Did the Rolling Stones intend Their Satanic Majesties Request to be a spoof of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or was it a sincere attempt to siphon some of the magic of the Beatles’ masterpiece? This question has hung over Satanic Majesties ever since its release in late 1967, perhaps due to the persistence of the perception that the two groups are locked in a deathless rivalry, or maybe just because their album artwork is so similar—not entirely surprising, considering how both ornate cover images are based on photographs snapped by Michael Cooper. Certainly, the arrival of a 50th Anniversary super deluxe reissue of Their Satanic Majesties Request just a few months after the lavish 50th Anniversary super deluxe reissue of Sgt. Pepper’s invites such comparisons and, once again, the Stones wind up with the raw end of the deal.
The Beatles plumped up Pepper with session tapes, alternate mixes, and other ephemera that not only made diehard fans salivate, but provided fresh insights to an album whose story seemingly had been exhausted. In contrast, ABKCO slaps CDs and LPs of the stereo and mono mixes into a slim LP-sized fold-out box but never bothering with anything laying in the vaults, even though annotator Rob Bowman mentions two separate unreleased versions of “Sing This All Together (See What Happens)” in his liner notes. Such offerings may seem skimpy but blame ABKCO, not the Stones, who have no say in how their ’60s material is disseminated and reissued.
Cast aside any comparisons to the Beatles, though, and consider Their Satanic Majesties Request on its own terms. Sure, Keith Richards claims in his 2010 memoir Life that “none of us wanted to make [Satanic Majesties], but it was time for another Stones album, and Sgt. Pepper’s was coming out, so we thought basically we were doing a put-on,” but that’s part of a rich tradition of the Rolling Stones dismissing their second album of 1967 that stretches all the way back to 1968, when Mick Jagger said it took them a year to finish the album because they were so “strung out.” While it is true that 1967 ranks among the worst years in Rolling Stones history—it opened with Jagger and Richards getting busted for dope, Brian Jones faced similar charges not much later, and interpersonal tensions were heightened by Keith swiping Anita Pallenberg away from Jones—the Satanic Majesties sessions didn’t last an abnormally long time. A few tracks were cut in February but they began in earnest in the late summer, after all the court cases were settled...a situation that presumably kept the Stones busy enough to not pay too much attention to the June release of Sgt. Pepper’s.
Amid the personal turmoil of 1967, the Rolling Stones also faced a fracture in their inner circles, as Richards and especially Jagger became disenchanted by their manager and producer Andrew “Loog” Oldham. Immediate Records, the label Oldham launched in 1965, gained momentum thanks to the success of the Small Faces, but a bigger distraction for Loog was his increasing fondness for various intoxicants. Hunkering down in the studio in the aftermath of the Summer of Love, the Stones were riding on the same vibes that flowed from coast to coast in 1967, but they—or at least Jagger—were also determined to sever ties with Oldham. Jagger later claimed the Stones went wild on Satanic Majesties “to piss Andrew off, because he was such a pain in the neck. Because he didn’t understand it. The more we wanted to unload him, we decided to go on this path to alienate him.” But, as always, there may have been a mercenary mission driving Mick’s emotions. According to Fred Goodman’s biography Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out the Beatles, Made the Stones, and Transformed Rock & Roll, “Oldham, who was contractually obligated to pay all recording costs, suspected the band members were out to bankrupt him and force his resignation. “Suddenly they weren’t arriving in the studio with songs. There’s actually nothing to do. Three weeks this is going on—and three weeks in the sixties was a very long time. I was bored and had no idea what I was doing there.’” According to Klein, the man who muscled aside Oldham in the management of the Stones, the faltering sessions was indeed intentional: “’What bothered Jagger was that Oldham was making five times as much as him.”
All of this means that Their Satanic Majesties Request is the product of a bizarre set of personal, professional, and cultural circumstances, each pushing the Stones to make a record that’s its own strange, wonderful entity, one that is an anomaly within the Stones’ catalog but not one without precedent. Certainly, its immediate predecessor Between the Buttons—in both its U.S. and UK incarnations—has elements that resurface on Satanic Majesties, especially an insouciant rhythm and calculated indifference, the first flowerings of the signature Jagger trend of floating just above whatever cultural trend he co-opts. The Stones don’t seem quite as assured here as they did on Between the Buttons or Beggars Banquet, the 1968 sequel that cemented the band’s reputation as heirs to an American tradition that never was theirs by birthright. Satanic Majesties, on the other hand, burrows into British music from music hall (witness the pure camp of the closer “On With the Show” or the stately “She’s a Rainbow,” purple in its prose and procession) to pastoral folk (the hesitant hum of “Gomper”).
What’s fascinating about Their Satanic Majesties Request is how it belongs to neither the precious school of English psychedelia or its rootsy American counterpart. Nobody on the American west coast really rocked hard in 1967—down in L.A., Love puffed themselves up with orchestras, up in San Francisco they were loathe to shake their folk roots—and the British psych acts of ’67 relied on trippy textures, eschewing any suggestion of swing. Keith Richards may later have claimed he couldn’t play his “old shit” on these sessions—and that was just four years later, in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1971—but Their Satanic Majesties has a pulse that no other psychedelic album does. Blame it on Charlie Watts if you want, but every song on Majesties has some air in its rhythm, which means it grooves when other psych records rely on texture.
Unlike whatever private press psych set you may unearth, this is a band that actually mastered their instruments, so the music is kinetic even when it’s aimless. The group enjoys pushing the boundaries of what they can achieve in the studio and what they can do as a unit, so they indulge in making sounds without the constructs of a song. Since the Stones usually adhere to a rigid structure, hearing them play without a net is thrilling, especially because they purposefully wandered without direction, then cut up a collage of the best elements some time later. This doesn’t mean Satanic Majesties is without songs—”She’s a Rainbow,” “2000 Man,” “Citadel,” “2000 Light Years From Home” are as clearly defined as any of their ’60s singles—but the endless, gormless “Sing This All Together (See What Happens)” and “Gomper” are supporting evidence for Oldham’s thesis that the band was attempting to run out the clock on his dime. They’re also strange and wonderful, pointing toward where the Stones would land, particularly “Sing This All Together (See What Happens),” which descends into a dry run for Keith’s five-string riffing. It’s a hint of a future to come that finds counterparts in the open string drones of “2000 Man” and the piercing echoes of “Citadel,” which contain bracing modern elements that overwhelm the period accoutrements of the production.
Nevertheless, the charm of *Their Satanic Majesties Request * is that it is an artifact of its time, especially in how it’s emblematic of the excesses of its era but sounds like nothing else of its year, either. Perhaps psychedelia wasn’t a natural fit for the earthbound Stones, but the dissonance between their gritty rhythms and ornate, precocious arrangements is enthralling, not in the least because there’s no other record—by the Stones or anybody else—that sounds quite like this. And that means, with all its bad ideas, absurdity and wonder, Their Satanic Majesties Request may capture the ideals of the psychedelic 1967 better than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as it holds dear to the idea that there’s an entire world existing within your head.
