Beggars Banquet
Abkco - Abkco
The Rolling Stones
Release date: 2002-08-27
Audio CD
Album Rock, Bass, Blues-Rock, England, Hard Rock, Pop, Pop/Rock, Pop/Rock Music, Rock, Rock & Roll, Rock/Pop
1. Sympathy for the Devil
2. No Expectations
3. Dear Doctor
4. Parachute Woman
5. Jigsaw Puzzle
6. Street Fighting Man
7. Prodigal Son
8. Stray Cat Blues
9. Factory Girl
10. Salt of the Earth
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Beggars Banquet
Date undefinedThis is the last full album with Brain Jones it is also the first with any kind of political statement. Sympathy For The Devil, Street Fighting Man and Salt Of The Earth are the songs that make the stones say something yet still play the blues. It took till Beggers Banquet for the stones to get an album cover banned in the US.
Beggars Banquet
Date undefinedThere are a lot of reasons to love The Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet (1968). Of course, there is all of this great music, but it's also special because it was Brian Jones' last full album with the band (he contributed to two songs on Let It Bleed [DSD] before he died on July 3, 1969). And the album kicked off a new era of artistic excellence for The Rolling Stones.
Sympathy For The Devil opened the album and made it clear that this was indeed a step up and into a new direction. No song had ever sounded like this before! Jagger as Lucifer.
So if you meet me have some courtesy
Have some sympathy and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste
Street Fighting Man is a killer acoustic/electric guitar rocking anthem and call for political revolution in the streets. It's also one of the band's greatest songs.
Everywhere I hear the sound
Of marching charging feet, boy
Cause summer's here and the time is right
For fighting in the street, boy
Beggars Banquet features a lot of country blues, so expect plenty of acoustic and slide guitars, bluesy harmonicas, lazy southern accents and outcast poetics. The lost and left behind apathy of No Expectations, the hilarious acoustic country twang of Dear Doctor and the blues drenched sexual bravado of the John Lee Hooker-esque Parachute Woman all channel the spirit of the early Delta country/blues.
The 6:17 minute Jigsaw Puzzle is a Blonde On Blonde-era Dylanesque surreal blues painting, and Stray Cat Blues really rocks with crunching guitars and jailbait lust. The working-class sexy Factory Girl and detached blue-collar salute Salt Of The Earth (which features the Los Angeles Watts Street Gospel Choir) wrap up the album in the wonderfully roguish Beggars style.
Beggars Banquet is essential to any Rolling Stones collection. A lot of Stones fans believe it is an equal part of the band's golden era that included Let It Bleed [DSD], Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street [Limited Edition]. I don't think it's quite there, but it's a great album, and the fact that Jumpin' Jack Flash was left off of the album to be released as a single makes it seem even more amazing. Great stuff!
"Please allow me to introduce myself..."
Beggars Banquet
Date undefineda.) QUESTION: How could you tell that Brian Jones, who was having trouble staying upright at this point, was also having difficulty adapting to the arrangements on Beggars' Banquet, the Stones' return to their blues-based roots? ANSWER: The wackily inappropriate Mellotron on "Stray Cat Blues." (Listen for it! You'll never be able to ignore it again!) QUESTION: What counterarguments could be made? ANSWER: The magnificently patient slide guitar on "No Expectations," where Jones manages to conquer a musician's natural instinct to rush the beat, and lets his sighing, resigned playing act as musical commentary on the lyrics.
b.) "Salt Of The Earth" has GOT to be the world's most amazingly insincere, unrighteous anthem to the masses I have ever heard - completely cynical, phony, and full of scat - and therefore absolutely brilliant. Nothing more perfectly encapsulates the Stones' discomfort with the "revolutionary masses" than this totally bourgeois hymn to them. Listen to those lyrics: "As I look out into faceless crowds, swirling mass of greys and blacks now, it don't look real to me, in fact it looks so straaaange..." This is so great; would we really want a truly compassionate anthem from The Stones? Of course not. So we get a song that sounds like a populist ode at first, but on closer listening turns out to be something quite different. And it has these wonderful images of rich people drinking wine trying to come up with toasts to the common people. They're "raising a glass" to the hard-working people. They certainly don't seem to be hard-working folk themselves. And as the song progresses, they seem to run out of good things to say about the common people, and start talking about stay-at-home voters, and those faceless crowds....here's to the bourgeoisie!
c.) In fact, Beggar's Banquet as a whole holds together lyrically much better than many of their other albums. All the songs seem to alternate between demonism ("Sympathy For The Devil," "Stray Cat Blues") and world-weariness ("Jig-Saw Puzzle," "No Expectations") and some seem to embrace both ("Street Fighting Man"). It seems to me that they're obviously becoming tired of that demon life that's got them in its sway.
