It’s no shock that the Rolling Stones may have dabbled in drugs during their time, but Mick Jagger claims this one album was addled by acid.
The now 81-year-old rocker reflected on their sixth studio album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, in a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone, admitting: ‘The whole thing, we were on acid.’
He continued: ‘We were on acid doing the cover picture. I always remember doing that. It was like being at school, you know, sticking on the bits of coloured paper and things. It was really silly. But we enjoyed it.’
While Mick admitted he was probably taking ‘too many drugs’ by that point, he reflected on the album: ‘Well, it’s not very good.
‘It had interesting things on it, but I don’t think any of the songs are very good. It’s a bit like Between the Buttons. It’s a sound experience, really, rather than a song experience.’
The frontman also admitted they went a bit psychedelic rogue on this instalment to ‘p**s off’ their manager and producer Andrew ‘Loog’ Oldham ‘because he was such a pain in the neck’.
Andrew parted ways with the band during the recording of this album.
The album came in a particularly tumultuous time for the Gimmie Shelter rockers, as also in 1967 both Jagger and Keith Richards were arrested at the latter’s Sussex home for drug possession.
The cover has often been directly compared to – and accused of being a mockery of – The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, which was released just before Satanic Majesties.
Funnily enough – or not so – the man behind the camera was Michael Cooper, who had shot that eerily similar Beatles cover just three months prior.
His son Adam told Vulture in 2017 that the cover shot by Cooper – who took his own life in 1973 – was directly inspired by The Beatles.
He said: ‘Well, Sgt. Pepper was such a tremendous success, of course the Stones wanted to jump on that bandwagon and take advantage of it.
‘So they went to Michael as a friend and said, “Look, you’ve done Sgt. Pepper. We want to do a similar type of thing with Satanic Majesties.”‘
Adam, a filmmaker, also admitted: ‘The British press were constantly dreaming up rumours that relations between the Beatles and the Stones were always bad, and they presented this bad-boy image of the Stones and the clean image of the Beatles and all of that.
‘It was a complete invention by the press. People believed it, so the Stones, by 1967, said, “We’ve had enough of this s**t. Let’s try to communicate through the cover to tell the public this is not the truth.”
It seems each album cover actually displayed a fondness between the bands, who even used to ring each other for a chinwag and to make sure their album releases didn’t clash, according to Richards.
On the cover of Sgt Pepper’s there is a doll in the right hand corner of the cover which says: ‘Welcome the Rolling Stones.’
Likewise Satanic Majesties – which recreated the flower power of the Beatles’ offering – shows the faces of all four Beatles.