Friday, June 3, 2011
A Revolutionary Interlude (Lee Michaels)
I'm a sucker for hippie self-righteousness. Recorded in 1970, this is pretty much cut from the same cloth as other hit singles of the year: "Signs," "Candle in the Rain," "Spirit in the Sky," when for an odd moment, the counterculture disguised itself as primitive Christianity.
However, unlike all those other songs, this one didn't chart. The lyric might have been a bit too close to the bone.
If you like this song, you might want to check out the album it comes from: Barrel, by Lee Michaels. Many of the songs also address the Vietnam war effort; "Thumbs" criticizes the military more generally. All of the songs have the same appealing, laid-back 70s groove thing happening. Michaels was born in LA, but there's a lot of New Orleans in his piano and organ playing. In All the Rage, Small Faces/Faces keyboardist Ian McLagen recalls being impressed by the sheer presence and volume of Michaels' Hammond B-3 playing live; I'll take his word for it.
Ochs Redux: Or Christgau and the Last Refuge of Scoundrels
Never mind what Samuel Johnson said: quoting Robert Christgau to legitimate your aesthetic preferences is clearly last refuge of scoundrels. Dear Reader, I am a Scoundrel; I was heartened to find that Christgau's contemporary review of Phil Ochs' Pleasures of the Harbor (1968) echoed--I want to say anticipated :)-- my words on that record, and why I can't listen to it, in a previous blog on Ochs (yes, this entry could have been called, "Yet Again, I Reinvent the Wheel"). You can find it in Any Old Way You Choose It.
"Cluttered with gaudy musical settings that inspire nostalgia for the three chord strum, it is "artistic" but never artful...Without a narrative (as in a ballad) or a great singer (my emphasis)...or a sophisticated but available structure, it become geometrically more difficult to sustain interest at about that time [over four minutes]. Not impossible, mind you (like "A Quick One While He's Away" or "Like a Rolling Stone" are marvelous indeed. But those that fail, like "Pleasures of the Harbor" and all the rest, are enervating bores. Good intentions are never enough."
How clever Bob and I are! :)
"Cluttered with gaudy musical settings that inspire nostalgia for the three chord strum, it is "artistic" but never artful...Without a narrative (as in a ballad) or a great singer (my emphasis)...or a sophisticated but available structure, it become geometrically more difficult to sustain interest at about that time [over four minutes]. Not impossible, mind you (like "A Quick One While He's Away" or "Like a Rolling Stone" are marvelous indeed. But those that fail, like "Pleasures of the Harbor" and all the rest, are enervating bores. Good intentions are never enough."
How clever Bob and I are! :)
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Lennon and Rock Fundamentalism
This is a response to Jeremy Harding's insightful review of Lennon Remembers (Verso, 2000), published in the London Review of Books (2000). I recently re-read it; it made me wish that I had room to discuss Lennon's art trajectory in the late 60s in my Beatles chapter in British Rock Modernism.
Harding argues that John rethinks his relation to rock music after meeting Yoko, in an effort to assimilate her avant-garde aesthetic. Yoko already had proven herself as an artist; John had only begun to consider bridging the art/pop divide. Harding claims that John rejects the Beatles' modernist bag of songwriting tricks, the new conceptual approach and collage/montage techniques that distinguished their post-Revolver records, for what Harding dubs "rock fundamentalism": a faith in rock as a mode of pure expression; crude, but essentially authentic. Lennon's new dogmatic rockism can be heard on many of his songs for the Beatles "White" Album (1968): also the "Cold Turkey" single and Live Peace in Toronto (1969), culminating, Harding claims, in John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (Dec 1970), Lennon's first post-Beatles solo record. It's a provocative argument: but I think the reality was more uneven--maybe just stranger--than this clear-cut opposition suggests. Post-Pepper, Lennon seems to have frequently mixed his rock fundamentalism with rock modernism.
Harding's bases his argument mostly on the (in)famous interview with John Lennon by Jann Wenner from late 1970 (published in Rolling Stone Jan and February 1971), just prior to the release of JL/POB. The interview was and remains riveting. It's a riveting celebrity tell-all, as well as a communique from the front lines of the underground, by a counterculture luminary. Fresh from sessions with "Primal Scream" therapist Arthur Janov, Lennon fashions himself as a revolutionary truth-teller, barely concealing his anger and rage at everyone he feels has lied to him or caused him pain: which is practically everybody, and everything, besides Yoko. John used the interview to rewrite his personal history, and how he and the Beatles were understood by their mass audience.
