"Street Fighting Man" is a song by the English rock band the Rolling Stones, written by the songwriting team of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Considered one of the band's most popular and most controversial songs, it features Indian instrumentation contributed by Brian Jones, which has led to it being characterized as a raga rock song. It also features controversial and ambiguous lyrics about armed revolution. In the United States, it was released as a single in August 1968, while it was not released in the United Kingdom until four months later on the Beggars Banquet album, where it opened side two. (It eventually saw release as a UK single in 1971.) The B-side of the American single featured "No Expectations", considered one of the final Stones tracks in which founding member Jones played a significant role in its construction. It was also the final Rolling Stones single on which Jones performed.
While "Street Fighting Man" was originally written with an entirely different set of lyrics, growing violence at political events throughout 1968 inspired Mick Jagger to alter the song to directly address such topics. With its release coming after a highly politically charged and publicized summer of violence, and the release of the Beatles' "Revolution", a song with similar themes, "Street Fighting Man" sparked controversy in the United States upon release, many radio stations boycotting the song and refusing to play it. As a result, the song peaked only at number 48 on the Billboard Hot 100, after the previous Stones single "Jumpin' Jack Flash" reached the top three in America. "Street Fighting Man" thus became the lowest-charting Rolling Stones A-side since their American single debut "Not Fade Away", four years prior.
Despite the initial poor chart reception and controversy, "Street Fighting Man" was praised by the music press upon its release, and played a role in elevating the Rolling Stones' reputation as a culturally subversive group. Retrospectively, the song has been praised for its lyrics and production, and is viewed by some commentators as one of the greatest and most important songs of the 1960s. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked the song number 295 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, while Pitchfork ranked it the 62nd best song of the 1960s.
Background
Throughout 1965 and 1966, the Stones moved further from their traditional blues-based sound and experimented more and more with Indian timbres in their music, with prominent examples of this trend in their work including "Mother's Little Helper" and "Paint It Black" Additionally, Brian Jones, the original leader of the Rolling Stones, became an important creative force within the band due to his contributions on multiple instruments during the sessions for Aftermath, Between the Buttons, and Their Satanic Majesties Request. "Street Fighting Man" became one of the final songs recorded by the Stones for which Brian Jones played a major role in the final arrangement, alongside its B-side "No Expectations", for which he contributed a slide guitar part. It was their final A-side to feature him and last to be released before his death.
While the final version of "Street Fighting Man" featured Indian musical elements like earlier Stones songs, the song's creation did not result from these influences. In an interview with Marc Myers, Keith Richards said that he wrote most of the music for the song in late 1966 or early 1967 on the acoustic guitar, and got the "dry, crisp" sound that he wanted by strumming a guitar with an open tuning in front of a portable Philips cassette recorder microphone, leading to notable distortion in the sound. According to Richards, the melody was influenced by the sound of police sirens, despite the song not having acquired its final, politically conscious lyrics at this stage of its evolution.
Development
Following the composition of the music for the song, a set of lyrics were written that differed significantly from the final song. Originally the song was entitled "Did Everyone Pay Their Dues?", and featured a set of lyrics about adult brutality, He also found inspiration in the rising violence among student rioters on Paris' Left Bank, the precursor to a period of civil unrest in May 1968.
Jagger explained how the inspiration for "Street Fighting Man" came from movements outside of his native United Kingdom in a 1995 interview with Jann Wenner in Rolling Stone:
Richards said, only a few years after recording the track in a 1971 Rolling Stone interview with Robert Greenfield, that the song had been "interpreted thousands of different ways". He mentioned how Jagger went to the Grosvenor Square demonstrations in London and was even charged by the police, yet on the topic of the song's meaning, he ultimately claims, "it really is ambiguous as a song".
Recording
Recording on "Street Fighting Man" took place at Olympic Sound Studios from April until May 1968, as part of the Beggars Banquet sessions. Jimmy Miller, the Rolling Stones' producer during this period described guitarist Keith Richards as "a real workhorse" while recording the album, mostly due to the infrequent presence of Brian Jones. When he did show up at the sessions, Jones behaved erratically due to his drug use and emotional problems. Miller said that Jones would "show up occasionally when he was in the mood to play, and he could never really be relied on:
Richards commented on the recording: