By January 1967, The Rolling Stones released their fifth album Between the Buttons, and headed back to the studio to configure a second album within the year. That spring, The Beatles released their iconic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, vividly covered by Michael Cooper’s photograph of the the band flanked by more than 50 iconic figures throughout history.
Later that year, the Stones had their sxith album, Their Satanic Majesties Requests, in December of ’67. Not only did the cover of the album closely resemble the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s‘ with the Stones in similar resplendent attire and an animated backdrop, but the band’s sound—a more psychedelic experiment using mellotrons and other instrumentation—penetrated the Stones’ regular bowels of blues-rock.
Keith Richards was never a fan of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and to this day, he shares the same sentiment for Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Stones album he is the least proud of from the band’s catalog.
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“If you’re the Beatles in the ’60s, you just get carried away—you forget what it is you wanted to do,” said Richards in 2015. “You’re starting to do Sgt. Pepper. Some people think it’s a genius album, but I think it’s a mishmash of rubbish, kind of like ‘Satanic Majesties,’—’Oh, if you can make a load of shit, so can we.’”
In 2010, Richards admitted in his memoir Life that Satanic Majesties was loosely based on the Beatles’ album in a moment of haste. “None of us wanted to make [‘Satanic Majesties’],” shared Richards, “but it was time for another Stones album, and ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ was coming out, so we thought, basically, we were doing a put-on.”
During recording sessions, the Stones were also in a state with various band members in court and jail and barely showing up to the studio. Stones’ then manager and producer Andrew Loog Oldham even walked out on the project leaving the band to produce it.
Despite the band’s indfference around making the album, Their Satanic Majesties Request went to No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and No. 3 on the UK Albums chart.
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Richards likes the tracks “Citadel,” “2000 Light Years from Home,” and “She’s a Rainbow,”—the latter two are the only songs from the album still played by the band live—but he still thinks the album was a “load of crap.”
“That album was made under the pressure of the court cases,” said Richards, “and the whole scene that was going on in London at that time.”
Photo: Norman Potter/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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