Among these other things, Lennon Remembers is an account of John's conversion experience away from pop to a fiercely purist notion of rock and roll. He gleefully points out how the Beatles and the entire second wave of rock stars fall short when compared to the Notion of Rock itself, and the American singers of the 50s: "There's nothing conceptually better than rock and roll. No group, be it Beatles, Dylan or Stones has ever improved on "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On."
In this respect, Lennon Remembers was also an aesthetic manifesto. Wenner provided Lennon with a pretext to revisit his own work with the Beatles; in a concerted effort at 'self-correction,' John separates the sheep from the goats, good songs from the bad, in his canon. The canon shrinks to what he calls his "personal" songs: this was, after all, the Lennon who had recently sang, "I don't believe in Beatles/I just believe in Me." "In My Life," "I'm a Loser," "Help," "Strawberry Fields Forever" were among the few songs plucked from the bonfire of vanities.
These songs have little in common in musical terms: one of them, "Strawberry Fields," is even a prime example of John's modernist songwriting mode. Yet for Lennon these songs came from his 'real' self, and that made all the difference. The emphasis now, as Harding observes, "is on a music that comes from the inside, no virtuosity, ...a first-person music," and nothing else matters.
It does seem the case, as Harding notes, that McCartney was far more comfortable, or perhaps more skillful, in incorporating modernist tricks in his songwriting: reveling in odd juxtapositions of song and sound, collaging bits and pieces of song--than John. In fact, McCartney would pursue song collage/montage till the Beatles split (the extended medley on Abbey Road), and beyond, to his first two solo records, McCartney (1970) and 1971's Ram. The latter album is frequently praised as an inspiration to latter day indie rockers with similar art aspirations. Harding even goes as far as suggest that it was Paul, not John, who was Yoko's real soul mate artistically!
However, while John may have preached rock fundamentalism in Lennon Remembers, he was inconsistent about practicing it. The art stance didn't fully rub off. Even in LR, "Strawberry Fields" and "Happiness is a Warm Gun," songs that self-consciously play with form, receive the stamp of approval. If JL/POB represents the apex of Lennon's rockism, Lennon's appearance as a solo performer on the Stones' Rock and Roll Circus program (never shown, but filmed December 1968) was perhaps the first attempt at defining his musical self outside of the Beatles. Even here, I'd suggest that John undercuts his rock fideism.
Lennon seems to have used the Stones' program as a platform to broadcast his new musical message and aesthetic. As I discuss in my book, The Stones, or at least Mick Jagger, had a similar goal, making similar claims about the power of rock as an art form. Jagger's art agenda was much closer, ironically, to the studio modernism of the Beatles than John's new found rock purism. The Stones' lead singer was fresh from the life-changing experience of filming Performance (Cammell/Roeg, dir.; released 1970). As stage managed by director and occultist Donald Cammell, the cast of Performance engaged in a freewheeling, collective experiment in sex, drugs, and intentional derangement of the senses as a means of self-liberation. Shaken but also strengthened by the experience, Jagger had begun to rethink the role of the rock singer in more overtly occult terms, as a shaman who magically alters reality through his art. The leap from art pretensions to magic is not hard: occultism has long been a shadow partner of modernism. Influenced by Crowely-ites Cammell and Kenneth Anger, Jagger discovered the heady esoteric tradition, and began to contemplate its possible links to rock music. (He would also provide the haunting moog soundtrack to Anger's menacing, portentous Invocation of My Demon Brother, filmed the following year).
Lennon fronted an all-star band with Mitch Mitchell (the Hendrix Experience), Keith Richards, and Eric Clapton for his bit on the Stones' new variety show. From our vantage point, the whole supergroup phenomenon may seem opposed to the question for personal liberation and authenticity at the core of Lennon's rock fundamentalism. Yet when the Circus concert was filmed in December 1968, improvised, long-form rock music was more associated with the informal rock culture of late-night jams than a part of commercial rock culture. The Bloomfield/Kooper/Stills Supersession record and the live sides of Cream's Wheel of Fire were only a few months old (both released summer 1968). Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland, a record where after-hours jamming spilled over into studio sessions, was a little over a month old. When Lennon and the group dubbed "the Dirty Mac," a gentle mock of one of John's favorite new bands, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac,the supergroup still represented a strain of non-commercial music within the rock field.
