I was pretty impressed when The Muse returned from London with some vinyl for DC (Daddy Cool). She apparently went into some uber trendy record shop and told the guy behind the counter to help her chose some “must have” albums. Must have been quite a clever guy she was talking to, because she left there with The Rolling Stones album, Beggars Banquet – which I did not yet have in my vinyl collection. Sick!

The Muse scored massive points at the time.

The Rolling Stones
Beggars Banquet

But let me tell you some interesting facts about the album, which makes it all the more special (let alone the fact that the first song on side 1 is the haunting and controversial Sympathy For The Devil).

The following interesting facts are courtesy of a site I found, called “Wikipedia“:

By June, the sessions were nearly completed in England, with some final overdubbing and mixing to be done in Los Angeles during July. However, both Decca Records in England and London Records in the US rejected the planned cover design – a graffiti-covered lavatory wall. The band initially refused to change the cover, resulting in several months’ delay in the release of the album. By November, however, the Rolling Stones gave in, allowing the album to be released in December with a simple white cover imitating an invitation card. (The letters R.S.V.P. that appear on this version of the cover are an abbreviation of the French phrase répondez, s’il vous plaît, which means “please respond”.) [no shit] The idea of a plain album cover was also implemented by The Beatles for their eponymous white-sleeved double-album, which was released one month prior to Beggars Banquet. This similarity, coupled with Beggars Banquet’s later release, garnered the Rolling Stones accusations of imitating the Beatles. In 1984, the original cover art was released with the initial CD remastering of Beggars Banquet.

And here we are today!

But THAT, my friends, is NOT the big news. Check this out:

In August 2002, ABKCO Records reissued Beggars Banquet as a newly remastered LP and SACD/CD hybrid disk. This release corrected an important flaw in the original album by restoring each song to its proper, slightly faster speed. Due to an error in the mastering, Beggars Banquet was heard for over thirty years at a slower speed than it was recorded. This had the effect of altering not only the tempo of each song, but the song’s key as well. These differences were subtle but important, and the remastered version is about 30 seconds shorter than the original release.

How awesome is that information you just captured on your hard drive? And now you’re going to run around town and, every time you hear Sympathy For The Devil, you’re going to tune everyone in the room, “hey did you know this was originally played at the wrong speed for, like 30 years!” – acting like you’ve always known the information. But then you’ll look like an absolute tool when your mates turn to you and say, “Yes, A-hole, we also read 2oceansvibe.”

Dick.

CLICK HERE to listen to Sympathy For The Devil by Ozzy Osbourne.

CLICK HERE to listen to Sympathy For The Devil by Guns ‘n Roses.

CLICK HERE to listen to Sympathy For The Devil by U2.

CLICK HERE to watch the famous 1969 live Rolling Stones Altomont concert where the crowd lost their minds.