That became clear over the past couple of years, as the ace team of Abkco chief engineer Teri Landi and veteran mastering engineer Bob Ludwig went back to the original tapes and meticulously remastered the album.
And perhaps most of all, they were creatively, psychically and physically drained: Over the preceding three years they’d recorded and released approximately nine albums’ worth of material while gigging an average of five nights a week.īut the group always put a vast amount of care into their albums, and “Satanic Majesties” is no exception. As if that weren’t enough, during the recording of this album the group split with Andrew Loog Oldham, the manager and producer who’d guided them to stardom they ended up producing themselves for the first time. Soon after, Jones - already hobbled by the drug and alcohol abuse that contributed to his death two years later - suffered a nervous breakdown and checked into a medical facility for three weeks. Jones’ longtime girlfriend Anita Pallenberg left him - for Richards. In 1967, Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones all were arrested on drug charges and spent a night (or, in Jagger’s case, three nights) in jail. Yet while “Satanic Majesties” is subpar by the Stones’ very high standards, this beautifully packaged and sonically pristine set, which includes stereo and mono versions of the album on both vinyl and hybrid SACD, shows that some long-overdue historic revisionism is in order.įor starters, as Rob Bowman points out in his excellent liner notes for this edition, a likely reason for the Stones’ antipathy toward the album is because it was recorded during a year that almost destroyed them.