Rolling Stones Single-By-Single Thread

Yes I always hear it as "One two". Great start to a song though however you hear it.

 

Isn't Mick Jagger world renowned for having the most garbled lyrics in rock music history?

 

If you mean sometimes difficult to understand because they are mixed low (within the soundscape of the songs, rather than in front of them), then perhaps. But that's not a bad thing. The production Jimmy Miller did with the band is incredible, IMO, and I love how the vocals aren't loud and upfront but are instead part of the stew itself.

 

yeah, but in some ways I thought it's charm is its curse, it drove me crazy trying to figure out WTF he was saying 50 years ago

 

Oh yeah, Tighten Up is one of the all time claasic dance records - totally infectious, and 'just right'. One of those records that catches lightning in a bottle, without overthinking the process in advance. What a groove, it's for the ages!

 

I dunno if it's been mentioned over the past two pages, but the great Jimmy Miller producing the Jumpin' Jack Flash - finally a record-making maestro at just the right time - makes it one of the first sonically brilliant Stones singles. Putting on the 45 and playing it real loud is easily one of the quintessential "singles thrills" of rock 'n' roll in itself - like lowering the needle on Rock Around The Clock or Be-Bop-A-Lula: everything is in the right place, and the track is an unstoppable force till the end. Like a crossfire hurricane or something.

 

Brian Jones with the little garden fork is a great touch - Satan's own garden fork!

 

it's a pitchfork

 

I like the glass of wine myself. Perfect touch of elegance.

 

Is there a definite tape drag moment though, in the third bar of the instrumental middle section - where it all goes down almost a semitone for a moment, as if someone leaned on the multi-track during the mix? I'm not crazy, am I? ...doctor?.....

 

Next up:

Street Fighting Man (1968)



Released: 8/30/68
B-Side: No Expectations
Charts: #48 (US)

"Street Fighting Man" is a song by English rock band the Rolling Stones featured on their 1968 album Beggars Banquet. Called the band's "most political song,"[4] Rolling Stone ranked the song number 301 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Originally titled and recorded as "Did Everyone Pay Their Dues?", containing the same music but very different lyrics, "Street Fighting Man" is known as one of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards' most politically inclined works to date. Jagger allegedly wrote it about Tariq Ali after he attended a 1968 anti-war rally at London's US embassy, during which mounted police attempted to control a crowd of 25,000.[5][6] He also found inspiration in the rising violence among student rioters on Paris' Left Bank,[7] the precursor to a period of civil unrest in May 1968.

On the writing, Jagger said in a 1995 interview with Jann Wenner in Rolling Stone,

Yeah, it was a direct inspiration, because by contrast, London was very quiet...It was a very strange time in France. But not only in France but also in America, because of the Vietnam War and these endless disruptions ... I thought it was a very good thing at the time. There was all this violence going on. I mean, they almost toppled the government in France; de Gaulle went into this complete funk, as he had in the past, and he went and sort of locked himself in his house in the country. And so the government was almost inactive. And the French riot police were amazing.[8]

On the song, Richards said, only a few years after recording the track in a 1971 Rolling Stone interview with Robert Greenfield, that the song had been "interpreted thousands of different ways". He mentioned how Jagger went to the Grosvenor Square demonstrations in London and was even charged by the police, yet he ultimately claims, "it really is ambiguous as a song".[9]

The song opens with a strummed acoustic riff. In his review, Richie Unterberger says of the song, "...it's a great track, gripping the listener immediately with its sudden, springy guitar chords and thundering, offbeat drums. That unsettling, urgent guitar rhythm is the mainstay of the verses. Mick Jagger's typically half-buried lyrics seem at casual listening like a call to revolution."[10]

Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy
'Cause summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy

Hey! think the time is right for a palace revolution, but where I live the game to play is compromise solution
Hey, said my name is called Disturbance; I'll shout and scream, I'll kill the King, I'll rail at all his servants

Well now what can a poor boy do except to sing for a rock & roll band?
Cause in sleepy London Town there's just no place for a street fighting man, no

Unterberger continues, "Perhaps they were saying they wished they could be on the front lines, but were not in the right place at the right time; perhaps they were saying, as John Lennon did in the Beatles' "Revolution", that they didn't want to be involved in violent confrontation. Or perhaps they were even declaring indifference to the tumult."[10]

Other writers' interpretations varied. In 1976, Roy Carr assessed it as a "great summer street-corner rock anthem on the same echelon as 'Summer in the City', 'Summertime Blues', and 'Dancing in the Street'."[7] In 1979, Dave Marsh wrote that it was the keynote of Beggars Banquet, "with its teasing admonition to do something and its refusal to admit that doing it will make any difference; as usual, the Stones were more correct, if also more faithless, philosophers than any of their peers."

