As was our wont in those days, as soon as was deemed remotely seemly - anytime after 11 am, basically - we'd all retire to the nearest hostelry and as the consoling fluids began to work their magic, 'Abe' would take us back to a world of pre-swinging London carnality, of improbable and uncormfortable back seat couplings with hobble skirted Judys, their feet imaginatively stirruped by the versatile gripping handles of some Zephyr or Wolsey that, if indeed they weren't, looked as if they should have been made of bakelite. Somewhere on this booze-fuelled odyssey down memory lane he must have alighted briefly on the subject of Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones, because several pints later he'd agreed to loan me his original 1956 HMV label copy of the first Elvis album, the one with the green and pink lettering, and I would reciprocate with my copy of Banquet which, presumably, he either didn't have or hadn't heard.
I guess this must have been before the days of all day drinking - or possibly a Sunday? - because I seem to recall the transaction involving swooping back to his place to pick up the Elvis album and then dropping me at mine, swapping LPs and agreeing to meet up again at the same pub that evening to return each other's stuff. So presumably in between eating something to soak up the afternoons booze and no doubt at some point passing out, I had just about enough time to make a cassette copy of the Elvis before rushing back such a valuable possession to its owner at opening time. Needless to say, I dutifully arrived, returned his album to him only to find the guy had completely forgotten to bring my Beggars Banquet but promised faithfully to 'drop it in some time'. Of course, I never saw him or the album again.
So hearing Beggars Banquet for the first time on vinyl in about 30 years, I realise I'd forgotten how much of a personal touchstone of the Stones work this is for me. Of their Sixties stuff I think I only ever had this and Their Satanic Majesties and maybe a couple of singles. I suppose being nearer to 'my era', I initially responded more to their 70s output - although I probably already had the complete Beatles discography by this point. Maybe I'd got swept up in all of that Beatles v Stones rivalry? Anyway, my aunt had made me cassette copies of Exile on Main St and Goat's Head Soup, both much played and loved, and I had Some Girls, Love you live (both pinched from a bazaar on Oxford Street during a brief and shameful shoplifting phase) and It's Only Rock n Roll on record, so for a long time that was my Stones world.
This reissue is, as hard as it is to credit it, pressed from the same digital master used for the much-heralded 2002 SACD remastered series that really started me off exploring the band's 60s albums. Hard to believe because the vinyl itself looks, feels and sounds like a hefty, unyielding piece of original late 60s plastic. Only a look at the dead wax and a quick Google search at the ever-reliable and exhaustive (occasionally exhausting!) Steve Hoffman audiophiles forum confirms that this is a direct metal mastering of the 2002 DSD master made by Bob Ludwig and cut to disc for this record by Bob's former protege at Masterdisk, Don Grossinger. I had to check this because the music on this LP sounds so much as I remember it from my long lost copy, and in the case of the fade outs of 'Steet Fighting Man' and 'Stray Cat a Blues' slightly different to the SACD version, that one could easily suspend disbelief that they'd used one of the original Decca lacquers for this after all.
So if, like me, you're the sort of person who gets bent out of shape when classic albums get reissued and mucked about with in the process, don't worry in this case. It's so good that, for the first time in a long while, I actually really *listened* to the music - it sounds good enough to jerk you out of the rut of familiarity it's easy to fall into with much-loved and listened to works. So once you get beyond the astonishing presence of the sound, the fact that it's apparently now been pressed at the correct speed for the first time (!?), the natural, unboosted bass, the crisp plectrum snap of the acoustic guitars and the sheer oomph of this band, even when captured on cassette as some of the rhythm guitar and tracks were, it starts dawning on you what sublime and immortal music you're listening to. The Stones at their best tap into sources so primal that you are surprised less by the fact that they're still around after all these years than that they haven't actually been going since the very dawn of history.
That Ur musical energy is here harnessed by Jagger and Richards to shape a sequence of songs that are as compelling and as unified as any of the more overt (for want of a better word) concept albums alongside which it can happily sit in the pantheon of classic rock albums. Great and bold though the album artwork the band originally submitted is, as used on this reissue, the RSVP invitation version that replaced it back in 1968 is perhaps more appropriate to the song cycle inside. To horrifically oversimplify things, the album unfolds as a series of guests arriving at the banquet of the title and you're reminded that, however much they may have warred and bickered since, this music springs from one of pop history's great partnerships.
Sadly that's partly because this record marks the last substantial contribution to a Stones album by the band's founder, Brian Jones. And what there is of that is confined to a few tasteful cameos - most notably the elegiac slide on 'No expectations' and some exotic Moroccan fanfares and percussion at the end of 'Steet fighting man'. Charlie Watts' painstaking congas and Nicky Hopkins' piano might dominate the album opener, but from then on, musically, this is very much Richards' record. The breadth of his playing alone on this album would be a career high for most - it's his bass that drives 'Sympathy', his incendiary cassette wobbled rhythm guitar that so thrillingly contradicts the ambivalence of Jagger's lyric on 'Street fighting man' and makes you want to run out and become just that. Jagger may have gone to the LSE, but in terms of groove, feel and sheer expressive power, Keith's intelligence is every bit as fierce.