John indeed jammed, with Clapton, etc. but also Ivry Gitlis and of course, Yoko. He also did one Beatles song, "Yer Blues." On the surface, John's selection of this neo-blues, with its simple, 'personal' lyric ("Yes, I'm Lonely/Want to Die") would seem a perfect fit with his new minimalist aesthetic. Yet "Yer Blues" also blurs the lines between irony and authenticity. The self-consciously cliched lyric, like the "Dirty Mac" moniker, pokes fun at Fleetwood Mac, but beyond that to the vogue for blues music among the white middle-class counterculture audience. For the new underground, the taste for blues was not only modish, but politically correct, and blues music itself a powerful signifier of authenticity. The lyrics and the make-shift band name treats the new fashion for blues to John's customary withering irony. At the same time, the power of the song (and the Beatles' recording as well) lies in the utter conviction with which Lennon sings the lines, "so lonely--want to die." "Yer Blues" by both the Beatles and the Dirty Mac is less a "pure" blues-rock song, than an intentionally broken vessel, combining self-expression with ironic distance.
Harding offers the stark, minimalist Plastic Ono Band record as the chief example of Lennon's rejection of the Beatles' modernist aesthetic, but arguably it is just as ambiguous in this regard as the Dirty Mac version of "Yer Blues." With Lennon's first solo record, Harding asserts, "there simply was no interest in form as anything other than a means to (the) end" of autobiography and self-expression.
Harding has shrewd things to say about the ideology of the recording, as represented Lennon's lyrics. "I don't believe in Beatles/I just believe in me/Yoko and Me/That's reality," Lennon sings in "God," a valediction to all things 60s. As Harding observes, believing in "Me" is hardly more of a given, than believing in Jesus or Zimmerman. (To Lennon's credit, "Me" doesn't stay "Me" very long, but is immediately revised to include Yoko, thus implying a reality outside the self).
Yet a careful listen reveals a structural tension between form and content, as Robert Christgau remarked of the album at the time. While approving of what he characterizes as Lennon's current aim to "make clear that right now truth is far more important than taste, art or anything else" (those were different times) (Any Way That You Choose It, 241), he also notes the heavy reliance on "studio gimmickry": distorted drums and guitars, and most of all, carefully prepared vocal tracks.
That last point is especially revealing. In his purist period, Lennon seemed to regard the Singer as the privileged vessel of musical authenticity. Yet, as Christgau notes, the vocals on POB are "echoed, filtered, and double-traced, with two voices sometimes emanating in synthesis from between the speakers and sometimes dialectically (nice touch, Bob) separated" (242). An early take of "Mother," where Lennon seems on the brink of tears but turns out to be acting out his grief for the purpose of the recording, would prompt Ian MacDonald to remark on "Lennon's deceptive professionalism." It would seem that POB is both raw AND cooked.
My point here is not that Art Will Out, or at least, that's not my entire point: more that the POB proves that John's idea of rock authenticity derives more from rock modernism than from 'nature.' For Lennon, even at his most ideological in regard to rock, the raw remained part of the same fold of modernist rock, rather than its negation.
Harding argues that John rethinks his relation to rock music after meeting Yoko, in an effort to assimilate her avant-garde aesthetic. Yoko already had proven herself as an artist; John had only begun to consider bridging the art/pop divide. Harding claims that John rejects the Beatles' modernist bag of songwriting tricks, the new conceptual approach and collage/montage techniques that distinguished their post-Revolver records, for what Harding dubs "rock fundamentalism": a faith in rock as a mode of pure expression; crude, but essentially authentic. Lennon's new dogmatic rockism can be heard on many of his songs for the Beatles "White" Album (1968): also the "Cold Turkey" single and Live Peace in Toronto (1969), culminating, Harding claims, in John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (Dec 1970), Lennon's first post-Beatles solo record. It's a provocative argument: but I think the reality was more uneven--maybe just stranger--than this clear-cut opposition suggests. Post-Pepper, Lennon seems to have frequently mixed his rock fundamentalism with rock modernism.
Harding's bases his argument mostly on the (in)famous interview with John Lennon by Jann Wenner from late 1970 (published in Rolling Stone Jan and February 1971), just prior to the release of JL/POB. The interview was and remains riveting. It's a riveting celebrity tell-all, as well as a communique from the front lines of the underground, by a counterculture luminary. Fresh from sessions with "Primal Scream" therapist Arthur Janov, Lennon fashions himself as a revolutionary truth-teller, barely concealing his anger and rage at everyone he feels has lied to him or caused him pain: which is practically everybody, and everything, besides Yoko. John used the interview to rewrite his personal history, and how he and the Beatles were understood by their mass audience.
