The Rolling Stones – Beggars Banquet (1968)

The Rolling Stones is a curious band, because their most popular songs are not on their most popular albums. The majority of their most popular songs are on the early albums, but those albums are not very exciting as albums. On the other hand, the end of the 60's and early 70's era saw many fantastic albums from Rolling Stones, but very few of these songs are so well known that people who haven't really listened to the Stones would know. Beggars Banquet is the first one of the so called golden age of the Rolling Stones where they released excellent roots rock albums. The influences on these albums are very much in the American blues, soul and folk traditions. It took me a while to get into the Rolling Stones at all. I had to learn to like soul music first before I understood the importance of these records.



I own this album on a new heavy weight vinyl pressing. The strange part of this is that the original vinyl album didn't look like this. The record company didn't accept the album cover with the toilet and writings on the wall, so it was replaced by a simplistic cover where the band and album names were just written on a white background. I do think it's nice that they decided to release the new pressing of this album with the album cover that was originally intended to be released.

The thing I said in the beginning about these albums not including popular songs is not true for two songs on this album. Sympathy for the Devil and Street Fighting Man are among the most well-known Stones songs. Sympathy for the Devil even started the well-known brouhaha about the Stones worshipping Satan. Obviously, it didn't help that their previous album was called Their Satanic Majesties Request. So, in a way, Rolling Stones with their song names, and The Beatles with their remark about being bigger than Jesus angered up the Christian circles even before that task was taken up by Heavy Metal groups that were soon to follow. Today, remarks about the Rolling Stones being satan worshippers seems laughable, but back in the 60's, there was a lot of commotion about these kinds of things.

Beggars Banquet has many country-western and folk influenced songs. Most notably No Expectations, Dear Doctor, Prodigal Son and Factory Girl. There's also lots of blues rock, such as the songs Parachute Woman and Stray Cat Blues. Jig-Saw Puzzle and Salt of the Earth draw influences from soul and gospel traditions. For a long time, I actually thought Rolling Stones would've been from the US, because their music sounded so American. My parents had taught me that there used to be a rivalry between the Stones and the Beatles back in the day and to me it was always clear that I liked The Beatles more and that's probably why it took me so long to start fully appreciating Rolling Stones.

I still don't own nearly all of the interesting Rolling Stones albums, but in recent couple of years, I've really started looking at their music in different eyes and now I really want to make sure that I will get at least their golden age albums on vinyl.

Listen to the album on Spotify.