The Rolling Stones album Mick Jagger called “nonsense”
The Rolling Stones have more material than most bands. Naturally, this volume includes a series of misfires. Yet outside of the obvious flops, frontman Mick Jagger considers one of the most famous efforts as nothing more than a load of old tosh.
Strangely, this is 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request, the record that saw The Rolling Stones jump headfirst into the day’s flourishing psychedelic rock genre. Featuring cuts such as ‘She’s a Rainbow’ and ‘2000 Light Years from Home’, it arrived in the year when hippiedom was all the rage.
Accordingly, the most notable records the counterculture produced in those consequential 12 months were The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s, Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Cream’s Disraeli Gears, and The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s debut Are You Experienced.
While Their Satanic Majesties Request is now a fan favourite amongst hardcore Rolling Stones followers, its initial reception was mixed. Some criticised it as too derivative of the searing experimental heights achieved by The Beatles on Sgt. Pepper. In the years that have followed the album’s release, and despite its reappraisal, Mick Jagger has echoed this historical critique and described most of the record as “nonsense” fuelled by resentment of their manager and too much acid.
The frontman reportedly told Rolling Stone (via The Express): “I think we were just taking too much acid. We were on acid doing the cover picture. I always remember doing that. It was like being at school, you know, sticking on the bits of coloured paper and things. It was really silly. But we enjoyed it. Also, we did it to piss Andrew [Oldman, our manager] off, because he was such a pain in the neck. Because he didn’t understand it. The more we wanted to unload him, we decided to go on this path to alienate him.”
Jagger continued: “I probably started to take too many drugs. Well, it’s not very good. It had interesting things on it, but I don’t think any of the songs are very good. It’s a bit like Between the Buttons. It’s a sound experience, really, rather than a song experience. There’s two good songs on it: ‘She’s a Rainbow’, which we didn’t do on the last tour, although we almost did, and ‘2000 Light Years From Home’, which we did do. The rest of them are nonsense.”
Unsurprisingly, Jagger’s songwriting partner Keith Richards feels similarly about Satanic Majesties and likens it to Sgt. Pepper, an album he also deems baloney. The guitarist told Esquire in 2015: “If you’re the Beatles in the ’60s, you just get carried away—you forget what it is you wanted to do. You’re starting to do Sgt. Pepper. Some people think it’s a genius album, but I think it’s a mishmash of rubbish, kind of like Satanic Majesties—’Oh, if you can make a load of s***, so can we.'”
Listen to Their Satanic Majesties Request below.