Among these other things, Lennon Remembers is an account of John's conversion experience away from pop to a fiercely purist notion of rock and roll. He gleefully points out how the Beatles and the entire second wave of rock stars fall short when compared to the Notion of Rock itself, and the American singers of the 50s: "There's nothing conceptually better than rock and roll. No group, be it Beatles, Dylan or Stones has ever improved on "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On."
In this respect, Lennon Remembers was also an aesthetic manifesto. Wenner provided Lennon with a pretext to revisit his own work with the Beatles; in a concerted effort at 'self-correction,' John separates the sheep from the goats, good songs from the bad, in his canon. The canon shrinks to what he calls his "personal" songs: this was, after all, the Lennon who had recently sang, "I don't believe in Beatles/I just believe in Me." "In My Life," "I'm a Loser," "Help," "Strawberry Fields Forever" were among the few songs plucked from the bonfire of vanities.
These songs have little in common in musical terms: one of them, "Strawberry Fields," is even a prime example of John's modernist songwriting mode. Yet for Lennon these songs came from his 'real' self, and that made all the difference. The emphasis now, as Harding observes, "is on a music that comes from the inside, no virtuosity, ...a first-person music," and nothing else matters.
It does seem the case, as Harding notes, that McCartney was far more comfortable, or perhaps more skillful, in incorporating modernist tricks in his songwriting: reveling in odd juxtapositions of song and sound, collaging bits and pieces of song--than John. In fact, McCartney would pursue song collage/montage till the Beatles split (the extended medley on Abbey Road), and beyond, to his first two solo records, McCartney (1970) and 1971's Ram. The latter album is frequently praised as an inspiration to latter day indie rockers with similar art aspirations. Harding even goes as far as suggest that it was Paul, not John, who was Yoko's real soul mate artistically!
However, while John may have preached rock fundamentalism in Lennon Remembers, he was inconsistent about practicing it. The art stance didn't fully rub off. Even in LR, "Strawberry Fields" and "Happiness is a Warm Gun," songs that self-consciously play with form, receive the stamp of approval. If JL/POB represents the apex of Lennon's rockism, Lennon's appearance as a solo performer on the Stones' Rock and Roll Circus program (never shown, but filmed December 1968) was perhaps the first attempt at defining his musical self outside of the Beatles. Even here, I'd suggest that John undercuts his rock fideism.
Lennon seems to have used the Stones' program as a platform to broadcast his new musical message and aesthetic. As I discuss in my book, The Stones, or at least Mick Jagger, had a similar goal, making similar claims about the power of rock as an art form. Jagger's art agenda was much closer, ironically, to the studio modernism of the Beatles than John's new found rock purism. The Stones' lead singer was fresh from the life-changing experience of filming Performance (Cammell/Roeg, dir.; released 1970). As stage managed by director and occultist Donald Cammell, the cast of Performance engaged in a freewheeling, collective experiment in sex, drugs, and intentional derangement of the senses as a means of self-liberation. Shaken but also strengthened by the experience, Jagger had begun to rethink the role of the rock singer in more overtly occult terms, as a shaman who magically alters reality through his art. The leap from art pretensions to magic is not hard: occultism has long been a shadow partner of modernism. Influenced by Crowely-ites Cammell and Kenneth Anger, Jagger discovered the heady esoteric tradition, and began to contemplate its possible links to rock music. (He would also provide the haunting moog soundtrack to Anger's menacing, portentous Invocation of My Demon Brother, filmed the following year).
Lennon fronted an all-star band with Mitch Mitchell (the Hendrix Experience), Keith Richards, and Eric Clapton for his bit on the Stones' new variety show. From our vantage point, the whole supergroup phenomenon may seem opposed to the question for personal liberation and authenticity at the core of Lennon's rock fundamentalism. Yet when the Circus concert was filmed in December 1968, improvised, long-form rock music was more associated with the informal rock culture of late-night jams than a part of commercial rock culture. The Bloomfield/Kooper/Stills Supersession record and the live sides of Cream's Wheel of Fire were only a few months old (both released summer 1968). Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland, a record where after-hours jamming spilled over into studio sessions, was a little over a month old. When Lennon and the group dubbed "the Dirty Mac," a gentle mock of one of John's favorite new bands, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac,the supergroup still represented a strain of non-commercial music within the rock field.
