Beggars Banquet

Beggars Banquet is the Rolling Stones' seventh studio album, released on December 6, 1968. Recorded primarily at Olympic Sound Studios in Barnes, London, between March and July 1968, it was the first album produced by Jimmy Miller, who would go on to shape the band's most celebrated creative run.

The album arrived during one of the most convulsive years of the twentieth century. 1968 saw the Tet Offensive, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the killing of Robert F. Kennedy, the May uprisings in France, Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia, and violent clashes at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Mick Jagger had marched against the Vietnam War in London's Grosvenor Square in March of that year; that experience fed directly into "Street Fighting Man."

Where Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) had been a poorly-received attempt at psychedelia, Beggars Banquet returned the band to American blues and roots rock, but filtered those traditions through a darker, more politically aware lens. The album opens with the panoramic Satanic epic "Sympathy for the Devil" and contains the social commentary of "Street Fighting Man," the menacing sexuality of "Stray Cat Blues," and the country-tinged "Factory Girl." Author Stephen Davis described it as "a sharp reflection of the convulsive psychic currents coursing through the Western world." It is widely considered one of the greatest rock albums ever made and the beginning of the band's most celebrated creative period.