‘Jigsaw Puzzle’: Everything great about The Rolling Stones in one song
As psychedelia arrived in earnest, The Rolling Stones were already one of the decade’s key songsmiths. Releasing an exhaustive stream of 45″s around their five UK LPs, a burnishing love of old R&B and blues saw the Stones become the leading force behind the British blues boom, swiftly conquering America by pursuing a more rock-oriented direction that oozed sexuality, danger, and healthy dollops of irreverence.
While not a bad record, and possessed by a dose of occultist auras in contrast to their Fab Four counterpart’s ‘Summer of Love’ totem, 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request spelt a moment where the Stones were thrust into a trend outside their creative comfort zone—a record that is as at ease with itself as the bewildered band look on its stilted Middle-Earth cover.
As the acid wore off and the era’s lysergic trends reached their heady peak, a roots rock return to America’s formative music forms was embraced by the likes of Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Band, and Bob Dylan—who skirted the entire LSD soaked rock of the day with his John Wesley Harding country record. The Beatles would move away from psychedelia for their eponymous double-LP, The Doors would slowly crawl toward a purer blues outfit by the decade’s close, but no one entered a creative rejuvenation quite like the Stones.
Whetting appetites with 1968’s stand-alone ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ single, the Stones would enter their golden album run, the four immaculate LPs which chronicle the moment they entered modern musical mythology and established themselves as a truly album’s band rather than just expert conjurers of knockout 7″s. With Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main St to follow, Beggars Banquet stands as the first entry of a band dwelling where they’re most inspired, down in the dirt of country blues and rock swagger, invoking America’s old world while poetically reporting on the counterculture’s looming clouds.
Their state of mind was made clear with the intended cover, Barry Feinstein’s grimy snap of a toilet flanked by scrawled graffiti, which was rejected by both their Decca and London labels.
Among immortal cuts such as ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and ‘Street Fighting Man’, one lesser-known track that’s never been played live documents everything that was magic about the Stones during their dazzling purple patch. ‘Jigsaw Puzzle’ tumbles out of the speakers with a disjointed, slack Delta blues effortlessness that marks the band amid a crackling and electric synergy they’d rarely bottle again for a non-single. Nicky Hopkins’ cascading piano plays out with understated honky-tonk mastery, but ‘Jigsaw Puzzle’s’ secret weapon is Brian Jones’ Mellotron, soaring and whining with prickly drama that distracts from the number’s lack of melodic development.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ lyricism are often overshadowed by their respective frontman and guitar chops, but here the pair dream up a fascinating, grubby realm of misfits and down-and-outs keeping life’s clarity and meaning forever out of reach: “…I’m waiting so patiently / Lying on the floor / I′m just trying to do this jigsaw puzzle / Before it rains anymore”.
The rain as a poetic harbinger of doom would return on the apocalyptic ‘Gimme Shelter’, but it’s ‘Jigsaw Puzzle’ that so easily documents what made the Stones so gripping in the heady tail-end of the 1960s, reaching through the cover’s squalid cubicle and wresting out a gem both scary, wistful, and infinitely evocative.
