The Rolling Stones normally planned out an album before going into the booth. However, one album saw the Stones at their most improvisational, with no cohesion. Mick Jagger said the album had no “idea” behind it, and it took “almost a whole year to make.”
Mick Jagger said it took almost a year to make ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’
While The Rolling Stones didn’t need to compete with other bands to be successful, they still had to respond when other bands put out a new project. In 1966, The Beach Boys released Pet Sounds; in 1967, The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Both were highly successful albums that revolutionized music during the late 1960s.
The Stones knew they had to release something soon, so the other two bands didn’t completely dominate the charts. What emerged was 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request, a messy album that many believe was The Rolling Stones’ attempt to emulate Sgt. Pepper’s. In a 1995 Rolling Stone interview, Jagger explained that there was “no idea” behind the album, but it evolved over time since it took so long to make.
“Absolutely no idea behind it,” Jagger said. “No, it’s wrong to say there is or was no idea at all, there was, but it was all completely external. It was done over such a long period of time that eventually, it just evolved. The first thing we did was ‘She’s a Rainbow,’ then ‘2000 Light Years From Home,’ then ‘Citadel’ and it just got freakier as we went along. Then we did ‘Sing This Song All Together’ and ‘On With The Show,’ ‘The Lantern’ and then Bill’s one (‘In Another Land’),” he added. “It took almost a whole year to make, not because it’s so fantastically complex that we needed a whole year but because we were so strung out.”
Mick Jagger said The Rolling Stones had to scramble for themselves while making the album
Their Satanic Majesties Request was challenging for The Rolling Stones as it was their first self-produced album. After Richards and Jagger were arrested in a 1967 drug bust, their producer and manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, quit. Jagger said the band did have some pre-recorded songs, but they were scrambling to turn them into an album before their deadline.
“It’s really like sort of got-together chaos,” the singer said. “Because we all panicked a little, even as soon as a month before the release date that we had planned, we really hadn’t got anything put together. We had all these great things that we’d done, but we couldn’t possibly put it out as an album. And so we just got them together and did a little bit of editing here and there.”
Jagger believes ‘Satanic Majesties’ only has two good songs
While the album did reach No. 2 in the U.S. and No. 3 in the U.K., it’s not regarded as one of The Rolling Stones’ best albums. It received mixed reviews from critics; even the band members don’t look back on it too fondly. Jagger once said that he believed there are only “two good songs on it.”
“Well, it’s not very good. It had interesting things on it, but I don’t think any of the songs are very good,” Jagger said via Far Out. “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.”
