Street Fighting Man: acoustic guitars piled on tape
When the Rolling Stones went into the studio for Street Fighting Man, Keith Richards could not reproduce the sound of his original demo. He told Guitar World that the demo was a cassette recording, so the band played the cassette through an extension speaker while he played along. A microphone went into an acoustic guitar, and the new performance was overdubbed onto the cassette track. That homemade starting point shaped everything that followed.
Time Is On Our Side says Richards wrote the melody in late 1966 or early 1967, before Jumpin' Jack Flash, and failed to record it in the studio in 1967. He worked on it at his Sussex farmhouse instead. The sound he wanted, uDiscover Music says, was a dry, crisp one that he got by miking an acoustic guitar closely into an early cassette recorder. Richards told Guitar World that at the time he was compressing acoustic guitars by running them through early Philips and Norelco cassette recorders and overloading them, slamming the little plastic microphone right down into the guitar. He wanted the drive and dryness of an acoustic, but he still wanted it distorted.
The basic track was cut at Olympic Sound Studios in London, with Richards and Charlie Watts sitting on the floor and recording onto a mono Philips cassette recorder, according to Time Is On Our Side. The recorder had no limiter, and its distortion became part of the sound. Watts did not play a standard kit. Both Time Is On Our Side and uDiscover Music describe an antique practice drum kit that came packed in a small suitcase. Time Is On Our Side calls it a 1930s toy drum kit.
From there the recording grew in layers. Richards told Guitar World that the cassette performance went onto a four-track, and as it played back he added guitar while pianist Nicky Hopkins played a bit of piano and Watts shuffled in the background. Drums were then put on, another guitar was added, and, in his words, they just kept layering. Time Is On Our Side lists the later additions: Watts added a bigger bass drum on one track, and Richards recorded a further acoustic guitar to widen the sound.
The guitars themselves are the heart of the puzzle. Richards says Street Fighting Man has one six-string and one five-string acoustic, both in open tunings, with a lot of capo work. He tried eight different guitars and could not say which ones were used in the final version. Because of all the layers, he says, it is difficult to say what you are hearing on the track. Time Is On Our Side adds that much of the guitar work is shadowed and hard to identify.
Not everything on the record is a guitar. Time Is On Our Side credits Brian Jones with sitar and tambura, which sit in the background of the track. Dave Mason of Traffic added a shehnai at the end of the song, and uDiscover Music describes the shehnai as a reed instrument used in Indian music. Bill Wyman was absent, so Richards recorded the bass line himself. Time Is On Our Side notes that the bass is the only electric instrument on the recording, and Jimmy Miller produced the sessions, with Eddie Kramer and Glyn Johns named as chief engineers.
The words changed too. Time Is On Our Side says Street Fighting Man began as Did Everyone Pay Their Dues, with lyrics about brutal adults that the band was unhappy with. The lyrics were rewritten after the unrest of 1968 in London and Paris. Mick Jagger has said that the song was directly inspired by the French riot police and the unrest in France. He also said it is not a call to violence and that he did not support violent political change. Jagger recalled being told the song was subversive, and he replied that it was unrealistic to think a record could start a revolution.
The record reached listeners in August 1968. uDiscover Music says the American release coincided with protests and clashes with police at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and that some radio stations refused to play the song, fearing it would incite violence. In 1968, Richards said that a couple of Chicago radio stations banned it, and he called that a sign of paranoia. Rolling Stones Data says the song peaked at number 48, which it attributes to a broadcast blackout by many radio stations, and notes that the record came out in the same month as the Beatles' Revolution.
Rolling Stones Data describes the finished mix as full of stereo separation and unconventional textures, and says it was impossible to replicate live. Richards's cassette, extension speaker and stack of overdubs had produced a record whose construction, in his own account, he could no longer fully untangle.
- Keith Richards on his 10 greatest riffs: Guitar World — www.guitarworld.com
- Street Fighting Man: Time Is On Our Side — www.timeisonourside.com
- Street Fighting Man: uDiscover Music — www.udiscovermusic.com
- Street Fighting Man: Rolling Stones Data — rollingstonesdata.com