John indeed jammed, with Clapton, etc. but also Ivry Gitlis and of course, Yoko. He also did one Beatles song, "Yer Blues." On the surface, John's selection of this neo-blues, with its simple, 'personal' lyric ("Yes, I'm Lonely/Want to Die") would seem a perfect fit with his new minimalist aesthetic. Yet "Yer Blues" also blurs the lines between irony and authenticity. The self-consciously cliched lyric, like the "Dirty Mac" moniker, pokes fun at Fleetwood Mac, but beyond that to the vogue for blues music among the white middle-class counterculture audience. For the new underground, the taste for blues was not only modish, but politically correct, and blues music itself a powerful signifier of authenticity. The lyrics and the make-shift band name treats the new fashion for blues to John's customary withering irony. At the same time, the power of the song (and the Beatles' recording as well) lies in the utter conviction with which Lennon sings the lines, "so lonely--want to die." "Yer Blues" by both the Beatles and the Dirty Mac is less a "pure" blues-rock song, than an intentionally broken vessel, combining self-expression with ironic distance.
Harding offers the stark, minimalist Plastic Ono Band record as the chief example of Lennon's rejection of the Beatles' modernist aesthetic, but arguably it is just as ambiguous in this regard as the Dirty Mac version of "Yer Blues." With Lennon's first solo record, Harding asserts, "there simply was no interest in form as anything other than a means to (the) end" of autobiography and self-expression.
Harding has shrewd things to say about the ideology of the recording, as represented Lennon's lyrics. "I don't believe in Beatles/I just believe in me/Yoko and Me/That's reality," Lennon sings in "God," a valediction to all things 60s. As Harding observes, believing in "Me" is hardly more of a given, than believing in Jesus or Zimmerman. (To Lennon's credit, "Me" doesn't stay "Me" very long, but is immediately revised to include Yoko, thus implying a reality outside the self).
Yet a careful listen reveals a structural tension between form and content, as Robert Christgau remarked of the album at the time. While approving of what he characterizes as Lennon's current aim to "make clear that right now truth is far more important than taste, art or anything else" (those were different times) (Any Way That You Choose It, 241), he also notes the heavy reliance on "studio gimmickry": distorted drums and guitars, and most of all, carefully prepared vocal tracks.
That last point is especially revealing. In his purist period, Lennon seemed to regard the Singer as the privileged vessel of musical authenticity. Yet, as Christgau notes, the vocals on POB are "echoed, filtered, and double-traced, with two voices sometimes emanating in synthesis from between the speakers and sometimes dialectically (nice touch, Bob) separated" (242). An early take of "Mother," where Lennon seems on the brink of tears but turns out to be acting out his grief for the purpose of the recording, would prompt Ian MacDonald to remark on "Lennon's deceptive professionalism." It would seem that POB is both raw AND cooked.
My point here is not that Art Will Out, or at least, that's not my entire point: more that the POB proves that John's idea of rock authenticity derives more from rock modernism than from 'nature.' For Lennon, even at his most ideological in regard to rock, the raw remained part of the same fold of modernist rock, rather than its negation.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Nicky Hopkins
I'm excited to read Julian Dawson's biography of the great session player of the 60s, Nicky Hopkins. I don't have the book yet; it's sold out on amazon.com, but I heard Dawson discuss it on West Coast Live. Even though you may never have heard of him, his resume includes most of the best rock music produced in the 1960s. A case could be made that Hopkins, a hired hand for the Stones, the Beatles, the early records of the Kinks and the Who AND the Jefferson Airplane and the Dead, virtually created rock as a transatlantic style, in rock's second wave.
Always respected, Hopkins never made the fortune he deserved. It's an old story: the only way to make money is to write the songs and own the publishing rights. Dawson tells the story that EMI paid Hopkins the princely sum of six pounds--about ten dollars--for his to the Beatles' Revolution: a deathless, truly manic, Jelly Roll of a piano solo, that more than matches the pumped up guitars on the track. Keith Richards is among the hundreds of people Dawson interviewed for the book. Richards recalls the sessions for the "We Love You" single; narrowly escaping long jail sentences (John "Hoppy" Hopkins would not be as lucky) and in the studio, Jagger and Richards were also, not surprisingly, dry of inspiration. But then Nicky came up with the song's riff, and "boom," Keith recalls, "we had a song."
