‘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).
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.
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.’
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?
Meet Me In Montauk 