Keith Richards on The Rolling Stones album that showed they were “back to business”
In addition to being one of the biggest rock and roll outfits to ever grace the airwaves, The Rolling Stones are also one of the longest-running. First formed in 1962 as disciples of the blues, the band has witnessed a discography spanning over six decades and 31 studio albums. Inevitably, within that incredible run of records, there have been a few missteps and misguided decisions. For guitarist and madman Keith Richards, one period of the group is particularly questionable in retrospect.
When the bunch of rock and roll misfits first got together in 1962, under the leadership of Brian Jones, The Rolling Stones were seemingly only concerned with blues rock and R&B. However, as the group progressed, becoming an icon of the British invasion and later immersing themselves in the counterculture age, their sound changed. For the most part, though, their music still featured heavy blues influences. Indeed, their most recent record, Hackney Diamonds, shows that this influence has never left the group.
Despite their dedication to the blues, the 1960s was a vibrant time for art, music and, of course, drugs. The advent of LSD and other psychedelics brought with it seemingly endless reservoirs of artistic inspiration. Towards the latter part of the decade, psychedelic rock became the defining sound of countercultural rock, pioneered by groups like The Byrds and Cream. Soon, this psychedelic inspiration would spread far and wide, even impacting groups like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
For their part, The Beatles’ psychedelic period was perhaps their greatest, leading to groundbreaking records like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. On the other hand, The Rolling Stones’ flirts with psychedelia were not nearly as celebrated. Their psych rock record Their Satanic Majesties Request saw the band temporarily move away from blues rock, favouring tripped-out, mind-bending psychedelia. While the album is a favourite among many fans, the band themselves were not so convinced.
During a 2015 interview with The Guardian, Richards reflected on that period for the band, saying, “God, that year, 1967, the effect of LSD on people’s music and lives. People dropping out and going to India! And the Maharishi”, referring to The Beatles’ trip to India which produced some of their greatest compositions. “I just saw people losing their thread,” the guitarist recalled, “That year, we all went off the tracks. It was a kind of mad vacation”.
The Stones were not as well-suited to psychedelic rock as some of the other outfits embracing that scene, but Their Satanic Majesties Request remains a fantastic and criminally underrated record. Nevertheless, Richards seemed glad that the band’s psych era only lasted one record. “When we made Beggars Banquet the next year,” he remembered, “I felt like: ‘Okay, hols are over, old boy, let’s get back to business’”.
From Beggars Banquet onwards, the Stones repeatedly reaffirmed their dedication to blues rock, rarely entering the realm of psychedelia again. While it might have been interesting to see how the group’s sound developed if they continued to trip out after Their Satanic Majesties Request, it is certainly difficult to be angry about the follow-up, which begins with the band’s magnum opus, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.
