Rolling Stones – "The Lantern" (1967)

My face, it turns a deathly pale

You’re talking to me through your veil

I hear you wail!

Their Satanic Majesties Request is the Rolling Stones album that rock critics love to hate.  Hell, even Keith Richards and Mick Jagger hated it.  

Richards once said the album as a whole was “a load of crap.”  

“It’s not very good,” Jagger has opined.  “There’s two good songs on it.  The rest of them are nonsense.”

I’m guessing that the two songs Jagger likes are “2000 Light Years from Home” and “She’s a Rainbow,” because those are the only two songs on the album that the Stones have ever performed in concert.  (Richards also liked those songs.)

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I bought Satanic Majesties soon after it was released in December 1967, and I’ve always liked it.  (I admit that there are a couple of weak tracks on it, but I think most of the songs on it are winners.)

Did your copy have the famous
lenticular cover?  (Mine did.)

So when I decided to induct a track from that album into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME, it wasn’t to choose just one.

I thought about going with one of the two identified by Jagger and Richards as their favorites.  But which one?  

I went back and forth between them – both were worthy, and I couldn’t decide which one I thought was better.

2 or 3 lines isn’t afraid to zig where others zag, and that’s what I did when I picked “The Lantern.”  (I almost went with “Gomper,” which is pretty good.  But I couldn’t bear to sully my wildly popular little blog with such an ugly song title.) 

IMHO, the best element of the record is the piano playing of Nicky Hopkins.  He was as integral to the sound of the Rolling Stones in the late sixties and early seventies as Keith or Charlie or anyone else.

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I’m not the only rock music savant who gives two thumbs up to “The Lantern.” 

For example, Matthew Greenwald of Allmusic had this to say about the “underappreciated” track:

“The Lantern” is a psychedelic folk song . . . . Some excellent guitar riffs from Keith Richards on both acoustic and electric foreshadow his layered work on Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed, and drive a subtle, but slightly bluesy melody that is one of the album’s best.  Lyrically, the song seems to have literary inspirations, not unlike some of Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd songs of the period.  

Greenwald also praised the “very restrained and beautiful horn arrangement,” which he believed exhibited “true craftsmanship.”

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Enough of that blah, blah, blah.  You probably don’t care what some rock critic you’ve never heard of has to say about “The Lantern,” and I don’t either.  

We just care about what 2 or 3 lines has to say . . . right?

I CAN’T HEAR YOU!

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Click here to listen to “The Lantern.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.