The song was released within a week of the violent confrontations between the police and anti-Vietnam War protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.[10] Worried about the possibility of the song inciting further violence, Chicago radio stations refused to play the song. This was much to the delight of Mick Jagger, who stated: "I'm rather pleased to hear they have banned (the song). The last time they banned one of our records in America, it sold a million."[12] Jagger said he was told they thought the record was subversive, to which he snapped: "Of course it's subversive! It's stupid to think you can start a revolution with a record. I wish you could."[13]

Keith Richards weighed into the debate when he said that the fact a couple of radio stations in Chicago banned the record "just goes to show how paranoid they are". At the same time they were still requested to do live appearances and Richards said: "If you really want us to cause trouble, we could do a few stage appearances. We are more subversive when we go on stage."[13]

Recording on "Street Fighting Man" took place at Olympic Sound Studios from April until May 1968. With Jagger on lead vocals and both he and Richards on backing, Brian Jones performs the song's distinctive sitar and also tamboura. Richards plays the song's acoustic guitars as well as bass, the latter being the only electric instrument on the track, because of regular bassist Bill Wyman being unavailable.[16] Charlie Watts performs drums while Nicky Hopkins performs the song's piano which is most distinctly heard during the outro. Shehnai is performed on the track by Dave Mason. On the earlier, unreleased "Did Everybody Pay Their Dues" version, Rick Grech played a very prominent electric viola.[15]

Personnel[edit]
The Rolling Stones[18]

• Mick Jagger – vocals, percussion
• Keith Richards – amplified acoustic guitars, bass guitars, slide guitar
• Brian Jones – sitar, tanpura
• Charlie Watts – drum

Additional personnel

• Dave Mason – shehnai, bass drum
• Nicky Hopkins – piano

 

Another great rock and roller. Always thought it should have been the lead off track and move Sympathy to Side 2. Great sound, love the piano too. Didn't realize Dave Mason was on this...he pops up on a lot of stuff, don't he.

Like No Expectations too....love it when the Stones do their country blues thing.

 

I'm afraid I'm headed out the door to work but here's the single mix.

Street Fighting Man (Original Single Mono Version)

 

"Street Fighting Man" just doesn't seem to belong in the Stones canon of great singles. It wasn't a huge hit and it's not one of the core songs casual fans tend to know but in Stones-lore it's one of their greatest live numbers - the Ya-Yas version is pretty great. It was the set closer from 1969-1973 and again in 1976. I love it because it is part of Beggars Banquet but I really don't think of it as a hit. Love the acoustic guitar (again with the lo-fi cassette player) and it fits nicely on to Banquet. "No Expectations" is one of my favourite Stones deep cuts. It's an affecting country song ("and as I watched you leaving me" moves me every time) plus it has Nicky Hopkins adding a beautiful piano and Brian's final shining moment as a Stone playing that bottleneck. By this era, B-sides were from the albums and there were no weak tracks.

 

both sides still sound oh so good even after all these years.

 

Street Fighting Man
This is my dad's #1 favorite Stones song, so I've always had a soft spot for it. He had it as his ringtone for a long time. It's incredible that this song is completely acoustic with the exception of the bass. Here's the point when Keith becomes not just a great guitarist but my favorite guitarist. His work during the "classic period" is nothing short of perfection for me, in everything from tuning to tone to recording. Recording an acoustic guitar through an overloaded cassette? Brilliant. Nicky is brilliant, I love the strange, eerie sound you get from the shehnai... The lyrics are powerful stuff. "My name is called Disturbance"...

It wasn't a hit (it got banned in many places around the country) but it has lived on as one of the band's all-time greats. I think it slots in perfectly on Hot Rocks Side 3, one of the greatest sides of vinyl ever (Jumpin' Jack Flash - Street Fighting Man - Sympathy - Honky Tonk Women - Gimme Shelter).

