The Rolling Stones Beggar's Banquet Album Launch Party 12-5-1968

 

"Time flies like an arrow, Fruit flies like a banana" (Groucho Marx)  Yesterday marked the 50th Anniversary of the release of the Rolling Stones' classic Beggar's Banquet album!  In 1968, the Rolling Stones were trying to salvage their careers as rock & rollers after the awkward release of their Sgt. Peppers influenced album, Their Santanic Majesties Request

 

Many of the sessions for Beggar's Banquet were marred by Brian Jones' erratic behavior in the studio.  Jimmy Miller, their new producer who would help them return to their earlier sound as an R&B blues band, described the problems Jones was having during these sessions: “When he would show up at a session—let's say he had just bought a sitar that day, he'd feel like playing it, so he'd look in his calendar to see if the Stones were in. Now he may have missed the previous four sessions. We'd be doing let's say, a blues thing. He'd walk in with a sitar, which was totally irrelevant to what we were doing, and want to play it. I used to try to accommodate him. I would isolate him, put him in a booth and not record him onto any track that we really needed. And the others, particularly Mick and Keith, would often say to me, 'Just tell him to piss off and get the hell out of here'”

 

Along with engaging Jimmy Miller, the Stones also wanted to return to their earlier controversial persona they had much success with when they were managed by Andrew Loog Oldham.  Part of their plan to revive their bad boys of rock & roll image involved the original idea for the cover of the album which portrayed a run-down garage restroom.  The band's ultra-conservative record label, London Records, immediately rejected the bathroom cover.

 

 

It was decided that the band would do a photo shoot for an alternate album cover which depicted them in medieval costumes that portrayed them as court jesters and beggars in a castle setting.

 

In the end, the Stones settled for the sedate simplistic cover pictured above. To me, it seemed that The Stones were once again copying The Beatles, who had released their White Album, which featured minimalist album cover art, a month before the release of Beggar's Banquet.

 

Trying to find a unique way to promote Beggar’s Banquet, The Stones threw a record release launch party at the elite The Gore Hotel at 190 Queen’s Gate on Dec. 5th, 1968. Today marks the 50th anniversary of their Beggar's Banquet Album Launch party.

 

For the party, The Stones were attired in costumes that recalled British aristocracy and the waitresses served food and drink dressed as medieval wenches.

 

 

As the sound of their new album filled the banquet room, the festivities soon degenerated into a near-riot. During the dessert course, a custard pie fight broke out, with most of the pastries aimed at record label execs who vetoed the Stones’ toilet cover art. Brian Jones, about to be fired by the band, delivers a few well-placed pies directly into Mick Jagger’s face. Strange as it may seem, Keith Richards (the official Rolling Stones bad boy) did not attend this gala event!

 

 

 

 

 

Rolling Stones' infamous Beggars Banquet shoot on show at exhibition |  London Evening Standard | Evening Standard

The Most Important Album of 1968 Wasn’t The White Album

It Was Beggars Banquet

From Slate.com: “I give the Stones about two years,” a 20-year-old Mick Jagger remarked to an interviewer in June of 1964. Fifty-four years later, the quote has become one of the wrongest predictions in music history, as the Rolling Stones gear up to once again hit the road in 2019, adding to their legacy as rock ’n’ roll’s resident avatars of parodic longevity. In the summer of 1964, though, it would have been totally reasonable to wonder if the Stones even had two more years in them. Jagger and Keith Richards had only just recently begun writing original songs and hadn’t had an American hit yet. They were still a year away from “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” their first No. 1 in the U.S., which would kick off a run of eight Top 10 singles in less than two years. And they were four years away from Beggars Banquet, the album that would revitalize their careers and, to no small degree, alter the trajectory of a genre.

One could argue until the cows come home over what the greatest album of 1968 is: Lady Soul, Music From Big Pink, The White Album, Electric Ladyland, and Astral Weeks all deserve a place in the conversation, to name just a few. But Beggars Banquet might have been the most consequential. It was the first work to show that a rock act could reinvent itself in the face of irrelevance, the first great “comeback” album of the genre, and the earliest indication that rock ’n’ roll lives might be capable of something like second acts. At the end of a year that saw an explosion of double albums and single tracks that took up the better part of an LP side, all adorned with ever-newer forms of sonic gadgetry that promised musical corollaries to other consciousness-expanding materials of the day, it was a mostly acoustic album steeped in blues, folk, rockabilly, and other, more inscrutable influences that it felt like the band had conjured from some ragged musical beyond. It was mature, painstaking, and ferociously intelligent, all things the Stones had rarely been previously accused of being. It was, weirdly, from a band who’d spent their early years as the music’s foremost exemplars of incorrigible youth, a road map toward something like adulthood that didn’t involve quitting the road and gradually disintegrating, a route their more-famous countrymen had recently taken.

 

A new reissue of the Rolling Stones' oft-demeaned

A new album finally arrived in December 1967, Their Satanic Majesties Request, an ill-advised attempt at Pepper-style psychedelia that was derided by critics and sold fewer copies than any album they’d made to date. Many wondered aloud whether the Stones were done, and who could blame them? This Jim Morrison kid was better-looking than Jagger anyway.

 

Rolling Stones Jumping Jack Flash The Daily Hatch, 54% OFF

Then, in May 1968, the Rolling Stones returned with a new single. Produced by an American expat, Jimmy Miller, whom the Stones had enlisted after firing longtime manager Andrew Loog Oldham, Jumpin’ Jack Flash sounded like nothing the band had ever made before. It was lean and pummeling, a churning cauldron of distorted guitar, off-kilter chord changes, shakers on the bridge, and sneering, slurred vocals; Jumpin’ Jack Flash/ It’s a gas, gas, gas were the only words most people could decipher, and no one knew what they meant. No matter. It went to No. 1 in the U.K. and topped out at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, kept out of the top slot by tracks like Herb Alpert’s This Guy’s in Love With You, Cliff Nobles & Co.’s The Horse, and Gary Puckett and the Union Gap’s godawful Lady Willpower, a fact you should feel free to mention the next time someone waxes nostalgic about what great taste everyone had in the 1960s.

When Beggars Banquet arrived in December, it was easy to assume it would continue this move into dark aggression. The album’s lead single, Street Fighting Man, released in the States in August, had boasted a sleeve featuring a graphic image of police brutality that had caused it to be quickly removed from shelves, and the song was widely banned from radio play in the wake of the unrest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

 

Beggars Banquet arrived with the most diverse, searching, and deceptively ambitious collection of music the Stones had ever made. It found the group straying down the corridors of country and folk on tracks like No Expectations, Dear Doctor, and Jigsaw Puzzle. By 1968, Brian Jones was already withdrawing from the band, his alienation fueled by creative disillusionment and substance abuse. On Beggars Banquet, the last album the Stones released during his lifetime, Jones plays guitar on only four of the album’s 10 tracks.

Richards’ soul is all over Beggars: riff-obsessed, compulsively rhythmic, and exquisitely musical. The same guy who plays the heavens-rattling acoustic guitar that opens Street Fighting Man plays the Motown Jamerson-ian bass line on Sympathy for the Devil. He plays the electric guitars that sound like actual cats on Stray Cat Blues—all of them—and even croaks the opening lines of Salt of the Earth, the album’s closer, which might be the most convincing attempt at political songwriting in the Stones’ catalog."

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

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