. A real violin soars sweetly and a mandolin on a mellotron tremolos around the vocal melody. It's more ambience than heartfelt but it's never unwelcome in the sequence.

Salt of the Earth begins with the sense of moment. Strident acoustic chords polished with hot clean electric arpeggios. Keith's strangled voice enters bidding us drink to the workers, foot soldiers to the humble figures suggested by the title. Jagger's welcome takeover of the lead vocal. A brief minor key bridge brings us back to the chorus but it's been building to something huge. By the time it comes around again it's sung by a gospel choir in a homecoming procession. After a bar's gap the drums kick us into the accelerating finale with more heavenly singing and Nicky Hopkins going for it on piano and Charlie Watts crashing into the fade. If the devil had the upper hand at the beginning it's the common folk who present it at the end.

Again, I don't think this is the Stones wresting free from the shadow of the dominant Beatles as much as regrouping after disaster and finding their strength had been there all along. If the self-styled bad boy stance has more articulation it's just from honing. They had emerged from the iffy position of flower power to embrace their real selves in greater songs, in cinema and a will to take the show to ever greater stages. After the medieval tights and recorders of the previous year it must have felt like opening a window.





Listening notes - I've owned a copy of this as a released vinyl record, a cd, a hi-res SACD and a hi-res remastered download. The latter is the freshest sounding I've ever heard it. The sound stage is articulate, the acoustic guitars sparkle, the vocals are in the room and Jimmy Miller's career-changing production has never sounded so alive. The original album and earliest cd releases were mastered slightly too slow. When I first heard the pitch corrected SACD it felt like a new album.