But though he's become somewhat overlooked in the general (and understandable) latterday Keith worship, it's Jagger who is at the very top of his game here. On a single record, perhaps only Bowie has since exhibited a greater range of vocal performance - and that's performance in the widest, most theatrical sense - so much so that it doesn't seem to be stretching things too far to see a nod to Brecht and Weill in the LP's title. Jagger shifts shape throughout, varying his narative persona with incredible dexterity; from Beelzebub himself ('Sympathy') to straw-in-mouth deep southern yokel gimp ('Dear Doctor'), the dry anomie of thedetatched LSE student voyeur of society's collapse ('Jigsaw puzzle'), armchair revolutionary ('Street fighting man'), Delta evangelist ('Prodigal son') to louche, paedophile provoacateur ('Stray cat blues').
This last is perhaps the most troublingly powerful piece on the record for the contemporary, post-Savile listener. Taken out of the context of performance, of theatre, that's been carefully built up in the tracks that precede it (and which would be reinforced in Jagger's first acting role, appropriately enough in a film called and about Performance) it's easy to read this as a tastelessly lascivious, self-aggrandising throw away. In my view, that's overly simplistic and self-deceptive. If Jagger's voicing of the Devil allows him to survey the travesty of human history as a diabolical blight upon the planet, here his lens zooms right close-up, into the here and now of the late sixties hipster bedsit.
Richards' guitars, one a stiff pronged cock crow blues bend the other an ominous rhythmic throb, rouse Jagger into leering chortles. And here comes 'the click-clack of [her] shoes on the stairs'. 'No scare-eyed honey' - no doubt because she's too young to know what she's letting herself in for - Jagger tempts this poor Lolita upstairs with the 'feast' that awaits her in his room. There's no ambiguity here, no moral grey area. He 'can see that [she's] fifteen years old' and that doesn't matter a jot. He knows that she's a little girl pretending in those heels to be all grown up, that she's 'restless' for the impending release of adulthood, a frightened runaway, 'so far from home' and parental disapproval and he's going to take full advantage of all those things:
it's no hanging matter, it's no capital crime.
So up she goes, poor Lolita, 'so weird...so far away from home'. She's a younger version of Jane Asher's northern runaway to Michael Caine's Alfie. And don't let those eyes deceive you - she is scared after all. Desperate, she conjures up an 'even wilder' friend. Maybe he'll want to do it with her instead? But no, he's on a roll now: 'if she's so wild she can join in too'. But 'don't be scared - [he's] no mad brained bear...' She scratches, she spits, she bites and she screams, but that just turns him on even more...
it's no hanging matter. It's no capital crime.
Almost as if in a parody of those old romances where the camera would discreetly pan away to leave the two lovers to their intimacy, Jagger's narrator retreats - scratched, bitten, screamed and spat at - leaving the rest to our imaginations, which is probably worse than actually seeing it all unfold.
And now we're back in the jungle of human infamy that we came in with on 'Sympahty for the Devil'. Charlie's congas and Hopkins' piano offer a brief musical reprise of the album opener, a reminder of the dark satanic presence who's overshadowed the whole of this banquet and must, we assume, be thoroughly enjoying this little 'feast'. On and on it goes until everything grows weary exept Richards' guttural, rutting guitar. And then, finally, that finises too and it's all over. It is dark. It is troubling. But it's also unflinchingly, and sadly, true to life. This music that feels as old and real as sin itself, so much so that it's beyond human politics and morality, is telling us something quite profoundly basic about what and who we are. This is the same brute, jungle 'politesse' as that laid bare in 'Sympathy for the Devil' only here it's the everyday kind that gets hidden away but still happens, is happening, somewhere, to someone, right now. And if you're still in any doubt as to their intent, take another look at that title: this is a blues, man. They tend to end unhappily.
But elsewhere, as always with the Stones, there is also transcendence and light; the tender farewell to Brian Jones that it's hard not to read 'No expectations' as being; the touching, gentle Christian allegory of 'Prodigal son'; the sheer thrill of the opening to 'Street fighting man', a near cinematic snapshot of the time that produced it that is so thoroughly engaging it seems to arouse every single cell in one's body. And the album closes with two tributes to the humble and down-trodden. The factory girl, who 'wears scarves instead of hats', 'has stains all down her dress' and 'gets me into fights' is so close to being a caricature... but so delicately rendered that, and in pointed contradiction to the massed ranks of common humanity depicted in the closer 'Salt of the Earth', she seems 'so real to me'. Their out-sized tongues may be somewhat in their cheeks at the end, but the 'it's not church, it's gospel' fervour of the fade to 'Salt of the Earth' that brings things to a close is a long, long way from the diabolic primal stew from which we and the record first slithered.
It's hard to pin down precisely what great art is, but if it can be defined at all then surely it's a piece of work that both describes and transcends the circumstances that produced it. Beggars Banquet certainly does both those things. Give it a listen, and raise a glass to it.
Buy Beggars Banquet remastered on vinyl here
