Music The Rolling Stones: Beggars Banquet reviewed – archive, 1968
10 December 1968: The Stones’ new album demonstrates their primal power at its greatest strength.
The special quality of rock music rhythm, when it is most relentless and dynamic, is to jam all the sensations that otherwise crowd us, distancing and fading them, so that in the midst of the beat our minds are concentrated. With the Velvet Underground and the Doors, the Rolling Stones’ rhythm has this power to focus our minds. The Stones’ new album, Beggars’ Banquet (Decca SKL 4955) – which has no trace of what I found to be the excursions of their last album, Their Satanic Majesties Request – demonstrates their primal power at its greatest strength.
The Stones’ beat, their carrier wave, is enormously magnified by their star quality. Virtually all big rock music bands pretend to distaste or ignorance of star power. The Stones are unique in making full use of it in their music. They have not changed and developed musically, in, say, the way the Beatles have. Almost all the Stones’ most powerful numbers quarry and refine the same lodes: menace and disturbance. These are made social and therefore inexhaustible especially by Mick Jagger. His image is at once personal/public and musical: uncompromised, wild, free, and without the law.
Let the music speak, on their new album’s first track, Sympathy for the Devil. High-stepping, delicate bongos, which nonetheless have nothing of the West Indies in them: pure Africa. Then there are two cries from Jagger, close to a hyena scream. Both echo. With the last, Bill Wyman starts shaking a big maraca, sounding like a seeded gourd. The drumming is now faster, with the energy of the added noises. Then a smaller cry; then masculine gasps and panting, as if a microphone were held close to the faces of African dancers.
The first verse, with bongos and maraca, now with wide-placed piano chords. Jagger begins insidiously and melodically, setting his voice up in suave contrast to the spiked music, (“Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste.”) Even at this point, still only seconds into a number that lasts more than five minutes, there’s no doubt that an elemental sensation is in store; it’s as fugal a beginning as Goin’ Home (on the Stones’ Aftermath album).
I’d do wrong to quote the lyrics I’ve been supplied, except when they’re clearly heard on record. Jagger is a master of the key phrase. At first, he lets you hear few of the words. Then, in the first verse, some jump out “I was around when Jesus Christ … moment … pain … made damn sure that Pilate … hope you guess my name”).
In the second verse, a switch: the piano gains melody, and Jagger becomes jagged. The effect is viscerally prickling. In the Observer on Sunday, Saul Bellow wrote: “All the experience of mankind crushed and mixed is pouring over us … this incredible social mental soup sends scalding impulses of excitement and confusion into the bloodstream.” He is disgusted at one being bathed by sensations, with no hope of feeling their meaning; as if seeing the world through glass. Jagger’s art destroys this nauseating distance. We feel horror because, at full volume, he makes us ride his carrier wave with him, experience his sensations, and awaken us to ours.
