The 1967 album Mick Jagger called “a lot of rubbish”
When anyone has been going as long as Mick Jagger has, there are times when they start seeing a few dips in their catalogue.
There was no chance of The Rolling Stones ever breaking up for an elongated amount of time, but being together with some of your bandmates can be more than a little bit draining if the music isn’t inspiring you like it used to. And while Jagger was proud of nearly all of the albums that the band worked on, he did admit that they were a little in over their heads whenever they were working on some bold new experiment.
Then again, The Stones never needed to be the kind of band that took a risk on every single one of their albums. They had a signature sound that worked better than anyone else in rock and roll, and if Keith Richards could spend time pumping out one great riff after the next, that was more than enough to keep them rolling. But Jagger didn’t like the idea of staying in one spot for too long, either.
He loved the idea of experimenting with new genres coming out at the time, but that doesn’t mean that every one of them suits the band all that well. Dirty Work is still one of the more embarrassing albums that they have ever made, and even when they found their way into the 1990s quite nicely on Voodoo Lounge, there’s no real excuse for why they made a song like ‘Might As Well Get Juiced’ later in the decade. But not even their classic material got Jagger’s approval all the time.
The frontman was the first to say that he wasn’t much of a fan of Exile on Main St, but that might have been because he didn’t see the band developing. They were still making some of the finest music that any of them had ever made at the time, but if there wasn’t a song that had a chance at radio, there was no reason for Jagger to care as much. At the same time, fans would rather take an album where they were doing their best work than see them try to pander to what their peers were doing.
And before the end of the 1960s, a lot of what The Stones tended to feel like was a half-hearted version of The Beatles whenever they performed. Between the Buttons was their version of Paul McCartney’s baroque pop experiments, and even ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ was like their own version of ‘Hey Jude’ to a certain degree, but Their Satanic Majesties Request couldn’t have been more pandering if they tried. They had entered their own psychedelic phase right after Sgt Pepper, and Jagger was more than a little bit embarrassed talking about the record after the fact.
Nothing about their sound had changed too drastically, but considering the fashions of the time and lyrics on songs like ‘She’s A Rainbow’, Jagger couldn’t really see the album holding up all that much, saying, “Their Satanic Majesties Request was a really fun moment, and there were some good songs on it: ‘She’s a Rainbow’ was very pretty. [But] there’s a lot of rubbish on Satanic Majesties. Just too much time on our hands, too many drugs, no producer to tell us, ‘Enough already, thank you very much, now can we just get on with this song?’”
“It’s like believing everything you do is great and not having any editing.”
Mick Jagger
It does tend to feel like they threw everything at the wall, but the fact that a lot of it manages to stick is actually a feat in and of itself. ‘2000 Man’ is a decent futuristic blues rocker, and while there are pieces that don’t quite hit as well as their classics, ‘2000 Light Years From Home’ deserves to go down in history with some of the greatest psych-rock tracks that the band ever made.
For a band that was born as a bluesy rock and roll outfit, this musical suit was a weird fit, but it’s not like it didn’t suit them well or anything. They were still willing to take a chance on one of their albums, and while that didn’t always work in their favour, it’s better to have them taking chances than getting too comfortable.