In fact, the song is the riff. When Dawson asks why Hopkins never got a songwriting credit, Keith cheerfully replies, "That's the Stones for you." Sigh. You're a cad, Keith (not that he cares).
But while Keith didn't want to share, he still loved--and certainly used--Nicky. Hopkins is all over the great Stones records of the late 60s and early 70s. Rod Stewart's cover of "Street Fighting Man" seems a direct nod and tribute to Nicky's work with the Stones in that period as much as to Jagger-Richards (from The Rod Stewart Album, 1969, Mercury Records; released a year after the Stones' original, Rod covered it because he admired the words so much, and was frustrated you couldn't make them out in the Stones' version).
Dear Reader, I don't normally recommend Rod Stewart records but this one's an exception (actually, the next three are). As Joe Kenny notes in Head Heritage, Rod's first record "could easily be re-titled Beggars Banquet," even down to similar cover designs (see above). "Street Fighting Man" opens the album, as a statement of intent. Nicky had played on the original song, contributing the trippy arabesques at the fade, if you can call arabesques "trippy." Where the Stones' song marched, and lurched, this version's slowed down to a funky groove. The Stones' song made the acoustic guitar rock. This sonic innovation did not go unnoticed by Rod and the band here: future Faces Ron Wood and Ian McLagan. They stop abruptly, and then start again, this time at the slightly faster tempo of the original. It's a wall of sound, a thick mesh of acoustic guitar, piano, and bottleneck slide. The song stops one more time, and resumes with Mac playing the piano riff to "We Love You" to the fade out. I don't know whose idea it was to mash up SFM with the earlier song, but the fact that it works perfectly suggests a band who were doing a lot of wood-shedding while listening to post-67 Stones records. I want to think the "We Love You" sample was Mac's idea, and that he realized, even then, the crucial role that Nicky Hopkins played in creating the best records the Stones ever made.
Always respected, Hopkins never made the fortune he deserved. It's an old story: the only way to make money is to write the songs and own the publishing rights. Dawson tells the story that EMI paid Hopkins the princely sum of six pounds--about ten dollars--for his to the Beatles' Revolution: a deathless, truly manic, Jelly Roll of a piano solo, that more than matches the pumped up guitars on the track. Keith Richards is among the hundreds of people Dawson interviewed for the book. Richards recalls the sessions for the "We Love You" single; narrowly escaping long jail sentences (John "Hoppy" Hopkins would not be as lucky) and in the studio, Jagger and Richards were also, not surprisingly, dry of inspiration. But then Nicky came up with the song's riff, and "boom," Keith recalls, "we had a song."
In fact, the song is the riff. When Dawson asks why Hopkins never got a songwriting credit, Keith cheerfully replies, "That's the Stones for you." Sigh. You're a cad, Keith (not that he cares).
But while Keith didn't want to share, he still loved--and certainly used--Nicky. Hopkins is all over the great Stones records of the late 60s and early 70s. Rod Stewart's cover of "Street Fighting Man" seems a direct nod and tribute to Nicky's work with the Stones in that period as much as to Jagger-Richards (from The Rod Stewart Album, 1969, Mercury Records; released a year after the Stones' original, Rod covered it because he admired the words so much, and was frustrated you couldn't make them out in the Stones' version).
Dear Reader, I don't normally recommend Rod Stewart records but this one's an exception (actually, the next three are). As Joe Kenny notes in Head Heritage, Rod's first record "could easily be re-titled Beggars Banquet," even down to similar cover designs (see above). "Street Fighting Man" opens the album, as a statement of intent. Nicky had played on the original song, contributing the trippy arabesques at the fade, if you can call arabesques "trippy." Where the Stones' song marched, and lurched, this version's slowed down to a funky groove. The Stones' song made the acoustic guitar rock. This sonic innovation did not go unnoticed by Rod and the band here: future Faces Ron Wood and Ian McLagan. They stop abruptly, and then start again, this time at the slightly faster tempo of the original. It's a wall of sound, a thick mesh of acoustic guitar, piano, and bottleneck slide. The song stops one more time, and resumes with Mac playing the piano riff to "We Love You" to the fade out. I don't know whose idea it was to mash up SFM with the earlier song, but the fact that it works perfectly suggests a band who were doing a lot of wood-shedding while listening to post-67 Stones records. I want to think the "We Love You" sample was Mac's idea, and that he realized, even then, the crucial role that Nicky Hopkins played in creating the best records the Stones ever made.
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