Tag Archives: Beggars Banquet

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Song of the Day #5,554: ‘Jigsaw Puzzle’ – The Rolling Stones

It took five years and 11 albums for The Rolling Stones to truly hit their stride. All of their output prior to late 1968 was very good, and included moments of true greatness, but Beggars Banquet was the band’s first masterpiece.

The Stones responded to the lukewarm reception of their psychedelic rock effort Their Satanic Majesties Request not just by returning to basics, but by churning out their most memorable batch of songs yet. Instant classics ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and ‘Street Fighting Man’ lead the charge but this is an album full of gems.

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Song of the Day #4,300: ‘Dear Doctor’ – The Rolling Stones

‘Dear Doctor’ is a fun country-blues track from 1968’s Beggars Banquet, The Rolling Stones’ first masterpiece.

By my count, The Stones released four albums on which I would hang that m-word. And they released them all in a row.

First up was Beggars Banquet, followed by Let it Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1961), and Exile on Main St. (1972).

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Song of the Day #1,448: ‘Street Fighting Man’ – The Rolling Stones

Best Albums of the 60s – #11
Beggars Banquet – The Rolling Stones (1968)

Back in high school and my first years of college, I made a point to discover the important music recorded before I was born. I had sufficiently mined the catalogs of Bob Dylan and The Beatles before finally turning my attention to The Rolling Stones.

Given my limited resources, I settled on two albums considered essential by the powers that be. One is still to come on this list, and the other was Beggars Banquet.

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Song of the Day #1,013: ‘Sympathy For the Devil’ – The Rolling Stones

Beggars Banquet was released just one year after Between the Buttons, in 1968, yet The Rolling Stones managed to sneak another album out in between them (Their Satanic Majesties Request, a foray into psychedelia). Talk about a prolific period.

Beggars Banquet was a return to a more blues/rock approach and is widely considered one of the band’s finest works. This was one of the first Stones albums I bought when I started reading up on their catalog and deciding where to dip my toe.

The album isn’t packed with hit singles — today’s track and ‘Street Fighting Man’ are the only songs here that would likely make a greatest hits record. But every song is great, from the jokey hoedown ‘Dear Doctor’ to the bawdy riff-tastic ‘Stray Cat Blues.’

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Song of the Day #10: ‘Stray Cat Blues’ – The Rolling Stones

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m thrilled by the use of a good pop or rock song on the big screen. And as a lover of both film and music, I have often listened to a song and imagined exactly how I would use it in a movie.

I’m sure this is something a lot of us do, matching images to the music we hear. Is it more prevalent for the generation that grew up on MTV and was conditioned to see music accompanied by videos? Or did my parents listen to Frank Sinatra and invent movies in their minds?

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