No Expectations
This is my favorite work that Brian Jones ever did with the Rolling Stones (marimbas on "Under My Thumb" at #2). His playing is beautiful and affecting and this is just a lovely, heartbreaking blues ballad that stands right alongside the songs by Robert Johnson that inspired it. The lyrics are wonderful. "Your heart is like a diamond / You throw your pearls at swine." Again, I think of this song in context of Beggars Banquet rather than as a b-side, but it's really special.

But what can a poor boy do? Except to sing for a rock 'n roll band?

 

I wonder if it would have been a bigger hit if it had totally different, non-political lyrics

 

Rarest picture sleeve on the planet Earth. I guarantee you that nobody on this forum owns one. 15 on a scale of 10.

 

Almost certainly. It was banned by radio because of the lyrics.

Here's the great, meaty '69 version.

 

Can't add much to the talk about JJF.....It's overplayed, sure, but it's a classic. Definitely in my all time top ten singles in rock history. And being a (amateur) bass player, I'd like to single out the great bass lines in the song. Simple yet effective.

I love Child of the Moon as well, always have. I too was puzzled by the (rmk) subtitle in 1989 and assumed it stood for remake. I also grew up thinking that the beginning part was Roger Daltrey. It still doesn't sound like any of the Stones to me.

 

Mick has remarked how the Stones purposefully buried his vocals and did not print lyrics because they wanted listeners to try to discern the words as if they were listening to an old blues record. To this day, nobody knows any of the lyrics to "Tumbling Dice" besides "roll me."

As for "Street Fighting Man," Keef played his acoustic into a portable recorder (cassette, IIIRC) to get that almost electric distortion we here. Great tune. Quite often overlooked.

 

There are many interesting things about "Street Fighting Man." First, its picture sleeve.

On a rarity scale of 1-10, crank this one to 11.

The London sleeve for "Street Fighting Man" is the world's most valuable picture sleeve; it routinely sells for four figures (US $), and really nice copies go for five. In the past 10 years, two legitimate copies have appeared at auction; one sold for over $9,000 in 2008 and the other, in 2011, for over $17,000!

Opinions vary as to whether the sleeve ever made it to record stores. When I was working for Goldmine, I had someone tell me he bought it in 1968 in a store in Columbus, Ohio, and if he'd have known how rare the sleeve would be, he'd have bought more than one. The next time he went to the store, it was gone, never to reappear. Others have said that none of the sleeves ever had a record inside of them and were office copies at London. I suspect the sleeve probably did get out, but it was yanked immediately.

The last time I was aware, approximately 15 copies of the "Street Fighting Man" picture sleeve were known to exist. It's not the rarest sleeve by sheer numbers; the sleeves for "All Tomorrow's Parties" by the Velvet Underground and the unreleased "The Times They Are a-Changin'" by the Byrds exist in smaller quantities. But "Street Fighting Man" is both rare and highly sought-after even now, 50 years after the song was first released.

Naturally, such a rare sleeve has been counterfeited. This isn't an exhaustive list, but some of the things to look for:
-- Legitimate sleeves have different photos of street violence on the two sides. Many counterfeits use the same photo on both sides.
-- Legitimate sleeves have "No Expectations" on the B-side. Some counterfeits have "Street Fighting Man" on both sides.
-- Legitimate sleeves have the "LONDON" logo in the lower right of both sides. Sone of the fakes don't have the logo on one or both sides.
-- Legitimate sleeves have a small "Printed in U.S.A." in black at the lower left of the "No Expectations" side.
-- Many fakes use a different font than the real ones.
-- Both of the two copies I've seen (I don't own one) have the "Street Fighting Man" side with a lower cut than the "No Expectations" side.

In 2016, "Street Fighting Man" was reissued on 45, with its picture sleeve, by ABKCO. But the reissue had a bar code and no mention of London on the sleeve.

 

The single mix of "Street Fighting Man" has an interesting alternate vocal, but is tinny and poorly balanced — only the stereo LP version (or the mono fold-down) sounds good, for my money

This also might have been part of the reason for this song's initial lack of traction as a single. Not enough drum and guitar THUD like you have in the stereo mix. Even the Stripped live version is better than the single